hasty calculation. If the train had been in motion all night, this early
morning stopping-place should be Indianapolis. Getting upon his feet, he
applied an investigative eye to the crack. The train, or at least his
portion of it, was side-tracked in a big yard with many others. Working
the pick-lock wire again, he unhasped the door and opened it. There was
no one in sight in this particular alley of the crowded yard, and he
dropped to the ground and slid the door back into place.
Making a note of the initials and number, so that he might find the car
again, he crawled under three or four standing trains and made his way
to a track-side lunch-counter. The thick ham sandwich and the cup of
muddy coffee eaten and drunk with the appetite of a starved vagrant set
up another mile-stone in the distances traversed. Was it, indeed, only
on the morning of yesterday that he had sent his toast back because,
forsooth, the maid at Mrs. Gilman's select boarding-house for single
gentlemen had scorched it a trifle? It seemed as incredible as a
fairytale.
Beyond the quenching of his hunger and the stuffing of his pockets with
two more of the sad sandwiches, he went back to his box car, knowing
that, in the nature of things, his flight was as yet only fairly begun.
His train, or some train in which his car was a unit, was just pulling
out, and he was barely in time to slide the door and scramble in. Once
inside, he made haste to close the opening before the train should
emerge from the shelter of its mate on the next track. But before he
could brace himself for the shove, a hand came down from the car roof, a
brakeman's coupling-stick was thrust into the riding-rail of the door,
and the closing operation was effectively blocked.
Smith stood back and waited for a head to follow the hand. It came
presently; the bare, tousled head of a young brakeman who had taken off
his cap and was lying on his stomach on the car roof to look under the
eaves into the interior. Smith made a quick spring and caught the
hanging head in the crook of his elbow. "You're gone," he remarked to
the inverted face crushed in the vise of forearm and biceps. "If you
turn loose, you'll break your back as you come over, and if you don't
turn loose, I can pull your head off."
"Leggo of me!" gasped the poor prisoner, drumming with his toes on the
roof. "Wha--whadda you want with my head? You can't do nothin' with it
when you get it!"
"I have got it," said Smith, showing his teeth. "By and by, when we get
safely out of town, I'm going to jump up and bite you."
The brakeman tried to cry out that he was slipping; that the fall would
kill him. Smith felt him coming and shifted his hold just in time to
make the fall an assisted somersault, landing the man clumsily, but
safely, inside of the car. The trigging stick had been lost in the
scuffle, and Smith's first care was to slide the door.
"Say; what kind of a 'bo are you, anyway?" gasped the railroad man,
flattening himself against the side of the car and struggling to regain
his suddenly lost prestige; the time-honored authority of the trainman
over the ride-stealer. "Don't you know you might 'a' killed me, pullin'
me off'm the roof that way?"
"I can do it yet, if you feel that you've missed anything that was
rightfully coming to you," Smith laughed. Then: "Do you happen to have a
pipe and a bit of tobacco in your clothes?"
"My gosh!" said the brakeman, "I like your nerve!" Nevertheless, he
rummaged in his pocket and handed over a corn-cob pipe and a sack of
tobacco. "Maybe you'll want a match, too."
"No, thanks; I have one."
Smith filled the pipe, lighted it, and returned the tobacco. The nickel
mixture was not quite like the Turkish blend in the humidor jar on the
Kincaid Terrace mantel, but it sufficed. At the pipe-puffing the
brakeman looked him over curiously.
"Say; you're no Weary Willie," he commented gruffly; "you're wearin' too
good clothes. What's your lay?"
More and more Smith could feel the shacklings of the reputable
yesterdays slipping from him. Civilization has taken its time ambling
down the centuries, but the short cuts to the primitive are neither hard
to find nor long to traverse.
"My 'lay' just now is to get a free ride on this railroad," he said.
"How far is this 'empty' going?"
"To St. Louis," was the reply, extorted by the very matter-of-fact
calmness of the question. "But you're not goin' to St. Louis in it--not
by a jugful. You're goin' to hop off at the first stop we make."
"Am I? Wait until I have finished my smoke. Then we'll open the door and
scrap for it; the best man to stay in the car, and the other to take a
chance turning handsprings along the right of way. Does that appeal to
you?"
