Chapter 5

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."

"No," he Insisted. "You are a part of my work--one of my reasons for existence. Christianity means something, Weyburn, and I am here to define its meaning in specific cases. There is a little legacy of common justice due you, and I shall take it upon myself to see that you get it. As for Zadoc Haddon, you needn't worry about him. I am ashamed to say that he is a member of my own church, but that doesn't prevent him from being a wolf in sheep's clothing. I have told him so to his face, and he has tried to get me ousted--without success, so far."

I saw difficulties and more difficulties for this generous young fellow who was so ready to champion my cause, and it seemed only decent to spare him if I could. But at the end of my protest he summed the situation up in a single sentence:

"What you say about me is all beside the mark; somebody has got to give you the chance you are needing, and the fight may just as well be made here in Springville as anywhere. Sit down again and let's dig a little deeper into that Mexican book of Enock's. I do like his blunt English way of describing things; don't you?"

Though the next three days were full of hopes and despairings for me I shall pass over them lightly. Each day, though he did not tell me in detail what he was doing, I knew that Whitley was trying his best to find a place for me; and I knew, too, that he was meeting with no success. He was such a fine, upstanding fellow, and so full of holy zeal and enthusiasm, that it was hard for him to acknowledge defeat. But on the third evening, after a dinner at which he had tried vainly to bridge the gaps that were continually opening out in the talk, he threw up his hands.

"Weyburn," he began, when the pipes were lighted and he had poked the grate fire into a roaring blaze, "don't you know, these last three days have come mighty near to making me lose faith in my kind. It's simply wretched--miserable!"

"I would have saved you if you had been willing to let me," I reminded him.

"The question is much bigger than Bert Weyburn or John Whitley, or both of them put together," he asserted soberly. "It involves the entire fabric of Christianity, and our so-called Christian civilization. The Church is here to shadow forth the spirit and teachings of Christ, or it isn't--one of the two. If it falls in its mission it is a hollow mockery; a thing beneath contempt. I go to my fellow Christians with a simple plea for justice for a man who needs it, and what do I get? I am told, with all the sickening variations, that it won't do; that the thing I am proposing is one of the things that 'isn't done'; that society must be protected, and all that!"

"The mills of the gods," I suggested.

"Nothing of the sort! It's a radical defect in the existing scheme of things. Heavens and earth, Weyburn, you are not a pariah! Assuming that you really did the thing for which you were punished--and I don't believe you did--is that any reason why we should stultify ourselves absolutely and deny the very first principles of the religion we profess? But I mustn't be unfair. Perhaps the fault is partly mine, after all. Perhaps I haven't done my duty by these people."

"No; the fault is not yours," I hastened to say.

"I'm hoping it is; some of it, at least. Just the same, the wretched fact remains. You might be the biggest villain unhung--if only you hadn't passed through the courts and the penitentiary. As you thought probably was the case, your story is known all over town; though how it has got such a wide publication in so short a time is more than I can fathom. Men whom I would bank on; men to whom I have felt that I could go in any conceivable extremity, have turned me down as soon as I mentioned your name. The prison story is like a big, brutal, inanimate mountain standing squarely in the way; and I--I haven't the faith needful for its removal!"

Being under the deepest obligation to this dear young fellow who was bruising himself for me, I said what I could to lighten his burden. But in the midst of it he got up and reached for his hat and overcoat.

"I have just thought of something," he explained hastily; "something that may throw a good bit of light on this thing. You sit right here and toast your shins. I'm going out for a little while."

He was gone for the better part of an hour, during which interval I obeyed his injunction literally, sitting before the fire and basking in its home-like warmth; making the most of the comfort of it all before I should again go forth to face an inclement world. When Whitley came in and flung himself into a chair on the opposite side of the hearth his dark eyes were blazing.

"Weyburn," he began abruptly, "what I have to tell you will stir every evil passion you've ever harbored; and yet, in decent justice to you, it must be told. Have you ever suspected that your fight for reinstatement has been deliberately handicapped, right from the beginning?"

"I have suspected it at times; yes," I returned. "But there is no proof."

"There _is_ proof," he shot back. "By the merest chance I stumbled upon it a few minutes ago. I went out with the intention of going to Zadoc Haddon and making him tell me where he got the information that you are the desperate criminal he professes to believe you to be. While we were sitting here it struck me all at once that this thing was being helped along by some one who had an object in view. At Haddon's house the doorman told me that Haddon had an appointment with an out-of-town customer and had gone to the hotel to keep it; and rather than wait, I went over to the Hamilton House to try to find my man. I didn't find him; but in the lobby of the hotel somebody found me. As I was turning away from the desk after asking for Haddon, a heavy-set young man, neatly dressed, stepped up and asked if my name was Whitley. I admitted it. Then he asked if I would give him a few minutes, and we went aside to sit facing each other in a couple of the lobby chairs. Weyburn, that young man is in the employ of a private detective agency, and what he wished to do, and did do, was to warn me that I was sheltering a dangerous criminal in my house!"

