SHIP AND BEACON
Craig was the first to speak. Perhaps it was because he had already
done his thinking, had decided to accept the one course that appeared
to be clear to him.
“I’ve come to see your father,” he said.
He dared not address her otherwise. All that old equality of theirs
was gone, so far as Craig was concerned. In a few minutes now he
would be the prisoner again. So he was telling himself. He was
telling himself that he was the prisoner already.
“My father?” breathed Joan.
She was looking at Craig. But also she was seeing Eddie Yarmouth. On
Eddie’s face was a look that was stricken, yet not minus hope, for
Eddie, emboldened by the need of the moment, was giving her a signal
of distress, an appeal to stand by. So was Sanders.
Joan spoke rapidly to these latter.
“Eddie,” she said, “you and this gentleman may go and see about
having the car pushed into the yard. Get some men to help you.” She
drew an inspiration from their misery, sought to comfort them. “I’ll
arrange everything here. Everything will be all right.”
She scarcely knew what she was saying. She scarcely heard the sound
of her own voice. If Craig had been like a ship driving along a dark
coast, she was suddenly become the beacon--shining, doing the right
thing, and not questioning beyond this present necessity. The right
thing was not to involve others. And everything would be all right.
She saw Craig changed. She saw him free. She saw him very much a
man--a young man, tall and strong, roughly dressed. He was dressed as
any young engineer might have been dressed when engaged on a rough
job, for he had outfitted himself down there in the swamps. It made
her head reel and her heart gasp like a fish, the mere thought of
taking this man and locking him into a cell.
“You mustn’t see my father,” she said.
There were tears in her voice, none in her eyes. They were liquid
clear.
“I must.”
“Why?”
“To give myself up.”
“Why must you give yourself up?”
“I’ve let myself in for it--the only thing I can do.”
“You mean because your presence is suspected here.”
“By Green and others.”
“They’ve seen you?”
“No.”
“Then----”
“But they’ll see me if I try to get away.”
“Still you can get away.”
“Not without their knowing that either you or your father have helped
me. Joan--Joan! I am willing. Where is your father?”
“No, no! You mustn’t see him.” She ran over to the door through which
her father had disappeared. She stood there for a moment listening
and still trying to get a grip on her thoughts. “Why--why----”
Craig read her thoughts.
“I wanted to show you how strong I was, how clever I was,” he began,
with a touch of self-contempt. But his mood softened, even toward
himself, as Joan left the door and came toward him. “The real reason
was I couldn’t forget that you were here.”
She made a movement of wilting self-abandonment.
“I know. I understand.”
“I wanted to look at this place again, if only from a distance--watch
one night under the stars, and feel that I was near you. Heaven
forgive me!”
He broke off abruptly. He had said more than he had intended to say.
But Joan also spoke impetuously.
“You shan’t sacrifice yourself,” she said. “I shan’t let you.”
“Nor will I let you sacrifice yourself or your father.”
“I’ve told my father as much as he wants to know. He suspects that it
was Three Sevens he saw out there the other time you came back. That
was all right. His conscience could let him let you go again. But it
would be different if he saw you here. No, no! He mustn’t see you
here. He wouldn’t be happy if he did. Think of his happiness. Think
of mine.”
This last was a cry from the heart to which Craig’s own heart gave a
responsive hail. He was telling himself that this moment was worth
all that he had been through. Neither of them could have told how
it happened, but the fact was upon them: Joan had surrendered her
hands to Craig, Craig was pressing her hands against his breast. They
looked at each other. Both of them now were fighting in the same
direction--mind fighting through the storm and the darkness toward
the ultimate salvation.
“I could bluff Green--frighten him,” said Craig.
“I’ll hide you until it’s dark.”
“And get yourself into trouble.”
“Do you suppose--oh, what is any trouble of mine compared to yours!”
“Leave it to Eddie,” said Craig. “Eddie’s the only one, besides
yourself, who knows I am here. He’ll relieve the gate watch to-night.
Flag the midnight train. Jones--Sanders will go on that. There’ll be
a diversion. I’ll take my chances with the posse.”
“You mustn’t take your chances, none that you don’t have to take. I
didn’t want to tell you--I didn’t want to raise false hopes--but I
will. You’re to be pardoned. I don’t know when. But I’m sure of it.
There’s the debt in the red ledger. You can’t pay that off while
you’re here, and if something happens to you, what good would a
pardon do?”
“When I look at you,” said Craig, “and when I hear your voice, I feel
the strength and the faith to defy the world--live--die! Take heaven
or hell by storm!”
