Treasure and Trouble Therewith Part 43

There he burrowed upward toward the light through the avalanche that had fallen on him.

At first there was only a gleam of it, a central glow. About this his thoughts circled like May flies round a lamp, irresistibly attracted and seemingly as purposeless.

"h.e.l.lo, Panchita! Ain't you the wonder. Your best beau's proud of you"--that was the glow. He saw the words traced at the end of the column, saw a hand tearing the piece out, saw into the mind that directed the hand, knew its conviction of the paper's value.

It was some time before he could get away from it; divert his mental energies to this night, the hour and its necessities, and the next day, the formidable day, now so close at hand.

From a clock tower nearby two strokes chimed out, dropping separate and rounded on the silence. They dropped on him like tangible things, calling him to action. He sat up, his brain-clouds dispersed, and thought. Any information of the lost bandit would gain clemency for Mayer, and Mayer had a clew. Knapp would remember the paper taken from his partner's coat and buried with the money. That would lead them to Pancha. Years before in Siskiyou he had witnessed the cross-examination of a girl, daughter of an absconding murderer, and the scene in the crowded courtroom of the wild mountain town rose in his memory, with Pancha as the central figure.

They would badger and break her down as they had the murderer's daughter.

She would know everything. There would be no secrets from her any more.

In an uprush of despair his life unrolled before him, all, it now seemed, progressing to this climax. Step by step he had advanced on it, builded up to it as if it were the goal of his desire. Wanting to keep her in ignorance he had created a situation that had worked out worse for her than for him. He could fly, leave her to face it alone, enlightenment come with shame and ignominy. It wasn't fair, it wasn't human. If it had only been himself that he had ruined he wouldn't have cared, he would have been glad to end the whole thing. But under the broken law of his conduct he had held to the greater law of his love. It was that he would sacrifice; be untrue to what had sustained him as his one ideal. He could have cried to the heavens that to let her know him for what he was, was a retribution too great for his sins. Death would have been a release but he could not die. He must live and make one final fight to preserve the belief that was his life's sole apology.

That determination toughened him, his despair past, and wrestling with the problem he came upon its solution and with it his punishment.

He would tell the man, give him warning and let him go. There was plenty of time; the authorities were not yet informed; no one was on the watch.

Mayer could leave the city that morning and make the Mexican border by night. It was the only way out and it dragged his penance with it--Pancha unavenged, the enemy rewarded, the prison doors set wide for the flight of their mutual despoiler.

Three strokes chimed out and he rose, trying to step lightly with feet that felt heavy as lead. It was very silent, as if the night and the brooding city were at one in that conspiracy to impress him with a sense of their hostility. The houses were still malignly watchful, again took up and tossed about his footsteps, echoed them from wall to wall till he wondered doors did not open, people did not come. On the main street he shrank by shop window and closed doorway, gliding blackly across a gush of light, slipping, a moving darkness, against the deeper darkness of shuttered lower stories. He had it almost to himself--a policeman lounging on a corner, a reveler reeling by with indignant mutterings, one or two night workers footing it homeward to rest and bed.

At the door of a drugstore he stopped and looked in. A frowsy woman was talking across the counter to a clerk whose bald head shone, glossy as ivory, above the gray fatigue of his face. In a corner was a telephone booth. Garland opened the door, then started as a bell jangled stridently and the bald-headed man craned his neck and the woman whisked round.

"Telephone," he muttered, tentative on the sill.

The clerk, too listless for words, jerked his head toward the booth and then handed the woman a package. As Garland entered the booth he heard her dragging step cross the floor and the bell jangle on her exit.

While he waited he struggled for a closer control on the rage that possessed him. He had decided what he would say and he cleared his throat for a free pa.s.sage of the words that were to carry deliverance to one he longed to kill. He had expected a wait--the man, confidant in his security, would be sleeping--but almost on top of his request for Mr.

Mayer came a voice, wide-awake and incisive:

"h.e.l.lo, who is it?"

His answer was very low, the deep tones hoa.r.s.e despite his effort.

"Is this Mr. Boye Mayer?"

"Yes. What do you want? Who are you?"

The voice fitted his conception of the man, hard, commanding, with something sharply imperious in its cultivated accents. He thought he detected fear in it.

"It don't matter who I am. I got somethin' to say to you that matters.

It's time for you to skip."

There was a momentary pause, then the word was repeated, seemed to be ejected quickly as if delivered on a rising breath:

"Skip?"

"Yes--get out. You've got time--till tomorrow afternoon. They'll be lookin' for you then."

Again there was that slight pause. When the voice answered, trepidation was plain in it.

"Who's looking for me? What are you talking about ?"

It was Garland's turn to pause. For a considering moment he sought his words, then he gave them in short, telegraphic sentences:

"End of August. The tules--opposite the Ariel Club. Twelve thousand.

