Читать книгу From Now On - Frank L. Packard - Страница 11

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FROM somewhere far along the iron gallery, a guard's boot-heel rang with a hollow, muffled, metallic sound;' from everywhere, as from some strange, inceptive cradle, the source out of which all sounds emanated, and which, too, was as some strange sounding-board that accentuated each individual sound as it was given birth, came a confused, indeterminate, scarcely audible rupture of the silence that never ceased its uneasy, restless murmur. It was like water simmering in a caldron—only the water was a drear humanity, and the caldron was this gray-walled, steel-barred place.

A voice, low, quite inarticulate, falling often to little more than a whisper, mumbled endlessly on. That was the old bomb-thrower, old Tony Lomazzi, the lifer, in the next cell. The man was probably clinging to the bars of his door, his face thrust up against them, talking, talking, talking—always talking to himself. He did not disturb anybody. Everybody was used to it; and, besides, the man did not talk loudly. One even had to listen attentively to catch the sound of his voice at all. It had become a habit, second nature; the man was incorrigible. Presently the guard would come along, and perhaps rap the old man on the knuckles; after that Lomazzi would retire to his cot quite docilely. It had been that way night after night, week after week, month after month, year after year.

Dave Henderson laid the prison-library book, that he had been fingering absently, down on the cot beside him. It was still early evening in early summer, and there was still light in the cell, though hardly enough to read by; but he had not been reading even when there had been better light. His mind was too active to-night. And now there was a curiously wistful smile on his face. He would miss that stumbling, whispering voice. A most strange thing to miss! Or was it the old man himself whom he would miss? Not to-morrow, not even next week, there still remained sixty-three days—but sixty-three days, with all the rest of the five years behind them, gone, served, wiped out, were like to-morrow; and, as against a lifer's toll, it was freedom, full born and actually present. Yes, he would miss Tony Lomazzi. There was a bond between the old man and himself. In almost the first flush of his entry into the penitentiary he had precipitated a fight amongst his fellow convicts on account of old Tony. Two of them had gone into the hospital, and he, Dave Henderson, had gone into the black hole.

He sat suddenly bolt upright on his cot. He had not forgotten the horror of those days of solitary confinement. He was not likely to forget them—the silence, the blackness. The silence that came at last to scream and shriek at him in myriad voices out of the blackness until he was upon the verge of screaming and shrieking back in raving, unhinged abandon; the blackness that was as the blackness of the pit of hell, and that came at last to be peopled with hideous phantom shapes that plagued him until, face down on his cot, he would dig his fists into his eyes that he might not see—the blackness! His hands clenched hard as the memory of it surged upon him; but a moment later he laughed a little under his breath. It had been bad, bad enough; but he wasn't there now, was he? Old Tony hadn't deluged him with any excessive thanks. The old man had simply called him a fool—but there had been a difference after that. On the march out from the cells, old Tony was always the man behind him, and old Tony's shoulder touch in the lock-step wasn't as perfunctory as it had been before. And there had been years of that. Yes, he would miss old Tony Lomazzi!

Instinctively he turned his head in the direction of that voice that whispered through the bars of the adjoining cell, and his face, lean and hard, softened, and, tinging the dead-white prison pallor, a flush crept into his cheeks. The man was a lifer. A lifer! God, he knew what that meant! Five years of a living hell had taught him that. Five years that were eternities piled upon eternities, and they were only a short step along the path toward the only goal to which a lifer could look forward—death!

Yes, he knew! The massed eternities, that were called five years by those who walked outside in the sunlight, where men laughed, and women smiled, and children played, had taught him why old Tony Lomazzi clung to the bars and whispered.

Five years! Was it only five years since he had stood in the dock in that courtroom, and the judge had sentenced him to—five years? The scene was vivid and distinct enough! Even the ages that spanned the gulf between the now and then could not efface that scene, nor dim it, nor rob it of a single stark and naked detail. Tydeman had been there—Martin K. Tyde-man, that prince of royal sports. Tydeman was about the only man in that courtroom whose presence had made him uneasy; and yet Tydeman, too, was the only man in that courtroom who had been friendly toward him. It was probably due to the old millionaire's plea for leniency that the sentence had been five years, and not ten, or fifteen, or twenty, or whatever it might be that the erect, spare little figure on the bench, with the thin, straight lips, had had the right to pronounce. And Tydeman was dead now.

Dave Henderson stirred uneasily on the edge of the cot. He drew his hand slowly across his eyes. He had wished from the start, hadn't he, that it might have been some one else rather than Martin K. Tydeman? But it had been Tydeman's money, and the hundred thousand dollars alone was all that had counted, and Tydeman was dead now, had been dead two or three years, and on that score that ended it—didn't it?

