Branded

  VII

  The Plunge

  By the train which bore me away from Springville I went only far enoughto put me safely beyond the possibility of stumbling upon any of theplaces where I had hitherto sought work; though as to that, I hadlittle hope of escaping the relentless blacklister who had been setupon me.

  About midnight I had a talk with the flagman in the smoking-car,calling myself a laborer looking for a job and asking about theprospects in the region through which we were passing. I was told thatthere were swamp lands in the next county, and that the contractors whowere installing systems of under-draining had been advertising for men.

  Accordingly, the next morning found me in the new field, with one setof difficulties outpaced for the moment only to make room for another.The first man I tackled was the foreman of a ditching crew, and helooked me over with a cold and contemptuous eye.

  "Show yer hands!" he rasped, and when I held them out, palms upward:"On yer way, Misther Counter-hopper; 'tis wor-rkin'min we're hirin'here this day--not anny lily-fingered dudes!"

  So it was, in a disheartening number of instances; on a railroadgrading force in an adjoining county, on city buildings where I askedto be taken as an unskilled helper, with a sewer contractor in anothercity, as a shoveler in a village brick-yard. Finally I landed a job asa stacker in a lumberyard; and now I found another of the day-laborerdifficulties lying in wait for me. At the time of my commitment fortrial I was in good physical condition. But the three years in prisonhad made me soft and flabby, a handicap which liberty--with a stringtied to it--had done little to remove; and four hard days of thestacking, in which two of us were handling two-by-ten eighteen-footjoists to the top of a pile twelve feet high, finished me.

  The boss grinned understandingly when he gave me my time-check for thefour days.

  "I thought you wouldn't last very long at the stacking," he commented;"that's a man's job." Then: "Got any head for figures?"

  I faced him fairly. "I can't take a job of that kind."

  "Why can't you?"

  He got the reason in a single sentence.

  "Paroled man, hey? What was you in for?"

  I named the charge, and did not add that it was an unjust one. I hadpleaded the miscarriage of justice so many times, only to be called aliar, that it seemed useless to try to explain.

  "Robbed a bank, did you? Well, I don't know as I think any worse ofyou for spittin' it right out. Tryin' to brace up?"

  "I'm trying to earn an honest living."

  "And havin' a mighty hard time of it, I reckon--'r you wouldn't bemakin' a push at stackin' lumber with them blistered hands. Say, boy;I sort o' like your looks, and I'm goin' to give you a boost. They'reneedin' a log-scaler in the sawmill. If you know figures, you cancatch on in half a day. Chase your feet down to the mill foreman andtell him I sent you."

  I went gladly enough, secured the new job, learned how to do itacceptably, and was temerariously happy and light-hearted for two wholeweeks. Then my Nemesis found me again. In the third week I chanced toget a glimpse of a short, heavy-set man talking to a bunch of my fellowlaborers. Before I could cross the mill yard to identify the strangerhe turned and walked quickly away; but the sixth sense of apprehensionwhich develops so surely and quickly in the ex-convict told me that theheavy-set man was Abel Geddis's hired blacklister, and that I was oncemore on the toboggan slide.

  Pay-day came at the end of the week, and when the envelopes had beengiven out the mill foreman took me aside.

  "I'm sorry, Weyburn," he began curtly, "but I'm afraid you'll have tobe moving on. Personally, I don't care, one way or the other, whatyou've been or where you hall from. You do your work well, and that'sall I ask of any man. But your story has got out among the hands, andthat settles it. They won't work with a convict."

  When I took the long road again after this latest rebuff I knew thatthe fine resolution with which I had left the prison five monthsearlier was breaking down. The relentless pressure was doing its work,and I began to ask myself how long I could hold out as a law-abidingcitizen and a victim of injustice against the belief of the world thatI was neither.

  The five months' wanderings had carried me the length and breadth ofthe State, and I had avoided only the large cities and my homeneighborhood. But with the lumber company's money in my pocket Iboarded a train for the State metropolis. At the end of the experimentI was doing what the released criminal usually does at theoutset--seeking an opportunity to lose myself in the crowd.

