Читать книгу Branded - Lynde Francis - Страница 6

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Out of the first twenty-four hours, when my little raft of respectability and good report was going to pieces under me, I have brought one heart-mellowing recollection. In the morning it was old John Runnels himself who brought me my cell breakfast, and he did it to spare me the shame of being served by the police-station turnkey. Past that, he sat on the edge of the iron cot and talked to me while I tried to eat.

"They was aimin' to telegraph the sheriff and have you railroaded slap up to the county seat las' night, but I told 'em nary," he confided. "I wasn't allowin' to have 'em jerk you out of your home town before you'd had a chance to pick a lawyer and talk to your friends; no sir-ee, I wasn't."

"I guess I haven't any friends any more," I was still bitter enough to say. And then: "Tell me, if you can, Uncle John, just what the charge against me is."

"I reckon you know a heap better'n I do, Bertie," was his sober rejoinder, "but I can tell you what I heard. They say you've been takin' the bank's money to put into a gold mine somewheres out yonder in the Rocky Mountains."

"Who swore out the warrant for my arrest?"

"Ab Withers."

Abner Withers, town miser, note-shaver and skinflint, was the one man on the board of directors of the bank whom I had always most cordially detested. Back in my childhood, before my father had got upon his feet, Withers had planned to foreclose a mortgage on the home farm, making the hampering of my father so that he could not pay the debt a part of the plan. More than once I had half suspected that he was in with Geddis on the mining deal, but I had no proof of this.

"You say they were getting ready to railroad me out of town last night: I suppose they will do it to-day, won't they?"

"Not if I can help it, Bertie. I'm goin' to try to hold you here till you've had time to kind of straighten yourself around and ketch up with the procession. I don't know what in Sam Hill you wanted to go and bu'st yourself up for, this way, but I'm owin' it to Amos Weyburn dead to help his boy get some sort of a fair show for his white alley. You ask me anything in reason, and I'll do it."

I considered the most necessary requirements hastily. My mother and sister were absent on a visit to a distant relative in the far-away Saskatchewan wheat country, and I thanked God for that. It was altogether unlikely that they would see any of the home newspapers, for some time, at least, and any anxiety on that score might be dismissed, or at all events postponed. The most pressing need was for a lawyer, and since lawyers do not serve without fees, I was glad to remember that my savings, which were still reposing in Abel Geddis's bank vault, would enable me to pay as I went.

By this time, in bitter revulsion from gratitude to fierce enmity, I was determined to defend myself tooth and nail. At one stroke Abel Geddis had cancelled all my obligations to him. At the very moment when I was promising his daughter to help cover up his criminality, he had been deliberately plotting to make me his scapegoat.

"I need a lawyer, of course," I told Runnels; and then I made the first and worst of a long series of wretched mistakes. "Send word to Cy Whitredge and tell him I'd like to see him."

If anybody had asked me five minutes after Runnels went away why I had chosen Cyrus Whitredge to be my counsel I doubt if I could have offered any justifiable reason. Whitredge was known throughout our end of the State as a criminal lawyer, shrewd, unscrupulous, and with a reputation built up entirely upon his singular success in defeating the ends of justice. Before a jury of farmers and small merchants, such as I was likely to have, I had prejudiced my case at the very outset.

I was completely and thoroughly convinced of this a little later when Whitredge came to see me. He was a lean man, leather-faced, and with an eye like that of a fish. To my consternation and keen disheartenment he assumed my guilt from the moment the cell door was locked upon him and he had seated himself upon the iron-framed cot to nurse a knee in the locked fingers of his bony hands.

"You've got the wrong idea of things, altogether, Weyburn," he criticised, after I had tried to tell him that I was being made to hold the bag for some one else; and his use of the bare surname, when he had known me from boyhood, cut me like a knife. "You can't expect me to do anything for you unless you are entirely frank with me. As your counsel, I've got to know the facts; and you gain absolutely nothing by insisting to me that you are not guilty."

There was more of it; a good bit more in which I stubbornly asserted my innocence while Whitredge used every trick and wile known to his craft to entrap me into admitting that I was guilty, in the act if not in the intention.