The dark eyes, that had wavered abstractedly around the cell, narrowed suddenly, and from their depths a smoldering fire seemed to leap as suddenly into flame. But there was another score that was not ended! Bookie Skarvan! Baldy Vickers, Runty Mott and the rest of Baldy's gang had lied speciously, smoothly, ingeniously and with convincing unanimity. They had admitted the obvious—quite frankly—because they could help themselves. They had admitted that their intention had been to steal the hundred thousand dollars themselves. But they hadn't stolen it—and that let them out; and they proved that he, Dave Henderson, had—and that saved their own hides. Also they had not implicated Bookie Skarvan.

Their story had been very plausible! Runty Mott “confessed” that, on the morning of the crime, he had overheard Bookie Skarvan and Dave Henderson making their arrangements at the race course to get Tydeman to put up the money to tide Bookie Skarvan over the crisis. He, Runty Mott, had then left at once for San Francisco, put the deal up to Baldy Vickers and Baldy's gang, and they had waited for Dave Henderson to arrive. Naturally they had watched their proposed prey from the moment of his arrival in the city, intending to rob him when the money was in his possession and before he got back to the race course that night; but instead of Tydeman turning the money over to Dave Henderson, as they had expected, Dave Henderson had completely upset their plans by stealing the money himself, and this had resulted in the prisoner's attempted getaway, and the automobile chase which represented their own efforts to intercept him.

The dark eyes were almost closed now, but the gleam was still there—only now it was half mocking, half triumphant, and was mirrored in a grim smile that flickered across his lips. He had not denied their story. To every effort to obtain from him a clue as to the whereabouts of the stolen money, he had remained as mute and unresponsive as a stone; cajolery, threats, the hint of lighter sentence if restitution were made, he had met with silence. He had not even employed a lawyer. The court had appointed one. He had refused to confer with the lawyer. The lawyer had entered a perfunctory plea of “not guilty.”

The grim smile deepened. There had been very good reasons why he had refused to open his lips at that trial—three of them. In the first place, he was guilty; in the second place, there was Bookie Skarvan, who had no suspicion that he, Dave Henderson, knew the truth that lay behind Runty Mott's story; and in the third place—there was one hundred thousand dollars. There was to be no hedging. And he had not hedged! That was his creed. Well, it had paid, hadn't it, that creed? The hundred thousand dollars was almost his now—there were only sixty-three days left. He had bought it with his creed, bought it with five years wrung in blood and sweat from his life, five years that had turned his soul sick within him. He had paid the price. Five years of sunlight he had given for that hundred thousand dollars, five years that had sought to bring the slouch of slavery and subjugation to his shoulders, a cringe into his soul, a whimper into his voice, and——

He was on his feet, his hands clenched until his knuckles cracked. And he stood there for a long time staring at the barred door, and then suddenly he shrugged his shoulders, and relaxed, and laughed in a low, cool way. But he had won, hadn't he, even on that score? It was not often that the penitentiary would do for a man what this devil's hole had done for him! He had entered it a crude, unpolished assistant to a crooked bookmaker, his education what he had acquired before he had run away from an orphan school at ten; and he could leave the place now, given the clothes and the chance, and pass anywhere for a gentleman—thanks in a very large measure to Charlie Millman.

Dave Henderson began to pace slowly up and down his cell. Millman had never understood, of course, just why he had had so apt a pupil. He had never explained to Millman that it had been from the very beginning his plan to rise to the level of a hundred thousand dollars that was waiting for him when he got out! Millman knew, of course, what he, Dave Henderson, was up for; but that was about all. And Millman had perhaps, and very naturally so, attributed his, Dave Henderson's, thirst for polish and education to the out-cropping of the inherent good that in him was, the coming to the surface finally of his better nature. And so Millman, up for two years, had proved a godsend, for there hadn't been much progress made along the lines of “higher education” until Millman had come into the prison.

He liked Millman; and somehow Millman seemed to like him. A gentleman from the tip of his fingers was Millman—and he took his medicine like a gentleman. Millman wasn't the name that was entered on the prison books—there it was Charlie Reith.

It was strange that Millman should have given him his confidence; he could never quite understand that, except that it had seemed to come gradually as their friendship grew, until finally it was almost the basis of that friendship itself. He had come to trust Millman as he had never trusted any other man, and he had come to believe in Millman as the soul of courtesy and honor. And yet he had not been quite as open with Millman as Millman had been with him; he had not spread his cards upon the table, and Millman had never asked to see them; and somehow he liked the man all the better for that. It was not that he did not trust the other; it was because his confidence was not the sort of confidence to give to an honest man—and Millman was honest. There was a queer twist to it all!