In a flash all the small mysteries that had been befogging me for months made themselves transparently clear: the man I had called a traveling salesman who had followed me from the prison gates to the scene of my first humble effort; the memorandum Chief Callahan had consulted; the "outfit" that was to be notified when my next destination was known; the second appearance of the "salesman" on the train at the capital, and his disappearance when he had learned from the conductor the name of my next stopping-place; and after this the long series of hitherto unaccountable blacklistings. My mouth was dry, but I contrived to tell Whitley to go on.

"I will," he conceded; "but you must promise me to control yourself. Naturally, my first impulse, when this scamp began on me, was to cut him off short and tell him what I thought of the despicable business to which he was lending himself. But the second thought was craftier, and I hope I may be forgiven for yielding to it. By leading him on I got the entire brutal story. It seems that the two old men upon whose complaint you were indicted knew when you were to be paroled. They profess to believe that you are a menace to society; that the prison authorities were at fault in releasing you short of the limit of your sentence. Hence, through his employers, they have set this man upon your track to see to it--I use his own words--that you do not have an opportunity to rob some one else."

I suppose I should have been driven mad with vindictive fury at this plain revelation of the true cause of most of my misfortunes, but there is a point beyond which the beaten man cannot rise to renew the fight, and I had reached and passed it. Wherefore I found myself saying, quite calmly:

"Neither Abel Geddis nor Abner Withers would spend one copper penny for any such altruistic reason as this man has given you, Whitley. Their motive is strictly selfish and personal. They are either afraid that I may go back to Glendale and try to expose them; or that I may take the shorter and surer way of balancing the account by killing them--as, at one time, I meant to."

"Oh, but my dear fellow!" Whitley protested. "In that case they would hardly take a course which was calculated to drive you to desperation!"

"You don't understand it all," I rejoined. "Everything has been done secretly, and it is only by the merest chance that I have now learned the truth. This man you have been talking to has been following me, or keeping track of me, ever since I left the penitentiary. I have seen him twice, and I took him to be a traveling salesman--as he doubtless intended I should. You can see how it was designed to work out. With a sufficient amount of discouragement it was reasonable to assume that the prison bird would finally yield to the inevitable; become a criminal in fact and get himself locked up again out of harm's way."

"You think that was the motive?"

"I am as certain of it as I should be if I could read the minds of those two old plotters in my home town. You see, I've summered and wintered them. The only thing I can't understand is why I have been so blind; why I didn't assume all this long ago and act accordingly."

"But why, _why_ should they be so utterly lost to every sense of right and justice; to all the promptings of common humanity? It's hideously incredible!"

"I have given you two reasons, and you may take your choice. It is either the fear of death--the fear of the vengeance of a man whose life they have ruined, or else the transaction in which they involved me, and in which they made me their scapegoat, was more far-reaching than I, or anybody in Glendale, supposed it was."

Whitley sat for a full minute staring absently into the fire. Then he said, very gently: "Now that you know the truth, what will you do?"

"I know well enough what I ought to do. We may pass over the fellow at the Hamilton House; he is only a poor tool in the hands of the master workmen. I bear him no malice of the blood-letting sort. But really, Whitley, I ought to go back to Glendale and rid the earth of those two old villains who have earned their blotting-out."

Again there was a pause, and then: "Well, why don't you do it?"

I laughed rather bitterly.

"Because all the fight has been taken out of me, Whitley. That is the reason and the only reason."

His smile was beatific. "No, it isn't," he denied. "You know you couldn't do it; you couldn't bring yourself to do it. Maybe, in the heat of passion . . . but to go deliberately: no, Weyburn; if you think you could do such a thing as that, I can tell you that I know you better than you know yourself."

"I merely said that that was what I ought to do. I know well enough that I shan't do it, but the reason is far beneath that which you are good enough to hint at. I'm a broken man, Whitley; what I have gone through in the past few months has smashed my nerve. You can't understand that--I don't expect you to. But if I should meet those two old men when I leave this house, I should probably run away from them and try to hide."

"But what _will_ you do?" he queried.

"What can I do, more than I've been doing?"

Again a silence intervened.