  Jobs were notably harder to find in the great city, though policeheadquarters, where I reported myself, placed no obstacles in my way sofar as I know; took no note of me in any fashion, as I was afterwardled to believe. That the hired traducer would follow and find me Imade no doubt; but by this time I was becoming so inured to thispeculiar hardship that I refused to cross bridges until I came to them,and was at times even able to forget, in the discouragements of otherhardships, that I was a marked man.

  In the search for means to keep body and soul together it was easy toforget. Day labor offered only now and then, and in my increasingphysical unfitness I could not hold my own against the trained musclesof seasoned roustabouts, porters and freight-handlers. Worse still,the physical deterrent grew by what it fed upon--or by the lack offeeding. Part of the time I couldn't get enough to eat; and there werecold and blustering nights when I had not the few cents which wouldhave given me a bed in a cheap lodging-house.

  It was in this deepest abyss in the valley of disheartenment that I meta former prison-mate named Kellow; a forger whose time of release fromthe penitentiary coincided nearly with my own. The meeting was whollyby chance. I was crossing one of the city bridges at night, pointingfor one of the river warehouses where I hoped to find a tramp's lodgingand shelter from the bitter wind, when I walked blindly into a mancoming in the opposite direction. The recognition was instant andmutual.

  Like myself, Kellow had been a "trusty," and under certain relaxationsof the rule of silence in the prison we had talked and an acquaintanceof a sort had slowly grown and ripened. In this intimacy, which I hadstriven to hold at arm's length, I had come to know the forger as acriminal of the most dangerous breed; a man of parts and of someeducation, but wholly lacking in the moral sense; a rule-keeper inprison only because he was shrewd enough to appreciate the fact that hewas bringing the day of release nearer by piling up "good-conduct" time.

  "Well, pinch me! Look who's here!" was his greeting when we met on thebridge.

  For a silent moment it was I who did the looking. Kellow had grown apair of curling black mustaches since his release; he was well-dressed,erect and alert, and was smoking a cigar the fragrance of which made mesick and faint with an attack of the long-denied tobacco hunger.

  "You're out, too, are you?" I managed to say at last, shivering in thecold blast which came sweeping up the river.

  "Three months, and then some," he returned jauntily. "I'm collecting alittle on the old debt now, and doing fairly well at it, thank you."

  "The old debt?" I queried.

  "Yep; the one that the little old round world owes every man: threesquares, a tailor, a bed and a pocket-roll."

  "You look as if you had acquired all four," I agreed, setting my jaw tokeep my teeth from chattering.

  "Sure I have; and you look as if you hadn't," he countered. And then:"What's the matter? Just plain hard luck? Or is it the parole scare?"

  "Both," I admitted.

  He shot me a quick look.

  "I can put you onto a dead sure thing, if you're game for it. Let'shunt us a warm place and chew it over."

  The place was the back room of an all-night saloon in the slum quarterbeyond the bridge. It was warm, stiflingly warm and close, after theoutdoor blast and chill, and it reeked like a sty. Kellow kicked out achair for me and drew up one for himself on the opposite side of thesmall round card-table over which a single gas-jet hissed and sizzled,lighting the tiny box of a place with a sickly yellow glare.
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  "What'll it be?" he asked, when the waiter came in.

  "A piece of bread and meat from the lunch counter, if you don't mind,"I said; and then, in an apology for which I instantly despised myself:"Liquor doesn't agree with me lately; it--it would gag me."

  Kellow ordered whiskey for himself, and after the waiter was gone hestared at me contemptuously.

  "So it's come to that, has it?" he derided. "You're so damned hungryyou're afraid to put a drop of bug-juice under your belt. You're afool, Weyburn. I know what you've been doing, just as well as if you'dtold me the whole story. Also, I'll believe now what I didn't believewhile we were in 'stir'; you were pinched for something you didn't do."