Dave Henderson smiled grimly again. It wouldn't be fair to make an honest man a party to the secret of where that money was, for instance, would it—to make an honest man an accomplice after the fact? And there was no doubt of Millman's clean-cut, courageous honesty. The prison stripes could not change that!

He knew Millman's story: A nasty bit of work on the Barbary Coast, and viciously clever. Millman, a stranger in the city, and en route for a long trip through the South Seas, had been inveigled by a woman's specious plea for help into a notorious resort on the night in which a much-wanted member of the underworld was hard put to it to give the police the slip—and Millman had unsuspectingly made himself the vehicle of the other's escape.

The details were sordid; the woman's story pitifully impressive; and Millman's chivalry had led him, innocent of the truth, to deprive the plain-clothes squad of the services of one of their best men for the period of several months—while one of the slickest counterfeiters in the United States, and the woman with him, had made good their getaway. It didn't look innocent in the eyes of the police, and Millman had stood for two years—convicted as Charles Reith—to save the name of Charles Millman, and those that belonged to him back in New York. He had been found in a very unsavory place, and no amount of explanation could purify those surroundings. Millman had never said so in so many words, but he was buying a little woman's peace of mind back there in New York with two years' hard labor. And meanwhile he was supposed to be somewhere on a trading schooner in the out-of-the-way isles of the Pacific, or something like that—maybe it was Borneo on a hunting trip—he, Dave Henderson, didn't remember just precisely how the other had fixed it. It didn't matter! The point was that they had made Millman one of the convict librarians in the prison, and Millman had become his tutor and his friend. Well, Millman was another he would miss. The day after to-morrow Millman's time was up, and Millman would be gone. He was glad for Millman's sake.

Five steps and a half from the rear wall of the cell to the steel-barred door, and five and a half steps back again—over and over. He was unaccountably restless to-night both in body and mind. He had spent his five years, less the time that had been manumitted for good conduct, and less the sixty-three days that still remained, not altogether to his own disadvantage in an educational sense. In that respect he was satisfied he was now ready to leave the prison and make the most of that hundred thousand dollars—not as a “raw skate,” blowing it to the winds, but as one who would make it pay dividends on those five years of servitude that represented its purchase price. It was enough, that amount, for the rest of his life, if he took care of it. It meant comfort, independence, luxury. He didn't want any more. That was the amount he had already fixed and decided upon even before the opportunity had come to take it. It was his first job—but it was equally his last. And it was his last because he had waited until, at the first attempt, he had got all he wanted. He wasn't coming back to the penitentiary any more. He was going out for good—in sixty-three days.

Sixty-three days! He wanted no piker, low-brow life at the end of those sixty-three days when he got out. He had had enough of that! That was one reason why he had taken the money—to pitch that one seamy room at Tooler's and the rotten race-track existence into the discard, and he was ready now, equipped, to play the part he meant to play. He had spent the years here learning not to eat with his knife, either literally or metaphorically. But there were only sixty-three days left, and there was still one thing he hadn't done, one problem still left unsolved, which of late had been growing into nightmare proportions. In the earlier years of his sentence he had put it aside—until the time came. That time was here now—and the problem was still aside.

He had made all other preparations. He had even communicated secretly, by means of a fellow convict who was going out, discharged, with Square John Kelly of the Pacific Coral Saloon in San Francisco, with whom he had invested his savings—that three thousand dollars at six per cent. And he had had foresight enough to do this months ago in order to give Kelly time to pull the money out of his business and have it ready in cash; for he wasn't quite sure where the law stood on this point. Failing to recover the proceeds of the Tydeman robbery, the law might confiscate those savings—if the law knew anything about them. But the law didn't—and wouldn't. Square John had sent back word that everything was all right.

But there was still one problem left to solve—the way, once he was a free man again and outside these walls, of getting that hundred thousand dollars away from under the noses of the police and then giving the police the slip. And this, grown to monumental proportions in the last few months, rose before him now like some evil familiar that had taken possession of both his waking and sleeping hours. And there came upon him now, as it had come again and again in these last months, that scene in the hospital when he had first opened his eyes to consciousness and they had rested on the face of the man who had run him to earth—Barjan, Lieutenant Joe Barjan, of the 'Frisco plainclothes squad. And Joe Barjan's words were ringing in his ears now; ringing, somehow, with a cursed knell in them:

“Don't fool yourself! It's a hell of a long time in the pen! And if you think you could get away with the wad when you get out again, you've got another think coming too! Take it from me!”