"You can't deny—you don't deny—that you knew these mining sharps, Hempstead and Lesherton, pretty intimately, that you saw them frequently and talked with them in the way of business, and that you knew all about the capitalization scheme they were trying to put over," was Whitredge's summing up of the situation. "You'll have to loosen up, Weyburn, if you expect to get any help. I'll come around again this afternoon, and maybe by that time you will have taken a tumble to yourself."

He got up, rattled the door for the turnkey, and then wheeled upon me with a sharp question.

"I take it you've got a little ready money hid away somewhere, haven't you?" he demanded.

I told him I had; but when I added that my savings were all in the bank he swore impatiently.

"That will mean an order from the court before you can even pay your counsel's retainer—always providing your account hasn't already been attached to apply on the shortage," he snapped; and at that the corridor officer came to let him out and he went away.

Having lived in Glendale practically all my life, I had a good right to expect that at least a few of my friends would rally to my support in the time of trouble. They came, possibly a half-dozen of them in all, between Whitredge's visit and old John Runnels's bringing of my dinner at one o'clock.

Who they were, and what they said to me, are matters which shall be burled in the deepest pit of oblivion I can find or dig. For the best of them, in the turning of a single leaf in the lifebook, I had apparently become an outcast, a pariah. One and all, they had already tried and condemned me unheard, and though there were clammy-handed offers of assistance they were purely perfunctory, as I could see, and there was never a man of them all to say heartily, "Bert Weyburn, I don't believe it of you." It wasn't the fault of any of these cold comfort bringers that the milk of human kindness didn't turn to vinegar in me that day, or that I did not drink the cup of bitterness and isolation to the very dregs.

I know now, of course, that I was boyishly hot-hearted and unfair; that I was too young and inexperienced to make allowances for that deathless trait in human nature—in all animate nature—which prompts the well to recoil instinctively from the pest-stricken. Later on—but I needn't anticipate.

It was along in the latter part of the afternoon, and before Whitredge's return, that Agatha came. Her appearance in my cell was a total surprise. I was standing at the little grated window when I heard footsteps in the corridor. I thought it was Whitredge coming back, and was morose enough not to turn or look around until after the door had opened and clanged shut again. Then I wheeled to find myself looking straight into the man-melting eyes.

"Oh, Herbert!" she gasped; and with that she dropped upon the cot and put her face in her hands.

If only the women wouldn't weep at us how vastly different this world would be! All day long I had been praying that I might some time have the chance to hold a mirror up to Agatha Geddis; a mirror that would reflect her soul and show her what a mean and shriveled thing it was. But what I did was to sit beside her and put my arm around her and try to comfort her as I might have comforted my sister.

When her sobbing fit had subsided and she began to talk I found out what she had come for—or I thought I did. It was all a miserable mistake—so she protested—and Abner Withers was the responsible one. It was he who had insisted that I should be arrested and prosecuted; and, thus far, her father had not been able to make him listen to reason. But it would come out all right in the end, if I would only be patient and wait. Mr. Whitredge had been up to the house to see her father, and they had had a long talk. Among other things, she had heard her father say that he would bear all the expenses, meaning—I supposed—that he would see to it that Whitredge did not lose his fee.

I have more than once had professional mesmerists try to hypnotize me, without success. But there is little doubt that Agatha Geddis turned the trick for me that afternoon in the steel cell of the Glendale police station. As she talked, my heart grew putty-soft again. As before, she dwelt upon the terrible consequences, the awful disgrace, the wreck of her happiness, and all that; and once more I promised her that I would stand by her. Even after she had gone I told myself that since the worst had already happened, it would be cowardly and unmanly to turn back.

Later, when the reaction came, it is more than likely that I swung back to the other extreme, writing Agatha Geddis down in the book of bitter remembrances as a cold-blooded, plotting fiend in woman's form. She was not that. It may be said that, at this earlier period, she was merely a loosely bound fagot of evil potentialities. Doubtless the threatened cataclysm appeared sufficiently terrifying to her, and she was willing to use any means that might offer to avert it. But it may be conceded, in bare justice, that in this stage of her development she was nothing worse than a self-centered young egoist, immature, and struggling, quite without malice, to make things come her way.

