Читать книгу Pleasant Jim - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 11

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In the hush of the night, Pleasant wakened to a touch on his arm, and the whisper of Rizdal: “Listen, Jim. Are you awake?”

“I’m awake.”

“I have the stuff here, now. That gem of a girl—that Sally—she gave me the last installment to-day. I’ve got the layout complete—the saws, the oil, and all. Shall we start now, Jim?”

Pleasant sat up in the dark; his brain was spinning a little. The faint, sick odor of the jail oppressed his nostrils.

“To cut our way out?”

“What else?”

The thrill leaped down the veins of Pleasant, and he swung an arm through the darkness, like a sabreman making a moulinet.

“But wait a minute; no, I can’t do it. It would be junking my life’s work. My years on the farm would be chucked, and because of what? Because your brother crooked me with a dirty deal!”

“He’d give a hand to have the doing of that over again.”

“How do you know what he’d give?”

“Old fellow, I hear from him every day, and he hears from me. The point is—you won’t believe it of a man like Long Tom—he didn’t dream that the stuff was queer; it was passed on him by an old pal.”

“Well,” said Pleasant, thinking the matter over, “I’m inclined to believe that he wouldn’t have played the sneak like that. But I’ll pull out of this without jumping into outlawry.”

“How? Will you go to prison?”

“Go to prison for what? For riding to Black Mountain and planting a matchsafe in some sand?”

“Pleasant, they know that you carried the safe; now they’re trying to make out the code that was used on the matches; and in any event, you can’t make them feel that you haven’t been deep with Long Tom.”

“After my job with you, Charlie? Does that seem like being deep with him?”

“They figure it simply enough. They think that you’re sore at me and deep with Tom. That might happen. But I’ll tell you, they’ve written you down one of my brother’s men, and you’ll see a fiver, for this.”

“You mean that they’d send me up for five years?”

“Or ten.”

“By God, they can’t! It’s not justice!”

“They’re looking for convictions, not for justice. And by the time that you got out of prison, what would be left of your farm?”

Pleasant, breathing hard, grasped the side of his cot and set his teeth.

“I’ll wait and see it through,” he declared at last.

“You’re a crazy man, Jim.”

“I can’t chuck the place.”

Rizdal was silent, after a time, and then his dim shadow rose and melted away in the darkness as he crossed the floor in his stockinged feet. And Pleasant found that his cot was shuddering like quake ooze beneath him; it was the tremor of his own body that caused the disturbance. He stood up, and mopped his wet forehead. Somewhere in the jail a prisoner was maundering in his sleep and now and again his voice rose to little mouse-like squeaks of terror, and aimless gibberings.

“That’s little Pete Marley,” murmured Rizdal, coming back to his cell-mate. “He did a stretch; and it broke his nerve. He was a regular rakehell in the old days, but he’s nothing, now. Listen to him crying in his sleep, poor little rat! But prison ain’t any sweet song, man.”

Pleasant noticed that there was no further attempt at persuasion, and he could not help saying: “If you have the stuff for cutting through, go ahead. I won’t make a noise about it.”

“Old son,” chuckled Rizdal, “Long Tom gave me my marching orders in the book that Sally brought to-day. I’m not to step out of this here jail unless I take you with me; that’s his last word.”

“How could he send a message in a book?”

“Little system of checking off the words. Very easy when you know the key. We’re here together, and he says that he’ll never stop working if it takes the rest of his life and every penny of his money until he’s got you out of this mess.”

He dwelt no longer on the subject, but Pleasant was touched. This was a sort of faith which he could understand.

So he asked about Sally, and it was a subject which seemed a favorite with his companion.

She was, according to Charlie Rizdal, the smartest woman in the entire universe, and of all the associates of Long Tom she was the most capable and the most trusted by her chief. He had sent her into Fisher Falls the instant that his brother was jailed there; and of her own devices she had managed the disguise which, so quickly, took her into the jail not for an occasional visit, but as a constant worker there.

