V
The Downward Path
I had left the board money and a note for my landlady on the mantel inthe darkened dining-room, had reached the railroad station, and wasabout to buy a ticket to the farthest corner of the State, when Isuddenly remembered that I was running away with an additional handicapto be added to all the others. Leaving the coal company and the citywithout notice or explanation, I was making it impossible to keep myrecord clear in the monthly report to the prison authorities.
With a sinking heart I realized that I must wait and fight it out withMullins to some sort of a conclusion which would give me a clean slate.There must be nothing that I could not explain clearly to any one whomight ask. I had a job, and I must be able to give my reason forquitting it. With this new entanglement to put leaden shoes on myfeet, I retraced my steps through the eight weary blocks to theboarding-house, dodging through back streets and walking because Ihadn't the nerve to face the cheerful throng of theater-goers at thathour crowding the street-cars.
I think Mullins knew or suspected what was coming when I went to himthe next morning and told him I wished to have a talk with him.Without a word he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the littleprivate office which was used at odd times by the district manager.
"I'm quitting this morning, Mr. Mullins," I began, when the door wasshut. "If my work has been satisfactory, I should like to have aletter of recommendation."
The bookkeeper smoked a corn-cob pipe, and he stopped to refill andlight it before he opened on me.
"What's wrong?" he demanded. For an Irishman he was always exceedinglysparing of his words.
"Suppose we say that the climate doesn't agree with me here."
"You're no sick man!" he shot back; and then: "Want more pay?"
"No; I want a letter of recommendation."
"We never give 'em."
"So I have heard. But this time, Mr. Mullins, you are going to make anexception and break your rule."
"Not for you, we won't."
"Why not for me?"
"Because we're knowing your record. You're fixing to go back to thepen, where you came from."
"You knew my record when you hired me. Chief Callahan gave it to you,and I knew that he did. But that is neither here nor there; I want myletter, and I want you to say in it that I am leaving to look for amore favorable climate."
"And if I don't give it to you?--if I tell you to go straight plumb tohell?"
"In that case I shall take all the chances--_all_ of them, mindyou---and write a letter to the Interstate Commerce Commission."
If the man had had a gun in his hands I believe he would have killedme. There was manslaughter in his little gray, pig-like eyes. But herecovered himself quickly.
"If you're that kind of a gink, I'm damned glad to get rid of you atany price," he rasped; and then went to the district manager's desk andwrote me the letter, "To Whom it may Concern," practically as Idictated it.
That ended it, and when the letter was signed and flung across the deskat me I lost no time in getting out of the noxious atmosphere of theplace. But before I was well out of the yard it occurred to me that Ihad still left a loaded weapon in Mullins's hands. Though the threatof exposure might tie him and his grafting coal company up, he couldstill appeal to Callahan, who would doubtless find an excuse forarresting me before I could leave town. And once in the hands of thechief crook I should be lost.
Under the spur of this new menace I returned quickly to the coaloffice, with some inchoate idea of trying to bully the scoundrellychief of police through the hold I had acquired upon the coal company.The office was empty when I reached it, and at first I thought Mullinshad gone out. But at a second glance I saw that he was in thetelephone closet, the door of which he had left ajar. Overhearing myown name barked into the transmitter, I listened without scruple.
"----Yes, Weyburn; that's what I'm telling you. He's flew thecoop. . . . Yes, he knows something--too damned much. . . . No, Iwouldn't snag him here; he might talk too loud and get somebody tobelieve him--some fool in a Federal grand jury, for instance. Let himgo--with a plain-clothes man to find out where he heads for--and thenwire that outfit that piped him off when he came here. That'll settlehim."
There may have been more of it, but I did not wait to hear. Speed wasmy best chance now, and I slipped out noiselessly and ran for therailroad station. If I should be lucky enough to find a train ready toleave, I might yet hope to escape whatever trap it might be that thebookkeeper and his official accomplice were going to set for me.
Reaching the station I found that the first train through would be awestbound, and that it was not due for half an hour. The wait waspainfully trying. I did not dare to buy a ticket for fear Callahanmight have telephoned the ticket office. As the passengers for theexpected train straggled in I sought vainly to identify the spy who wasundoubtedly among them; and when the train thundered up to the platformI made haste to board it and to lose myself quickly in the crowdedsmoking-car. Later, when the conductor made his round, I paid a cashfare to the end of the division, forbearing to draw a full breath ofrelief until the cesspool city had faded to a smoky blur on the horizon.
With time to think, I began to puzzle anxiously over the newdevelopment of mystery opened up by the overheard telephone talk. Whoor what was the "outfit" that had been meddling in my sorryaffair?--that was to be wired when my new destination should beascertained? One by one the suspicious circumstances remarshaledthemselves; the feeling that I had been spied upon, the speedypublicity which my story had attained in the town where I had made myearliest attempt at wage-earning, the memorandum which Chief Callahanhad consulted before sending me to the crooked coal company. It seemedsingular to me afterward that the one answer to all of these smallmysteries should not have suggested itself at once. But it did not.
