Читать книгу The Iron Trail - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 5
Оглавление“Prisoner Away! Help!”
Sitting crosslegged on the floor, with the screech of his whistle never silent on his lips, except when he changed off for a raucous song, Eddie Clewes worked his files. At the second long, swift, biting stroke, he knew that it was not the tool-proof steel with which the sheriff had threatened him. It was very ordinary stuff, and Eddie’s set of files ate through it, assisted now and then with a slight moistening of oil. He cut two bars completely through. Then he cut them until they were hanging above by mere shreds. Then he bent them out.
It was a bit of work in steel-cutting that might have taken whole weary days. But the files of Eddie Clewes were no ordinary ones. The tips of his fingers were chafed but not sore when he methodically put away pencil and files and brushed the steel dust from his hands. Then he stepped out into the corridor.
There were two massive doors between him and the rear exit from the jail. Those doors were in fact lined with tool-proof steel. But Eddie Clewes had no intention of attempting to force his way through. A narrow bit of steel, and a moment spent leaning at each lock, and he was through them.
In the back yard of the jail, he crushed down his hair with his hand, remembering with a sigh that his hat had been taken from him. But that was soon remedied. The very first window that he passed showed a narrow little lighted hallway, and in it a rack covered with the hats and caps of a prosperous family.
So he jumped up to the sill of the window, reached in, helped himself to a hat that luckily fitted well enough, and dropped down again to the path below.
To the next house beyond he also gained access, but this time by a window in the second story, which he gained by climbing catlike up the drain pipe from the roof gutter. He passed softly from room to room until he found what he wanted, which was a wallet in a locked drawer. Because, as a matter of fact, it was only the locked drawers that interested Mr. Clewes.
From the wallet he extracted a thick roll of bills, and counted out no less than fourteen hundred and sixty-eight dollars. Of that sum, he took exactly eighty-six dollars. In his own pockets, when he was taken to the jail, there had been found eighty-six dollars and seventy-five cents!
So, with a sigh, he restored the rest of the money to the wallet and retreated through the window, murmuring to himself, “Society owes you seventy-five cents.”
“But society gave me a free meal,” he argued with himself.
And at that point in his reflections he heard a voice saying gently beneath him: “All right, Clewes. Just come down and talk it over, will you?”
He kept his grip tight on the drain pipe and glanced down. It was the voice and the too-familiar figure of Sheriff Matthews, and the predicament of Mr. Clewes was clumsy, to say the least. If he attempted to flee, he could only move in one of two directions. If he clambered up, he could not hope to go half so fast as a shower of bullets from the revolver of Mr. Matthews. And if he clambered down, he was giving himself straight into the hands of the sheriff.
“Well, well, Matthews,” he said, “you see that I’ve been taking my little constitutional after dinner.”
“Sure you have, and a fairly brisk one, too. But talking is better than walking. Come down and talk to me, kid!”
“Certainly!” said Eddie Clewes, and began to clamber briskly and yet noiselessly down the drain pipe. Gay voices floated out to him from the interior of the house. But somehow those cheerful voices represented to him, as he worked his way down, all the pleasures of a free existence, most miserably contrasting with the dark of a prison life. And suddenly it seemed to Eddie Clewes that life without freedom was worthless indeed!
One side glance showed him his mark. He had still a dozen feet to clamber down, and with an outthrust of arms and legs he cast himself down at the sheriff, whirling about. The gun exploded almost in his face, he thought. Then with elbows and bunched knees he struck Matthews and crushed him to the ground.
Voices sounded here and there. A window was yanked up just above him, and a long shaft of dim lamplight wandered across the vacant lot and glistened in the sleepy eyes of a cow which was pasturing there.
“I thought it was right outside, Henry.”
“It was just a tire blowing out—or a back-fire. You can’t tell a back-fire from a gun going off, hardly. Not unless you really know!”
The window closed, the shade was drawn. Just a narrow pencil of light fell through the night and, by this meager illumination, Mr. Clewes examined the purse which he had just taken from the breast pocket of the sheriff.
At the same time, the sheriff himself stirred and groaned.
The cold mouth of his own Colt, pressed beneath his chin, brought him more swiftly to a sense of where he was.
“It’s you again, kid!” sighed Matthews.
“It’s I again,” nodded Eddie Clewes. “I find that you have twelve hundred dollars in this wallet.”
