His mind was already far away, moving swiftly over other, long past scenes. He was not even thinking of the innocent victim of his jealousy. He was traveling again the long, lean, cruel winter trail. He was once more toiling amid the snows of the bitter north.
"You are sure, sure – it can be done?"
The spell was broken.
"Sure," the man replied, with a heavy sigh.
The door closed. The darkened room was still and silent. For some moments the man remained standing where he was. Then he slowly moved over the soft rugs to the light switch on the wall, and his hand rested upon it. He hesitated. Then, with an impatient movement, he pressed the brass knob, and the room was flooded with light.
He stared out across the sumptuous furnishings, but did not attempt to move. His face was ghastly in the glare of light. His eyes were full of horror and straining.
Presently he moved a step toward the desk. It was only one step. He halted. Slowly his look of horror deepened. He raised one great hand and passed the fingers of it through his mane of tawny hair. It was the movement of a man half dazed. Then his lips moved.
"Audie!" he murmured, in a hoarse whisper. "Audie!"
CHAPTER III
TWO LETTERS
Number "Forty-nine" was standing just inside and clear of the door of his cell. It was dinner time in the Alston Penitentiary. On the gallery outside the faint hubbub of the distribution of food just reached him. He was hungry, even for prison fare.
"Forty-nine" heard the trolley stop at the door of the next cell. He heard the click of the lock as the door was opened. Then came the sodden sound of something moist emptied into a pannikin, and then the swish of liquid. The door clicked again, and he knew his turn was next.
The trolley stopped. His door opened. A man, in the hideous striped costume, like his own, of a fellow-convict, winked up into his face. It was the friendly wink of an evil eye. The man passed him in a loaf of black bread. Then, with a dexterity almost miraculous, a second loaf shot into "forty-nine's" hands, and was immediately secreted in the rolled hammock, which served for a bed.
The whole thing was done almost under the very eyes of a watchful warder. But he remained in ignorance of it. The double ration was a friendly act that was more than appreciated, however evil the eye that winked its sympathy. The prisoner's shining pannikin was filled, and a thin stream of cocoa was poured into his large tin cup. Then the trolley and its attendants passed on, and the door automatically closed.
"Forty-nine" glanced about him, and, finally, sat on the floor of his cell. He sniffed at the vegetable stew in his pannikin, and tasted it. Yes, he was too hungry to reject the watery slush. He took a loaf, tore it in shreds with his fingers and sopped it in the liquid. Then he devoured it as rapidly as the hard black crust would permit. After that his attention was turned to the cocoa. The same process was adopted here, and, by the time his meal was finished, and the process of cleaning his utensils was begun, his appetite was fully appeased.
It was a hideous place, this dreadful cell. It was bare from the ceiling above to the hard floor on which he was sitting. In one corner a hammock was rolled up to a universal pattern adopted throughout the prison. There was a small box in one corner in which cleaning materials were carefully packed, and close by were placed two books from the prison library. For the rest there was nothing but the bare walls, in which, high up, was set a grated aperture to admit light and air.
After cleaning up his utensils in orthodox fashion "forty-nine" went to his box and produced a lump of uneatable, half cured bacon fat, left from his breakfast. With this he calmly set to work on a process of massaging his hands. The work of the convict prison was cruel. In a short while hands would become a mere mockery of their original form. To obviate this, the fat bacon process had been adopted, and "forty-nine" had learned it from the fellow-convicts, more familiar with the ways and conditions of prison life.
"Forty-nine's" self-appointed task was just completed when, without warning, the door of his cell suddenly opened, and the burly form of a rubber-shod warder appeared.
"Forty-nine! For the governor. Right away!"
There was just a suspicion of softening from the warder's usual manner in the order.
"Forty-nine" looked up without interest. His eyes were hollow, his cheeks drawn. A deep, hopeless melancholy seemed to weigh upon his whole expression. A year of one of the hardest penitentiaries in the country, with the prospect of years of service yet to complete, left hope far beyond the reach of his crushed spirit. He stood up obediently. His manner was pathetically submissive. His great frame, little more than frame, towered over his guard.
The man stood aside from the doorway and the convict passed out.
