VIII
Westward
A sleety rain was retarding the March dawn and obscuring the MiddleWestern farmstead landscape when the lights were turned off in thethrough-train smoking-car. A glance at the railroad time-table whichhad been given me with my ticket proved that the train was well pastthe boundaries of my home State, and suddenly the vile atmosphere ofthe crowded, night-fouled car seemed shot through with the life-givingozone of freedom.
Before long, however, the reaction set in. True, I was free at last,but it was the freedom only of the escaped convict--of the fugitive.To be recaptured now would mean a return to prison and the serving outof the remainder of the full five-year term, with an added penalty forthe broken parole. I knew well the critical watchfulness with whichthe workings of the new law were regarded. The indeterminate sentenceitself was on trial, and the prison authorities and others interestedwere resolved that the trial should be fair and impartial. Therefore Imight count confidently upon pursuit.
At first there seemed little likelihood that my midnight flight couldbe traced. In the great city I had left behind I had been only anuncounted unit in a submerged minority. It was doubtful if any onebesides Kellow and the keeper of the police records would know orremember my name. There had been many travelers to board the throughtrain with me, and surely one might consider himself safely lost insuch a throng, if only by reason of the unit inconsequence.
But now I was to be brought face to face with a peril which constantlybesets the fugitive of any sort in an age of rapid and easy travel.Under such conditions the smallness of the modern world has passed intoa hackneyed proverb. I had scarcely rubbed the sleep out of my eyesand straightened up in the car seat which had served for a bed whensome one came down the aisle, a hand was clapped on my shoulder, and acheery voice said:
"Well, I'll be dog-daddled! Bert Weyburn--of all the people in theworld!"
There was murder in my heart when I looked up and recognized a Glendaleman whom I had known practically all my life; a rattle-brained youngfellow named Barton, who had tried a dozen different occupations afterleaving school, and had, at my last account of him, become a travelingsalesman for our single large factory--a wagon-making company.
Under the existing conditions Barton was easily the last man on earthwhom I should have chosen out of a worldful of men for a travelingcompanion; but before I could do more than nod a surly response to hisgreeting he had slipped into the empty half of the seat and wasoffering me a cigar.
At first our talk was awkwardly constrained, as it was bound to be withone party to it wishing fervently that the other were at the bottom ofthe sea. But Horace Barton was much too good-natured, and tooloquacious, to let the constraint remain as a barrier. Working aroundby degrees to the _status quo_--my _status quo_--he finally broke theice in the pond of the intimate personalities--as I knew he would.
"I'm mighty glad to see you out, and alive and well, Bert," was the wayin which he brushed aside the awkwardnesses. "You've had pretty toughlines, I know; but that's no reason why you should be grouchy with me.I'm not letting it make any difference, am I?"
"Not here on the train," I conceded, sourly.
"No; and, by George, I wouldn't let it at home, either! I'll betyou've got a few friends left in Glendale, right now, and you've had'em all along. Been back there since you--since--er----"
I shook my head, and he went on as if he were afraid that a stop mightprove fatal to another start.
"It sure isn't any of my butt-in, but I don't believe you ought tododge the home town, Bert. There are a lot of good people there, andif I were in your fix, I believe I'd want to go and bully it out rightwhere it happened. You've bought your little chunk of experience andpaid for it, and now you're a free man just like the rest of us. Youwant to buck up, and tell them that don't like it to go straight plumbto the dickens."
There was ample reason why he should take this tone with me if he feltlike it. I looked like a derelict and was acting like one. Moreover,I was tormented to the verge of madness by the fear that the conductormight come along on a ticket-punching tour, and that by this meansBarton would learn my ultimate destination--which would be equivalent,I fancied, to publishing it in the Glendale _Daily Courier_.
"Cut it out!" I said gruffly. "If Glendale were the last place in theuniverse, I wouldn't go back there."
He dropped the argument with perfect good-humor, and even made apology."I take it all back; it's none of my business. Of course, you knowbest what you want to do. You're a free man, as I say, and can gowhere you please."
