THE PROMISE
The girl said a number of things in the course of this day that were
to remain with Craig always, just as would the presence of her as she
said them--soft-voiced, clear-eyed, brave. She was only eighteen or
so, but she had talked so much with her father that she talked like a
man plus a woman’s instinct to soothe and heal:
“You’ve had a dream that turned out bad--but that is no reason why
you shouldn’t dream again. Half the tragedies of this world were
caused by dreamers, but so also all of the world’s progress. My
father’ll set things right here in San Pedro. The courts’ll put you
in a cell for life if you stay here. You can be of more use outside.
Outside you can offset the evil you’ve let loose.”
She was urging him to flee.
“If I should bring them back?” said Craig.
“Bring them back?”
“Ben Jarvis, Bud Gaspell----”
Among the papers that had been left on the chapel table by the
convict who had acted as clerk of that curious, improvised court of
the morning, was a little red memorandum book. The girl seized this.
She meditated. She looked at Craig.
“Yes, yes,” she said. “The small and the weak--they don’t matter.
They’ll be herded back here like sheep, when the posses get a start.
It’s the men like Bud Gaspell, train robber and highwayman, and Ben
Jarvis, who kills for pleasure, and ‘Trick’ O’Ray.”
The two of them worked over the records like a pair of students in
a library. They added name after name to the list in the little
red book. There were those on the list whom Craig had never seen
nor known. But the girl knew them, by reputation. She had been her
father’s secretary--and, for that matter, almost his sole companion,
since her mother’s death two years before.
Sinister, cruel, perverse; men who were as deadly as moccasin snakes,
and as ruthless, as concentrated in the satisfaction of their own
needs and appetites. Wild men, like “Sancho Red,” “of the arid hills,
who tortured as well as killed”--their names, and, when necessary,
their descriptions, all went into the little red ledger, put there by
this girl with blue eyes and the shimmering hair, written out in a
schoolgirl hand.
There was no time to waste. Craig himself had now sent the news
of what had happened in the prison by telephone and haltingly, by
telegraph, to the outside world.
Craig had told the girl the purport of that first telephone message
that had reached him after he and she had left the chapel when the
riot began. Major Gracie himself had been wounded by Ben Jarvis.
Nothing much. A mere scratch. Father and daughter had later talked
together over the telephone. And now Major Gracie had resumed his
interrupted run by special train and would be here in less than an
hour.
Craig had told the girl about his past--all of it. There was no more
formality between them than if the two of them were on a life raft on
a stormy sea at night. But at that, she was taking much for granted.
She trusted him. She understood what he meant when he said that he
would bring back to prison the enemies of society he had unwittingly
set free. It was she who referred to the little memorandum book as
his ledger--the one in which they had written out his debt.
When he would have faltered on her account, it was she who bravely
encouraged him.
“You started out to do a great thing, and an original thing. Do it
yet. In the meantime I’ll get my father and I’ll do it myself. We’ll
prove your innocence, get you a pardon.”
Night was closing down. Back of the prison, a quarter of a mile away,
there was a dry gully with a few stunted willows in it. She had
noticed this when she was riding to the prison. To this place she
sent Eddie with the horse. Craig was to ride this horse. He was to
leave it at a certain place where the farmer who owned it could get
it later.
She thought of everything. She lived in Fairhaven. Four or
five miles out of Fairhaven, she had an aunt--a Miss Katherine
Middleton--eccentric, but with a heart of gold, who lived in a
cottage near some big woods.
Her voice came fitfully, or so Craig, his head momentarily skipping
and whirling, heard her. He broke in:
“You’re getting yourself into trouble, helping a convict!”
“Don’t say the word,” she cried. “You’re not a convict--not in your
eyes, or mine. Don’t you suppose I know what you tried to do? Hasn’t
my father been trying to do the same sort of thing all his life--only
in a different way with different luck? You’re a brute to make me
talk this way--when I’m trying so hard to--see straight, do right----”
Craig was stricken with pity and awe. This girl had been acting like
a soldier, like a man. For nothing at all she again had tears in her
eyes, had a quivering lip.
“Forgive me,” he said, without knowing what it was he had to be
forgiven for.
The girl steadied herself, looked at the little red book. She had
covered several pages of it with her writing.
“This is the list,” she said.
He put out his hand.
“Wait,” she said.
She wrote something else in it:
This book is given to Daniel Craig by Joan Gracie.
She looked at him with an expression that was not a smile exactly,
although he always remembered it as a smile. In pain and danger, and
in the blackest despair, he remembered this look she was giving him
now as the most beautiful smile he had ever seen. It was a look of
illumination, vision, faith.
“There,” she said. “If they find it now, there will be no doubt as to
where it came from.”
