Three sevens A detective story
himself, as Joan left the door and came toward him. “The real reason
was I couldn’t forget that you were here.”
She made a movement of wilting self-abandonment.
“I know. I understand.”
“I wanted to look at this place again, if only from a distance--watch
one night under the stars, and feel that I was near you. Heaven
forgive me!”
He broke off abruptly. He had said more than he had intended to say.
But Joan also spoke impetuously.
“You shan’t sacrifice yourself,” she said. “I shan’t let you.”
“Nor will I let you sacrifice yourself or your father.”
“I’ve told my father as much as he wants to know. He suspects that it
was Three Sevens he saw out there the other time you came back. That
was all right. His conscience could let him let you go again. But it
would be different if he saw you here. No, no! He mustn’t see you
here. He wouldn’t be happy if he did. Think of his happiness. Think
of mine.”
This last was a cry from the heart to which Craig’s own heart gave a
responsive hail. He was telling himself that this moment was worth
all that he had been through. Neither of them could have told how
it happened, but the fact was upon them: Joan had surrendered her
hands to Craig, Craig was pressing her hands against his breast. They
looked at each other. Both of them now were fighting in the same
direction--mind fighting through the storm and the darkness toward
the ultimate salvation.
“I could bluff Green--frighten him,” said Craig.
“I’ll hide you until it’s dark.”
“And get yourself into trouble.”
“Do you suppose--oh, what is any trouble of mine compared to yours!”
“Leave it to Eddie,” said Craig. “Eddie’s the only one, besides
yourself, who knows I am here. He’ll relieve the gate watch to-night.
Flag the midnight train. Jones--Sanders will go on that. There’ll be
a diversion. I’ll take my chances with the posse.”
“You mustn’t take your chances, none that you don’t have to take. I
didn’t want to tell you--I didn’t want to raise false hopes--but I
will. You’re to be pardoned. I don’t know when. But I’m sure of it.
There’s the debt in the red ledger. You can’t pay that off while
you’re here, and if something happens to you, what good would a
pardon do?”
“When I look at you,” said Craig, “and when I hear your voice, I feel
the strength and the faith to defy the world--live--die! Take heaven
or hell by storm!”
But Joan, womanlike, was inspired by this devotion of his to merely
practical ends.
“You remember that Aunt Katherine I spoke of?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got to go to her house.”
“And then?”
“Stay there until this storm blows over--until I can get word to you.
We live in Fairhaven, not far from there.” She read the gathering
objections in Craig’s eyes. “You’ve got to do what I ask you,” she
panted, half in command, half in appeal. “It’s for the welfare of all
of us.”
They heard a distant voice, a distant step. Then the great steam
whistle of San Pedro quavered into a mighty blast--like the whistle
of any other factory--to indicate that another day of toil and
suffering was drawing to a close.
All that evening ex-Warden Green had lurked and watched about this
isolated empire where he had once been the absolute monarch. The
more he studied the situation, the less he understood of it. And with
his deepening mystification came the sense that some one was trying
to make a fool of him--Major Gracie, for example, and again, Three
Sevens, for example.
He was there when a gang of trusties came out of the railroad gate of
the prison and pushed the box car with the mule in it into the prison
yard. What were they doing that for? Was this a subterfuge to get
Three Sevens into the prison without his being seen? But, even so,
what was the big idea? Why should Three Sevens have wanted to come
back to San Pedro at all? And why should Three Sevens have intrusted
himself to the keeping of that small man with a squint in his eye?
The ex-warden had seen Sanders or Jones, all right. That was when the
trusties had come to push the car into the prison yard. Previously,
the ex-warden had seen the keepers come and remove the bound prisoner
from the car, and there for a while the ex-warden was excited with
the thought that this was Three Sevens himself.
No; it was Sancho Red, as the warden could make out later by the
well-known bulk of the famous bandit.
There followed bitter hours when the ex-warden became convinced that
the tip was all wrong in the matter of Three Sevens, and that Masters
had not come anywhere near San Pedro at all.
Seven or eight friends of his had responded to that call Green had
sent out for a posse--ex-keepers mostly from Banner Junction and
Clear Rapids, as eager as Green himself was to get revenge on the man
who had held them up and imprisoned them and ultimately caused them
to lose their places. Green and his posse conferred. It was decided
that it would be well to keep an eye on all those who came to the
prison and went away in the course of the ensuing night.
The sun flamed down. Camp fires began to twinkle over the San
Pedro plain. The original posse had grown--for no special reason,
in response to no special appeal or report, except those of the
deep-seated instinct that all Americans feel for the chase and the
frontier life.
Some sort of a chase was on. Some sort of a vague unrest was in the
air. There was a presentiment abroad that something was going to
happen, no one knew what.
There were rumors enough.
But only a distant shot in the silence of the desert plain, and
a faint babble of voices off in the same direction, rewarded the
listeners during the night, as they sat around Green’s camp fires.