"I wish I knew how to advise you," Whitley said at length. "If there were only some way in which you might shake off this wretched hired spy!"

"I can't. If I dodge him, he has only to wait until I report myself again to the prison authorities. The one thing I can do is to relieve you of my threatening presence, and I'll do that now--to-night, while the going is good."

He was at the end of his resources, as I knew he must be, and he made no objections. But at train-time he got up and put on his overcoat to accompany me as far as the station. It was a rough night outside, and I tried to dissuade him, but he wouldn't have it that way. "No," he said; "it's my privilege to speed the parting guest, if I can do no more than that," and so we breasted the spitting snow-storm which was sweeping the empty streets, tramping in silence until we reached the shelter of the train-shed.

It was after the train had whistled for the crossing below the town that Whitley asked me again what I intended doing. I answered him frankly because it was his due.

"It has come down to one of two things: day-labor, in a field where a man is merely a number on the pay-roll--or that other road which is always open to the prison-bird."

He put his hand on my shoulder. "You are not going to take the other road, Weyburn," he said gravely.

"I hope not--I hope I shan't be driven to."

"You mustn't make it conditional. I know you are not a criminal; you were not a criminal when you were convicted. You can't afford to begin to be one now."

"Neither can I afford to starve," I interposed. "Other men live by their wits, and so can I, if I'm driven to it. But I'll play fair with you, Whitley. So long as I can keep body and soul together, with a pick and shovel, or any other implement that comes to hand, I'll stick. I owe you that much, if only for the reason that you are--with the single exception of an old police chief who lives at the other edge of the State--the one really human being I've met since I shook hands with the warden."

The train was in and the conductor was waving his lantern. Whitley grasped my hand and wrung it. "Be a man, and God bless you!" he said in low tones. "And when the pinch comes again and you are tempted to the limit, just remember that there is a fellow back here in Springville who believes in you, and who will limp a little all the rest of his days if you stumble and fall and refuse to get up. Good-night and good-by!"

VII

The Plunge

By the train which bore me away from Springville I went only far enough to put me safely beyond the possibility of stumbling upon any of the places where I had hitherto sought work; though as to that, I had little hope of escaping the relentless blacklister who had been set upon me.

About midnight I had a talk with the flagman in the smoking-car, calling myself a laborer looking for a job and asking about the prospects in the region through which we were passing. I was told that there were swamp lands in the next county, and that the contractors who were installing systems of under-draining had been advertising for men.

Accordingly, the next morning found me in the new field, with one set of difficulties outpaced for the moment only to make room for another. The first man I tackled was the foreman of a ditching crew, and he looked me over with a cold and contemptuous eye.

"Show yer hands!" he rasped, and when I held them out, palms upward: "On yer way, Misther Counter-hopper; 'tis wor-rkin'min we're hirin' here this day--not anny lily-fingered dudes!"

So it was, in a disheartening number of instances; on a railroad grading force in an adjoining county, on city buildings where I asked to be taken as an unskilled helper, with a sewer contractor in another city, as a shoveler in a village brick-yard. Finally I landed a job as a stacker in a lumberyard; and now I found another of the day-laborer difficulties lying in wait for me. At the time of my commitment for trial I was in good physical condition. But the three years in prison had made me soft and flabby, a handicap which liberty--with a string tied to it--had done little to remove; and four hard days of the stacking, in which two of us were handling two-by-ten eighteen-foot joists to the top of a pile twelve feet high, finished me.

The boss grinned understandingly when he gave me my time-check for the four days.

"I thought you wouldn't last very long at the stacking," he commented; "that's a man's job." Then: "Got any head for figures?"

I faced him fairly. "I can't take a job of that kind."

"Why can't you?"

He got the reason in a single sentence.

"Paroled man, hey? What was you in for?"

I named the charge, and did not add that it was an unjust one. I had pleaded the miscarriage of justice so many times, only to be called a liar, that it seemed useless to try to explain.

"Robbed a bank, did you? Well, I don't know as I think any worse of you for spittin' it right out. Tryin' to brace up?"

"I'm trying to earn an honest living."

"And havin' a mighty hard time of it, I reckon--'r you wouldn't be makin' a push at stackin' lumber with them blistered hands. Say, boy; I sort o' like your looks, and I'm goin' to give you a boost. They're needin' a log-scaler in the sawmill. If you know figures, you can catch on in half a day. Chase your feet down to the mill foreman and tell him I sent you."