His repetition of this "free man" phrase suddenly opened my eyes. Hehad forgotten, as doubtless a good many others had, all about theindeterminate sentence and its terms, if, indeed, he--and theothers--had ever known anything about its conditions. It was not to bewondered at. Three years and a half will ordinarily blot the best ofus out of remembrance--at least as to details.
It was at this point that I twisted the talk by thrusting in a questionof my own.
"No; I haven't been in Glendale right lately--been out on the road fora couple of weeks," was Barton's answer to the question. "We'vewidened the old wagon-shop out some few lines since you knew us, andI've been making a round of the agencies. I was in the big city lastnight and got a wire to go to St. Louis. The wire got balled upsomewhere, and I didn't get it until late at night. Made me hustle,too. I'd been out of the city for the day and didn't get back to theMarlborough until nearly midnight."
This bit of detail made no impression upon me at the moment because Iwas too busy with the thoughts suggested by the fact that I might haveBarton with me all day. Returning to Glendale at the end of his round,he would be sure to talk, and in due time the prison authorities wouldlearn that I had been last seen in St. Louis. This accidental meetingwith Barton figured as a crude misfortune, but I saw no way to mitigateit.
About this time came the first call for breakfast in the dining-car,and I hoped this would relieve me of Barton's presence, for a while, atany rate. But I was reckoning altogether without my host.
"Breakfast, eh?--that fits me all the way down to the ground," was hiswelcoming of the waiter's sing-song call. "Come along, old man, andwe'll go eat a few things. This is on me."
I tried to refuse. Apart from a frantic desire to be quit of him, Iwas in no condition to present myself in the dining-car. I showed himmy grimy hands, and at that he made me forgive him in advance for allthe harm he might eventually do me.
"That's perfectly all right," he laughed. "Fellow can't help gettingthat way on the road. My sleeper is the first one back, and thedining-car's coupled on behind. You come along into the Pullman withme and wash up. I've got a bunch of clean collars and a shirt, if youwant them; and if the Pullman man makes a roar I'll tell him you're mylong-lost brother and give him the best ten-cent cigar he eversmoked--I get 'em at a discount from a fellow who makes a little on theside by selling his samples." And when I still hung back--"Don't be anass, Bertie. This old world isn't half as mean as you'd like to thinkit is."
I yielded, weakly, I was going to say; yet perhaps it wasn't altogetherweakness. For the first time since leaving the penitentiary I wasmeeting a man from home; a man who knew, and apparently didn't care. Iwent to the Pullman with Barton and was lucky enough to meet theticket-punching train conductor on the way. Barton was a step or twoahead of me and he did not see my ticket. In consequence, the Coloradodestination was still my own secret.
In the Pullman wash-room Barton stood by me like a man, fetching hisown clean linen and tipping the porter to make him turn his back whileI had a wash and a shave and a change. One who has always marched inthe ranks of the well-groomed may never realize the importance of soapand water in a civilized world. As a moral stimulus, the combinationyields nothing to all the Uplift Foundations the multi-millionaireshave ever laid. When I took my place at the table for two oppositeBarton in the diner, I was able to look the world in the eye, and toforget, momentarily at
least, in the luxury of clean hands and cleanlinen, that I was practically an outlaw with a price upon my head.
Yearning like a shipwrecked mariner for home news, I led Barton on totalk of Glendale and the various happenings in the little town duringmy long absence. Though I had quartered the home State in alldirections for half a year he was, as I have said, the first Glendaleman I had met.
He told me many things that I was eager to know; how my mother andsister were living quietly at the town place, which the income from thefarm enabled them to retain. For several years after her majority mysister, older than I, had taught in the public school; she was now, soBarton said, conducting a small private school for backward little onesat home.
There were other news items, many of them. Old John Runnels was stillchief of police; Tom Fitch, the hardware man, was the new mayor; BuckSeverance, my one-time chum in the High School, was now chief of thefire department, having won his spurs--or rather, I should say, his redhelmet and silver trumpet--at the fire which had destroyed theBlickerman Department Store.
"And the bank?" I asked.