The end of the conductor's run--the point which I had paid fare--cameat midday at the capital of the State, where there was a stop longenough to enable the train's people--or those who chose to evade thedining-car--to seek a lunch counter. I went with the others and had afrugal sandwich and a cup of coffee, hastening afterward to the stationticket office to buy a ticket to a town well over toward the westernboundary of my prison State, and chosen haphazard from its location onthe wall-map beside the ticket window. A little later, upon resumingmy seat in the train, I had a small shock. Sitting just across theaisle, and once more barricaded behind his hand-baggage and buried in anewspaper, was the round-faced salesman who had been my travelingcompanion on the day of my release from prison.
Naturally, all the suspicions I had been harboring for the past fewhours leaped alive again at the sight of this man. But at the secondtrain stop in the westward flight they were promptly disconnected frommy _vis-a-vis_ across the aisle when the salesman gathered hisbelongings and disappeared; left the train--as I made sure by lookingout of the window and seeing him cross the station platform. In theshort run from the capital he had not so much as looked in mydirection, emerging from his newspaper only once for a word with theconductor at the moment of ticket-collecting.
After he was gone I was able to smile grimly and call it a coincidence,wondering meanwhile, if one of the consequences of my hideouslydisarranged life was to be a lapse into chittering cowardice; anendless starting aside at shadows.
The new field of endeavor, chosen blindly at the ticket window in thecapital, proved to be a small manufacturing city. Here the chief ofpolice, to whom I reported on the evening of my arrival, was of a typeexactly opposite to the grafting brute from whose jurisdiction I hadfled; a promoted town-marshal, like John Runnels of Glendale; ashrewd-eyed, kindly old man who heard my story patiently and gave me aword of encouragement that was like a draft of cold water in the desert.
"You're goin' to get a square deal in this town, my boy," he said,after I had enlarged upon my story sufficiently to make it include mylate experience with Callahan and Mullins. "It ain't any part of myjob to bruise the broken reed
n'r quench the smokin' flax. You don'tlook like a thief, and, anyways, if you're tryin' to make an honestlivin', that settles all the old scores--or it ort to. Go find you ajob, if you can. What you've told me stays right in here"--tapping hisbroad chest--"leastwise, it won't be used against you as long as youwalk straight."
Under such kindly auspices it did seem as if I ought to be able to diga quiet little rifle-pit in the field of respectability and good reputeand to hold it against all comers. But, oddly enough, I couldn't doit--not to save my life. My experience had all been in office work,and since business was good in the small city, I had little difficultyin finding employment. Yet in each case--and there were five of them,one after another--I secured work only to lose it almost immediately.By some means my story had got out, and it spread through the town likean epidemic. After the fifth failure I went back to the fatherly oldchief of police to confess defeat and to notify him that I was leavingtown.
In this interview he made me tell him more about my trial andconviction, and when I finished he was shaking his head. "There'ssomething sort o' queer about this pull-down of yours, Weyburn," hecommented. "I gave you my word not to talk unless you went back on me,and I've kept it. You hain't told anybody else?"
"Not a soul."
"Still, it's been told--not once, but a heap o' times. Have you triedchasin' it back to its startin' point?"
"Yes; but it is no good. It seems to be in the air."
"Well, it's a dum shame. It looks as if you had somebody houndin' youout o' sheer spite. Is there anybody back behind that would do that?"
I suppose I was bat-blind; but the suggestion, even when it was addedto the mysterious entanglements that were tripping me at every step,failed to open my eyes. Truly, Abel Geddis and Abner Withers had usedme ruthlessly as their criminal stop-gap, but since I had paid thepenalty and still bore the criminal odium, I could postulate nopossible reason why they should reach out across the three-yearinterval to add cruel persecution to injury.
"No," I said, after a reflective pause. "There are only the two oldmen I have named. And now that it is all over, I can see that theywere only shoving me into the breach to save themselves."
He nodded, half-doubtfully, I thought; and then: "You're goin' to tryagain somewheres else?"
I replied that there was nothing else to do; whereupon thiswhite-haired old angel, who seemed so vastly out of place as the headof even a small city's police department, made an astounding proposal.
"Get your bit of dunnage--I s'pose you hain't got very much, haveyou?--and come around here about dark this evenin'. I'll have my buggyready and we'll drive over to Altamont, so you can take the train thereinstead of here. If there's anybody follerin' you up and blacklistin'you, maybe that'll throw 'em off the track."
It was a splendid bit of kindness; and when I could swallow the lump itbrought into my throat I accepted joyfully. And as the disappearancewas planned, so it was carried out. In the dusk of the evening thegood old man drove me the ten miles across to the neighboring village,and after thanking him out of a full heart I boarded a train and beganmy wanderings afresh.