Chapter 16

"It is, unquestionably. I hope I shall never see her or hear of her again."

For a moment he sat nibbling the end of the pencil with which he had been figuring, trying, as I well understood, to be fairly equitable as between even-handed justice and his prejudices. There was a sharp little struggle, but at the end of it he said: "As I remarked yesterday, I labor under all the disadvantages of the average American father. I can occupy the position only of a deeply interested onlooker. But I'll meet you half-way and lift the embargo. You may resume your visits to the house if you wish to."

"I want more than that," I broke in hastily. "I am going to ask Polly to be my wife. If she says Yes, I don't want to wait a minute longer than I'm obliged to."

He demurred at that, intimating that I ought to be willing to wait until a reasonable lapse of time could prove the sincerity of my protestations. He was entirely justified in asking for delay, but I begged like a dog and he finally gave a reluctant consent--contingent, of course, upon his daughter's wishes in the matter. Half an hour later I was sitting with Polly Everton before a cheerful grate fire in the living-room of the cottage on the hill, trying, as best I might, to tell her how much I loved her.

One of the things a man doesn't find out until after he has been married quite some little time is that the best of women may not always wear her heart on her sleeve, nor always open the door of the inner confidences even to the man whose life has become a part and parcel of her own. Mary Everton's eyes were deep wells of truth and sincerity as I talked, but I read in them nothing save the love which matched my own when she gave me her answer. If I had known all that lay behind, I think I should have fallen down and worshiped her.

I did not know then how much or how little she had heard of the Agatha Geddis affair. None the less, I broke faith, if not with her, at least with myself. I did not tell her that she was about to become the wife of an escaped convict; that her life must henceforth be lived under a threatening shadow; that her children, if she should have any, might be made to share the disgrace of their father.

Once more I make no excuses. A little later, if I had waited, the just and honorable impulse might have reasserted itself; I might have realized that the removal of one unscrupulous woman out of my path merely took the lightning out of the edge of the nearest cloud. But in the supreme exaltation of the moment I considered none of these things. In this climaxing of happiness the disaster which had hung over my head for weeks and months seemed as far removed and remote as it had been imminent only a few hours before.

We were together through what remained of the afternoon; until it was nearly time for Phineas Everton to come home. When we parted I had gained my point and our plans were all made. We were to be married very quietly the following day. I had no wish to make the wedding the social function which my position as one of the three partners in the Little Clean-Up might have justified; and Polly agreed with me in this.

It was not until after I had left the house that I remembered that the forced financing of Agatha Geddis's elopement had practically drained my bank account. There had been no mention of money in our talk before the fire; we were both far and away beyond the reach of any such sordid topic. But Phineas Everton would have a right to ask questions, and I must be prepared to answer them. After dinner at the hotel I captured Barrett, drove him into a quiet corner of the lobby, and made my wail.

"Heavens and earth!" he gasped when I had told him the shameful truth. "Are you telling me that you let that woman hold you up for all the ready money you had in the world?"

"It listens that way," I confessed; adding, out of the heart of sincerity: "It was cheap at the price; I was glad enough to be quit of her at any price."

"This is pretty serious, Jimmie," he asserted, after he had re-lighted his cigar. "It isn't the mere fact that you have recklessly chucked a small fortune at the Geddis person--that is a mere matter of dollars and cents, and the Little Clean-Up will square you up on that. But there is another side to it. The dreadful thing is the fact that she had enough of a grip on you to make you do it. I'll like it better if you will say that you were blind drunk when you did it."

"I wasn't--more's the pity, Bob; on the contrary, I was never soberer in my life."

"Of course, you haven't told Polly."

"No--not yet."

"Nor Everton?"

I shook my head. "I didn't want to commit suicide."

Barrett chuckled softly.

"I happen to know this fellow the Geddis woman is running away with," he said. "He has gone through his wife's fortune, in addition to squandering a good little chunk that his father left him. And you've grub-staked 'em both to this! Well, never mind; it's a back number, now, and you have given me your word for it. Don't worry about the money you are going to need for the honeymoon. There is plenty in the bank--in my account, if there isn't any in yours."

I thanked him with tears in my eyes. Was there ever another such generous soul in this world, or in any other? He stopped me in mid career, wishing to know more about the wedding.

"Let the money part of it go hang and tell me more about this hurry business you've planned for to-morrow. It's scandalous and unheard of, but I don't blame you a little bit. Dope my part out for me while you're here--so I'll know where I am to come on and go off."