I went gladly enough, secured the new job, learned how to do it acceptably, and was temerariously happy and light-hearted for two whole weeks. Then my Nemesis found me again. In the third week I chanced to get a glimpse of a short, heavy-set man talking to a bunch of my fellow laborers. Before I could cross the mill yard to identify the stranger he turned and walked quickly away; but the sixth sense of apprehension which develops so surely and quickly in the ex-convict told me that the heavy-set man was Abel Geddis's hired blacklister, and that I was once more on the toboggan slide.

Pay-day came at the end of the week, and when the envelopes had been given out the mill foreman took me aside.

"I'm sorry, Weyburn," he began curtly, "but I'm afraid you'll have to be moving on. Personally, I don't care, one way or the other, what you've been or where you hall from. You do your work well, and that's all I ask of any man. But your story has got out among the hands, and that settles it. They won't work with a convict."

When I took the long road again after this latest rebuff I knew that the fine resolution with which I had left the prison five months earlier was breaking down. The relentless pressure was doing its work, and I began to ask myself how long I could hold out as a law-abiding citizen and a victim of injustice against the belief of the world that I was neither.

The five months' wanderings had carried me the length and breadth of the State, and I had avoided only the large cities and my home neighborhood. But with the lumber company's money in my pocket I boarded a train for the State metropolis. At the end of the experiment I was doing what the released criminal usually does at the outset--seeking an opportunity to lose myself in the crowd.

Jobs were notably harder to find in the great city, though police headquarters, where I reported myself, placed no obstacles in my way so far as I know; took no note of me in any fashion, as I was afterward led to believe. That the hired traducer would follow and find me I made no doubt; but by this time I was becoming so inured to this peculiar hardship that I refused to cross bridges until I came to them, and was at times even able to forget, in the discouragements of other hardships, that I was a marked man.

In the search for means to keep body and soul together it was easy to forget. Day labor offered only now and then, and in my increasing physical unfitness I could not hold my own against the trained muscles of seasoned roustabouts, porters and freight-handlers. Worse still, the physical deterrent grew by what it fed upon--or by the lack of feeding. Part of the time I couldn't get enough to eat; and there were cold and blustering nights when I had not the few cents which would have given me a bed in a cheap lodging-house.

It was in this deepest abyss in the valley of disheartenment that I met a former prison-mate named Kellow; a forger whose time of release from the penitentiary coincided nearly with my own. The meeting was wholly by chance. I was crossing one of the city bridges at night, pointing for one of the river warehouses where I hoped to find a tramp's lodging and shelter from the bitter wind, when I walked blindly into a man coming in the opposite direction. The recognition was instant and mutual.

Like myself, Kellow had been a "trusty," and under certain relaxations of the rule of silence in the prison we had talked and an acquaintance of a sort had slowly grown and ripened. In this intimacy, which I had striven to hold at arm's length, I had come to know the forger as a criminal of the most dangerous breed; a man of parts and of some education, but wholly lacking in the moral sense; a rule-keeper in prison only because he was shrewd enough to appreciate the fact that he was bringing the day of release nearer by piling up "good-conduct" time.

"Well, pinch me! Look who's here!" was his greeting when we met on the bridge.

For a silent moment it was I who did the looking. Kellow had grown a pair of curling black mustaches since his release; he was well-dressed, erect and alert, and was smoking a cigar the fragrance of which made me sick and faint with an attack of the long-denied tobacco hunger.

"You're out, too, are you?" I managed to say at last, shivering in the cold blast which came sweeping up the river.

"Three months, and then some," he returned jauntily. "I'm collecting a little on the old debt now, and doing fairly well at it, thank you."

"The old debt?" I queried.

"Yep; the one that the little old round world owes every man: three squares, a tailor, a bed and a pocket-roll."

"You look as if you had acquired all four," I agreed, setting my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.

"Sure I have; and you look as if you hadn't," he countered. And then: "What's the matter? Just plain hard luck? Or is it the parole scare?"

"Both," I admitted.

He shot me a quick look.

"I can put you onto a dead sure thing, if you're game for it. Let's hunt us a warm place and chew it over."

The place was the back room of an all-night saloon in the slum quarter beyond the bridge. It was warm, stiflingly warm and close, after the outdoor blast and chill, and it reeked like a sty. Kellow kicked out a chair for me and drew up one for himself on the opposite side of the small round card-table over which a single gas-jet hissed and sizzled, lighting the tiny box of a place with a sickly yellow glare.

"What'll it be?" he asked, when the waiter came in.

"A piece of bread and meat from the lunch counter, if you don't mind," I said; and then, in an apology for which I instantly despised myself: "Liquor doesn't agree with me lately; it--it would gag me."

Kellow ordered whiskey for himself, and after the waiter was gone he stared at me contemptuously.