“YOUR WORK!”
It was right then that Eddie had his moment of greatness. It comes to
every man once in his lifetime, and blessed is he who is ready for
it when it does come. Eddie was ready. Eddie may have wondered what
his own particular schooling was for those nights when he had stood
with revolver ready, watching, waiting, every nerve trained for quick
violence. This was it.
“_Bang!_”
A flash, a report, a strand of smoke; and there was the owner of the
shrill voice lunging up like a man who reaches for a butterfly.
There was the picture of Eddie himself--_Rip Van Winkle_ awaking
from his sleep, but shorn of hair and beard; _Rip_ as Joe Jefferson
presented him, mostly eyes, tragic, but stirred and amused.
“The court,” said Craig, “is adjourned. The guards will maintain
order.”
All this as if it hadn’t been swift, as if it had been arranged,
a little stiff and formal, yet dignified, and called for by the
circumstances. The butterfly chaser now collapsing, supported by his
brethren. Eddie still revolving the dark searchlight of his eyes.
Other guards flexing their arms to bring their weapons into play.
And Craig, taking his time about it, just as a regular judge would
have done, stepped down from the platform, turned to the left, gained
that side aisle at the other end of which the girl stood. He came up
to her.
So much while the heavy blow of Eddie’s shot was still reverberating
in the air, or, at least, in the minds of the convicts good and bad,
who happened to be present.
“I think you’d better get out of here,” said Craig softly to the
girl, as he came close to where she stood.
She shrank from him slightly, with horror in her eyes. He smiled
at her soberly. He could feel that his own face was bloodless.
Curiously, some voice in his brain was telling him that this was on
her account, not his own. Otherwise, he was as cold and steady as
he had been those ten or eight hours ago--or ten or eight years, so
it seemed--that he had come creeping up to the guardroom from the
punishment block.
This coldness he threw about him as they say an iceberg chills
the air at sea, when he turned and looked at his fellows. But the
coldness was of the nerves, not of the heart. He saw what was needed.
These men were like children, with brains that were stunted, or
crooked, or dulled. This was a new game. They didn’t understand it
very well. And yet the playing of it, like some new exercise, or like
some new system of education, might mean the salvation of a number of
them, at least.
“The jury,” Craig announced, “will select another judge, so that
there will be no loss of time. Are you with me for maintaining order?”
There was a shout, mostly of approval. But this first shout was
followed by another shout, a scream:
“_Shot me!_”
It was the voice of the butterfly chaser. And there he was, the man
that Eddie had wounded, threshing about and spitting blood. Those
who had been holding him up were beginning to look vengeance, while
Eddie backed away, ready to fire again, and fresh shouts and screams
went up.
There was another shot, and this spawned howls with the awful
fecundity of most elemental things. Some one howled into the face
of the girl, and Craig bashed straight into the open mouth with his
fist, although he was armed; and then he was striking this way and
that, with elbows and fists, the center of a sudden mob, only one
thought in his head at all, and that to protect the girl.
He did protect her, but himself he couldn’t have told how--not in
detail; mostly by the smashing of heads, a roughing of it with
shoulders and knees, in the midst of jaggedness--call it that--as
applied to speech and action. Then, he and the girl were outside the
chapel.
“This way!”
Even now, there seemed to be no great speed in what was taking place.
Every one was groping, as through a thick darkness--as, indeed, they
were. But Craig and the girl were up a flight of stairs, bringing
a nightmare vision with them of men who ran toward the chapel--men
armed with shotguns--so armed by Craig himself, who had put them
under oath.
Craig paused to swing a grilled gate shut back of them, and to make
sure that the lock had caught. Up the stairs were the principal
offices of San Pedro--the telegraph and the telephone; the records,
personal and otherwise, which were still there other than such books
as had been taken to the chapel. But at the door of the offices they
paused--Craig and the girl. They looked into each other’s eyes, as
people sometimes will when they both listen for the same thing. That
was what they were doing--listening--waiting--remembering the guards
they had left below and those other guards who had been seen coming
on the run.
Shots! Almost a volley! Then silence.
At that, the girl began to sob--silently, spasmodically--while the
tears came into her eyes. But she was still looking at Craig.
“Go in there and wait,” said Craig. “You’ll be safe here.”
“And you?”
He pointed below.
“No!”
He put out a hand to support himself against the side of the door.