The governor looked up from his desk in the center of a large, simply furnished hall. Behind a wrought iron cage at the far end of the apartment stood number "Forty-nine," with the warder close behind.
The governor turned to his secretary and spoke in an undertone. He was a youngish, baldheaded man who had acquired nothing of the hardness of visage to be found in his subordinates. Just now there was something almost like a kindly, sympathetic twinkle in his eyes as he opened out a sheaf of papers, evidently to do with the man just ushered into his presence.
The secretary rose from his seat and walked over to the iron cage. Unfastening a heavy lock he flung it open. To the prisoner, full of the bitterness of his lot, it almost seemed as though he were some wild beast being suddenly released from captivity.
The secretary signed to the warder to bring his charge into the room. This unusual proceeding left the astonished warder at a loss. And it required a sharp order from the governor himself to move him.
"Forty-nine" was conducted to the far side of the desk, and the governor looked him in the face.
"I am pleased to be able to inform you – er – a free pardon has been – er – extended to you."
The announcement was made in formal tones, but the look in the eyes of the speaker was the only human thing to be found in the notorious Alston Penitentiary. Even the worst criminals who were brought into contact with Governor Charles Raymond had, however grudgingly, to admit his humanity, which only left it the greater mystery that the methods of his prison were all so directly opposed to his nature.
"Forty-nine" started. For a moment the settled melancholy of his cadaverous face lightened. A hand went up to his head as though to ascertain that he was not dreaming. It came into contact with the bristles of his cropped hair, and dropped at once to his side.
"I'm to go – free, sir?"
"That's precisely what I'm telling you."
"Forty-nine's" eyes rolled. He looked from the governor to the secretary.
"Pardon?" he said. Then a hot light grew in his eyes at an inner sense of injustice in the method of his release. "But I've done nothing wrong, sir."
Charles Raymond smiled. But his smile was genuine and expressed none of the usual incredulity.
"That is a matter for yourself. I simply receive my orders from the usual authorities. Those orders are that a free pardon has been extended to you. I also have here a letter for you, which, since it is in a lady's handwriting, and you are to be released at once, I have waived the regulations and refrained from opening. You will receive your railroad fare to whatever place in the country you wish to go. Also the usual prison allowance in cash. That will do. The prison chaplain will visit you before you go out."
"I don't need to see him, sir. He tires me."
The secretary looked up sharply at the fiercely resentful tone of the prisoner's denial. But the governor only smiled.
"As you will," he said, and signed again to the warder. "Your letter will be handed to you at the outer gate – with the other things."
"Forty-nine" was marched off. He re-entered the iron cage and vanished amid the labyrinth of iron galleries beyond.
As he passed out of the office the governor turned to his secretary.
"I've looked up the record of that man's trial. Guess there's some mystery behind it. Poor devil. Only a youngster, too. I wonder." Then he turned to his papers again. "Well, they got him by the heels, and started him on the road to hell, anyway. Poor devil."
The secretary's murmured agreement with his chief's commiseration was non-committal. He had no sympathy. He took his salary and anything else that came his way. To him convicts were not human.
It was late in the afternoon when Frank Burton found himself at the outer wicket of the prison. He was clad now in his own clothes; the clothes he had worn on the night of his arrest. His prairie hat was crushed unusually low upon his close-cropped head. As he approached he called out his number for the last time.
"Forty-nine!"
The guard was ready for him.
"Going to Toronto?" he said, pushing a paper and pen toward him. "Twenty-eight dollars and seventy cents. Prison allowance four dollars fifty. Your letter. Sign!"
The money was handed to him in separate amounts, and the letter was placed beside them. Frank signed in a trembling hand, and took his possessions. Then he moved toward the wicket.
"So long!" cried the chief guard. Then he added facetiously. "Maybe I'll see you again some day."
Frank made no answer. He was beyond words. He passed through the wicket, which the guard opened for him, and stood outside in the summer evening light – a free man.
But he experienced no feeling of elation. A sort of apathy had got hold of him. His liberty now seemed almost a matter of indifference, and it was merely a mechanical movement that took him away from the frowning gray stone ramparts which had held him for a long twelve months. He had no thought of whither his steps were taking him. That, too, seemed to be a matter of no importance.
