Branded Part 5

V

The Downward Path

I had left the board money and a note for my landlady on the mantel in the darkened dining-room, had reached the railroad station, and was about to buy a ticket to the farthest corner of the State, when I suddenly remembered that I was running away with an additional handicap to be added to all the others. Leaving the coal company and the city without notice or explanation, I was making it impossible to keep my record clear in the monthly report to the prison authorities.

With a sinking heart I realized that I must wait and fight it out with Mullins to some sort of a conclusion which would give me a clean slate.

There must be nothing that I could not explain clearly to any one who might ask. I had a job, and I must be able to give my reason for quitting it. With this new entanglement to put leaden shoes on my feet, I retraced my steps through the eight weary blocks to the boarding-house, dodging through back streets and walking because I hadn't the nerve to face the cheerful throng of theater-goers at that hour crowding the street-cars.

I think Mullins knew or suspected what was coming when I went to him the next morning and told him I wished to have a talk with him.

Without a word he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the little private office which was used at odd times by the district manager.

"I'm quitting this morning, Mr. Mullins," I began, when the door was shut. "If my work has been satisfactory, I should like to have a letter of recommendation."

The bookkeeper smoked a corn-cob pipe, and he stopped to refill and light it before he opened on me.

"What's wrong?" he demanded. For an Irishman he was always exceedingly sparing of his words.

"Suppose we say that the climate doesn't agree with me here."

"You're no sick man!" he shot back; and then: "Want more pay?"

"No; I want a letter of recommendation."

"We never give 'em."

"So I have heard. But this time, Mr. Mullins, you are going to make an exception and break your rule."

"Not for you, we won't."

"Why not for me?"

"Because we're knowing your record. You're fixing to go back to the pen, where you came from."

"You knew my record when you hired me. Chief Callahan gave it to you, and I knew that he did. But that is neither here nor there; I want my letter, and I want you to say in it that I am leaving to look for a more favorable climate."

"And if I don't give it to you?--if I tell you to go straight plumb to h.e.l.l?"

"In that case I shall take all the chances--_all_ of them, mind you---and write a letter to the Interstate Commerce Commission."

If the man had had a gun in his hands I believe he would have killed me. There was manslaughter in his little gray, pig-like eyes. But he recovered himself quickly.

"If you're that kind of a gink, I'm d.a.m.ned glad to get rid of you at any price," he rasped; and then went to the district manager's desk and wrote me the letter, "To Whom it may Concern," practically as I dictated it.

That ended it, and when the letter was signed and flung across the desk at me I lost no time in getting out of the noxious atmosphere of the place. But before I was well out of the yard it occurred to me that I had still left a loaded weapon in Mullins's hands. Though the threat of exposure might tie him and his grafting coal company up, he could still appeal to Callahan, who would doubtless find an excuse for arresting me before I could leave town. And once in the hands of the chief crook I should be lost.

Under the spur of this new menace I returned quickly to the coal office, with some inchoate idea of trying to bully the scoundrelly chief of police through the hold I had acquired upon the coal company.

The office was empty when I reached it, and at first I thought Mullins had gone out. But at a second glance I saw that he was in the telephone closet, the door of which he had left ajar. Overhearing my own name barked into the transmitter, I listened without scruple.

"----Yes, Weyburn; that's what I'm telling you. He's flew the coop. . . . Yes, he knows something--too d.a.m.ned much. . . . No, I wouldn't snag him here; he might talk too loud and get somebody to believe him--some fool in a Federal grand jury, for instance. Let him go--with a plain-clothes man to find out where he heads for--and then wire that outfit that piped him off when he came here. That'll settle him."

There may have been more of it, but I did not wait to hear. Speed was my best chance now, and I slipped out noiselessly and ran for the railroad station. If I should be lucky enough to find a train ready to leave, I might yet hope to escape whatever trap it might be that the bookkeeper and his official accomplice were going to set for me.

Reaching the station I found that the first train through would be a westbound, and that it was not due for half an hour. The wait was painfully trying. I did not dare to buy a ticket for fear Callahan might have telephoned the ticket office. As the pa.s.sengers for the expected train straggled in I sought vainly to identify the spy who was undoubtedly among them; and when the train thundered up to the platform I made haste to board it and to lose myself quickly in the crowded smoking-car. Later, when the conductor made his round, I paid a cash fare to the end of the division, forbearing to draw a full breath of relief until the cesspool city had faded to a smoky blur on the horizon.

With time to think, I began to puzzle anxiously over the new development of mystery opened up by the overheard telephone talk. Who or what was the "outfit" that had been meddling in my sorry affair?--that was to be wired when my new destination should be ascertained? One by one the suspicious circ.u.mstances remarshaled themselves; the feeling that I had been spied upon, the speedy publicity which my story had attained in the town where I had made my earliest attempt at wage-earning, the memorandum which Chief Callahan had consulted before sending me to the crooked coal company. It seemed singular to me afterward that the one answer to all of these small mysteries should not have suggested itself at once. But it did not.

