Branded Part 6

After such a disheartening experience in a community where I had had the help and countenance of a just and charitable head of the police department, I went back to the smaller places. Merely because it seemed foolish to take the time to learn a new trade when I already had one, I still sought office work. There was little difficulty in finding such employment--at humble wages; the unattainable thing was the keeping of it. Though I could never succeed in running it down and bringing it to bay, a pitiless Nemesis seemed to dog me from town to town. Gossiping marshals there may have been, now and then, to spread my story; but I had twice been given proof that another agency must be at work--a mysterious persecution that I could neither fight nor outwit, nor account for upon any reasonable hypothesis.

So the hopeless and one-sided battle went on as I fled from post to pillar up and down and back and forth in the "permitted" area, doing a bit of extra bookkeeping here and another there. The result was always the same. Work of that kind necessarily carried more or less responsibility, and in consequence I was never retained more than a few days at a time.

It was borne in upon me more and more that I must sink lower, into some walk in life in which no questions were asked. This conviction impressed itself upon me with greater emphasis at each succeeding failure, and the decision to drop into the ranks of the unidentified was finally reached in a small city in the agricultural section of the State where I had been employed for a few days in a hardware and implement store as s.h.i.+pping clerk. Once more I was discharged, peremptorily, and with a reproachful reprimand for having thrust myself, unplacarded, upon well-behaved people.

"I don't admit your right to say such things to me, Mr. Haddon," I protested, after the reproach had been well rubbed in. "I have given you good service for small pay, and there was no reason why I should have furnished you with an autobiography when you didn't ask it. In the circ.u.mstances it seems that I am the one to be aggrieved, but I'll waive the right to defend myself if you'll tell me where you got your information."

The implement dealer was a thin, ascetic person, with cold gray eyes and two distinct sets of manners; one for his customers and another for his employees; and the look he gave me was meant to be withering.

"I don't recognize your right to question me, at all," he objected, with the air of one who brushes an annoying insect from his coat-sleeve. "It is enough to say that my source of information is entirely reliable. By your own act you have placed yourself outside of the pale. If you break a natural law, Nature exacts the just penalty.

It is the same in the moral field."

"But if any penalty were due from me I have paid it," I retorted.

"No; you have paid only a part of it--the law's part. Society still has its claims and they must be met; recognized and satisfied to the final jot and t.i.ttle."

Though this man was a church member, and a rather prominent one in Springville--we may call the small city Springville because that isn't its real name--I did not accuse him, even mentally, of conscious hypocrisy. What I said, upon leaving him, was that I hoped he'd never have to pay any of the penalties himself. I did not know then--what I learned later--that he was a very whited sepulchre; a man who was growing rich by a systematic process of robbing his farmer customers on time sales.

Turned out once again upon an unsympathetic world, I was minded to do what I had done so many times before--take the first train and vanish.

But a small incident delayed the vanis.h.i.+ng--for the moment, at least.

On the way to the railroad station I saw a sight, commoner at that time in my native State than it is now, I am glad to be able to say; a young, farmer-looking fellow overcome by liquor, reeling and stumbling and finding the sidewalk far too narrow. He was coming toward me, and I yielded to the impulse which prompts most of us at such times; the disposition to give the inebriate all the room he wants--to pa.s.s by, like the priest and the Levite, on the other side.

Just as I was stepping into the roadway, the drunken man collided heavily with a telephone pole, caught clumsily at it to save himself, and fell, striking his head on the curbstone and rolling into the gutter. It was a case for the Good Samaritan, and, as it happened, that time-honored personage was at hand. Before I could edge away, as I confess I was trying to do, a clean-cut young man in the fatigue uniform of the Church militant came striding across the street.

"Here, you!" he snapped briskly to me. "Don't turn your back that way on a man needing help! That fellow's hurt!"

We got the pole-bombarder up, between us, and truly he was hurt. There was a cut over one eye where he had b.u.t.ted into one of the climbing-steps on the pole, and either that, or the knock on the curbstone, had made him take the count. Since Springville wasn't citified enough to have a hospital or an ambulance, I supposed we would carry the wounded man to the nearest drug store. But my Good Samaritan wasn't built that way. Hastily commandeering a pa.s.sing dray, he made me help him load the unconscious man into it, and the three of us were trundled swiftly through a couple of cross streets to a--to a church, I was going to say, but it was to a small house beside the church.

Here, with the help of the driver, we got the John Barleycorn victim into the house and spread him out on a clean white bed, muddy boots, sodden clothes, b.l.o.o.d.y head and all. I asked if I should go for a doctor, but the Samaritan shook his head. "No," he said; "you and I can do all that is necessary." Then he paid the dray driver and we fell to work.

It was worth something to see that handsome, well-built young theologue--it didn't seem as if he could have been more than a boy freshly out of the seminary--strip off his coat and roll up his sleeves and go to it like a veteran surgeon. In a few minutes, with such help as I could render, he had the cut cleaned and bandaged, the red face sponged off, and the worst of the street dirt brushed from the man's clothing.

"That is about all we can do--until he gets over the double effects of the hurt and the whiskey," he said, when the job was finished; and then, with a sort of search-warrant look at me: "Are you very busy?"

I told him I was not.

"All right; you stay here with him and keep an eye on him while I go and find out who he is and where he belongs." And with that he put on his coat and left the house.