He moved on and on, quite slowly. His letter was still unopened in his pocket, whence it had been thrust along with his money. The trail wound its way down the hill upon which the prison stood. It led on, nearly two miles away, to the village of Alston. But it might have been Chicago for all Frank cared.
He was thinking of the past year, and all the events which led up to his incarceration, with the bitterness of spirit which only such unutterable degradation could inspire. Nor, curiously enough, were his feelings directed against the author, or the methods by which his downfall had been brought about. All that had long since exhausted itself during the interminable hours of wakefulness spent in his stuffy cell. His feelings against the man had worn themselves out, that is, they had settled down to a cold, unemotional hatred. No, it was the thought of life itself which haunted him like an evil shadow, from which he would gladly have escaped.
For him life seemed to be ended. Whichever way he looked it was the same. Nothing could help him, nothing could save him from the hideous stigma under which he lay. He was a convict, an ex-convict, and to the hour of his death so he would remain. Wherever he went the pointing finger would follow him. There was no escape. The brutalizing influence under which he had existed for twelve months had got into his very bones.
He told himself that he belonged to the underworld, to the same world to which some of those wretched beings belonged who had only escaped death at the hands of the law on some slight quibble, and with whom he had so recently herded. The daylight could never again be for him. He belonged to the darkened streets where recognition was less easy, where crime stalked abroad, and flitting shadows of pursuer and pursued hovered the night long.
He sank wearily at the roadside. His weariness was of spirit. His body was as hard as nails from the tremendous physical labors of the past year. A morbid craving to review his wrongs was upon him, that and an invincible desire to wait for the gathering of the evening shadows.
The westering sun was shining full upon him. A great waste of open land stretched away toward a purple line of low hills, fringed with a darker shadow of woods. Not a living soul was about, no one but himself seemed to be upon that trail – and he was glad.
For long hours he sat brooding, and, with each passing minute, his morbid fancies grew. He felt that from the beginning he had been doomed to disaster, and he only wondered that he had not realized it before. Was he not a bastard? Was he not a nobody? His father? He never had a father, only the wretched creature whose selfish passions had brought him into the world.
He saw it all in its true colors now. He could more fully understand it. That was the brand under which he was born, and it was a brand which was part of the criminal side of life.
His thoughts drifted on to Phyllis. She had not understood when he told her. How could she? She was clean, she was wholesome, she was born in wedlock. She – but he turned impatiently from the drift of his thoughts. He could never go back to her. She, like his mother, was a part of that life which was over and done with. He belonged to another world now. The underworld.
The underworld. But why – why should he live on, part of a world he hated and loathed? Why should he permit the cruel injustice of such a fate? There was a way to defeat this ruthless enemy. Why not adopt it? Why live? He had no desire to do so. He had the means at his disposal. He had money with which to procure a gun. Why go to Toronto at all? Why show his shaven head to the world, an object for that hateful, pointing finger?
For a while the idea pleased him. It was such a simple remedy for all his sufferings. He had passed out of Phyllis's life, so why risk the finger of scorn being pointed at her through the fact of his existence. And his mother. His gentle mother. He caught his breath. The finger of scorn would never be a burden to her. She was not like others. Her memory still retained the faintest sheen of light amid his darkness. He knew, even in those dark moments, that his self-inflicted death would utterly destroy her life. No. He was condemned to this under —
He remembered his unopened letter, and drew it from his pocket. He had not looked at it before. It had never occurred to him that he had any connection still with a world beyond the gray stone prison walls.
Now he looked at the envelope, and felt the hot blood of shame sweep up to his tired brain as he saw that it bore his mother's handwriting. He opened it reluctantly enough.
Folded carefully inside a number of sheets of closely written paper was a large sum of money. He took it out and examined it. There were five thousand dollars. Most of it was in bills of large denomination, but on the top, with careful forethought, there were half a dozen which ran from ten dollars down to one dollar bills. He understood, and the careful attention only left him the more pained.
With these was a smaller envelope. It was addressed in Phyllis's well-known hand. This, with the money, he bestowed in an inner pocket and proceeded to read his mother's letter first.