But Joan, womanlike, was inspired by this devotion of his to merely
practical ends.
“You remember that Aunt Katherine I spoke of?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got to go to her house.”
“And then?”
“Stay there until this storm blows over--until I can get word to you.
We live in Fairhaven, not far from there.” She read the gathering
objections in Craig’s eyes. “You’ve got to do what I ask you,” she
panted, half in command, half in appeal. “It’s for the welfare of all
of us.”
They heard a distant voice, a distant step. Then the great steam
whistle of San Pedro quavered into a mighty blast--like the whistle
of any other factory--to indicate that another day of toil and
suffering was drawing to a close.
All that evening ex-Warden Green had lurked and watched about this
isolated empire where he had once been the absolute monarch. The
more he studied the situation, the less he understood of it. And with
his deepening mystification came the sense that some one was trying
to make a fool of him--Major Gracie, for example, and again, Three
Sevens, for example.
He was there when a gang of trusties came out of the railroad gate of
the prison and pushed the box car with the mule in it into the prison
yard. What were they doing that for? Was this a subterfuge to get
Three Sevens into the prison without his being seen? But, even so,
what was the big idea? Why should Three Sevens have wanted to come
back to San Pedro at all? And why should Three Sevens have intrusted
himself to the keeping of that small man with a squint in his eye?
The ex-warden had seen Sanders or Jones, all right. That was when the
trusties had come to push the car into the prison yard. Previously,
the ex-warden had seen the keepers come and remove the bound prisoner
from the car, and there for a while the ex-warden was excited with
the thought that this was Three Sevens himself.
No; it was Sancho Red, as the warden could make out later by the
well-known bulk of the famous bandit.
There followed bitter hours when the ex-warden became convinced that
the tip was all wrong in the matter of Three Sevens, and that Masters
had not come anywhere near San Pedro at all.
Seven or eight friends of his had responded to that call Green had
sent out for a posse--ex-keepers mostly from Banner Junction and
Clear Rapids, as eager as Green himself was to get revenge on the man
who had held them up and imprisoned them and ultimately caused them
to lose their places. Green and his posse conferred. It was decided
that it would be well to keep an eye on all those who came to the
prison and went away in the course of the ensuing night.
The sun flamed down. Camp fires began to twinkle over the San
Pedro plain. The original posse had grown--for no special reason,
in response to no special appeal or report, except those of the
deep-seated instinct that all Americans feel for the chase and the
frontier life.
Some sort of a chase was on. Some sort of a vague unrest was in the
air. There was a presentiment abroad that something was going to
happen, no one knew what.
There were rumors enough.
But only a distant shot in the silence of the desert plain, and
a faint babble of voices off in the same direction, rewarded the
listeners during the night, as they sat around Green’s camp fires.
But the plain around San Pedro, when the night was deep, was like
that desert of Egyptian mythology across which the souls of the
dead are conducted to the land of ghosts. There were moving shadows
about. No one could tell for certain just what had happened except
that the ex-warden of San Pedro had fired at a man on a mule and
happily missed him, it having turned out that the man was but another
volunteer member of the ex-warden’s own posse who had ridden over
from his own home on a steed like that because he didn’t have a horse.
Also, it was known that train No. 93 had been flagged, had taken on
a passenger from San Pedro for the West. Not Three Sevens, that. It
couldn’t have been.
Altogether, the night was destined rather to add to than subtract
from the reputation of the late warden of San Pedro.
Green was furious. He was furious with the small, concentrated fury
of the large man whose soul is small. He was all by himself as he
started to ride away along toward dawn. He swore in his beard. He
recalled ugly souvenirs of his official life in San Pedro. He wished
he were still warden there now. He would have done things to relieve
his spirit--things that would have made preceding occurrences there
pale by comparison.
He was on the trail that led vaguely in the direction of the
Fairhaven pike when he heard the honk of an automobile back of him.
His horse shied a little. The auto swept past. It was a big touring
car that the ex-warden recognized. It was the car of a rich young
lawyer of Clear Rapids, a young man named Gary Lee.
Green had reined in his horse. He sat there at the side of the trail
for a long time after Lee and his car were gone. He knew that the Lee
and the Gracie families belonged to the same social status--a sort
of country aristocracy to which he himself had never been able to
attain, not even when he had become warden of San Pedro.
What had Lee been doing over at San Pedro, Green wondered--over there
sparking the new warden’s daughter, perhaps?
“They’ll all run after a gal,” he meditated in his bitterness.
And little suspected that he was just then echoing a thought that was
in the mind of the youth who had passed him so fast in the night in
that big touring car.