And she quoted her father again--something to the effect that a lot
of suffering in the world was due, also, to the fear so many people
had of appearing to be foolish, of not seeming respectable.
“Joan,” said Craig.
“Daniel,” said she, and it was the first time that he had heard
himself so addressed for more than two years; it stirred his heart
within him.
“May God and His angels bless you,” said Craig, his own eyes
reaffirming the words.
“Just promise to do your best,” said the girl. “You’re going out to
battle. You’re going out to fight for your country. That’s what my
father says. Every criminal’s a traitor. You’ve got a debt to pay. So
has every one. Yours is written out in the little red ledger. And
when you’ve settled that, there’ll be other debts.”
“I’ll pick out the worst man first, and turn him in----”
“No, not that,” the girl interrupted him. “Take them as you find
them. Oh, be careful!” Her thought crystallized. “All the time,
you’ll be between two fires. Don’t you see--the law on one side, the
outlaws on the other----”
“I’ve thought of that,” said Craig.
“Listen,” said the girl, now speaking more out of her heart than
out of her brain. Her eyes wavered, came back to his. “You’re on
probation. You’ve got to report to me. I don’t know how. But you’ve
got to report.”
“You’ll hear from me--‘Three Sevens,’” said Craig. “Until my debt is
paid, I’ll be Three Sevens.”
Then, through the vast silence of the prison and the San Pedro
country there sounded the hooting wait of a rushing train. The might
and the majesty of retributive law!
To Daniel Craig, riding away from San Pedro on the horse that had
been furnished him by Joan Gracie, along the road that she had
indicated, there came a feeling at once so sad and so joyful that he
could have cried aloud. No words could express the feeling. It was
too overwhelming for words.
Ticketed and wrinkled, but clean enough, he had found the clothing
that he had worn when the sheriff had brought him to San Pedro two
years ago from the city where he had been tried and sentenced. But he
was no longer the man--or the boy--who had worn that clothing then.
As surely as it had happened to that certain man of Bethany, he also
had died, been entombed, and now was alive again.
His wounds hurt him. The bandages might have been burial cloths. He
had an agonizing sense--still as Lazarus might have had--that this
new lease of life was too good to be true, could not last.
He took off his familiar old felt hat. He raised his face to the
night.
Thus his mind surveyed the past.
Mostly poor, introspective, oversensitive, often unhappy--that had
been his lot up through boyhood, as he perceived it. Yet always some
lurking faith was there in a happiness to come, a happiness to be
fought for and won. Was this the beginning of the final campaign?
He had no family. Even the stern and pious old grandmother who had
reared him was dead. He had started to work his way through the State
University. He was going to be an engineer. No other calling seemed
big enough. There were deserts to water, swamps to drain, chasms to
bridge. Then came his expulsion--one of those tragedies of college
life that seem too small to the outside world. It had all started
as a joke on a certain crabbed old professor, a chance to steal his
examination papers, and Craig accused of cheating.
There swept in upon him even now the old sense of having been
disgraced for life, a whiff of that morbid sickness that had almost
driven him to suicide.
It was with this mental sickness upon him, and a willingness to die,
that he had tramped into a strange labor camp and there found that
other boy whose tragedy surpassed his own--a sister crying her heart
out back home, the boss of this camp “the guilty man,” a boyish sense
of honor calling for retribution. Then the shot in the dark, Craig’s
promise to say nothing, the flight of this other youth, Craig himself
arrested for murder.
There was no wise old friend to tell him that he was a fool for
feeling the way he did at what had happened in college, that the
world forgets, that no man is perfect, that every one goes wrong
some time or other, and that now he was by way of committing suicide
indeed. Anyway, he had thought that the real slayer would return; he
had thought that he would be let off. He had believed that maybe this
was an intended atonement for his “sin” in college. He had thought
many things.
But now, Craig, with his hat in his hand, and his face still up, got
a message out of the night that Joan Gracie understood his tale of
folly and suffering.
How strange it had seemed to him before that he had been sent to
San Pedro--San Pedro of all prisons! But now, hadn’t a part of the
plan--the Plan--been revealed to him since it was at San Pedro that
he had met Joan Gracie? Wasn’t there, after all, an immutable truth
in what the great and gentle Emerson had written about compensation?
On a ridge, only a mile or so from San Pedro, he had paused to watch
the arrival of the special train. It wasn’t much of a train, merely
a locomotive and a caboose--a few twinkling lights, and a flash of
firelit steam. Faintly, through the puffing of the engine, Craig
heard a sound of excited voices. There was going to be some quick
action. He was sure of that. Still, his soul was tranquil. He felt no
need of hurry. Whatever would happen was bound to happen, whatever
should happen was bound to be good.