For a little while longer--as long a while as I could spare from Polly--we talked of the impromptu wedding and arranged for it. Barrett was a brother to me in all that the word implies. He took on all of the "best man's" responsibilities--and more. When I was leaving to walk up the hill he walked to the corner of the side street with me, and at the last moment business intruded.

"I forgot to tell you," he cut in abruptly. "After you left yesterday afternoon a court notice was served upon us. Blackwell's lawyers have taken the Lawrenceburg suit to the Federal court--on the ground of alien ownership--and we've got to show cause all over again why we shouldn't be enjoined for trespass. Benedict seems to be more or less stirred up about it."

"If that is the case, I oughtn't to be going away," I said.

"Yes, you ought; Gifford and I can handle it."

Notwithstanding Barrett's assurance I was vaguely disturbed as I climbed the hill to the Everton cottage. Blackwell had proved to be a veritable bull-dog in the long-drawn-out fight, and the tenacity with which he was holding on was ominous. Why the Lawrenceburg people should make such a determined struggle to wipe us out was beyond my comprehension. It had been proved in the State courts, past a question of doubt, that our title to the Little Clean-Up was unassailable, and still Blackwell hung on. What was the animus?

If I could have had the answer to that question it is conceivable that my one evening as Polly Everton's affianced lover--an evening spent in the seventh heaven of ecstasy before the cheerful coal blaze in the cottage sitting-room--would have been sadly marred.

XXI

The End of a Honeymoon

Our high-noon wedding was in all respects as quiet and unostentatious as we had planned it. The little brown box of a church, bare of decorations because there was neither time nor the group of vicariously interested young people to trim it, was only a few doors from the Everton cottage, and we walked to it; Phineas Everton and I on each side of the plank walk, and Polly between us with an arm for each.

Barrett had told a few of his friends, so there were enough people in the pews to make it look a little less than clandestine. Barrett acted as usher in one aisle and Gifford, very much out of his element but doggedly faithful, did his part in the other. There was even a bit of music; the Wagner as we went in, and a few bars of the Mendelssohn to speed us as we went out. The good-byes were said at the church-door, and the only abnormal thing about the leave-taking was Barrett's gift to the bride, pressed into her hand as we were getting into the carriage to go to the railroad station--a silver filigree hand-bag stuffed heavy with five- and ten-dollar gold pieces, "to be blown in on the wedding journey," as he phrased it.

We had agreed not to tell anybody where we were going; for that matter, I didn't even tell Polly until after we had started. Turning southward from Colorado Springs and stopping overnight in Trinidad, we took a morning train on the Santa Fe and vanished into the westward void. A day and a night beyond this we were debarking at Williams, Arizona, and in due time reached our real hiding-place; a comfortable ranch house within easy riding distance of that most majestic of immensities, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It was Polly's idea; the choice of a quiet retreat as against the social attractions of the great hotel on the canyon's brink. We had each other, and that was sufficient.

Of that heavenly month, spent in a world far removed from all the turmoil and distractions of modern civilization, there is nothing to be here written down. For those who have drained a similar cup of blissful happiness for themselves there is no need; and those who have not would not understand. What I recall most vividly now is a single unnerving incident; unnerving, I say, though at the time it was quickly drowned in the flowing tide of joy.

It chanced upon a day toward the month's end when we had broken the heavenly sequence of quiet days by riding a pair of our host's well-broken cow ponies over to El Tovar for dinner. Since it was not the tourist season there were not many guests in the great inn; but one, a man who sat by himself in a far corner of the dining-room, gave me a turn that made me sick and faint at my first sight of him. The man was big and swarthy of face, and he wore a pair of drooping mustaches. For one heart-stopping instant I made sure it was William Cummings, the deputy prison warden who had so miraculously missed seeing me in the dining-car of my train of escape. But since nothing happened and he paid no manner of attention to us, I decided gratefully that it was only a resemblance. There was no such name as Cummings on the hotel register, which I examined after we left the dining-room, and I saw no more of the man with the drooping mustaches.

Momentary as the shock had been, I found that Polly had remarked it. She spoke of it on the ride back to our retreat at Carter's.

"Are you feeling entirely well, Jimmie, dear?" she asked; and before I could reply: "You had a bad turn of some sort while we were at table. I saw it in your face and eyes."

I hastened to assure her that there was nothing the matter with me; that there couldn't be anything the matter with a man who had died and gone to heaven nearly a month previous to the dinner at El Tovar.