It was quite late in the afternoon when Whitredge made his second visit to my cell, and this time his attitude was entirely different. Also, he dropped the curt use of my surname.

"We're going to ignore the question of your culpability for the present, Bert, and wrestle with the plain facts of the case," was the way he began on me. "From what you said this morning, I was led to infer that you had some notion of trying to shift the responsibility to Mr. Geddis. I won't say that something couldn't be done along that line; not to do you any good, you understand, but to do other folks a lot of harm. You could probably roil the water and stir up the mud pretty badly for all concerned. But in the outcome, and before a jury, you'd be likely to get the hot end of it. I'll be frank with you. If I were in your shoes, I'd rather have Geddis for me than against me. He has money and influence, and you are a young man without either."

"You are trying to advise me to plead guilty?" I asked.

"Oh, of course, the formal plea in court would be 'Not guilty.' I'm merely advising you not to make the fight vindictive. If you don't, I'm inclined to believe that Geddis will stand by you and you'll get off easy."

It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I would fight to the last gasp before I would suffer myself to be tried and condemned for a crime of which I was innocent. Then the distorted sense of honor got in its work again. Agatha Geddis's visit was still recent enough to make me believe that I owed her something.

"You'll have to get me out of it in some way," I returned. "I can't afford to be convicted."

"Abel Geddis has been a pretty good friend of yours in the past, Bert," the lawyer suggested. "You don't want to forget that."

"I'm not forgetting it, and I'm giving him all the credit that is due him. But you can't blame me for thinking a little of my mother and sister, and myself. You know what a prison sentence means to a man, better than I do. I couldn't stand for that."

Whitredge stroked his long chin and looked past me out of the little grated window.

"We'd hope for the best, of course," he returned. "If we can make it appear as an error in judgment"—there was that cursed phrase again—"without any real criminal intention, and if we can prove that you didn't reap any monetary benefit from the transfer of the mining stock, there is good reason to hope that the court may be lenient. Do I understand that you are giving me a free hand in the case, Bert?"

"I don't see that there is anything else for me to do," I said, half-doubtfully; and as he was going I asked him about the question of bail.

"I have waived the preliminary examination for you—merely to save you the humiliation of appearing in a justice's court in Glendale," was the evasive reply.

"But without the examination I shan't have a chance to offer bail, shall I?"

Whitredge shook his head. "The guaranty company that is on your bond beat us to it, I'm sorry to say. They sent their attorney over from Cincinnati last night, and he is here now, prepared to refuse the company's consent in the matter of ball. That is another reason why, acting for you, I have waived the preliminary. Without the guaranty company's assent to the arrangement it would be useless for us to offer sureties, though Geddis and two or three others have expressed their willingness to sign for you."

"Then what am I to expect?"

"Nothing worse than a little delay. Court is in session, and you will be taken to Jefferson. If the grand jury finds a true bill against you, the cause will probably be tried at the present term of court. There need be nothing humiliating or embarrassing for you here in Glendale. Sam Jorkins will take you over to Jefferson on the midnight train, and you needn't see any of the home-town folks unless you want to."

Remembering the clammy handshakings of the forenoon, I thought I should never again want to see anybody that I knew. And thus I made the second of the miserable blunders which led to all that followed.

"Let it be that way," I said. "If Jorkins will go with me up to Mrs. Thompson's so that I can get a few things and pack a grip——"

"Oh, of course," said Whitredge, readily enough. "I'll have a carriage to take you to the train, and it can drive around by your boarding-house. But you mustn't try to run away. I suppose you wouldn't do anything like that, would you?—even if you had a good chance?"

I turned upon him as quick as a flash.

"Do you mean that you're trying to give me a hint that I'd better run away?" I demanded.

He took a step toward the cell door and I had a fleeting impression that he was listening to determine whether or not there was any one in the corridor. When he faced me again he was frowning reprovingly.

"I am a member of the bar in good standing," he reminded me stiffly. "If you knew the first letter of the legal alphabet you'd know that I couldn't advise a client to run away."

"Damn the legal alphabet!" I broke out hotly. "You're a man, Cy Whitredge; and I'm another man and in trouble. Can't you drop the professional cant for half a minute and talk straight?"