An acute sense of the realization of the tangibility of his surroundings seized upon him and brought a chill to his heart. That hard, unyielding cot; these walls, that caged him within their few scanty feet of space; his keepers' voices, that lashed out their commands; the animals, of which he was one, that toiled upon the eternal treadmill of days whose end but foretold another of like horror and loathing to come! Barjan had told the truth; more of the truth than Barjan ever knew, or could know, that he had told. It had been a hell of a long time. Long! His face, as he still paced the cell, grayed under the prison pallor. God, it had been long! Years of damnable torment that had shut him out from the freedom that he loved! It had been a price beyond all reckoning that he had paid for that hundred thousand dollars. But he had paid it! He had paid it—paid it! He had gone all the way—gone the limit. Was Barjan, right in one thing, right in that other thing as well—that at the end they would beat him?

His hands curled into knotted lumps. There were not enough Barjans for that though the world were peopled with Barjans! The thought had brought a chill of dread for a moment, that was all. He had paid the price; he was not likely to forget what that price had been; and he would never yield up what that price had bought. True, he had no plan for this last play of his worked out in detail, but he would find a way—because he must. He was probably exaggerating what the police would, or could do, anyhow! At first when he had come into the penitentiary, they had tried to trap, sometimes to wheedle him into disclosing where the money was, though they had long since given up those tactics and left him to himself. But suppose the police did watch him now when he got out. He could afford to wait—to wait a long while—until the police got tired, perhaps, or perhaps came to the conclusion that, after all, they had got the wrong man. They would not forget that, though he had refused to say anything at the trial, he had not been so mute in his attitude toward Runty Mott and Baldy Vickers, who had “sent him up;” and Barjan would not forget, either, that in the hospital that day, with scarcely strength to speak, he had threatened to get even with the gangster and the Runt. There was a psychological factor in this. If he, Dave Henderson, made no effort to get the money, showed no sign that he had any knowledge of its whereabouts, might not the police in time come to the far from illogical conclusion that they might better have watched—five years ago—the men who had so glibly acted as witnesses for the State, the men who had, admittedly, themselves attempted to steal the money? It wasn't unreasonable, was it? And he could afford to wait. The three thousand dollars from Square John Kelly would keep him going for quite a while! He was a fool to let this thing madden his brain with its constant torturing doubts. It was their move—not his.

From far along the iron gallery again a boot-heel rang with a dull, metallic sound. It was the guard, probably, coming to rap old Tony Lomazzi over the knuckles. Dave Henderson stopped his restless pacing, and stood still in the center of the cell to listen. No, the old bomb-thrower wasn't talking any longer; there wasn't any sound at all except that boot-heel ringing on the iron flooring. The sound came nearer, and Dave Henderson frowned in a puzzled way. The guard was not alone, in any case. He could distinguish the footsteps of two men now. It wasn't usual at this hour for any one to be out there with the guard. What was in the wind? The warden, perhaps, making an unexpected round, or——

His hands gripped suddenly hard and tight—but he did not move. There came flashing over him once more the scene in that hospital ward of five years ago. The cell door had opened and closed. A man had entered. The guard's footsteps died away outside. The man spoke:

“Hello, Dave!”

It was Barjan, Lieutenant Joe Barjan, of the 'Frisco plain-clothes squad. It was the scene of five years ago. That was exactly what Barjan had said then: “Hello, Dave!” And he had answered: “Hello, Joe!” But he did not answer now.

“This is a little irregular, Dave,” said Barjan pleasantly; “but I wanted to have a quiet little chat with you, you know, before”—he stepped forward and clapped his hand on Dave Henderson's shoulder, and laughed—“well, before you changed your address.” Dave Henderson made no reply. He moved back from the other, and sat down on the edge of his cot.

“There's a couple of things I want to say to you,” said Barjan, still pleasantly. “And the first of them is that I want to tell you on the level just where you stand. You're going out of here pretty soon now, Dave. I guess you've got a better line on that than I have—eh?” He laughed again good-humoredly. “Got the days counted, haven't you, Dave?”

No answer. Dave Henderson's eyes were fixed on the ungainly lines of the toe of his prison boot.

“Oh, come on, now, Dave!” Barjan's tones were still hearty and jocular, but the heartiness and jocularity, as though disconcerted, lacked some of their original spontaneity. “Loosen up! You've been a clam for five years. That's long enough. I've come up here to-night to play square with you. You know that whatever I say goes with both of us. I know you aren't holding anything against me personally just because I happened to be the one who put the bracelets on you, and back of that we used to be pretty good friends. I haven't forgotten the tips you used to give me in the old days—and don't you think I have, either! Remember when that old skeleton with the horse-hair cover pranced away with a forty-to-one shot? Bonnie Lass, her name was—or was it Boney? Remember? She got the hee-haw—but my missus got the swellest outfit of gewgaws and fixings the old girl ever had before or since. You wised me up to that, Dave.”