He recalled a dozen times in his life when black despair had clawed
and gnawed at his heart like a bloody-fanged vampire.
No more. He had gone down into the gates of hell and had come out
again. And, even in the gates of hell, there had still been hope, had
he only known it. He knew it now. He would always know it--that men
were fools to worry, to succumb to fright.
Suddenly, he heard a soft cry, saw a dim form surging up in front of
him. Then, as Craig snatched at his revolver:
“Boss! Don’t shoot!”
It was George Washington, late of the dark cells.
He was a big negro, counted bad, in more than one jail and labor
camp. Even now, he was checking that first movement of recognition,
drawing back for a possible attack. He was armed.
“Is it you?” he queried in his soft voice.
“Me--Three Sevens,” Craig answered.
“Bless God!”
The negro came up to Craig’s bridle. Craig told him something of what
had passed. Washington had been one of the first to get away, but he
had slept the day through on the warm earth.
Craig saw in the negro a possible ally. He would need an ally for a
while. George Washington was willing. He also needed an ally. Toward
morning they tied the horse in the corner of a field, where the owner
would find it. Then they came to a stream--Craig staggering--where
they drank their fill. There were wild hills all about them. They
picked their way up a rocky gulch where even a hound would have had a
hard time to trail them. They came to a platform of rock, where they
could command a view for miles back in the direction whence they had
come.
Craig slept.
It was late afternoon when he awoke. And now he felt not so much like
a man who had come back from death as one who was going to die. The
negro was gone. But just when Craig was beginning to realize what it
might mean to him to be all alone here in the hills now, tracked,
weak, without food or the means of acquiring it, there was his black
friend again. He had a hatful of eggs.
“Where’d you get them?” Craig asked.
The negro told him. Five or six miles from where they were there was
a big stock farm. There, George had found a barrel with bran in it,
and he was so hungry he was going to eat a mouthful of bran. But when
he had shoved his hand into the bran, he found that the bran was full
of eggs, put there by some thieving farmhand, no doubt, to keep them
fresh until he should have enough of them to make it worth while to
take a trip to market on his own account.
They ate the eggs, raw.
Night found them on their way again, out across the houseless,
treeless prairie that appeared to be a deserted cattle range. The
night like the one before, was radiant and clear, with a waxing moon.
They talked about religion. They talked about justice. Then Craig
asked George if he didn’t think that prisons were right, and George
said that, yes, he did think that prisons were right if they were
good prisons, and that was why he had sworn his oath, when Craig
asked him to, not to abuse the liberty that he was going to receive.
“How much longer did you have to serve?” asked Craig.
“One more year.”
“If you knew that, during this year, you’d get good treatment, good
food, and time off for good conduct, would you go back?”
“White man, what you aimin’ at?”
Craig told him. He showed George the red ledger.
“You got me frighten’,” said George.
“You needn’t be frightened,” said Craig, “except of all the people
you’ll ever pass in the road, and each time that you lie down to
sleep, and every time that you want a mouthful of food----”
“Man! Man!”
“I’m talking for your own good, George. I’m trying to help you
because I’m going to need your help.”
“What you want me to do?”
“I want you to swear another oath--here under the stars.”
George swore. And Craig had not only an ally, but a deputy. There
were a dozen names set down in the little red book that Joan Gracie
had given him. Twelve names, each like a sum charged against him by
society. He would have to pay off each sum by returning the escaped
convict to prison. There could be no delay, for with every day of
delay there would be an increment of interest.
These men that the daughter of the new warden of San Pedro had
charged up against Craig in this little red ledger were not likely
to remain idle, now that they were free. They would be hungry before
long. They would begin their quest for prey, as two of them already
had done.
“Man! Man!” said the negro, as Craig discussed his plans.
“I’m going to arrest them myself and bring them back or see that they
are taken back,” said Craig. “When I organized the revolution I meant
that none of them should get away--none except those who, like you,
had been punished enough and who would take the oath to do no wrong
when the jury turned them loose.”
“And when you done bring these men back?”
“I’ll return to San Pedro myself,” said Craig. “You can’t fool with
the law, George. The law is too big, too old.”
“Ain’t you breakin’ the law now?” asked George, with native cunning.
“Not the higher law,” said Craig. “I’m working for the law. I’ve made
a mistake. I’m going to try and right that mistake. I will right
it--so help me God!”
But it was of Joan Gracie that he thought.
Softly, his black deputy repeated some of those names from the red
ledger, fearsome names, repeated fearsomely in the black man’s mellow
voice:
“Bud Gaspell! Trick O’Ray! Sancho Red! Man! Man! They’s bad. And Ben
Jarvis! Count Wolf!”
“I’ll get them,” said Craig, with his thought on the girl.