"No, by jacks! You bet your life it don't!"
"All right; what's the other answer?"
If the brakeman knew any other answer he did not suggest it. A few miles
farther along, the train slowed for a stop. The brakeman felt his
twisted neck tenderly and said: "If you'll tell me that you ain't
runnin' away from some sheriff 'r other...."
"Do I look it?"
"I'm dogged if I know what you do look like--champeen middle-weight,
maybe. Lemme open that door."
Smith took a final whiff and returned the pipe. "Suppose I say that I'm
broke and haven't had a chance to pawn my watch," he suggested. "How
does that strike you?"
The trainman slid the door open a foot or so as the train ground and
jangled to a stand at the grade crossing with another railroad.
"I'll think about it," he growled. "You pulled me off'm the roof; but
you kep' me from breakin' my back, and you've smoked my pipe. My run
ends at Terre Haute."
"Thanks," said Smith; and at that the tousle-headed young fellow dropped
off and disappeared in the direction of the caboose.
Smith closed the door and hooked it with his wire, and the train jogged
on over the crossing. Hour after hour wore away and nothing happened. By
the measured click of the rail joints under the wheels it was evident
that the freight was a slow one, and there were many halts and
side-trackings. At noon Smith ate one of the pocketed sandwiches. The
ham was oversalted, and before long he began to be consumed with thirst.
He stood it until it became a keen torture, and then he found the bit of
wire again and tried to pick the hasp-lock, meaning to take advantage of
the next stop for a thirst-quenching dash.
For some reason the wire refused to work, and he could not make it free
the hasp. After many futile attempts he whittled another peep-hole,
angling it so that it pointed toward the puzzling door hook. Then he saw
what had been done. Some one--the somersaulting brakeman, no doubt--had
basely inserted a wooden peg in the staple in place of the hook and the
empty box car was now a prison-van.
Confronting the water famine, Smith drew again upon the elemental
resources and braced himself to endure. When night came the slow train
was still jogging along westward somewhere in Illinois, and the box-car
prisoner was so thirsty that he did not dare to eat the meat in the
remaining sandwich; could eat the bread only in tiny morsels, chewed
long and patiently. Still he would not make the outcry that the tricky
brakeman had doubtless counted upon; the noise that would bring help at
any one of the numerous stops--and purchase relief at the price of an
arrest for ride-stealing.
Grimly resolute, Smith made up his mind to hang on until morning. Every
added mile was a mile gained in the flight from the gallows or the
penitentiary, and the night's run would put him just that much farther
beyond the zone of acute danger. Such determination fights and wins its
own battle, and though he dreamed of lakes and rivers and cool-running
brooks and plashing fountains the greater part of the night, he slept
through it and awoke to find his car side-tracked in a St. Louis yard.
One glance through the whittled peep-hole showed him that the
imprisoning peg was still in its staple, so now there was no alternative
but the noise. A brawny switchman was passing, and he came and unhasped
the door in response to Smith's shower of kicks upon it.
"Come down out o' that, ye scut! 'Tis the stone pile f'r the likes of
yez in this State, and it's Michael Toomey that'll be runnin' ye in,"
remarked the brawny person, when the door had been opened.
"Wait," said Smith hoarsely. He had caught sight of a bucket of water
with a dipper in it standing by the door of the switch shanty, and he
jumped down and ran for it. With the terrible thirst assuaged, he
wheeled and went back to the big switchman. "Now I'm ready to be run
in," he said. "But first, you know, you've got to prove that you're the
better man," and with that he whipped off his coat and squared himself
for the battle.
It was joined at once, the big man being Irish and nothing loath. Also,
it was short and sweet. Barring a healthy and as yet unsatisfied
appetite, Smith was in the pink of condition, and the little trainer in
the Lawrenceville Athletic Club had imparted the needful skill. In three
swift rounds the big switchman was thrashed into a proper state of
submission and hospitality, and again, being Irish, he bore no grudge.
"You're a pugnayshus young traithor, and I'm fair sick for to be doin'
ye a fayvor," spluttered the big man, after the third knock-out. "What
is ut ye'll be wantin'?"