  "Well?" I said, neither affirming nor denying. The free lunch had comeand I was falling upon it like a famished wolf. I hadn't a penny in mypockets, and the bread and meat stood for breakfast, dinner and suppercombined.

  Kellow swallowed his whiskey at a gulp and stood the empty glass bottomupward on the table.

  "Been trying the honest lay, I suppose--handing in your name and numberwherever you went?" he suggested.

  I nodded, adding that there was nothing else to be done, as I saw it.

  He laughed scornfully. "A minute ago I said you were a fool, butyou're worse than that--you're an infant! Why, good hell, Weyburn,there are a dozen ways to beat the parole game! Look at me: I'm here,ain't I? And the warden knows all about it, does he? Not on yourlife! Every four weeks he gets a letter from me telling him what afine time I'm having on Dad's farm down in Wayne, and how I'm all tothe good and thanking him every day for all he did for me. What?"

  "Somebody mails those letters for you in Wayne?" I asked.

  "Sure! And a little split for the marshal in the nearest town does therest. Bimeby, when I've collected enough of the debt I spoke of, I'llshake the dust and disappear."

  "They'll find you and bring you back."

  "Not without a fine-tooth comb, they won't. This old world is plentygood and wide when you learn how to use it."

  "I suppose I haven't learned yet; and I don't want to learn--in yourway, Kellow."

  Again he gave me the sneering laugh.

  "You may as well begin, and have it over with. It's all the same toyou, now, whether you cracked the bank or didn't. You may think youcan live square and live the prison-smell down, but you can't. It'llstick to you like your skin. Wherever you go, you'll be a marked man."

  Though I had devoured the bar hand-out to the final crumb, I was stillhalf-famished; and hunger is but a poor ally in any battle. What hewas saying was truth of the truth, so far as the blunt facts wereconcerned. Every failure I had made in the six weary months confirmedit. There was little room in the world of the well-behaved for the manwho was honest enough--or foolish enough--to confess himself anex-convict; less still for a man who had been made the object of apersecuting conspiracy. None the less, I had resolution, or obstinacy,enough to say:

  "I don't believe it."

  "That's what makes me say you're a fool!" he snapped back. "You've gotthe name, and you may as well have the game. The world is dead easy,if you take it on its blind side; easy living, easy money. Listen,Weyburn, and I'll show you how you can climb into the bandwagon."

  I listened because I could not well help it, being the man's wretchedbeneficiary, in a sense. As he talked I felt the ground of goodresolutions slipping from beneath my feet. He was staging the old andtime-honored swindle--the gold-brick game--and he needed a confederate.The fish was almost as good as landed, and with a little coaching Icould step in and clinch the robbery. Kellow proposed to stake me forthe clothes and the needful stage properties; and my knowledge ofbanking and finance, limited as it was, would do the rest. It was acinch, he averred, and when it was pulled off we could divide thespoils and vanish.

  It was hardly a temptation. That word calls up a mental picture ofstern virtues assailed on every side and standing like a rock in astorm. But, stripped of their poetic glamor, the virtues--and thevices, for that matter,--are purely human; they can rise no higher orsink no lower than the flesh-and-blood medium through which they findtheir expression. The six months of hardship and humiliation which hadbrought me to a pass at which I could eat a saloon luncheon at theexpense of a thief were pushing me over the brink. Kellow sat back inhis chair, smoking quietly, but I could feel his black eyes boring intomy brain. When he judged that the time was fully ripe, he drew a fatroll of bank-notes from his pocket, stripped ten ten-dollar bills fromit and tossed them across the table to me.

  "There's the stake, and here's the lay," said he, tersely. "Yourname's Smollett; you've struck it rich, and you're on your way home toNew York, we'll say, from your mine in Colorado. You're stopping atthe Marlborough, and we'll run across you accidentally--I and thecome-on--to-morrow forenoon in the hotel lobby. Get that?"

  "I hear what you are saying."

