"By gosh, there was Dick sound asleep! He had a bed and blankets and
lots o' provisions, and was just as comfortable as a bug in a rug.
He'd been there ever since he got out of the mineral hole! Tell you I
got to laugh whenever I think of it. Dick laughed 'bout it himself
t'other day when he told me what fun he had listenin' to Ike and the
deputies plannin' to catch him. There ain't another man around here
who'd been smart enough to pick out the belfry. He was right over the
room in the court-house where they was, ye see, and he could look down
'tween the cracks and hear every word they said. Rainy nights he'd
sneak out, and his mother would come down to the market, and he'd see
her outside. They never tracked her, of course, when she come there.
He told me she wanted him to go clean away somewheres, but he wouldn't
leave her.
"When the janitor got his breath he busted in on Ike and the others
sittin' 'round swappin' lies how they'd catch Dick, and Ike reached
for his gun and crep' up the ladder with two deputies behind him, and
Ike was so scared and so 'fraid he'd lose the money that he fired
'fore Dick got on his feet. The ball broke his leg, and they all
jumped in and clubbed him over the head and carried him downstairs for
dead in his blankets, and laid him on a butcher's table in the market,
and all the folks in the market crowded 'round to look at him, lyin'
there with his head hangin' down over the table like a stuck calf's,
and his clothes all bloody. Then Ike handcuffed him and started for
Stoneburg in a wagon 'fore Dick come to."
"That's why he couldn't walk to-night," I asked, "and why the driver
took him over in the stage?"
"Yes, that was it. He'll never get over it. Sometimes he's all right,
and then ag'in it hurts him terrible, 'specially when the weather's
bad.
"All the time he was up to Stoneburg them last four years--he got a
year off for good behavior--he kept makin' little things and sellin'
'em to the visitors. Everybody went to his cell--it was the first
place the warders took 'em, and they all bought things from Dick. He
had a nice word for everybody, kind and comforting-like. He was the
handiest feller you ever see. When he got out he had twenty-nine
dollars. He give every cent to his mother. Warden told him when he
left he hadn't had no better man in the prison since he had been
'p'inted. And there ain't no better feller now. It's a darned mean
shame how Chris Rankin and them fellers is down on him, knowin', too,
how it all turned out."
I leaned back in my chair and looked at the landlord. I was conscious
of a slight choking in my throat which could hardly be traced to the
dryness of the beef. I was conscious, too, of a peculiar affection of
the eyes. Two or three lamps seemed to be swimming around the room,
and one or more blurred landlords were talking to me with elbows on
tables.
"What do you think yourself about that money of the farmer's?" I asked
automatically, though I do not think even now that I had the slightest
suspicion of his guilt. "Do you believe he stole the three dollars
when he handed the wallet back?"
"Stole 'em? Not by a d---- sight! Didn't I tell you? Thought I had.
That galoot of a farmer dropped it in the woods 'longside the road
when he got out to fix his traces, and he was too full of Chris
Rankin's rum to remember it, and after Dick had been sent up for the
second time, the second time now, mind ye, and had been in two years
for walking off with Rankin's ham, a lot of school children huntin'
for ches'nuts come upon that same envelope in the ditch with them
three new dollars in it, covered up under the leaves and the weeds
a-growin' over it. Ben Mulford's girl found it."
"What, the child he had with him tonight?"
"Yes, little freckle-faced girl with white eyes. Oh, I tell you Dick's
awful fond of that kid."