Branded Part 4

"Like h.e.l.l you have! See here, young fellow--you needn't spring that kind of talk on me. I know you and your kind up one side and down the other. You say you've put three years in 'stir' and that settles it."

At this point he broke off short, righted his chair with a snap and reached for a bill-spindle on his desk. After a glance at one of the impaled memoranda he sat back again, chewing his cigar and staring into vacancy. A full minute elapsed before he deigned to become once more aware of my presence. Then he whirled upon me to rap out an explosive question.

"What did you say your name was?" and when I told him: "Aw right; you come back here this afternoon and we'll see whether you stay or move on.

That's all. Now get out. I'm busy."

I went away and killed time as I could until the middle of the afternoon.

Upon returning to police headquarters I found the hard-faced chief tilted in his chair with his feet on his desk, looking as if he hadn't moved since my visit of the forenoon. When he saw who it was cutting off the afternoon sunlight he straightened up with a growl, rummaged in a file of papers and jerked out a typewritten sheet which he glanced over as one who reads only the headings.

"James Bertrand Weyburn, eh?" he rasped. "I know all about you now, and you may as well can all that didn't-do-it stuff. Forget it and come down to business. You say you want to hit the straight-and-narrow: how would a job in a coal yard fit you?--keepin' books and weighin'-in the coal cars?"

I told him, humbly enough, that I was too nearly a beggar to be a chooser; that I'd be only too glad to get a chance at anything at which I might earn a living.

"Aw right," was the curt rejoinder. "You hike over to the Consolidated Coal Company's yard on the West Side, and tell Mullins, the head book-keeper, that I sent you, see? Tell him to call me on the 'phone if he wants to know anything more about you. That's all. Pull your freight out of here and get busy--if you don't want to get the 'move on' out of this burg."

Notwithstanding this crabbed speech, matching all the other things this man had said to me, I left police headquarters with a warm spot in my heart, thinking that I had lighted upon a diamond in the rough and hadn't had discernment enough to recognize it.

Yet there was a small mystery thrusting itself into this second interview with the chief. What was the content of the typewritten sheet he had consulted, and who had written it? If it had been a telegram I might have concluded that he had wired the warden of the penitentiary for a corroboration of my story. But it was not a telegram.

I was still puzzling over the mystery half an hour later when I found the coal yard and the bookkeeper, Mullins, a red-faced Irishman who winked solemnly when I told him that Chief Callahan had sent me.

"Know anything at all about the railroad end of the coal business?" was the first inquiry shot at me; but it was not made until after the book-keeper had shut himself into the telephone booth, presumably for a wire talk with Callahan.

I shook my head. "None of the details. But I can learn."

"Maybe you can, and maybe you can't. We'll try you out on the railroad desk, and Peters 'll show you what you don't know. Peel your coat and jump in. Hours eight to six; pay, sixty dollars a month: more bimeby if you're worth it."

Robert Louis Stevenson's cheerful little opening verse:

"Light foot and tight foot, And green gra.s.s spread; Early in the morning, And hope is on ahead,"

was ringing in my ears when I squared myself at the railroad desk and attacked the first big bunch of "flimsies," as the tissue copies of the waybills are called. It was almost unbelievable that my luck had turned so soon, and yet the fact seemed undeniable. I had a job to which I had been recommended by the one man in the city who knew my record. No questions had been asked, and the inference seemed to be that none were going to be asked.

I was all of a busy week getting a firm working hold upon the routine of my desk, and during that time I didn't exchange a dozen words with Mullins, who appeared to be the head and front of Consolidated Coal, locally, at least, and whose word, in the office and about the yards, was law. None the less, the little mystery connected with this easy finding of a job in a strange city persisted, and it kept me from dwelling too pointedly upon the object for which I meant to live and work; namely, the squaring of accounts with Abel Geddis and Abner Withers.

Singularly enough, it took me, trained accountant as I was, a full month to find out what I had been let in for, and why the job I was holding down had been given to an ex-convict. It was my duty to check the railroad waybills on consignments of coal, to correct the weights, and to make claims for overcharges and shortages. I made these claims as I had been told to make them, taking the figures of the weights from Peters, who, in turn, took them from the scale men in the yard. It was Peters who gave the snap away one night when we two were working overtime in the otherwise deserted offices.

"Say, Weyburn; you've got about the coldest nerve of any fellow I've ever run up against," he said, looking up from his place across the flat-topped desk.