Smith promptly named three things; breakfast directions, a morning
paper, and a railroad man's advice as to the best means of getting
forward on his journey. His new ally put him in the way of compassing
all three, and when the westward faring was resumed--this time in the
hollow interior of a huge steel smoke-stack loaded in sections on a pair
of flat cars--he went eagerly through the newspaper. The thing he was
looking for was there, under flaring headlines; a day late, to be sure,
but that was doubtless owing to Lawrenceville's rather poor wire
service.
ATTEMPTED MURDER OF BANK PRESIDENT
Society-Leader Cashier Embezzles $100,000 and Makes Murderous
Assault on President
LAWRENCEVILLE, May 15.--J. Montague Smith, cashier of the
Lawrenceville Bank and Trust Company, and a leader in the
Lawrenceville younger set, is to-day a fugitive from justice
with a price on his head. At a late hour last night the
watchman of the bank found President Dunham lying unconscious
in front of his desk. Help was summoned, and Mr. Dunham, who
was supposed to be suffering from some sudden attack of
illness, was taken to his hotel. Later, it transpired that the
president had been the victim of a murderous assault.
Discovering upon his return to the city yesterday evening that
the cashier had been using the bank's funds in an attempt to
cover a stock speculation of his own, Dunham sent for Smith and
charged him with the crime. Smith made an unprovoked and
desperate assault upon his superior officer, beating him into
insensibility and leaving him for dead. Since it is known that
he did not board any of the night trains east or west, Smith is
supposed to be in hiding somewhere in the vicinity of the city.
A warrant is out, and a reward of $1,000 for his arrest and
detention has been offered by the bank. It is not thought
possible that he can escape. It was currently reported not long
since that Smith was engaged to a prominent young society woman
of Lawrenceville, but this has proved to be untrue.
Smith read the garbled news story with mingled thankfulness and rage;
thankfulness because it told him that he was not a murderer, and rage,
no less at Dunham's malignant ingenuity than at his own folly in setting
the seal of finality upon the false accusation by running away. But the
thing was done, and it could not be undone. Having put himself on the
wrong side of the law, there was nothing for it now but a complete
disappearance; exile, a change of identity, and an absolute severance
with his past.
While he was folding the St. Louis newspaper and putting it into his
pocket, he was wondering, half cynically, what Verda Richlander was
thinking of him. Was it she, herself, who had told the newspaper people
that there was nothing in the story of the engagement? That she would
side with his accusers and the apparent, or at least uncontradicted,
facts he could hardly doubt. There was no very strong reason why she
should not, he told himself, rather bitterly. He had not tried to bind
her to him in any shackling of sentiment. Quite the contrary, they had
both agreed to accept the modern view that sentiment should be regarded
as a mildly irruptive malady which runs, or should run, its course, like
measles or chicken-pox, in early adolescence. That being the case, Miss
Verda's leaf--like all other leaves in the book of his past--might be
firmly pasted down and forgotten. As an outlaw with a price on his head
he had other and vastly more important things to think about.
Twenty-four hours beyond this final decision he reached Kansas City,
where there was a delay and some little diplomacy to be brought into
play before he could convince a freight crew on the Union Pacific that
he had to be carried, free of cost, to Denver. In the Colorado capital
there was another halt and more trouble; but on the second day he found
another empty box car and was once more moving westward, this time
toward a definite destination.
During the Denver stop-over he had formulated his plan, such as it was.
In a newspaper which he had picked up, he had lighted upon an
advertisement calling for laborers to go over into the Timanyoni country
to work on an irrigation project. By applying at the proper place he
might have procured free transportation to the work, but there were two
reasons why he did not apply. One was prudently cautionary and was based
on the fear that he might be recognized. The other was less easily
defined, but no less mandatory in the new scheme of things. The
vagabonding had gotten into his blood, and he was minded to go on as he
had begun, beating his way to the job like other members of the vagrant
brotherhood.
IV
The High Hills
Train Number Seventeen, the Nevada through freight, was two hours late
issuing from the western portal of Timanyoni Canyon. Through the early
mountain-climbing hours of the night and the later flight across the Red
Desert, the dusty, travel-grimed young fellow in the empty box car
midway of the train had slept soundly, with the hard car floor for a bed
and his folded coat for a pillow. But on the emergence of the train from
the echoing canyon depths the sudden cessation of the crash and roar of
the shut-in mountain passage awoke him and he got up to open the door
and look out.