"Which one? We've got three of them now, if you please, and one's aNational."
"I meant the Farmers'," I said.
"Something right funny about that, Bert," Barton commented. "The oldbank is rocking along and doing a little business in farm mortgages andnote-shaving at the old stand, same as usual, but it's got a hoodoo.The other banks do most of the commercial business--all of it, youmight say; still, they say Geddis and old Abner Withers are gettingricher and richer every day."
"Agatha is married?" I asked.
"No; and that's another of the funny things. Her engagement with youngCopper-Money was broken off--nobody knew just how or why--shortly afteryour--er--shortly after the trouble at the bank three years and a halfago. Agatha's out West somewhere now--in a sanitorium, I believe. Herhealth has been rather poor for the last year or so."
This was news indeed. As I had known her as girl and woman, AgathaGeddis had always been the picture of health. I put up a ferventlittle prayer that her particular sanitorium might not prove to be inthe vicinity of Denver. If it should be it meant another move for me.
"I didn't see the finish of the bank trouble before they buried me, didI, Barton?" I queried.
"You bet your life you didn't! There was the dickens to pay allaround. Under the State law, as you probably know, the depositors'losses had to be made up, to the extent of twice the amount of thestockholdings, by the stockholders in the bank. When they came tocount noses they found that Geddis and Withers hadn't done a thing butto quietly unload their bank stock here and there and everywhere, untilthey held only enough to give them their votes. There was a yell toraise the roof, but the stockholders of record had to come across. Itteetotally smashed a round dozen of the best farmers in the county; andI heard, on the quiet, that it caught a good many outsiders who hadbeen buying Farmers' stock at a bargain, among them this young Mr.Copper-Money who was going to marry Agatha--and didn't. Geddis andWithers played it mighty fine--and mighty low-down."
All this was a revelation to me. In my time Geddis and Witherstogether had held a majority of the stock in the close littlecorporation known as the Farmers' Bank. The despicable trick by meansof which Geddis, or both of them, had shifted the defalcation loss toother shoulders proved two things conclusively: that the scheme hadbeen well planned for in advance, and that the two old men had workedin collusion. I remembered my suspicion--the one I couldn'tprove--that Withers had been as deep in the mud as Geddis was in themire.
"What became of the mining stock?" I inquired.
"Geddis put it into the assets, 'to help out against the loss,' as hesaid. Nobody wanted it, of course; and then, to be right large-heartedand generous, Geddis bought it in, personally--at ten cents on thedollar."
"And you say Geddis is still running the bank?"
"Oh, yes; he and Withers run it and own it. As you'd imagine, Farmers'Bank stock was mighty nearly a drug in the market, after all the billshad been paid, and, just to help their neighbors out of a hole, as theyput it, the two old skinflints went around buying it back. I don'tknow what they paid; different prices, I suppose. But Hawkins, ourmanager, told me that he sold his for twenty-five cents on the dollar,flat, and was blamed good and glad to get that much out of it."
It was just here that my breakfast threatened to choke me. If I hadbeen as guilty as everybody believed I was, I should still have been awhite-robed angel with wings compared with these two old Pharisees whohad deliberately robbed their friends and neighbors, catching them bothcoming and going. And yet I was a hunted outlaw, and they were honoredand respected--or at least they were out of jail and able to live andflourish among their deluded victims.
The choking was only momentary. Barton was in a reminiscent mood, andhe went rambling on about people in whom I was most deeply interested.It was like a breath of the good old home air in my nostrils just tosit and listen to him.
But it seems as though there has to be a fly in everybody's pot ofsweetened jam. In the midst of things, at a moment when I wasgratefully rejoicing in the ability to push my wretchedlife-catastrophe a little way into the background, I had a glimpse of anew face at the farther end of the dining-car. A large-framed man withdrooping mustaches had just come in from the Pullman, and thedining-car steward was looking his car over to find a place for thenewcomer at the well-filled tables.
I did not have to look twice to identify the man with the droopingmustaches. For three long and weary years I had seen him dally in theoffice of the State penitentiary. His name was William Cummings, andhe was the deputy warden.