"What makes you say that, Tommy?" I asked.

"Because it's so. I've been watching you. You've been sitting on the lid for an even month, now, and never batting an eye when these railroad fellows come at you and make their little roar about the overcharges.

Believe me, it takes nerve to do that--and carry it off as if you were reading 'em a verse out o' the Bible. Blaisdell, the lad who was here before you, went batty and talked in his sleep. Told me once he couldn't see anything but stripes, any way he looked."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, with a sudden sinking of the heart. "Why should it take nerve to tell a railroad agent he's been overcharging us?"

Peters's laugh was a cackle. "You're the traffic man of this outfit: do you know the rates on coal from the mines to Western Central common points?"

"Of course I do."

"Got 'em all down in the printed tariff, so you can't help knowing 'em, eh? Consolidated Coal pays these rates, doesn't it?--all according to Hoyle and the Interstate Commerce laws?"

"I suppose we pay them. I check the bills as they are presented."

"Exactly. But every little so-while you have to make a whaling big claim on the railroad company for overcharges, and maybe you've noticed that these claims are always paid--or maybe you haven't?"

I was beginning to see the hole in the millstone.

"I make the claims on the weights as you give them to me, Peters. Do you mean to tell me that you've been giving me false figures?"

The yard clerk stuck his tongue in his cheek. "I'm not telling you anything. You know as well as I do that it's against the law to give or receive rebates. But if you're not a heap greener than you look, you know that we're getting our cut rates, just the same. All we need is a man right here at your desk who has the nerve to make out the claims, and is fly enough to do a little bluffing and ask no questions. You're all right, Bertie."

"But the figures of the weights," I insisted. "You are the man who gives them to me, and you are responsible if they are wrong."

"Not in a thousand years!" was the prompt retort. "I never put anything on paper--you're the man that does that--and if the Interstate Commerce people should break in, I'd have the best little forgettery of any clock-watcher in the works. Nix for me, Weyburn; you are the chap with the figures, and the only man in the shop who has them down in black on white. When the roar comes, it'll be up to you, and Mullins will throw up his hands and accuse you of having a private graft of some sort with the railroad clerks in the claim office. That's about what he'll do."

My overtime companion had finished his job and was putting on his coat.

I let him go without further talk, but after he had gone, I stayed long enough to check over the files of the yard-master's blotter. When the checking was completed I knew perfectly well why I had been hired so promptly, and why Mullins had been willing to take on an ex-convict. My basing figures, which Peters had been giving me verbally, were all wrong.

The majority of the claims I had been making from day to day were fraudulent, and in paying them the railroad company was merely rebating the coal rates for Consolidated Coal.

It was easy to see where I stood. A scapegoat was necessary, and with a prison record behind me I had about as much show as a rat in a trap. If there should be an investigation, Mullins would swear that I had entire charge of the claim department. And having no written data to fall back upon, I should be helpless.

The date of this disheartening discovery chanced to be the 25th of the month--our regular pay-day, and I had my month's salary in my pocket when I left the office about eleven o'clock to go to my boarding-house. At the nearest street corner I met the patrolman on the beat.

"h.e.l.lo, cully!" he growled as I was pa.s.sing him; and then with a hand on my arm he stopped me. "You're forgettin' somethin', ain't you?"

"I guess not," I answered.

"I guess yes," he retorted. "It's pay-day at the works, and you gotta come across."

Here was the remainder of the conspiracy made plain as day. The crooked chief of police had turned me over to the crooked coal company to do crooked work, and I was to be held up for a graft on my salary. With a swift return of the blood-boiling which had once helped me to manhandle the deputy, Simmons, I faced the patrolman.

"And if I don't come across--what then?"

The policeman grinned good-naturedly. "You're goin' to 'produce' all right. You're a paroled man, and you can't afford to have the chief get it in for you."

It was just here that the three nerve-breaking years got in their work.

I couldn't face the grafter down, and--I confess it with shame--I was horribly afraid.

"How much?" I asked, and my tongue was dry in my mouth.

"This is the first mont', and we'll let you down easy. You fork over a ten-spot for the campaign fund and we'll call it square. Next mont'

it'll be more."

I paid the blackmail with trembling hands, and when the patrolman was out of sight around the corner I ran to reach my boarding place, intent only upon flight, instant and secret, from this moral cesspool of a city. I remembered that there was a westbound train pa.s.sing through at midnight, and by hurrying I hoped to be able to catch it.