"But the man has got to go back to earth again pretty soon, and take the woman with him," she retorted, laughing. "Just think, Jimmie; it has been nearly a month, as you say, and we haven't had a letter or a telegram in all that time! Not that I'm regretting anything; I'm happy, dearest--as happy as an angel with wings; but I want to see my daddy."

The heavenly path was leading back into the old world again, the fighting world, and I knew it, and presently we were taking all the steps of the delightful vanishing in reverse; boarding the through train at Williams, catching glimpses of the stupendous majesty of mountain and plain as the powerful locomotives towed us up the grades of the Raton, doing a brisk walk on the platform at Albuquerque while the train paused, and all the rest of it.

From Trinidad I wired Barrett, telling him that we were on our way home; that we should go in by way of Colorado Springs instead of Florence, with a stop-over between trains for dinner at the Antlers. I half-expected he would run down to the Springs to meet us, and so he did, bringing Father Phineas with him. Polly's love for her father was always very sweet and touching, and Barrett and I left them to themselves at the meeting.

"I'm mighty glad to see you back, Jimmie, old man," Barrett declared, when we had found a quiet corner in the rotunda. "You are looking like a new man, and I guess you are one. And you are on your feet again financially, too. We declared a dividend yesterday, and you've got a bank account that will warm the cockles of your silly old heart."

"How is Gifford? and how are things at the mine?" I asked.

"Gifford is all right; only he's got too much money--doesn't know what to do with it now that he has built all the new houses the camp will stand for. And the Little Clean-Up is all right, too; though we are digging into a small mystery just now."

"A mystery?" I queried.

"Yes. You remember how the branch vein in the two-hundred-foot level was bearing off to the east?"

"I do."

"Well, three weeks ago the sloping carried us over into the Mary Mattock ground, and I tell you what, Jimmie, I was more than glad we had bought that claim outright while we could. The ore is richer than anything we have found since we made the big strike at grass-roots, and we'd be up against it good and hard if we hadn't paid those Nebraska farmers what they asked and taken a clear title to the ground."

"But the mystery," I reminded him.

"It is a little trick of acoustics, I guess; it has happened in other mines, so Hicks tells me. Some peculiar geological structure of the porphyry in particular localities makes it carry sound like a telephone wire. In that eastern adit of ours you can hear them working in the Lawrenceburg as plainly as if they were only a few feet away."

"That is odd," I mused; "especially as the Lawrenceburg workings are all in exactly the opposite direction--down the hill on their side of the spur."

Barrett thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

"I have often wondered, Jimmie, if they really _are_ downhill. Nobody, outside of the men on their own pay-roll, knows anything about it definitely; and Blackwell wouldn't let an outside engineer go down his shaft for a king's ransom. I know it, because I have tried to send one. If the downhill story that we've been hearing should happen to be a fake; if he should be under-cutting us, instead; it would explain a heap of things."

"The stubborn lawsuit among others," I offered.

"Yes; the lawsuit. By the way, we've been up to our necks in that while you've been hiding out. Blackwell's lawyers succeeded in persuading the Federal court to grant a temporary injunction, in spite of everything we could do, and we are operating now under an indemnity bond big enough to make your head swim. The hearing to determine whether the injunction shall be dissolved or made permanent is timed for next Monday."

"Heavens!" I ejaculated. "We can't let them tie us up!"

"I don't think they are going to be able to. Benedict is feeling a little better now and he thinks he has them sewed up in a blanket, only he won't tell me how, and you never can tell what's going to happen when the lawyers get at you. There are lots of holes in the legal skimmer: for example, at the preliminary hearing Blackwell had three surveyors who went on the stand and swore flat-footed that the lines on our side of the spur were all wrong; that the Lawrenceburg group of claims covered not only our original triangle, but the Mary Mattock as well. Paid-for perjury, of course, but we couldn't prove it; so there you are."

At my urging Barrett would have gone into this phase of the trouble more deeply, but just then Polly and her father came across the rotunda and we all went to the dining-room together. I shall never forget, the longest day I live, just where our table for four stood, and how a group of gabbling tourists had the three or four tables nearest to us, and how the lights, due to some trouble with the electric current, winked now and then, like the stage lights in a theater ticking off the cues.

We had got as far as the black coffees, and Barrett was joking Polly and telling her that she shouldn't take sugar, when I saw, through a vista of the tourists, a square-shouldered, dark-faced man rising from his place at a distant table. There was no mistaking him. He was the man I had seen in the dining-room of the hotel at the Grand Canyon.