Pleasant Jim remembered the white, round face, and the blank eyes, and he wondered, for he saw that he had come upon the verge of a world of new things. And deep into the dark of the morning his companion talked, picking out details, painting them with skill and devising before the imagination of Pleasant an existence where joy was merely deliciously spiced with danger, and where all one’s chosen companions were true to the death; where there was no labor but play; where the good deed of to-day was never forgotten to-morrow; where men stood to men as brothers.

“Put on quarter boots, Charlie,” said the listener, at length. “You’re overreaching yourself a little.”

“All right, Jim,” replied the other. “You’ll see that I haven’t lied. You’ll see when you’re one of us.”

And as Rizdal went away, Pleasant said gravely to himself that that day never should come. Somehow there was justice in the law; and if he had made one vital error in serving the will of a notorious outlaw, had he not paid enough for the single slip? And had he not been sorely tempted for the mere bearing of a trinket to a mountain top?

The first stroke was not delayed beyond the next day. First, on that day he asked to see the judge and was told that the “old man” had a full day. Secondly, he received a little message from bank president Lewis Fisher, a courteous little note, but one which drove home its point with much precision. Mr. Fisher had come upon evil days, said the note, and he was forced to protect important interests by calling in every outstanding loan. Among the rest, he was sorry that he had to ask for Pleasant’s twenty-five hundred, still outstanding. Of course Pleasant would have no difficulty in raising the money on such a fine property as was his; and Mr. Fisher would not press at once for payment. He would allow three days of grace!

In the meantime, he was sorry to hear of the plight of his young friend, but he knew that Jim Pleasant was far too much a man to have been beguiled into any dealings with that human viper, Tom Rizdal.

So all would come out well in the end.

And was there anything he could do to serve Mr. Pleasant during his confinement?

That letter slipped from the numb fingers of Pleasant and whisked across the floor to Rizdal, who made no pretense of not reading it as he picked it up. Having glanced through the contents, he nodded.

“He’ll have the farm in a week, then,” said Charlie Rizdal.

“I dunno what you mean,” murmured Pleasant. “But it looks queer. How can he need money? He’s rich—his safe is full of cash securities all the time, as every one knows!”

“Of course it is,” remarked the other, “but the old boy has a taste for horses, and of course he’s glad not to have to pay for them.”

The eye of Pleasant was utterly blank.

“You see, of course?”

“Not a damn thing!”

“Why, they’ll foreclose on you, you see? Then they’ll auction off everything that you’ve got!”

“I’d have their blood, if they dared. It’s not possible, besides!”

“It’s the law, partner!”

Pleasant groaned, but then he took new hope out of despair. “If they wiped out my work, still they’d have to leave me with a good deal of cash!”

“You’ll probably get about twenty-five hundred—enough to pay Fisher’s note.”

“I see,” chuckled Pleasant, greatly relieved. “But you don’t understand. I was offered twenty thousand dollars flat, no longer than three months back, and I laughed in the face of old Grindle when he made the offer. Well, he’d bid the place up that high, at least. And then he’d have Young, and Chalmers. They would like my farm, too. You see, Rizdal?”

The latter paused to drum his fingers lightly on the edge of his cot.

“You ain’t young,” he explained to himself, “but just kind of innocent. Why, son, if Fisher started bidding on that place of yours, there ain’t a wealthy man in the range that would dare to bid against him.”

“Will you tell me why?”

“Because it’s understood. They keep their hands off when Fisher goes after something, and then he keeps his hands off when they’ve got a plum in the wind. So they play for each other. He does the financing—at damned fat interest—and they all get rich. Why, Jim, you didn’t think that old Fisher got his coin squarely, did you? He was a money-lender in St. Louis before he came out here—for his health!”

It brought Pleasant to such a nervous tension that for eight days he hardly slept, but walked ceaselessly up and down the cell like an impatient tiger. And the rest of the time, he busily wrote letters—wild appeals to this friend and to that. Ah, how bitterly he wished, now, that he had invested a little more time in human friends, and a little less in horses! For his bosom cronies and old companions were far away, their addresses uncertain, and as for the few he knew here in the valley, what one of them could advance him twenty-five hundred dollars?

In the meantime, he was made to taste the first sting of the law.