Branded Part 26

Even as my fingers clutched at her for the strangling hold she twisted herself free and put the breadth of the table between us; then I found myself looking into the muzzle of a small silver-mounted revolver.

"You fool!" she gasped. "Do you think I would take any chances with you? If you should kill me, the axe would fall and find your neck, just the same! I put it in a letter to the chief of police. Get me that money before ten o'clock if you want me to stop the letter!"

I was beaten, this time not by fear of her or what she could do, but by the crus.h.i.+ng loss I had suffered in those few mad moments. I had done the thing that no man may do and still claim that he has a single drop of gentle blood in his veins; I had laid my hands in violence upon a woman, and with murder in my heart.

Convinced now that there was no deeper depth of degradation to which I could sink, I set about the task she had given me, laboring through it like a man in a dream. To gather up such a huge sum of money after banking hours was well nigh impossible; but I compa.s.sed the end by chartering a cab and going to anybody and everybody who could by any possibility cash my checks, leaving a disgraceful trail of the bank paper in dives and gambling dens and night resorts without number--driven to this because all respectable sources were closed at that time in the evening.

Returning to the hotel only a few minutes before the critical hour, I went directly to her rooms, carrying the money in a small hand-bag that I had bought for the purpose. I found her waiting for me, gowned and hatted as if for a journey. She was standing before a mirror, dabbing her neck with a powder-puff--histronic to the last; she was showing me how she had to resort to this to cover up the marks of my a.s.sault. I have failed in my picture of her if I have not portrayed her as a woman of moods and lightning changes. There was no trace of the late volcanic outburst in her manner when she greeted me and handed me a sealed and stamped envelope addressed to the Denver chief of police.

"You got the money?" she said quietly. "I knew you would." And then with a sudden pa.s.sion: "Oh, Bertie! if you weren't such a cold-blooded fish of a man!--but never mind; it's too late now."

I placed the small hand-bag on the table, pocketed the fateful letter, and backed toward the door. "If there is nothing else," I said.

"Oh, but there is!" she put in quickly. "I want you to get a cab and take me to the station. I'm leaving for California. Don't you want to go with me?"

"G.o.d forbid!" I exclaimed, and it came out of a full heart. Then I went down to order the cab.

She was curiously silent on the short drive down Seventeenth Street to the Union Station, sitting with the little hand-bag on her knees and breathing as they say the Australian pearl fishers breathe before taking the deep-sea dive. In the station she stood at a window in the women's room and waited while I purchased her ticket for San Francisco and paid for the sleeper section which had evidently been reserved some time in advance.

It is perhaps needless to say that I did not buy my own California ticket at the same time, though the train she was taking was the one I had planned to take. My journey could be postponed; and in the light of what had happened, and what was now happening, I was beginning to understand that my runaway trip to the Pacific Coast was no longer necessary, on one account, at least. But in any event, wild horses couldn't have dragged me aboard of the same train with Agatha Geddis.

She seemed strangely perturbed when I went to her with the tickets, and she made no move to leave the window.

"Your train is ready," I told her, as she thrust the ticket envelope into the bosom of her gown.

"Wait!" she commanded; then she turned back to the window which looked out upon the cab rank.

There were cabs coming and going constantly, and I didn't know until afterward what she saw that made her eyes light up and the blood surge into her cheeks.

"Now I'm ready," she announced quickly. "Put me on the sleeper."

I took her through the gates and at the gate-man's halting of us I saw that we were followed.

Our shadow was an alert, dapper young man who wore gla.s.ses, and I remembered having seen him, both at the ticket window and in the women's room. Outside of the gates he confirmed my suspicion by trailing us to the steps of the sleeping-car.

Even then I didn't suspect what was going on. While the sleeping-car conductor was examining the tickets and taking the section number I saw the young man with the spectacles making a hurried reconnaissance of the car by walking back and forth beside it and peering curiously in through the lighted windows. Then I missed him for a minute or two until he came running from the gates with a railroad ticket in his hand.

"I'm going to Cheyenne, and I want a berth in this car," he told the Pullman conductor, "They said they couldn't sell me one at the office--that you had the diagram."

The conductor looked over his list. "Nothing doing," he returned.

"All sold out."

"That's all right," snapped the young man; "I'll take my chance sitting up." With that, he climbed aboard and disappeared in the car.

All this time we had been waiting for the conductor to return my companion's tickets. When he did so, I helped her up the steps. The air-brakes were sighing the starting signal, and she turned in the lighted vestibule and blew me a kiss.

"Good-by, Bertie, dear," I heard her say. "Be a good boy, and give my love to Little Brown-Eyes." Then, as if to prove the immortal saying that there is no such thing as ultimate total depravity in the human atom, she leaned over to whisper the parting word: "Make good with her if you can, and want to, Bertie: I didn't mean it when I said I'd spoil your chances. Good-night and good-by." And with that the train moved off and she was gone.

I slept late in my room at the hotel the next morning, waking with a vague sense of inexpressible relief, which was quickly followed by the emotions which may come to a man regaining consciousness after he has been sandbagged and robbed. At table in the breakfast-room the boy brought me a morning paper. On the first page, in screaming headlines, I saw the complete explanation of the mysteries of the previous evening. Agatha Geddis had eloped with a married man notably prominent in social and business circles. The newspaper had two reliable sources of information. The deserted wife had been interviewed, and the guilty pair had been followed on the train by a reporter.

