Branded Part 29

"Yes, my lover--a thousand times, yes! And I knew this would come, too,--some time; this dreadful thing that has fallen upon us to-day. I am heart-broken only for you, dear. What will they do to you?"

I told her briefly. They would make me serve the remaining two years of the original sentence, doubtless with an added penalty for the broken regulations.

"Dear G.o.d--two years!" she gasped, with a quick little sob; and then she became my brave little girl again. "They will pa.s.s, Jimmie, dear, and they won't seem so terribly long when we remember what we are waiting for. I'm going with you, you know--as far as they'll let me; and when things look their blackest you must remember that I'm only just a little way off; just a little way--and waiting--and waiting----"

She broke down at the last and cried in my arms, and when she could find her voice again:

"It mustn't be two years, Jimmie; it would kill you, and me, too. They _must_ pardon you--you who have done no wrong! I'll go down on my knees to the Governor, and----"

There was something in this to send the blood tingling to my finger-tips; to rouse the final reserves of manhood.

"Never!" I forbade. "You must never do that, Polly; and you mustn't let Barrett stir hand or foot in that direction. I shall come out an ex-convict, if I have to, but never as a pardoned man with the presumption of guilt fastened upon me for the remainder of my life.

Promise me that you won't do anything like that!"

I don't know whether she promised or not. c.u.mmings was stirring uneasily in his window and looking at his watch. I led Polly to the door, kissed her, and put her out into the corridor. The agony, the keenest agony of all, was over, and I turned to the deputy warden.

"Whenever you are ready," I said.

Barrett was at the train when we went down, as I was sure he would be, and he seemed strangely excited.

"Give me just a minute with your prisoner, Mr. c.u.mmings," he begged; and after the deputy warden had amiably turned his back: "I've just had a telegram from Gifford. The Lawrenceburg lawyers are offering to compromise. They say that their owners are tired of dragging the quarrel through the courts, and they offer to buy us out, lock, stock and barrel, for five million dollars."

"After they've committed every crime in the calendar to smash us? Not for a single minute!" I exploded.

"Right you are, Jimmie!--I knew you'd be with me!" he agreed defiantly.

"We'll fight 'em till the last dog's too dead to bury. There's a hole in the bottom of the sea, somewhere, and we'll find it before we're through with that piratical outfit. Here's your conductor: you'll have to go. Polly will follow you in a day or two. I had a handful of it keeping her from going on this train; but, of course, that wouldn't do.

Put a good, stiff bone in your back, and remember that we shan't let up, day or night--any of us--until you're free again. Good-by, old man, and G.o.d help you!"

XXIII

Skies of Bra.s.s

The depressive journey from Colorado to the Middle West records itself in memory as a dismal dream out of which there were awakenings only for train-changings or a word of talk now and then with c.u.mmings. The deputy warden was a reticent man; somber almost to sadness, as befitted his calling; but he was neither morose nor churlish. Underneath the official crust he was a man like other men; was, I say, because he is dead now.

On the final day of the journey I persuaded him to tell me how I had been traced, and I was still human enough to find a grain of comfort in the a.s.surance that Agatha Geddis had not taken my money at the last only to turn and betray me.

Barton, the Glendale wagon sales manager, was the one who was innocently responsible. He had talked too much, as I had feared he would. The clue thus furnished had been lost in St. Louis, but was picked up again, some months later, by c.u.mmings himself through the police-record photograph in Denver.

c.u.mmings admitted that he had followed Polly and me on our wedding journey; that he had known where we were stopping, and had seen us in the canyon-brink hotel.

"Why didn't you take me then?" I asked.

He explained gruffly that the requisition papers with which he was provided were good only in Colorado, and that it was simpler to wait than to go through all the red tape of having them reissued for Arizona. Knowing that the wires were completely at his service, the answer did not satisfy me.

"Was that the only reason?" I queried.

He turned his sober eyes on me and shook his head sorrowfully, I thought.

"I was young once, myself, Weyburn--and I had a wife: she died when the baby came. Maybe you deserve what's coming to you, and maybe you don't; but that little woman o' yours will never have another honeymoon."

Disquieting visions of harsh prison punishments were oppressing me when we reached the penitentiary and I was taken before the eagle-eyed old Civil War veteran who had given me my parole. But the warden merely put me through a shrewd questioning, inquiring closely into my experiences as a paroled man, and making me tell him circ.u.mstantially the story of my indictment, trial and conviction, and also the later story of the mining experience in Colorado.

"I don't recall that you ever protested your innocence while you were here serving your time, Weyburn," he commented, at the dose of the inquisition.

"I didn't," I replied, wondering why he should go behind the returns to remark the omission. Then I added: "They all do that, and it doesn't change anything. You set it down as a lie--as it usually is."

"Can you look me in the eye and tell me that you are not lying to me now?" he demanded.