As he came toward us between the tables the resemblance, which I had so confidently assured myself was only a resemblance, transformed itself slowly into the breath-cutting reality, and I was staring up, wild-eyed and speechless, into the face of the deputy warden, Cummings, when he tapped me on the shoulder and said, loud enough for the others to hear:

"You've led us a pretty long chase, Weyburn, but we don't often miss, and it's ended at last. I guess you'll have to come with me, now."

XXII

A Woman's Love

It is useless for me to try to picture the consternation which fell upon the four of us when the deputy warden touched me on the shoulder and spoke to me. I can't describe it. I only know that Barrett sprang up, gritting out the first oath I had ever heard him utter; that a look of shocked and complete recognition leaped into the mild brown eyes of the old metallurgist; that Polly was standing up with her arms outstretched across the table as if she were trying to reach me and drag me out of the crushing wreck of all our hopes.

When he found that I was not going to offer any resistance, Cummings was very decent--not to say kindly. He let me walk with the others out of the dining-room; made no show of his authority in the rotunda or at the elevators to point me out as a prisoner; and in the up-stairs room to which he took me, pending the departure-time of the earliest eastbound train, he let me see and talk, first with Barrett, and afterward with my wife.

In this most trying exigency Barrett proved to be all that my fancy had ever pictured the truest of friends. His first word assured me that he meant to stand by me to the last ditch, and I knew it was the word of a man who never knew when he was beaten. While Cummings smoked a cigar in the window-seat I told Barrett the whole pitiful story, beginning with the night when I had promised Agatha Geddis that I would pull her father out of the hole he had digged for himself and ending with my appearance in the Cripple Creek construction camp.

Barrett believed the story, and I didn't have to wait for him to tell me so. I could see it in his eyes.

"Jimmie!" he said, wringing my hand as if he would crush it, "you've got the two of us behind you--I'm speaking for Gifford because I know exactly what he will say. We'll spend every dollar that ever comes out of the Little Clean-Up, if needful, to buy you justice! But I wish you had told me all this before; and, more than that, I wish you had told Polly."

"My God, Bob!" I groaned; "don't rub it in!" And then I told him brokenly how I had known Polly as a little girl in Glendale, and how I was certain that her father had more than once been on the verge of recognizing me. Then, in such fashion as I could, I made my will, or tried to, telling him that Polly must have her freedom, and that he must help her get it, and that my share in the mine must go to her.

"It is the only return I can make her for the deception I have put upon her," I said; "and I want you to promise me that----"

In the midst of all this Barrett had turned aside, swearing under his breath, which was his only way, I took it, of letting me know how it was rasping him. But now he whirled upon me and broke in savagely:

"Stop it, you damned maniac! If you have lived with Polly Everton a whole month and don't know her any better than that, you ought to be shot! She is waiting now to have her chance at you, and I'm not going to take any more of her time." Then he went soft again: "You keep a stiff upper lip, and we'll get you out of this if we have to retain every lawyer this side of New York!"

Polly came so soon after Barrett left that I knew she must have been waiting in the corridor. Cummings was considerate enough to shift his smoking-seat to the other window and to turn his back upon us. All the cynics in the world to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a tender spot in the heart of every man that was ever born, if one can only be fortunate enough to touch it.

"_My darling_!" That is what she said when I took her in my arms; and for a long minute nothing else was said. Then she drew away and held me at arm's length, and there was that in her dear eyes to make me feel like the soldier who faces the guns with a shout in his heart and a song on his lips, knowing that death itself cannot rob him of the Great Recompense.

"You needn't say one word--Jimmie--_my husband_! I have known it all, every bit of it, from the first--from that Sunday morning when Daddy took me over to your mine," she whispered. "I--I loved you, dearest, when I was only a foolish little school-girl, and your sister and I have exchanged letters ever since Daddy and I left Glendale. So I knew; knew when they sent you to prison for another man's crime, and knew, even better than your mother and sister did, why you let them do it. Oh, Jimmie!"--with a queer little twist of the sweet lips that was half tears and half smile--"if you could only know how wretchedly jealous I used to be of Agatha Geddis!"

"You needn't have been!" I burst out. "But you don't know it all. Last winter--in Denver----"

She nodded sorrowfully.

"Yes, dear; I knew that, too. I knew that Agatha Geddis was using you again--against your will; and that this time she had a cruel whip in her hand. We had all heard of the broken parole; it was in the home newspapers, and, besides, your sister wrote me about it."

"And in the face of all this, you----"

She nodded again, brightly this time, though her eyes were swimming.

"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 God--two years!" she gasped, with a quick little sob; and then she became my brave little girl again. "They will pass, 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. Cummings 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.