It was still no later than a lazy man's breakfast time, and the May
morning was perfect, with a cobalt sky above and a fine tingling quality
in the air to set the blood dancing in the veins. Over the top of the
eastern range the sun was looking, level-rayed, into a parked valley
bounded on all sides by high spurs and distant snow peaks. In its nearer
reaches the valley was dotted with round hills, some of them bare,
others dark green to their summits with forestings of mountain pine and
fir. Now that it was out of the canyon, the train was skirting the foot
of the southern boundary spur, the railroad track holding its level by
heading the gulches and rounding the alternating promontories.
From the outer loopings of the curves, the young tramp at the car door
had momentary glimpses of the Timanyoni, a mountain torrent in its
canyon, and the swiftest of upland rivers even here where it had the
valley in which to expand. A Copah switchman had told him that the
railroad division town of Brewster lay at the end of the night's run, in
a river valley beyond the eastern Timanyonis, and that the situation of
the irrigation project which was advertising for laborers in the Denver
newspapers was a few miles up the river from Brewster.
For reasons of his own, he was not anxious to make a daylight entry into
the town itself. Sooner or later, of course, the scrutiny of curious
eyes must be met, but there was no need of running to meet the risk. Not
that the risk was very great. While he was killing time in the Copah
yard the day before, waiting for a chance to board the night freight, he
had picked up a bit of broken looking-glass and put it in his pocket.
The picture it gave back when he took it out and looked into it was that
of a husky young tramp with a stubble beard a week old, and on face and
neck and hands the accumulated grime of two thousand miles of
freight-train riding. Also, the week's wear and tear had been, if
anything, harder on the clothes than on the man. His hat had been lost
in one of the railroad-yard train-boardings and he had replaced it in
Denver with a workman's cap. It was a part of the transformation,
wrought and being wrought in him, that he was able to pocket the bit of
looking-glass with a slow grin of satisfaction. When one is about to
apply for a job as a laboring man it is well to look the part.
As the train swept along on its way down the grades the valley became
more open and the prospect broadened. At one of the promontory roundings
the box-car passenger had a glimpse of a shack-built construction camp
on the river's margin some distance on ahead. A concrete dam was rising
in sections out of the river, and dominating the dam and the shacks two
steel towers, with a carrying cable stretched between them, formed the
piers of the aerial spout conveyer for the placing of the material in
the forms.
A mile or more short of the construction camp the railroad made another
of the many gulch loopings; and on its next emergence the train had
passed the site of the dam, leaving it fully a mile in the rear. Here
the young man at the car door saw the ditch company's unloading
side-track with a spur branching away from the main line and crossing
the river on a temporary trestle. There were material yards on both
sides of the stream, and in one of the opposing hills a busy quarry.
The train made no stop at the construction siding, but a half-mile
farther along the brakes began to grind and the speed was slackened.
Sliding the car door another foot or two, the young tramp with the
week-old stubble beard on his face leaned out to look ahead. His
opportunity was at hand. A block semaphore was turned against the
freight and the train was slowing in obedience to the signal. Waiting
until the brakes shrilled again, the tramp put his shoulder to the
sliding door, sat for a moment in the wider opening, and then swung off.
After the train had gone on he drew himself up, took a deep
chest-filling breath of the crisp morning air, and looked about him. The
sun was an hour high over the eastern mountains, and the new world
spread itself in broad detail. His alighting was upon one of the
promontory embankments. To the westward, where the curving railroad
track was lost in the farther windings of the river, lay the little
intermountain city of Brewster, a few of its higher buildings showing
clear-cut in the distance. Paralleling the railroad, on a lower level
and nearer the river, a dusty wagon road pointed in one direction toward
the town, and in the other toward the construction camp.
The young man who had crossed four States and the better part of a fifth
as a fugitive and vagrant turned his back upon the distant town as a
place to be avoided. Scrambling down the railroad embankment, he made
his way to the wagon road, crossed it, and kept on until he came to the
fringe of aspens on the river's edge, where he broke all the trampish
traditions by stripping off the travel-worn clothes and plunging in to
take a soapless bath. The water, being melted snow from the range, was
icy-cold and it stabbed like knives. Nevertheless, it was wet, and some
part of the travel dust, at least, was soluble in it. He came out
glowing, but a thorn from his well-groomed past came up and pricked him
when he had to put the soiled clothes on again. There was no present
help for that, however; and five minutes later he had regained the road
and was on his way to the ditch camp.