At this he shook his head again.

"It would prejudice your case mighty badly—that is, if you should try it and not succeed. On the other hand—but no; I won't say another word. Your best friend wouldn't advise you to make such a break. Besides, you have no money, and you couldn't get very far without it. I shouldn't even think of it, if I were you. Dwelling on a thing like that sometimes gives it a chance to get hold of you. But this is all foolishness, of course. You are going to Jefferson, and you'll take your medicine like a man if you have to. That's all, I believe, for the present. Keep a stiff upper lip, and if anybody comes to see you, don't talk too much. I'll be over at the county seat in a day or two, and we'll thresh it out some more."

After Runnels had brought me my supper, and I had nothing to do but to wait for the constable and train-time, I did the very thing that Whitredge had advised me not to do; I couldn't get it out of my mind that freedom at any price was now the most desirable thing on earth—in the universe, for that matter. It was facilely easy to picture a future in some far distant corner of the country where I might begin all over again and make good. Other men had done it. Every once in a while I had read in the newspapers the story of some fellow who had eluded his fate, deserved or otherwise, years before and had lived and builded anew and in a fashion to win the applause of all men.

Because I had lived in a small town the better part of my life, I had the mistaken notion that the world is very wide and that there must be no end of safe hiding-places for the man who needs to seek one. From that to imagining the possible details was only a series of steps, each one carrying me a little nearer to the brink of decision. As I have said, I had money of my own in the bank vault; much more than enough to bribe easy-going Sam Jorkins, the constable who, as Whitredge had said, was to take me to Jefferson. I weighed and measured all the chances and hazards, and there were only two for which I could not provide in advance. There was a possibility that Geddis might be staying late in the bank; and if he were not, there was the other possibility that he might have changed the combination on the vault lock since my arrest.

The more I thought about it, the more fiercely the escape notion gripped me. Whitredge's talk had made it perfectly plain that the best I could hope for in a court trial would be a light sentence. As train-time drew near, the obsession pushed reason and all the scruples aside. If I could only persuade Jorkins to let me go to the bank on the drive to the station——

The town clock in the tower of the new city hall was striking eleven when good old John Runnels and the constable came for me. At the final moment I was telling myself feverishly that it would be of no use for me to try to bribe honest Sam Jorkins; that this was the fatal weakness in my plan of escape. Hence, I could have shouted for joy when Runnels unlocked the cell door and turned me over, not to Jorkins, but to a stranger; a hard-faced man roughly dressed, and with the scar of a knife slash across his right cheek.

"This is Bill Simmons, a deputy from Jefferson, Bertie; come to take you over to the county ja—to the sheriff's office," said Runnels. "I've told him he ain't goin' to have no use for them handcuffs he's brought along."

"That may be," growled the sheriff's messenger. "All the same, I ain't takin' no chances—not me!" and with that he whipped the manacles from his pocket. But Runnels intervened quickly.

"Nary!—not here in my shop, you don't, Simmons," he said. "For two cents I'd go along with Bertie, myself, if only to see to it that he gets a fair show. You treat him right and white, or I'll fire you out, warrant or no warrant!"

When we reached the street I said I wanted to go around by way of my boarding-house for a change of clothing.

"That's all been 'tended to," said the surly deputy, with a jerk of his thumb toward a suitcase in the seat beside the driver of the hack carriage. "You get in and keep quiet; that's all you've got to do."

After this he said nothing and made no further move until we were jouncing along on our way to the railroad station. Then, without warning, he turned upon me suddenly and tried to snap the hand-cuffs on my wrists.

It was all I was waiting for; something to pull the trigger. In a flash the savage, which, in the best of us, lies but skin-deep under the veneer of habit and the civilized conventions, leaped alive. There was a fierce grapple in the interior of the darkened carriage—fierce but silent—and the blood sang in my veins when I found that I was more than a match for the scar-faced deputy. With fingers to throat I choked him into submission, and when I had taken his pistol and hand-cuffed him with his own manacles, the step that made me a criminal in fact had been overpassed.