No answer. There seemed to be something curiously significant in the uncouthness and the coarseness of that boot toe—but the significance was irritatingly elusive in its application.

There was silence for a moment. Barjan walked the length of the cell, and back again.

“All right,” he said, halting in front of the cot. “Maybe we'll get along better on another tack. I'm not beating about the bush, Dave”—his voice was a little harder, crisper, sterner—“I want to know where that hundred thousand dollars is. But I told you that I'd put you straight first on where you stand. Now, listen! We've played both ends to the middle. We believed that the story Runty Mott and Baldy Vickers told was true; but both men had a record, and you can't be sure of a crook on his own say-so. We didn't take any chances, and so we're sure now. Those men were watched—not for a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, but for the last four years. They don't know where the money is, and they never did know what you did with it after you handed them that automobile smash and beat it for the woods. Get that? It's up to you! And now, get this: I told you in the hospital that day, you remember, that you could never get away with it, and that's as true as I'm standing here talking to you now. You've got some brains, Dave—use 'em now for your own sake. From the moment you step outside these walls you're a marked man, and not for just a little while either, but for all your life. They'll never let up on you, Dave. Let that sink in! And it ain't only just old Joe Barjan you've got to fool. Talking racey, Dave, your number's up on the board on every police track in this country from one end to the other. You can't beat that kind of a game. I'm talking straight, and you know it. Come on now, Dave, pry them lips of yours apart, and come across!” Dave Henderson's lips parted—but it was only to touch them with the tip of his tongue. They were dry. His eyes were still on that coarse, ungainly toe. Its significance had taken concrete form now. He knew now what it meant. It typified a living hell of five long years, a ghastly hell and a ghastly price paid for that hundred thousand dollars—years that had left a stench in his nostrils that would live as long as he lived—years that piled the daily, never-ending details of petty persecutions, of loathsome associations, of miserable discomforts, of haggard dreariness, of heart sickness, of bitterness that was the bitterness of gall, into one overwhelming mass of horror from which the soul recoiled, blanched, seared, shrivelled. And it went back further than that. It went back to a night of the long, long ago, eternities ago, a night when, in physical torture and anguish from his wound, his teeth had sunk into his lips, and he had become blood-fanged like the hunted animal at bay he was, and he had endured until the blackness came. That was what it meant, this rough, heavy ungraceful clod of a prison boot upon his foot! It meant that he had gone the limit, that he had never hedged, that he had paid the price, all of it—all of it—except only the sixty-three days that were left.

“Ain't you going to say anything, Dave?”

Tony Lomazzi must have shuffled his way back to the bars of his cell door. The old Italian was whispering and muttering again. If one listened very intently, one could hear him. There was no other sound.

Barjan cleared his throat.

“Look here,” he said slowly, “what's the use, Dave? I've showed you that you're bound to lose, and that on that score it don't pay. And it don't pay any way you want to look at it. You don't have to go out of here a marked man, Dave. There ain't any truth in that—that the police never give a guy a chance to go straight again. There ain't anything in that. It's all up to the guy himself. You come across, make good on that money, and I'll guarantee you'll get the squarest deal any man ever got. Why, it would be proof in itself that you meant to go straight, Dave, and everybody'd fall over himself to give you the glad hand. You can see that, can't you, Dave? Don't you want to look the other fellow in the eye for the rest of your life? Don't you want to be a free man? You've got a lot of years ahead of you. Ain't you ever thought of a home, and kiddies, maybe? It don't pay, Dave—the other way don't. You've got the chance now to make good. What do you say?”

Tony Lomazzi was still muttering. Strange the guard was letting the old bomb-thrower have so much license to-night! Tony seemed to be chattering louder than he had ever chattered in all the years he had occupied that next cell there!

Barjan laughed a little in a low, but not unpleasant way.

“Well, then, listen again, Dave,” he said. “I got one more thing to tell you. You know what I've said is right. You come across, and I'll see that you get your chance—and you don't have to wait for it, either, Dave. I've got it all fixed, I've got the papers in my pocket. You come across, and you walk out of here a free man with me right now—to-night!” He leaned forward and slapped Dave Henderson's shoulder again. “To-night, Dave—get that? Right now—tonight—this minute! What do you say?”