When he had gone a little distance he found that the wagon road dodged
the railroad track as it could, crossing and recrossing the right of way
twice before the construction camp came into view. The last of the
crossings was at the temporary material yard for which the side-track
had been installed, and from this point on, the wagon road held to the
river bank. The ditch people were doubtless getting all their material
over the railroad so there would be little hauling by wagon. But there
were automobile tracks in the dust, and shortly after he had passed the
material yard the tramp heard a car coming up behind him. It was a
six-cylinder roadster, and its motor was missing badly.
He gave the automobile passing room when it came along, glancing up to
note that its single occupant was a big, bearded man, wearing his gray
tweeds as one to whom clothes were merely a convenience. He was chewing
a black cigar, and the unoccupied side of his mouth was busy at the
passing moment heaping objurgations upon the limping motor. A hundred
yards farther along the motor gave a spasmodic gasp and stopped. When
the young tramp came up, the big man had climbed out and had the hood
open. What he was saying to the stalled motor was picturesque enough to
make the young man stop and grin appreciatively.
"Gone bad on you?" he inquired.
Colonel Dexter Baldwin, the Timanyoni's largest landowner, and a breeder
of fine horses who tolerated motor-cars only because they could be
driven hard and were insensate and fit subjects for abusive language,
took his head out of the hood.
"The third time this morning," he snapped. "I'd rather drive a team of
wind-broken mustangs, any day in the year!"
"I used to drive a car a while back," said the tramp. "Let me look her
over."
The colonel stood aside, wiping his hands on a piece of waste, while the
young man sought for the trouble. It was found presently in a loosened
magneto wire; found and cleverly corrected. The tramp went around in
front and spun the motor, and when it had been throttled down, Colonel
Baldwin had his hand in his pocket.
"That's something like," he said. "The garage man said it was carbon.
You take hold as if you knew how. What's your fee?"
The tramp shook his head and smiled good-naturedly.
"Nothing; for a bit of neighborly help like that."
The colonel put his coat on, and in the act took a better measure of the
stalwart young fellow who looked like a hobo and talked and behaved like
a gentleman. Colonel Dexter was a fairly shrewd judge of men, and he
knew that the tramping brotherhood divides itself pretty evenly on a
distinct line of cleavage, with the born vagrant on one side and the man
out of work on the other.
"You are hiking out to the dam?" he asked brusquely.
"I am headed that way, yes," was the equally crisp rejoinder.
"Hunting a job?"
"Just that."
"What sort of a job?"
"Anything that may happen to be in sight."
"That usually means a pick and shovel or a wheelbarrow on a construction
job. We're needing quarrymen and concrete handlers, and we could use a
few more rough carpenters on the forms. But there isn't much office
work."
The tramp looked up quickly.
"What makes you think I'm hunting for an office job?" he queried.
"Your hands," said the colonel shortly.
The young man looked at his hands thoughtfully. They were dirty again
from the tinkering with the motor, but the inspection went deeper than
the grime.
"I'm not afraid of the pick and shovel, or the wheelbarrow, and on some
accounts I guess they'd be good for me. But on the other hand, perhaps
it _is_ a pity to spoil a middling good office man to make an
indifferent day-laborer--to say nothing of knocking some honest fellow
out of the only job he knows how to do."
Colonel Baldwin swung in behind the steering-wheel of the roadster and
held a fresh match to the black cigar. Though he was from Missouri, he
had lived long enough in the high hills to know better than to judge any
man altogether by outward appearances.
"Climb in," he said, indicating the vacant seat at his side. "I'm the
president of the ditch company. Perhaps Williams may be able to use you;
but your chances for office work would be ten to one in the town."
"I don't care to live in the town," said the man out of work, mounting
to the proffered seat; and past that the big roadster leaped away up
the road and the roar of the rejuvenated motor made further speech
impossible.
* * * * *