I met the test soberly. "I can. I was convicted of a crime that I didn't commit, and I broke my parole solely because that appeared to be the one remaining alternative to becoming a criminal in fact."

The interview over, I expected to be put into stripes, cropped, and sent to the workshops. But instead I was taken to one of the detention cells, and for an interval which slowly lengthened itself into a week was left a prey to all the devils of solitude. It seemed as if I had been buried out of sight and forgotten. Three times a day a kitchen "trusty" brought my meals and put them through the door wicket, but apart from this I saw no one save the corridor guard, who never so much as looked my way in his comings and goings.

That week of palsying, unnerving isolation got me. Consider it for a moment. For a year I had been living at the very heart of life, working, fighting, scheming, mixing and mingling, and succeeding--not only in the money-winning, but also--until the Agatha Geddis incident came along--in the field of good repute. At the last Agatha had set me free, and Polly's love had opened the ultimate door of supreme happiness; a joy so ecstatic that at the end of the honeymoon I was only beginning to realize what it meant to me.

And then, on the very summit of the mountain of joy, had come the touch of the deputy warden's hand on my shoulder in the Antlers dining-room.

That touch had swept the new-born world ruthlessly aside--all save Polly's love and loyalty. Success had been blotted out with the loss of liberty wherewith to profit by it; and for those who had known me in the great gold camp and elsewhere in the West--my new friends--I was branded as an escaped convict. For two shameful years I should be shut away from Polly, from freedom, from partic.i.p.ation in the fight my partners were making to save the mine, and most probably from any knowledge of how the fight was going, either for or against us.

Is it any matter for wonder that by the end of the solitary week I was little better than a mad-man? If I might have had speech with the warden, I should have prayed for work; for any employment, however hard or menial, that would serve to stop the sapping of the very foundations of reason. One hope I clung to, as the drowning catch at straws. I could not doubt that Polly was near at hand. If the regular "visiting day" should intervene they would surely admit her. But in this, too, I was unlucky. The date of my reincarceration fell between two of the regular visiting days. So I waited and looked and longed in vain.

I don't know how many more circlings of the clock-hands were measured off before the break came. I lost count of the time by days and was no longer able to think clearly. In perfect physical condition when I was arrested, I began to go to pieces, both mentally and physically, under the strain of suspense. Then insomnia came to add its terrors; I could neither eat nor sleep. I had an ominous foreboding of what the total loss of appet.i.te meant, and kept telling myself over and over that for Polly's sake I must fight to save my sanity.

Under such conditions I was beginning to see things where there was nothing to be seen on the day when I had my first visitor, and the shock of surprise when the cell door was opened to admit Cyrus Whitredge, the lawyer whose bungling defense had done so little to stave off my conviction, was almost like a premonition of further disaster. Before I could rise from my seat on the cot he was shaking hands with me and twisting his dry, leathery face into its nearest approach to a smile.

"Don't bother to get up, Bert," he began effusively. "Just stay right where you are and take it easy. I've been trying for three solid days to get up here, but court is in session and I couldn't break away.

You're not looking very well, and they tell me down below that you're off your feed. That won't do, you know--won't do at all. We are going to get you right out of this, one way or another, mighty quick. You've taken your medicine like a man, and we don't propose to let 'em give you a second dose of it--not by a jugful."

All this was so totally unlike the Whitredge I had known that I fairly gasped. Then I reflected--while he was drawing up the single three-legged stool and sitting down--that in all probability the Little Clean-Up was responsible for the change in him. I was no longer a poor bank clerk without money or friends.

"'We,' you say?" I put in, meaning to make him define himself.

"Why, yes, of course I'm including myself; I'm your attorney, and as soon as the news of your arrest came I made preparations to drop everything else, right away, and get into the fight. You got your sentence and served it, and we'll sc.r.a.p 'em awhile on the proposition of bringing you back for more of it simply because you happened to forget, one day, and step over the State boundaries. I don't know but what we could show that the law is unconst.i.tutional, if we had to. But it won't come to anything like that, I guess."

I looked him straight in the eyes.

"Whitredge, who has retained you this time?" I asked.

"I don't know what you mean by that, Bert."

"I mean that four years and a half ago there were pretty strong reasons for suspecting that you were Abel Geddis's attorney, rather than mine."

"Oh, pshaw!" he returned with large lenience. "Geddis wanted to be fair with you--he thought a good bit of you in those days, Bert, little as you may believe it--and he did offer to pay my fee, if you couldn't.

But that has nothing to do with the present aspect of the case. I was your attorney then, and I'm your attorney now. It's a point of professional honor, and I couldn't think of holding aloof when you're needing me. Besides, your Colorado lawyers have been in communication with me--naturally, since I was attorney for the defense four years and a half ago."

"They sent you to me here?" I inquired.

"They knew I would come, of course; I was on the ground and had all the facts. They couldn't come themselves, either of them. They have had their hands full with the injunction business."