He saw that his hand was covered with blood. He didn’t want the girl
to see, so he lowered his hand. So doing, he almost lost his balance
and lurched against the jamb like a drunken man, hung there with
his shoulder. A slight haze swept across his eyes. Nothing much. He
sought to explain:
“I’m--out of--training.”
Also it was meant for an apology. He hated weakness. He didn’t want
to appear weak. But, after all, it had been bad for him--that beating
he had received from Copton, his stay in the hospital, his removal to
the dark cell while he was still more or less mauled up. And since
then! How many days and nights had there been without sleep--or
almost without--while he was sawing, half-dozing, half-awake? He
didn’t know. He didn’t care. But he didn’t want to appear weak--not
in the presence of this girl.
He let her lead him, none the less, to an office chair, and there he
slumped--making efforts all the time to summon his strength. He was
needed back in the chapel. There he would have to go.
“Take off your coat,” she said.
“No!”
“Take off your coat!”
She was removing it for him, quick and deft.
He had objected merely because this would have been another evidence
of weakness, also more delay. Had the girl already suspected? Not
only suspected, but known--his shorn, but unkempt head, the prison
pallor of his skin. Still, she may not have noticed these things when
there was so much that had clamored for her attention. But she knew
for a certainty, when his coat slipped off, when she saw his canvas
shirt. There was a spreading blood stain on his shirt. The blood was
spreading over the grossly stenciled letters: “S. P. P.”
The initials of San Pedro Prison--the brand of bondage as much
as stripes would have been. She comprehended. She comprehended
everything--everything, that is, that she had seen and experienced
since her arrival here this otherwise bright and lovely Sabbath
morning. And no one could have told from her voice--not even herself
perhaps--what her feelings were as she murmured:
“Your work?”
“My work,” he answered. His voice rose. He was struggling to his
feet. “_My work!_”
That was his last flare of strength. It was, for some time. He
collapsed. It was the loss of blood that was doing for him--a
knife wound on his breast, another on his shoulder. He didn’t lose
consciousness, although he sat there with his head lolling about,
like a man who is asleep or a man who is drunk. So far as mental
symptoms went, he was a little of both, slightly delirious.
He wasn’t trying to go to the chapel any more because, as a matter of
fact, he thought he was there.
“_You’re free--free!_”
This was when he thought he was still the judge.
“_Order! Order!_”
He yelled it so loud that the cry brought him a fresh spasm of pain,
so acute that he was wide awake again, and there was the girl back
at his side with gauze and medicaments. The hospital was just back
of the offices, on the same floor. It proclaimed its presence with a
smell of creosote, a smell of ether and iodoform. It had needed no
sleuth to find it.
“Who are you?” he asked.
She humored him, repeated the information that she had given in the
chapel, with additions. The governor, informed of some of the things
that transpired in San Pedro, had induced his friend, Major Jerome
Gracie, to become head of the institution, there to put into effect
cherished theories of his as to what a prison should be--discipline,
fair treatment, self-government, education.
“But where is he? Where is he?” the girl broke in. “He was to
have been here with his commission, at dawn. I was coming up from
Fairhaven to join him here. The car broke down. A farmer offered me a
horse--twenty miles----”
It was a broken narrative. She was skilled in first aid. She was
treating his wounds with rough but efficient knowledge, unsparing of
the iodine. Her talk was lulling. It killed the pain. Perhaps she
knew this. She couldn’t have been telling him all this merely for
his information. To Craig, that golden head of hers, so near his
eyes, was another sort of dawn. The pain he felt was not the scalding
iodine, but a regret, a stabbing yet curative hope.
“He never broke an engagement in his life--taught me that----” the
girl continued, as her clean, strong hands manipulated the tape.
And all the time she was doing this, intent at once on this convict
patient of hers and on the subject of her father, she kept casting
glances--almost of appeal, one would have said--at the telephone on
the desk at one side of the room.
Then the telephone bell began to ring sharply, as if to proclaim that
the message was important.
“I’ll go,” said Craig.
“Stay where you are,” the girl said.
“Stand back,” said Craig.
“It’s my father,” she completed desperately.
She tried to leap to the telephone ahead of him. But, wounded and
only half-bandaged as he was, he flung himself ahead of her. He
picked up the instrument, faced her.
“I’m warden here as yet,” he flung at her over the whirring of the
bell.
