Branded Part 11

There is little use piling on the agony by trying to tell what I suffered during this forenoon of nerve-racking torture and suspense.

Let it be sufficient to say that the torments ended for me at Decatur, Illinois, when, at the train stop, I saw c.u.mmings cross the platform to a street-car followed by a station porter carrying his grip. Barton marked the change in me at once.

"By George, Bert, what did you see in that platform jumble to make you look as if you had suddenly taken on a new lease of life?" he inquired jestingly. Then he pa.s.sed the ever-ready cigarcase. "Smoke up, and after a bit we'll go and try it on the dog--see if a second meal in the diner will come as near to upsetting you as the first one did. Say, don't you know, I'm bully glad we met up in the smoker this morning? I was rawhiding myself to beat the everlasting band at the prospect of having to make this long, tiresome day jump alone, and it's done me a heap of good to talk you to frazzles. And that reminds me: you haven't told me yet where you are heading for."

I had not; and what was more, I did not mean to. There were distant relatives on my mother's side of the family living somewhere in central Missouri, and I spoke of them.

"Sedalla, you say?" he commented. "Well, if that's the how of it, I may see you again in a day or so, and here's hoping. I have a horrible suspicion that our St. Louis general agent wants me to chase out with him and dig up some of his dead-alive country dealers. We sell a raft of wagons in Missouri."

It was just here that it occurred to me that Barton was carrying it off pretty toppingly for a mere traveling salesman; also that he dressed better, smoked better cigars, and seemed a good bit freer with his money than such a job warranted.

"You were selling Whiteley Wagons by yourself, when I dropped out," I said. "Have I been doing you an injustice by not allowing for a promotion in the three years and a half?"

"You sure have!" he laughed. "In the reorganization a year ago they made me sales manager. Oh, yes, Bert; I've blossomed out some since you knew me. I've actually got a little chunk of stock in the concern.

You never would have thought it of old Hod Barton, would you? Look at this."

He reached into a pocket and pulled out a money roll, riffling the ends of the bills between thumb and forefinger to let me see that the denominations were all comfortably large. There was something instantly suggestive in the bit of braggadocio; a feeling that I had seen somebody do that same thing in exactly that same way once before.

But before I could follow up the impression he was making me an offer which put everything but his free-hearted generosity out of my mind.

"You haven't said a word, Bert, and if it's none of my business, you can tell me so--but if a couple of these yellow-backs would come in handy to you just now, they're yours and you can toss 'em back to me any old time when you're good and ready."

I shook my head and thanked him out of a full heart. The purchase of the Denver ticket hadn't left me much of a balance out of the black pocketbook's holdings, but I couldn't borrow of Barton; that was out of the question.

Shortly after this we had another meal together in the dining-car, and this time there were no sudden alarms to make me turn sick and panicky.

Afterward, I made another attempt to return to my place in the forward end of the train, but since Barton would not hear of it, we spent the remainder of the short afternoon in the Pullman smoker.

During this interval, Barton did most of the talking, growing confidential along toward the last and telling me a lot about the girl he was going to marry--the youngest daughter of good old Judge Haskins, of Jefferson--the man who had sentenced me. If all the world loves a lover, certainly no considerable part of it cares to pay strict attention while he descants at length upon the singular and altogether transcendent charms of the loved one; and when Barton got fairly started I had time to consider another matter which was of far greater importance to me.

Earlier in the day Barton had a.s.sured me that he would not fail to go and see my mother and sister when he returned to Glendale. I could scarcely urge him not to do so, though I knew very well that he would not stop with telling the home-folks; that he would doubtless tell every Tom, d.i.c.k and Harry in town how he had met me, and where. What I was asking myself as he burbled on about Peggy Haskins was whether I might dare give him the one cautionary word which would reveal the true state of affairs. In the end I decided that it would be most imprudent, not to say disastrous. He would have sympathized with me instantly and heartily, but the knowledge would have been as fire to tow when he got back where he could talk. I could foresee just how it would bubble out of him as he b.u.t.ton-holed each fresh listener: "Say!

you must keep it midnight dark, old man, but I met Bert Weyburn on the train: he's jumped his parole and, skipped--lit out--vanished! Not a word to any living soul, mind you; this is a dead secret. We mustn't give him away, you know,"--and a lot more of the same sort.