I laid the paper aside and stared out of the breakfast-room window like a man awakening from a horrid dream. Once again the submerging wave of realization and relief rushed over me. Truly, I had been held up and robbed; had in fact innocently financed this city-shaking elopement.

But, so far as Agatha Geddis's banishment from Denver and Colorado could accomplish it, I was once more a free man.

XX

Broken Faith

"Sweet are the uses of adversity," sang the great bard who is supposed to have known human nature in all its mutations; and humanity has echoed the aphorism until it has come to believe in some sort that bufferings are benedictions, and hard knocks merely the compacting blows that harden virtues, as the blacksmith's hammer beats a finer temper into the steel upon the anvil.

With all due respect for the shades of the mighty, and for the tacit approval of the many, I beg leave to offer the _argumentum ad hominem_ in reb.u.t.tal. Fight the conclusion as I may, I cannot resist the convincement that ill winds have never blown me any good; that, on the contrary, the steady pressure of hards.h.i.+p and misfortune, during a period when my life was still in a great measure in the formative state, exerted an influence which was altogether evil, weakening the impulses which should have been growing stronger, and giving free rein to those which, under more favoring conditions, might never have been quickened.

When I forsook the breakfast-table and the hotel, after having read the newspaper story telling how effectively Agatha Geddis had removed herself from my path, it was to make a joyous dash for the first train leaving the capital for Cripple Creek. With shame I record it, I had already forgotten my own culpable weakness in permitting a dastardly fear of consequences to make me Agatha's puppet and a sharer in her more than questionable dissipations; had forgotten that by every step I had taken with Agatha Geddis I had increased the distance separating me from Mary Everton.

Perhaps it is only a characteristic of human nature to minimize evils past, and evils to come, at the miraculous removal of a great and pressing evil present; even so, one may suffer loss. I was hastening back to take up the dropped thread of my relations with Phineas Everton and his daughter, and I should have gone softly, as one who, knowing himself the chief of sinners yet ventures to tread upon holy ground.

But by the time the train was slowing into the great gold camp at the back of Pike's Peak, these, and all other chastening thoughts, were crowded aside to make room for the one jubilant fact: I was free and I was going back to Polly.

Barrett was the first man I met upon reaching our offices. If he were surprised at seeing me in Cripple Creek when I should have been well on my way to the Pacific Coast, he was quite as evidently disappointed.

"I thought you had started for California," he said in his evenest tones.

"I thought so, too; but it was only a false start." Then I had it out with him. "You and I both know, Barrett, why you thought I ought to go, and the reason wasn't even remotely connected with the s.h.i.+pping of the car-load of test-ore. If you have seen the morning papers, you probably know why it is no longer necessary for me to leave Colorado."

He turned to stare absently out of the office window. When he faced about again there was a frown of friendly concern wrinkling between his straight-browed level eyes.

"How the devil did you ever come to get mixed up with the Geddis woman, Jimmie?" he demanded.

I evaded the direct question. "It is a long story, and some day I may be able to tell you all of it. But I can't do it now. You must take my word for it, Bob, that I haven't done a single thing that I didn't believe, at the time, I was compelled to do. That sounds idiotic, I know; but it is the simple truth."

Again he turned to the window and was silent for a full minute. I knew that I had in no uncertain measure forfeited his good opinion--that, I had earned the forfeiture: also, I knew perfectly well what he was doing; he was leaving me entirely out of the question and was weighing the hazards for Polly. When he turned it was to put a hand upon my shoulder.

"I'm taking you 'sight unseen,' old man," he said, with the brotherly affection which came so easily to the front in all his dealings with me. "If you tell me it's done and over with, and won't be resurrected, that's the end of it, so far as I am concerned. What comes next?"

"A little heart-to-heart talk with Polly's father," I said, and began to move toward the door. But he stopped me before I could get away.

"Just one other word, Jimmie: wouldn't it be better to let things rock along for awhile until the dust has time to settle and the smoke to blow away? You've come back red-handed from this thing--whatever it is--and----"

"No," I returned obstinately. "It is now or never for me, Bob. I'm sinking deeper into the mire every day, and Polly has the only rope that will pull me out. You'll say that I am much more likely to drag her in; maybe that is true, but just now I'm like a drowning man.

Possibly it would be better for all concerned if I should drown, but you can't expect me to take that view of it." And with that I crossed the corridor to the laboratory.

I can say for Phineas Everton that he was at all times and in all things a fair man, generous to a fault, and always ready to give the other fellow the benefit of the doubt. I sought him that afternoon with an explanation which was very far from explaining, but he listened patiently and with an evident desire to draw favorable inferences where he could from my somewhat vague story of my entanglement with Agatha Geddis.

It was perfectly apparent to me that I was not making the story very clear to him; I couldn't, because any complete explanation would have reached back too far into my past. The half-confidence was inexcusable, and I was aware of this. I owed this man, whose daughter I wished to marry, the fullest and frankest statement of all the facts.

But I didn't give it to him.

"You are trying to tell me that the affair with this woman had its origin in a former foolish infatuation?" he said at length.