The end of the conductor's run--the point which I had paid fare--came at midday at the capital of the State, where there was a stop long enough to enable the train's people--or those who chose to evade the dining-car--to seek a lunch counter. I went with the others and had a frugal sandwich and a cup of coffee, hastening afterward to the station ticket office to buy a ticket to a town well over toward the western boundary of my prison State, and chosen haphazard from its location on the wall-map beside the ticket window. A little later, upon resuming my seat in the train, I had a small shock. Sitting just across the aisle, and once more barricaded behind his hand-baggage and buried in a newspaper, was the round-faced salesman who had been my traveling companion on the day of my release from prison.

Naturally, all the suspicions I had been harboring for the past few hours leaped alive again at the sight of this man. But at the second train stop in the westward flight they were promptly disconnected from my _vis-a-vis_ across the aisle when the salesman gathered his belongings and disappeared; left the train--as I made sure by looking out of the window and seeing him cross the station platform. In the short run from the capital he had not so much as looked in my direction, emerging from his newspaper only once for a word with the conductor at the moment of ticket-collecting.

After he was gone I was able to smile grimly and call it a coincidence, wondering meanwhile, if one of the consequences of my hideously disarranged life was to be a lapse into chittering cowardice; an endless starting aside at shadows.

The new field of endeavor, chosen blindly at the ticket window in the capital, proved to be a small manufacturing city. Here the chief of police, to whom I reported on the evening of my arrival, was of a type exactly opposite to the grafting brute from whose jurisdiction I had fled; a promoted town-marshal, like John Runnels of Glendale; a shrewd-eyed, kindly old man who heard my story patiently and gave me a word of encouragement that was like a draft of cold water in the desert.

"You're goin' to get a square deal in this town, my boy," he said, after I had enlarged upon my story sufficiently to make it include my late experience with Callahan and Mullins. "It ain't any part of my job to bruise the broken reed n'r quench the smokin' flax. You don't look like a thief, and, anyways, if you're tryin' to make an honest livin', that settles all the old scores--or it ort to. Go find you a job, if you can. What you've told me stays right in here"--tapping his broad chest--"leastwise, it won't be used against you as long as you walk straight."

Under such kindly auspices it did seem as if I ought to be able to dig a quiet little rifle-pit in the field of respectability and good repute and to hold it against all comers. But, oddly enough, I couldn't do it--not to save my life. My experience had all been in office work, and since business was good in the small city, I had little difficulty in finding employment. Yet in each case--and there were five of them, one after another--I secured work only to lose it almost immediately.

By some means my story had got out, and it spread through the town like an epidemic. After the fifth failure I went back to the fatherly old chief of police to confess defeat and to notify him that I was leaving town.

In this interview he made me tell him more about my trial and conviction, and when I finished he was shaking his head. "There's something sort o' queer about this pull-down of yours, Weyburn," he commented. "I gave you my word not to talk unless you went back on me, and I've kept it. You hain't told anybody else?"

"Not a soul."

"Still, it's been told--not once, but a heap o' times. Have you tried chasin' it back to its startin' point?"

"Yes; but it is no good. It seems to be in the air."

"Well, it's a dum shame. It looks as if you had somebody houndin' you out o' sheer spite. Is there anybody back behind that would do that?"

I suppose I was bat-blind; but the suggestion, even when it was added to the mysterious entanglements that were tripping me at every step, failed to open my eyes. Truly, Abel Geddis and Abner Withers had used me ruthlessly as their criminal stop-gap, but since I had paid the penalty and still bore the criminal odium, I could postulate no possible reason why they should reach out across the three-year interval to add cruel persecution to injury.

"No," I said, after a reflective pause. "There are only the two old men I have named. And now that it is all over, I can see that they were only shoving me into the breach to save themselves."

He nodded, half-doubtfully, I thought; and then: "You're goin' to try again somewheres else?"

I replied that there was nothing else to do; whereupon this white-haired old angel, who seemed so vastly out of place as the head of even a small city's police department, made an astounding proposal.

"Get your bit of dunnage--I s'pose you hain't got very much, have you?--and come around here about dark this evenin'. I'll have my buggy ready and we'll drive over to Altamont, so you can take the train there instead of here. If there's anybody follerin' you up and blacklistin'

you, maybe that'll throw 'em off the track."

It was a splendid bit of kindness; and when I could swallow the lump it brought into my throat I accepted joyfully. And as the disappearance was planned, so it was carried out. In the dusk of the evening the good old man drove me the ten miles across to the neighboring village, and after thanking him out of a full heart I boarded a train and began my wanderings afresh.

VI

A Good Samaritan