The arrival of the through train in the great echoing Terminal at St.

Louis was timed accurately with the coming of a gloomy twilight fitly climaxing the bleak and stormy day. Having no hand-baggage I was the first to leave the Pullman, and on the platform I waited for Barton who had gone back into the body of the car to get his coat and hat and bags. As he ran down the steps and gave his two suit cases to the nearest red-cap, the links in a vague chain of recognition snapped themselves suddenly into a complete whole, and I knew instantly why the thumbing of the pocket-roll in my friend's generous offer to lend me money had struck the chord of familiarity. The two hand-bags turned over to the platform porter were the same two that I had seen s.n.a.t.c.hed out of a cab in front of the Marlborough entrance while their owner was digging in his pockets for the cab fare, and the coat and hat Barton had donned for the debarking were the fur-lined luxury and the soft felt worn by the man who had dropped the black pocket-book.

"Well, old boy," he said, gripping my hand in leave-taking, "the best of friends must part. I suppose you'll wait here to take your Sedalla train. Maybe we'll get together again in a day or so. If we shouldn't, here's hoping that the world uses you well from this on--to sort of make up for what has gone, you know."

"Wait a minute," I gasped, as he was turning to follow the red-cap.

"You said you were at the Marlborough last night. I was there--on an--on an errand. Did you come in late?--in a cab?"

"I did; and I had a funny experience--or have I told you about it?"

"No, you didn't tell me," I contrived to say.

"I didn't know but I had; I've talked so much about everything to-day.

It was this way: when I got out of the cab I saw a sort of hobo-ish looking fellow standing at the curb with his hands in his pockets and all doubled over as if he were cold. It never occurred to me for a minute that he was anything but what he looked to be."

The porter, with Barton's suit-cases, was disappearing in the direction of the cab stand, and I suggested that we walk along. I had learned all I needed to know. But Horace Barton never left a story unfinished if he could help it.

"Yes, sir; that fellow fooled me good and proper," he went on, as we hurried to overtake the suit-cases. "He wasn't any hobo at all; he was a pickpocket, and one of the finest. I was hunting for a half-dollar to pay the cabby, and I could have sworn that that 'dip' never got within six feet of me. And yet he 'frisked' me before I could get across the sidewalk and into the hotel. Luckily, all he got was a little pocketbook with some sixty or so dollars in it."

"You reported your loss to the police?" I asked.

"Not for one little minute!" was the laughing rejoinder. "I didn't discover the loss until after I got up to my room and found the St.

Louis wire waiting for me; and then there wasn't time. But I shouldn't have done it anyway. Any fellow fly enough to do me that way when I'm wide awake and 'at' myself is welcome to all he gets. . . . Well, here's our jumping-off place, I guess. My man 'll be waiting for me at the Southern, and I must go. Take care of yourself, and so long!"

I let him go; saw him climb into a cab and disappear. There was nothing to be done about the money, of course: I had spent more than half of it for my Denver ticket. But, since honesty, like all other human attributes, dies hard in any soil where it has once taken root, I turned away with a great thankfulness in my heart. The owner of the black pocketbook was found, and some day he should have his own again--with interest.

Nothing of any consequence happened after Barton left me. Finding upon inquiry that the westbound connecting train would not leave until eight o'clock, I ventured out in search of a slop-shop where I could purchase a cheap suit to go with the clean s.h.i.+rt and collar given me by the free-handed sales manager. The purchase left me with less than ten dollars in my pocket, but it made a new man of me otherwise. In the old life at home I had never dreamed that a few rags and wisps of cloth, properly sewed together, make all the difference in a moralizing world between the man and the vagrant.