He was gone for over an hour, and during that time I sat by the bed, keeping watch over the patient and letting my thoughts wander as they would. Here was a little exhibition of a spirit which had been conspicuously absent in my later experiences of the world and its peopling. Apparently the milk of human kindness had not become entirely a figure of speech. One man, at least, was trying to live up to the requirements of a nominally Christian civilization, and if this bit of rescue work were a fair sample, he was making a success of it.

I took it for granted that he was the minister of the next-door church, and that the house was its parsonage or rectory. It was a simple story-and-a-half cottage, plainly furnished but exquisitely neat and home-like. There were books everywhere, and an atmosphere about as much of the place as I could see to make me decide that it was a man's house--I mean that the young minister wasn't as yet sharing it with a woman. You can tell pretty well. A woman's touch about a house interior is as easily distinguishable as the stars on a clear night.

From my place at the bedside I could look through an open door into the sitting-room. There were easy-chairs and a writing-table and a general air of man-comfort. Among the pictures on the walls was one of a stately group of college buildings; another was a cla.s.s picture taken with a church, or perhaps it was the college chapel, for a background.

When the hour was about up, the man on the bed began to stir and show signs that he was coming out of the unconscious fit. Pretty soon he opened his eyes and asked, in a liquor-thickened voice, where he was.

I told him he had had an accident and was in the hands of his friends; and at that he dropped off to sleep, and was still sleeping when a farm wagon stopped at the cottage gate and the Good Samaritan came in. His search had been successful. Our broken-winged bird was a young farmer living a few miles out of town. The young minister had found his team, and a friend to drive it, and both friend and team were at the gate ready to take the battered one home.

With the help of the volunteer driver we got the young farmer up and out and into the wagon; and there the Samaritan outreaching ended--or I supposed it was ended. But as a matter of fact, it was merely transferring itself to me. As I was moving off to resume my interrupted dash for the railroad station, Whitley--I read his name on the notice board of the near-by church--stopped me.

"What's your hurry?" he asked; adding: "I haven't had time to get acquainted with you yet."

I answered briefly that I was leaving town, and this brought the questioner's watch out of his pocket.

"There is no train in either direction before nine o'clock this evening," he demurred. And then: "It is nearly six now: if you haven't anything better to do, why not stay and take dinner with me? I'm a lone bachelor-man, and I'd be mighty glad of your company."

The wagon had driven off and the street was empty. I looked my potential host squarely in the eyes and said the first thing that came uppermost.

"I have just been discharged from Mr. Haddon's store--for what Mr.

Haddon considers to be good and sufficient cause. I don't believe you want me at your dinner-table."

His smile was as refres.h.i.+ng as a cool breeze on a hot summer day.

"I don't care what Mr. Haddon has said or done to you. If you can't give any better reason than that----"

"But I can," I interposed. "I am a paroled convict."

Without another word he opened the gate and drew me inside with an arm linked in mine. And he didn't speak again until he had planted me in the easiest of the big chairs before the grate fire in the cozy sitting-room, and had found a couple of pipes, filling one for me and the other for himself.

"Now, then, tell me all about it," he commanded, "You are having plenty of trouble; your face says that much. Begin back a bit and let it lead up to Mr. Zadoc Haddon as a climax, if you wish."

It had been so long since I had had a chance really to confide in anybody that I unloaded it all; the whole bitter burden of it. Whitley heard me through patiently, and when I was done, put his finger on the single omission in the story.

"You haven't told me whether you did or did not use the bank's money for your own account in the mining speculation," he said.

I shook my head. "I have learned by hard experience not to say much about that part of it."

"Why?" he asked.

"If you knew convicts you wouldn't ask. They will all tell you that they were innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced."

He smoked in silence for a minute or two and then said: "You are not a criminal, Weyburn."

"I am not far from it at the present time--whatever I was in the beginning."

Another silence, and then: "It seems incredible to me that you, or any man in your situation, should find the world so hard-hearted. It isn't hard-hearted as a whole, you know; on the contrary, it is kind and helpful and charitable to a degree that you'd never suspect until you appeal to it. I know, because I am appealing to it every day."

Again I shook my head.

"It draws a line in its charity; and the ex-convict is on the wrong side of that line." I was going on to say more, but at that moment a white-haired old negro in a spotless serving jacket came to the door to say that dinner was ready, and we went together to the tiny dining-room in the rear.

At dinner, which was the most appetizing meal I had sat down to in many a long day, Whitley told me more about himself, sparing me, as I made sure, the necessity of further talk about my own wretched experiences.

He was Southern born and bred--which accounted for the old negro serving man--and Springville was his first parish north of the Ohio River. He was enthusiastic over his work, and he seemed to forget completely who and what I was as he talked of it.

Later, when we had come again to the sitting-room with its cheerful fire, we talked of books, finding common ground in the field of autobiography and travel. Whitley's reading in this field had been much wider than mine, and his knowledge of far countries and the men who wrote about them was a revelation to such a dabbler as I had been.

Book after book was taken from the shelves and dipped into, and before I realized it the evening--so different from any I had enjoyed for months and years--had slipped away and the little clock on the mantel was chiming the half-hour after eight. It was time for me to efface myself, and I said so--a bit unsteadily, perhaps, for the pleasant evening had been as the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land.

"No," said Whitley, quite definitely. "You are not going to-night. I have a spare bed upstairs and I want you to stay--as my guest. Beyond that, you are not going to leave Springville merely because Mr. Haddon has seen fit to deny you your little meed of justice and a fair show."

"It's no use," I said. "The story is out, and it will follow me wherever I go--doubtless with Mr. Haddon's help. You'd best let me go while the going is easy."