  "All right. Now for the preliminaries. Any all-night pawnbroker canfit you out with a couple of grips and some clothes that will let youdress the part--or at least let you into the hotel. Then, to-morrowmorning bright and early you can hit the ready-made tailors and blossomout right as the honest miner spending some of his money for the gladrags. I'm at the Marlborough myself--J. T. Jewett, Room 706--but, ofcourse, I won't know you; you'll just butt in as a stranger to both ofus. When we get together I'll give you the cues as we go along."

  During all this talk the hundred dollars had lain on the table betweenus. It didn't look like money to me; it stood for food and decentclothing and a bath--but chiefly for food. Slowly I took it up andfingered it, almost reverently, straightening out the crumpled cornersof the bills and smoothing them down. . . .

  I scarcely know how I got away from Kellow, nor do I know why he choseto stay on there in the back room of that miserable doggery, drinkingwhiskey sours alone and smoking his high-priced cigars. But I do knowthat I was up against the fight of my life when I went out to face thebitter night wind in the streets.

  It was a singular thing that helped me to win the fight, temporarily,at least. By all accounts it ought to have been those threeheart-warming days spent with Whitley a month earlier, and his farewellwords of helpfulness and cheer spoken as I was boarding the outgoingtrain at the Springville station. But though Whitley's sturdy faith inme came to do its part, it was another and much longer leap of memorythat made me hesitate and draw back; a flash carrying me back to myschool-days in Glendale . . . to a certain afternoon when a plain-facedlittle girl, the daughter of our physics and chemistry teacher, hadtold me, with her brown eyes ablaze, what she thought of dishonesty ingeneral, and in particular of the dishonesty of a boy in her class whowas lying and stealing his way past his examinations.

  I don't know to this day why I should have recalled Polly Everton andher flaming little diatribe against thievery and hypocrisy at thatdesperate moment. She, and her quiet college-professor father who hadseemed so out of place teaching in a Glendale school, had dropped outof my life years before. But the fact remained, and at the memory,Kellow's bribe, gripped pocket-deep in my hand, burnt me like a coal offire. With a gasp I realized that I was over the brink at last,stumbling and falling into the pit which has no bottom. With a singledollar of the thief's money spent and gone beyond recall, I should belost.

  With that memory of little Polly Everton to drive me, I went doggedlyback to the riverside slum and sought for Kellow where I had left him.He was gone, but the newly aroused resolution, the outworn swimmer'sstubborn steeling of the nerves and muscles to make one more strokebefore he drowns, persisted. Footsore and half-frozen, I tramped thedozen squares to the great hotel in the business district. The nightclerk sized me up for precisely what I was, listening with only half anear to my stammering question. But he deigned to answer it,nevertheless. Yes; Mr. Jewett was the gentleman who had Number 706,but he was not in. His key was still in the box.

  There were writing-desks in the lobby, a number of them, and I went tothe first that offe
red. Some guest had left a few sheets of the hotelpaper and an envelope. Without a written word to go with it, I slippedthe unbroken bribe into the envelope, sealed the flap hurriedly andwent back to the clerk.

  "Put this in Mr. Jewett's key-box, if you please," I requested; andwhen I had seen the thing done, and had verified the number of the boxwith my own eyes, I headed once more for the inhospitable streets.

  It was on the icy sidewalk, directly in front of the revolving doors ofthe big hotel, that my miracle was wrought. While I hesitated, notknowing which way to turn for shelter for the remainder of the night, acab drove up and a man, muffled to the ears in a fur-lined overcoat,got out. He was apparently an arrival from one of the night trains;while he was slamming the cab door a bell-hop from the Marlboroughskated across the sidewalk, snatched a couple of grips from the frontseat of the cab and disappeared with them.

  Humped and shivering, I was almost at the traveler's elbow when heturned and felt in his pockets for the money to pay the cab driver. Iwas so busy envying him the possession of that warm, fur-lined coatthat I didn't pay much attention to what he was doing, but it wasevident that he had forgotten in which pocket he carried his change,since he was feeling first in one and then in another.