There was a wreck on the Missouri road some time during the night, and our train was caught behind it and delayed. For this reason another rainy afternoon was drawing to its close when I had my first glimpse of Kansas City, high-perched on its hills from my glimpsing view-point on the opposite bank of the Missouri River, but low-lying and crowded to suffocation with railroad yards in that part of it where the train came to a stand.

As a matter of course, I had missed my proper Denver connection, owing to the wreck delay. But, a pa.s.senger agent directing me, I found the evening Union Pacific train waiting at another platform. A short half-hour later the tangle of railroad yards in the river "bottoms" was left behind and the overland train was boring westward into a cloudy night through Kansas.

With the welcoming West lying fair and free before me, the memory of the prison years and of the parole purgatory to which they had led was already beginning to fade into a limbo of things past and irrevocable, and therefore to be quickly and decently forgotten. There should be a new life in the new world, and the humiliation and disgrace of the past should be so deeply burled that it could never be resurrected. I was still under twenty-nine, it must be remembered, and at that age Hope, the one human quality which seems to have in it the precious germ of immortality, will flap its wings over the most wretched ash-heap that was ever blown together by the bleak winds of misfortune.

X

The Plain-Clothes Man

Upon landing in Denver in the middle of a day that seemed too bright and exhilaratingly bracing to be true, I had an adventure which, while it had no immediate bearing upon my escape, is worthy of record because it led to a second hasty flight, and so became in a manner responsible for much that happened afterward.

As I left the train a squarely built man, sharp-eyed under the brim of his modish soft hat, was standing aside on the track platform and evidently scrutinizing each of the debarking pa.s.sengers in turn. Some acute inner sense instantly warned me, telling me that this silent watcher was a plain-clothes man from police headquarters; and his first word when he stepped out to confront and stop me confirmed the foreboding.

"You're wanted," he announced curtly, twitching his coat lapel aside to show his badge.

This was another of the crises in which I was made to feel the murder madness leaping alive in blood and brain; but the publicity of the place and the blank hopelessness of escape in a strange city made any thought of resistance the sheerest folly.

"What am I wanted for?" I asked.

"You'll find that out later. Will you go quietly, or do you want the nippers?"

The cooler second thought rea.s.sured me. It seemed entirely incredible that the news of the broken parole had already been put on the wires.

In the natural order of things I should hardly be missed until after my failure to report to the prison authorities at the month end should raise the hue and cry.

"I'll go quietly, of course," I conceded; and then I added the lie of sham bravado: "I don't know of any reason why I shouldn't. You are the man who is taking all the chances."

With no further talk I was marched through the station building, out the long approach walkway to the foot of Seventeenth Street, and so on up-town, the plain-clothes man keeping even step with me and indicating the course at the corner-turnings by a push or a wordless jerk of his head.

As we went I was striving anxiously to invent a plausible story to be told at headquarters. It was an entirely new experience. Hitherto I had always told the plain truth, as the law required, and now I found the inventive machinery singularly rusty. But the wheels were made to turn in some fas.h.i.+on. By the time we were mounting the steps of the antiquated City Hall at the crossing of Cherry Creek, I knew pretty well what I was going to say, and how it must be said.

At first they gave me little chance to say anything. In the inspector's office my captor and two others got busy over a book of newspaper clippings, pictures and descriptions of "wanted" criminals.

With wits sharpened now to a razor-edge, I came quickly to the conclusion that I had been mistaken for some one else. The conclusion was confirmed when they took an ink-pad impression of the ball of my right thumb and fell to comparing it with one of the record prints.

After a time the inspector put me on the rack, beginning by demanding my name.

Meaning to lie only when there should be no alternative, I told him a half-truth. Though every one at home called me "Herbert" and "Bert,"