“Let me speak to him, you--you----”
“I’m responsible,” he said more gently.
“Responsible for the riot and the killing!”
“For everything,” he said, with unconscious dignity. He lifted the
receiver. “Hello! Hello!”
There was a pause, while the girl stared at him--her slender frame
tense, her fingers working.
“Yes, this is San Pedro Prison. No matter who this is. State your
message. Ben Jarvis escaped? Committed an assault?”
“Ben Jarvis!” whispered the girl, with a movement of recoil, as Craig
hung up the receiver, put the instrument down. “Ben Jarvis, the
outlaw?”
Craig nodded.
“And you set him free?”
“Not that I know of.”
“But he was here. I know. I’ve helped my father go over the records.”
Again Craig nodded. There had been a cessation of noise from the
chapel, but the noise had broken out in another part of the prison.
The prison bell clanged a few times, as if in response to an
inexperienced hand.
Craig stumbled to a window. The sun was shining. The sky was
cloudless. In some respects it was the picture of a world that
he remembered--as an adept may remember a day or an epoch from an
earlier avatar.
But he saw that the auto truck had returned from another trip, that
it was being loaded by all the men who could gain a handhold or a
foothold on it. The stronger were compelling the weak to remain
behind. The voices of the mob came up to him. Vaguely, like hasty
shadow sketches, he saw figures and faces which he recognized as
those of men who should never have escaped.
He heard a gasp from the girl. He turned. She was facing another
convict--a man who was lithe and graceful, who might have been
handsome, in a darksome way, if it hadn’t been for the snarl on
his face, a snarl compounded of greed and all other evil. Craig
recognized the man, San Pedro’s only member of the nobility. He was
an international thief and trickster of great reputation, known as
“Count Wolf.”
Wolf saw Craig and decided to go elsewhere.
There was all the reason in the world why Craig should regain
control of the prison. But the sleepiness and the loss of blood were
combining against him in a fresh attack. It was all that he could do
to keep back a whimper.
The girl surveyed him. He was young. His face was almost boyish.
It might have been the face of a student. There were ambition and
purpose in the broad, high forehead, in his gray eyes.
There was an accusation in her own eyes. It seemed to be trembling on
her lips. But all she said, just then, was:
“You’re bleeding again. Quick! Let me finish that bandage.”
Again Craig was fighting off a desire to sleep, an intrusion of
dreams. This intrusion of dreams was curious in that his whole
life in prison was like a dream. He had never been arrested, never
been tried, never been handcuffed. So it seemed it had all been a
nightmare. Now he was waking from it. He had been sick. Who was this
girl? He must have muttered something of this.
“Who are you?” she asked in turn.
“Daniel Craig.”
“Craig? Craig? I remember no such name in the San Pedro list.”
“No one knew,” he announced with a glimmer of triumph. “Here, I was
Thomas Masters--Three Sevens!”
“Why did you kill that man?” She had suddenly remembered.
“I didn’t.” He laughed. “The kid shot him on his sister’s account.
Poor little----”
Craig jerked back his head, awake again.
“Tell me,” said the girl.
“What?”
“You didn’t kill him, but----”
A one-armed convict with a face like a weasel, or like an ermine,
rather, his face was so white, came limping into the room with a
grin. He was small and wizened. He carried a sheet of flimsy yellow
paper in his hand, and this stirred Craig to the knowledge that here
was the prison telegrapher.
“Been lookin’ for you, boss,” he said in a high, nasal voice. “Looks
like some of the boys----”
He stopped and stared at the girl with a malicious grin.
“Give me the message and go back to the key,” said Craig, as he put
out an unsteady hand.
But when the telegrapher was gone, Craig looked at the yellow tissue
paper the telegrapher had handed him; he was unable to read what was
written thereon.
“Something the--matter--with my eyes,” said Craig.
The girl took the message, read:
“BANNER JUNCTION.
“Train No. 93 robbed ten miles east here by masked men,
supposed escaped convicts, San Pedro. Party boarded train
on signal at your station last night----”
“Shall I go on?” the girl faltered.
“My work!” breathed Craig ghastly. “Go on! Go on!”
She read:
“Conductor, brakeman shot, and three passengers also
wounded. Leader of band partly identified Bud Gaspell
supposed to have been in San Pedro serving life
imprisonment. Wire details.”
There followed the name of a famous sheriff.
“My work! My work!” breathed Craig.