Whatcheer House, Sacramento. Harry Romaine."

The pause was longer, then the voice came breathless, shaken:

"What in h.e.l.l do you mean by this gibberish?"

"I guess that's all right. You don't need to play any baby business. You know now and _I_ know, and by tomorrow evening the Express company and the police'll know."

A stammering of oaths came along the wire, a burst of maledictions, interspersed by threats. Garland cut into it with:

"That don't help any. You ain't got time to waste that way. You want to make the Mexican border by tomorrow night and to do that you got to go quick."

The man's anger seemed to rise to a pitch of furious incoherence. His words, shot out in a storm of pa.s.sion and fear, were transmitted in a stuttering jumble of sound, from which phrases broke, here and there rising into clearness. Garland caught one: "Who's turned you loose on this? Who's behind it?" and the restraint he had put on himself gave way. He laid his hand on the shelf before him as something to seize and wrenched at it.

"If _I_ was there you'd know--I'd make it plain. And maybe you guess. You thought you'd struck someone who was helpless. But she could pay you back and she _has_."

He stopped, realizing what he was saying. Through the singing of the blood in his ears the answering words came as an unintelligible mutter.

With an unsteady hand he hung up the receiver, his breath beating in loud gasps on the stillness that had so suddenly fallen on the small, walled-in place. For a s.p.a.ce he sat crouched in the chair, trying to subdue the pounding of his heart, the shaking of his limbs. Then, stealthily, like a guilty thing, he opened the door and came out. From above a line of bottles on the prescription desk the clerk's bald head gleamed, his eyes dodging between them.

"It's all right," Garland muttered; "I'm through," and shambled to the door with its jangling bell.

In his room at Mrs. Meeker's he threw himself dressed on the bed. The shade was up and through the window he could see the long flank of the new building and above it a section of sky. He kept his eyes on the night-blue strip and as he lay there his spirit, all spring gone, sank from depths to depths. He saw nothing before him but the life of the outlaw, and, mind and body taxed beyond their powers, he longed for death.

Presently he slept, sprawled on the wretched bed, the light of the dawn revealing the tragedy of his ravaged face.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

THE MORNING THAT CAME

When the voice had ceased Mayer stood transfixed at the phone, seeing nothing. He fumbled the receiver back into its hook and, wheeling, propped himself against the wall, his mouth slack, his eyelids drooped in sickly feebleness. The final shock, succeeding the long strain, came like a blow on the head leaving destruction.

He got to a chair and dropped into it, sweat-bathed, feeling as if cold airs were blowing on his damp skin. Sunk against the back, his legs stretched before him, his arms hanging over the sides, he lay shattered.

His mind tried to focus on what he had heard and fell back impotent, eddying downward through darkling depths like a drowning swimmer. A vast weakness invaded him, turning his joints to water, giving him a sensation of nausea, draining his strength till he felt incapable of moving his eyes, which stared gla.s.sily at the toes of his shoes.

Presently this pa.s.sed; he raised his glance and encountered the clock face on the mantelpiece. He held to it like a hand that was dragging him out of an abyss; watched it grow from a circular object to a white dial crossed by black hands and edged by a ring of numerals. The hour marked slowly penetrated to his consciousness--a quarter to four. He drew himself up and looked about; saw his notes on the desk, his hat on the table, the matchsafe with a cigarette stump lying on its saucer. They were like memorials from another state of existence, things that connected him with a plane of being that he had left long ago. He had a vision of himself in that distant past, packing his trunk, making brisk, satisfactory jottings on a sheet of hotel paper, standing on the hearth looking into Lorry Alston's angry eyes.

Groaning, he dropped his head into his hands, rocking on the chair, only half aroused. He was aware of poignant misery without the force to combat it, and knowing he must act could only remember. Irrelevant pictures, disconnected, having no point, chased across his brain--the saloon in Fresno where he had cleaned the bra.s.ses, and, jostling it, Chrystie's face, just before she had wept, puckered like a baby's. He saw the tules in the low sun, the green ranks, the gold-glazed streams, Mark Burrage coming down the long drawing-room eyeing him from under thick brows, Lorry's hand with its sparkle of rings holding out the letter.

That last picture shook him out of his torpor. He lifted his head and knew his surroundings for what they were--four walls threatening to close in on him. The necessity to go loomed suddenly insistent, became the obsessing matter, and he staggered to his feet. Flight suggested disguise and he went to the bedroom and clawed about in the bottom of the cupboard for the old suitcase which held the clothes he had worn on his Sacramento trips. As he pulled it out he remembered the side entrance of the hotel accessible by a staircase at the end of the hall; he could slip out unseen. There would be early trains, locals, going south; an express to be caught somewhere down the line. By the next night he could be across the Mexican border. It was the logical place, the only place--he knew it himself and the voice had said so.