But the plain around San Pedro, when the night was deep, was like
that desert of Egyptian mythology across which the souls of the
dead are conducted to the land of ghosts. There were moving shadows
about. No one could tell for certain just what had happened except
that the ex-warden of San Pedro had fired at a man on a mule and
happily missed him, it having turned out that the man was but another
volunteer member of the ex-warden’s own posse who had ridden over
from his own home on a steed like that because he didn’t have a horse.
Also, it was known that train No. 93 had been flagged, had taken on
a passenger from San Pedro for the West. Not Three Sevens, that. It
couldn’t have been.
Altogether, the night was destined rather to add to than subtract
from the reputation of the late warden of San Pedro.
Green was furious. He was furious with the small, concentrated fury
of the large man whose soul is small. He was all by himself as he
started to ride away along toward dawn. He swore in his beard. He
recalled ugly souvenirs of his official life in San Pedro. He wished
he were still warden there now. He would have done things to relieve
his spirit--things that would have made preceding occurrences there
pale by comparison.
He was on the trail that led vaguely in the direction of the
Fairhaven pike when he heard the honk of an automobile back of him.
His horse shied a little. The auto swept past. It was a big touring
car that the ex-warden recognized. It was the car of a rich young
lawyer of Clear Rapids, a young man named Gary Lee.
Green had reined in his horse. He sat there at the side of the trail
for a long time after Lee and his car were gone. He knew that the Lee
and the Gracie families belonged to the same social status--a sort
of country aristocracy to which he himself had never been able to
attain, not even when he had become warden of San Pedro.
What had Lee been doing over at San Pedro, Green wondered--over there
sparking the new warden’s daughter, perhaps?
“They’ll all run after a gal,” he meditated in his bitterness.
And little suspected that he was just then echoing a thought that was
in the mind of the youth who had passed him so fast in the night in
that big touring car.
CHAPTER XIV
AUNT KATHERINE
It was a trip that had been made in silence. Gary Lee had seen to
that. He hadn’t told Craig to keep silent, but he had hinted that it
would be better not to talk, and Craig had always been a man to take
a hint. Still, he would have told Lee everything, had Lee wanted him
to, or had even permitted him to. But Lee was a lawyer.
He had come up to Craig in the dark prison yard where neither could
have distinctly seen the other’s face.
“I’ve been requested to carry you to a place of safety.”
That was about all. Craig had taken his place in the back of the car.
The prison gates had swung open. And again the night had become the
shoreless gulf of dreams and hopes. Again Craig would have spoken.
He would have said: “How wonderful is the night! How strange is the
destiny of man! What a pity that there are not more men like Major
Gracie in the world! How gladly I’d die for Joan!”
But the handsome, cool, skillful driver of the big touring car was
now ignoring him, had as if forgotten him, had spoken no word to him
at all except that time he bade Craig hide himself. That was when
they passed the ex-warden of San Pedro seated on his horse at the
side of the trail.
Dawn came when they reached a wooded crest beyond which lay
Fairhaven. And then the big car had trodden as softly as a cat into a
sylvan lane.
“I leave you here,” said Lee briefly, without giving Craig a glance.
Craig remembered now. Lee had not looked at him once except in the
shadowy twilight of the prison yard where he had presented himself.
It occurred to Craig that thus would Lee be unable to identify him if
ever called upon to do so. Sensible that, and yet there was something
about it to make Craig color.
“I am sorry to have occasioned you all this trouble,” said Craig.
Lee had a half smile. “I’ll introduce you,” he said. “Wait here.”
There was a cottage at the end of the lane, isolated in a garden of
flowers. The late moon had gone, long ago, but the early daybreak
was as soft and mysterious as moonlight would have been--a cottage,
a garden, woods all around, with even the road and the lane as if
private and hidden from the world.
Craig heard Lee knock at the door. There was a wait. Then he heard
Lee’s voice. Again a long wait. Then Craig saw Lee coming back
accompanied by a small old woman, spry enough but bent.
Craig took off his hat. He was ready to be presented. But as he
noticed Lee continue speaking without looking in his direction, Craig
turned and gazed away. He wished he wasn’t there. He remained there
until he heard a “Good-by, Miss Middleton,” and a snort from the
machine. He turned. Lee was intent on turning his machine, and when
the machine had obeyed him like a nimble elephant, was gone.
“I’m Miss Gracie’s Aunt Katherine,” the old lady said. “What has that
girl been up to now? Come on in. You can tell me about it while I’m
getting you a cup of coffee.”
There was a short path leading from the lane to the cottage door.
This path was crowded on both sides by ornamental shrubs--a hundred
varieties of them, a riot of them, disordered and lusty, greedy for
attention. And among these, Aunt Katherine poked and tweaked while
she walked, no coddler, but a natural gardener, breaking off a twig
here, a leaf there, pushing back one clamorous spray to give air and
light to something else, rough and kindly.
Before Craig had finished his coffee, Aunt Katherine was treating him
like that. She had some bitter aloes growing in a little hothouse.
She was like those bitter aloes--stiff and rough, but salutary.
She pried into his wounds and she pried into his story. She turned
him wrong side out. Many a woman, with age, gets the strength of a
man without losing anything of her womanhood--becomes the human being