“County’s money, kid,” said the sheriff. “But I suppose that you’ll take it, just the same?”
“A thousand of it is mine by rights,” said Eddie. “You haven’t forgotten the bet?”
“It’s true,” gasped Matthews. “That damned bet! But you win—fair and square.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Eddie Clewes. “I’m a bit shorter of change than I usually like to be when I’m working so far into the field, so I’m taking two hundred and fifty dollars. However, I’m not taking them for keeps. One of these days you’ll get an envelope with that money tucked away inside. I hope you believe it.”
“You’re a queer mess of a kid,” said the sheriff. “Damned if I know what to think about you!”
“Think nothing, Matthews,” replied Eddie Clewes, “because the easiest way through this vale of tears—this path of sorrows—this coil of weariness—”
“Oh, hell,” exclaimed the sheriff. “Get off my chest.”
Eddie Clewes stood up.
“Very well,” said he. “It’s plain that you’ve never learned patience in a church—but I have.”
He stepped back.
“I’m putting both your guns on the ledge of this fence. But why two of them, Matthews?”
“And why not?” asked Matthews, sitting up, vaguely wondering how it was that he was left at liberty in this rash fashion by an escaped criminal. “Why not two?” he continued, “when I have to tackle slippery ones like yourself, Eddie?”
“You’ll never need two for me,” said Eddie calmly, “because I’ve never packed a gat and I never shall. I don’t treat myself to the luxury of being dangerous.”
“It ain’t the way that you see yourself, but the way that others see you that counts, y’understand?” said the sheriff. “Just you get down to hard cases, m’son, and lemme tell you that the next time I go on your trail I’m going to pack along a machine gun, and that is that!”
“Thank you,” said Eddie Clewes. “But, returning to the guns—they’re so heavy, Matthews, that they must be a weight on your mind. And now I tell you what I can do. I can throw those two guns away into the brush—and then some stray kid will find the revolvers of the sheriff, in the next week or two. Or else, I can leave the guns lying here on the ledge of the fence, and when I get to the edge of the trees, yonder, you’re free to come here and take them. And in that way, Matthews, there’ll be no talk raised about the mysterious way in which those blackberry bushes have raised a crop of the sheriff’s guns—you understand?”
“I understand,” sighed the sheriff gloomily. “But will you please tell me why it is that you want to be so easy with me, kid?”
“I’ll tell you why,” said Mr. Clewes. “I have one great weakness. Otherwise, I’m almost the perfect confidence man. But my weakness is that I’m sentimental, and sentimental about a damned ridiculous thing—honesty! I like simple, honest people, Matthews. And that’s why I’m willing to take your word that these two guns of yours on the fence ledge will not be used by you until I’ve reached those trees.”
“It’s a go,” said Matthews. “But the moment you’re across that border of the tree shadows, I’m after you!”
“That’s fair. So good night, old-timer.”
“Good night, kid. I hope that you have luck—but none from me!”
Scrupulously, the sheriff waited until his ex-prisoner was at the edge of the trees, and then he fired twice, as accurately as the shadows permitted. He almost knew that he was missing with each shot, but also he could guess that those bullets had traveled close enough for Eddie Clewes to hear the hiss of them as they went by, and that was all that the sheriff actually asked. He wanted to be respected by this young man. It was ridiculous how keenly he desired the esteem of Eddie Clewes!
He fired, and then he raced ahead as fast as his rather short, fat legs would carry him, shouting: “Prisoner away! Help!”
Men came tumbling out of houses. They swept with Mr. Matthews through that wood. They rushed into the streets beyond. They poured the current of their noise and their enthusiasm down every far alley, and swarmed into every house with questions. Had such and such a man been seen?
He had not been seen. For, after the torrent of the searchers had at last flooded itself dry and passed beyond the trees, Mr. Clewes dropped down from the branches of a pine and strolled back across the other part of the town, taking no care to hide himself, and even pausing under the light of a street lamp while he touched a match to a cigarette.
He marched through the town. The velvet fields of the night lay before him. In his pocket reposed something over three hundred dollars. The lights of Burnside were gathering behind him into narrower focus. They hung in the blackness like lanterns, red and yellow and blue. They dwindled to a cluster of fireflies, gleaming close to the ground. And then a dip of the road blotted them out altogether.
A sweet, resinous wind blew into the nostrils of Clewes, and he sang gently to himself, in rhythm with his marching.