  Suddenly my heart skipped a beat and then fell to hammering a fiercetattoo as a gust of the highwayman's madness swept over me. The manhad taken out a huge pocket roll of bank-notes and was running thebills over to see if there were one small enough to serve thecab-paying purpose. Obviously there was not, and with a grunt ofimpatience he searched again, this time unearthing a handful of silver.Dropping the proper coin into the cabman's outstretched hand, he turnedand disappeared through the revolving doors, and at the same instantthe cabby whipped up his horse and drove away. Then I saw it lyingalmost at my feet; a small black pocketbook which the traveler had letfall in his fumbling search for change.

  Judged by any code of ethics--my own, for that matter--what followedwas entirely indefensible. The grab for the treasure, its swifthiding, the breathless dash into the shadows of the nearest crossstreet; all these named me for what I was at the moment--ahalf-starved, half-frozen, despair-hounded thief. When I had made surethat there was no policeman in sight I examined my prize by the lightof a crossing electric. The black pocketbook contained sixty-threedollars in bills and a single half-dollar in silver. And a hastysearch revealed nothing by which the loser could be identified; therewere no papers, no cards, nothing but the money.

  Though a desperate disregard for anything like property rights hadprompted the sudden snatch and the thief-like dash for cover, I am gladto be able to say that common honesty, or some shadowy simulacrum ofit, revived presently and sent me back to the hotel, though not withoutterrible foot-draggings, you may be sure. And as I went, many-tonguedtemptation clamored riotously for a hearing: the man had so much--hewould never miss this carelessly spilt driblet; I had no means ofidentifying him, and with the fur-lined coat removed I should probablyfail to recognize him; if I should try to describe him, the hotelclerk, he of the detached and superior manner, would doubtless take thepocketbook in charge and that would be the last I should ever hear ofit.

  Giving these arguments their just weight, I hope I may take some smallcredit for the perseverance which finally drove me through the swingingdoors and up to the clerk's counter. For the second time that night Isought speech with the bediamonded chief lackey, and got it grudgingly.No; no one had registered within the past few minutes, and no mananswering my exceedingly incomplete description had presented himselfat the counter. Conscious that I must do, there and then, all thatever could be done, I persisted.

  "The gentleman I speak of came in a cab and he had two hand-bags; theywere brought in by one of the bell-boys," I said, thinking that thismight afford the clue.

  The clerk looked afar over my head. "Some guest who already has hisroom and had gone to fetch his grips." Then, with the contemptuouslip-curl that I had encountered too often not to recognize it at sight:"Who are you, anyway?--a plain-clothes man looking for crooks? You'llnot find them in the Marlborough. We don't keep that kind of a house."

  I turned away, gripping the precious treasure-trove in my pocket. Fora full half-year I had kept faith with the prison authorities and thelaw, living the life of a hunted animal and coming at last to thechoice between starvation and a deliberate plunge into the underworld.Through it all I had obeyed the requirements of my parole in letter andin spirit. But now----

  The black pocketbook was warm in my hand. It was mine, if not by thefinder's right, at least by the right of possession, and it containedthe price of freedom. Before I had reached the corner, of the firststreet my determination was taken, and there had been but one instantof hesitation. This had come in a frenzied burst of red rage when Iremembered that, when all was said, I owed this last downward step, aswell as all that had gone before, to two old men who . . . I stoppedshort in my shuffling race to the railroad station. I had money;enough to take me to Glendale--and far beyond when the deed should bedone. Years before I had sworn to kill them, and since that time theyhad doubly earned their blotting-out.

  I don't know to this day whether it was some remaining shreds of theconventional conscience, or a broken man's inability to screwretaliatory determination to the murder point, that sent me onward tothe westbound station and framed my reply to the ticket agent's curtquestion, "Where to?" when I thrust my money through his wicket. Bethat as it may, a short half-hour later I had boarded a throughwestbound train and was crouching in the corner of a seat in theoverheated smoking-car with a ticket to Denver in my pocket. Though Iwas not on my way to commit a double murder, I was none the less anoutlaw. I had broken my parole.