But the pathos of it, the breaking heart, which was sufficiently apparent in every line of that long story she had to tell, passed him utterly by, and left him unmoved. Just now he had no sympathy for anything or anybody in the world but himself, and it would have needed the heart of a Puritan to have blamed him. Yet his reading was not without interest in spite of the hardness of his mood.
It was a long, long story that Monica had to tell him, and it was full of that detail, rambling detail, inspired by the knowledge that she no longer had anything to conceal, the knowledge that the truth could be indulged in, in a manner that had been so long denied her. From the very outset she told him the real facts of his birth, and it was with something approaching regret that he learned that she, Monica, was not his mother. Somehow the shame of his birth, as it had reflected upon her, was forgotten. Somehow the stigma seemed to belong to him solely.
In her story she carried him through the old, old days of their life together, reminding him of trials and struggles never before fully explained. Tribulations which pointed for him her devotion and loyalty to the dead and the living.
Then she passed on to the manner in which he had been trapped by her husband. Here were displayed her passion-torn feelings, which left the man cold. She gave all the details in uncolored nakedness, and while condemning utterly, the cruelty and injustice of her husband, she yet pointed his motives and pleaded for him.
Then she passed on to the manner of her own discovery of his whereabouts in prison, her own discovery of her husband's ruthless handiwork. And again came that note of pleading for the man she loved. She told him how Hendrie, directly he discovered his hideous mistake, moved heaven and earth, and scattered money broadcast, to obtain his release; and how, at last, he had succeeded.
Finally she appealed to him with all the ardor of a mother's love to come back to her at once. To come back and receive all the reparation which she and her husband were yearning to make.
At the end of the reading Frank refolded the letter and returned it to his pocket. In spite of the identity of its author, in spite of his own natural kindliness of heart, there was not one sign of softening in his now hardened blue eyes.
It was different, however, with his second letter. Phyllis had no story to tell, she had no forgiveness to plead for any one. She merely had the fullness of her own simple, loving heart to pour out at his feet. Not once through four pages of closely written paper did she hint at his hardships, his dreadful wrongs. She loved him, she wanted him, as she believed he loved and wanted her; and so she just told him, as only Phyllis, with her wide understanding and simplicity of heart could have told him.
As he returned this letter to his pocket there was a marked difference in his manner. There was a lingering tenderness in his actions, and a dewy moisture about his hollow eyes.
The sun had set, and a golden twilight was softening the world to a gentle, almost velvet tone as he rose from the edge of the grass-lined trail. He stood erect. That painful slouch he had acquired during the past year appeared to have left his shoulders. His head was lifted, and he began to walk down the trail at a gait full of decision and purpose. Phyllys's love had heartened him as it always heartened him. Something of his morbid shadows had receded before the brightly burning lamp of her love. He felt a better man, and a spirit of defiance had risen to combat the claims of that underworld which had threatened to swallow him up.
At Alston he made his way to a store where he could procure some letter paper and envelopes. Just for one moment he hesitated at the door of the building. He was about to meet a free citizen. One who had never known prison bars. With a thrust he drew his hat well down to his ears, squared his shoulders and went in. His precautions proved needless. The man who served him was used to such visitors, and quite indifferent. He scarcely even looked at him as he fulfilled his order, and took the prison money.
Frank hurried away. His self-consciousness was quite painful. But he meant to beat it.
His next effort was a restaurant. He was a long time making his selection. Nor did it occur to him to wonder at the number of cheap eating houses this small village supported. Finally, however, he accepted the doubtful hospitality of a Chinese establishment where they dispensed a cheap chop-suey. Again his appearance caused no surprise as he gave his order and then sat down at a corner table.
Here he drew out his letter paper and laid it on the much-stained table before him, and, in a moment, had forgotten the almond-eyed attendant who was preparing his food.
He felt it necessary to answer Monica's letter at once. His purpose was definite and quite clear in his mind. The past, his past, their past was done with. He would face the world alone, and on his own resources. The letter was quite short and was finished before the Chinaman brought him his food.
His meal finished and bill settled, he waited until the lynx-eyed Mongolian was engaged elsewhere. Then he placed the letter and the five thousand dollars into an envelope and addressed it to Monica at Winnipeg. It was his intention to mail the packet from Toronto.