"One yip out of you, and you get a bullet out of your own gun!" I warned him; and then I got speech with the driver, a squat, thickset Irishman, whose face and brogue were both strange to me.

"Drive to the Farmers' Bank—side door—and be quick about it!" I called to him over the lowered window-sash.

"I'm hired to go to the train. Who's payin' me for the side-trip?" he queried impatiently.

"I am," I snapped; adding: "There's money in it for you if you put the whip on."

He obeyed the order with what might have seemed suspicious readiness, if I had been cool enough to consider it, and a minute or two later the hack ground its wheels against the curb at the side door of the bank building. With the pistol at his ribs I pushed the deputy out ahead of me. My keys were still in my pocket—Runnels hadn't searched me for anything—and I opened the door and entered, driving Simmons a step in advance.

The bank was untenanted, as I knew it would be if Geddis should not be there, since we had never employed a night watchman. At that time of night there was nothing stirring in the town, and in the midnight silence the ticking of the clock on the wall over Abel Geddis's desk crashed into the stillness like the blows of a hammer. I made the deputy sit down under the vault light while I worked the combination. The lock had not been changed, and the door opened at the first trial.

Again pushing Simmons ahead of me, I entered the vault. It was a fairly modern structure; Geddis had had it rebuilt within the year; and it was electric-lighted and large enough to serve the double purpose of a bank strong-room and a safety deposit. Shoving the deputy into a corner I opened the cash-box and took out the exact amount of my savings, neither more nor less. Simmons stretched his neck and leered at me with an evil grin.

"You're the fine little crook, all right enough," he remarked. "They was sayin' over at Jefferson that you was a Sunday-school sup'rintendent, or somethin' o' that sort. Them kind is always the flyest."

It struck me suddenly that he was taking his defeat pretty easily, but there was no time for a nice weighing of other men's motives.

"I'm fly enough to give you what's coming to you," I said; and with that I snapped off the electric light, darted out, slammed the vault door and shot the bolts. For a few hours at least, during the latter part of which he might have to breathe rather bad air, the deputy was an obstruction removed.

My hurriedly formed plan of escape would probably have made a professional criminal weep; but it was the only one I could think of on the spur of the moment. In the next county, at a distance of thirty-odd miles, there was another railroad. If I could succeed in bribing the Irish hack-driver, I might be far on my way before the bank vault would be opened and the alarm given.

The Irishman took my money readily enough and offered no objections when I told him what I wished to do. Also, he claimed to be familiar with the cross-country road to Vilasville, saying that he could set me down in the village before daylight. Oddly enough, he made no comment on the absence of the deputy, and seemed quite as willing to haul one passenger as two. With my liberal bribe for a stimulant he whipped up his horses, and in a few minutes we were out of town and rolling smoothly along the intercounty pike.

For a time the sudden break with all the well-behaved traditions kept me awake and in a fever heat of excitement. But along in the small hours the monotonous clack-clack of the horses' hoofs on the limestone pike and the steady rumbling of the wheels quieted me. Reflecting that I had had little sleep the night before, and that the way ahead would be perilous enough to ask for sharpened faculties and a well-rested body, I braced myself in a corner of the carriage and closed my eyes.

When I awakened, after what seemed like only the shortest hand-space of dreamless oblivion, a misty dawn was breaking and the carriage was stopped in a town street and in front of a brick building with barred windows. While I was blinking and rubbing my eyes in astoundment, a big, bearded man whose face was strangely familiar opened the door and whipped the captured pistol from the seat.

"This was one time when the longest way 'round was the shortest way home," chuckled the big pistol-snatcher quizzically. And then: "Old Ab Withers seems to know you better than most of us do, Bert. He told me I'd better not risk you on the train with just one Glendale constable; that I'd better send a rig and two deputies after you, if I wanted to make sure o' seein' you. What have you done with Simmons?"

I told him briefly.

"All right," he said. "Climb down out o' that and come on in. The jig's up."

It was not until I was standing on the sidewalk beside the gigantic sheriff, with the Irishman grinning at me from his seat in the hack, that I realized fully what had happened. Instead of taking me to Vilasville, the driver, who was Simmons's partner and fellow deputy, had changed his route while I was asleep and brought me to the county seat.