Three sevens A detective story
complete and perfect, possessed of all human knowledge worth knowing,
and all human experience.
“You’re a tough nut,” she said. “Joan and Jerry--that’s her
father--have been sending me human specimens now for years, and I
thought I’d about exhausted the lot of them. But you’re new. Most
of you boys are all alike when you’re just out of prison, crazy to
square yourselves, but just common and ordinary.”
“I’m like that,” said Craig.
“I’d die before I admitted it,” she said.
“I’ve got to work.”
“You’ll work as long as I have you.”
“I can’t stay here. The posses are probably out again right now.”
“I’ll guess no posse’ll bother you here.”
“It may get you into trouble!”
“La, I’m too old to let that worry me. I’m seventy-four and a
woman--if you know what that means--which you don’t.”
Craig slept the clock around. There was a back porch to the cottage,
and a part of this had been partitioned off and made into a
detached room, two sides of which were lattice, covered thick with
morning-glory vines--fragrant, airy, filled with the small noises of
the garden and the neighboring woods. This was his room, all his own;
and the last time that he had a room of his own--so long ago that it
seemed like something remembered from another life--was the airless
iron box in the dark subcellar of San Pedro.
In the meantime, it had been as Joan Gracie had predicted that first
day that she and Daniel Craig had ever seen each other.
The former population of San Pedro was drifting back again. There
had been other posses out scouring the country here and there. Also,
there had been raids on cheap lodging houses in big cities here and
there. Now and again some railroad detective or other had “swapped
shots” with a fugitive. Portraits and descriptions of those who had
fled the old prison still adorned the walls of depots and telegraph
offices along the railroads, the windows of country stores and
village post offices.
Still, as the girl had foretold, all this had been but as a net for
the taking of the smaller fish. The big ones, like the two that Craig
had himself thus far taken, had broken through.
Craig, cutting firewood out in the thick forest that extended for
miles in almost every direction from his place of refuge, sat on the
barrow he had loaded and looked at the little red book. Not even here
would he know peace until that debt was paid. He read the names, like
the items of an account that had been written against his own name:
Trick O’Ray, safe blower and robber; Count Wolf, international thief
and swindler; Ben Jarvis, highwayman; Taylor Leamy, promoter of fake
mining companies; Harry Gosse, otherwise “Harry, the Goose”----
The signature of Joan Gracie looked up at him, as she had written it,
linked with his own. He kissed the place where her hand had rested.
Could he keep on dawdling like this, waiting? Waiting for what!
It was as if some similar spell had come over the woods, as well.
There, for the time being, no bird chirped nor leaf stirred in the
breeze, no squirrel ran, nor even a locust sang.
Then, through this silence, came a slight vibration of sound that
brought a chill with it--as the whir of a rattlesnake does, however
faint and far away. This was no rattlesnake, although there were a
few in the open, sandy places. But, all the same, the sound was one
that caused Craig to clasp the red book to his breast, caused him to
hold his breath, with open mouth, as he listened.
There was something in that sound that had recalled the prison--why,
how, he could not tell.
He knew that the chase had never stopped, never would stop so long as
he or any one else who had escaped from San Pedro should be on earth
and still unaccounted for. He knew that much about the law, both
man-made and natural, that it never forgets.
But he hadn’t expected it so soon. Then he had left the barrow behind
him, was running through the woods in the direction of the cottage.
He went with all the speed he could manage--while making no noise.
He came out of the woods at the back of the garden. He vaulted the
fence, sped up the back path and around the side of the house with
the silent certainty of a shadow. How grateful he was now that Aunt
Katherine had kept him here, and his strength was with him again!
Just before he turned the corner of the house that would bring him in
view of whoever it was out there in front, talking to Aunt Katherine,
he paused once more, drew a deep breath.
Yes, he had recognized that voice. He had heard it once, heard it in
the dark. It was the voice, sneering and cruel, that he had heard
from dark cell No. 4, the voice of him who had boasted that he was a
“killer.” And the name of this creature was in the little red book,
put there in the blessed handwriting of Joan Gracie.
“Well, ain’t you goin’ to give me no money?” This from the killer.
“No. I’ve fed you, now be on your way.”
Craig turned the corner. There was Aunt Katherine, with a grim
expression on her face, plucking off a dead leaf here, tucking a
branch up there, rough and nervous, but all as usual.
Beyond her was the former occupant of No. 4, and there was joy in his
face. It was a face that was pasty and concave. The joy was a greed.
It was a fearful thing to see, or to guess the presence of--as if
there had been another face, or another something, back of a sheet,
showing itself only through those glittering eyes.
Craig took a step forward--a step as stiff and ponderous and yet
as silent as the step of a mastiff stalking a cat. And, curiously
enough, he was aware at once that Aunt Katherine knew he was
there--that she had seen his shadow--while the man from No. 4 could
see nothing, for the moment, but this fascinating, hypnotizing victim.
An old woman! All alone! Rich, most likely! Not even a neighbor
within a quarter of a mile!
Then pasty face looked up.
“Hello, Harry,” said Craig softly. He repeated it, what was written
in the little red book, and to himself it sounded as if Joan were
there repeating it for him, word for word, as she had written it:
“‘Harry Gosse--Harry the Goose--married a girl and murdered her.’”
The thing looking through the sheet, the dirty drab sheet, of Harry’s
face flickered and changed.
“Why, Tommy,” he began.
Then Harry had dropped his hand into the side pocket of his coat. He
didn’t stop or hesitate or try to pull his hand out again. He fired
through the cloth.
CHAPTER XV
QUARRY
There was a shout from the road. And the shout spoiled any intention
Harry, the Goose, may have had for a second shot. Yet he knew
that his first and only shot had gone wide of the mark. With that
peculiar, microscopic interest that all men have for little things in
the midst of big events, Harry had seen a blood-red rose, well off
to one side of Craig, drop as if the stem of it had been snipped by
invisible shears, and knew that it was there his bullet had passed.
Besides, Craig had him--had seized his two wrists, the one that was
in his pocket and the other in the air, and was squeezing them fit to
pulverize the bones.
It would have been all over with Harry, the Goose--was, in fact, all
over with him, anyway--if it hadn’t been for that shout in the road.
For both he and Craig had twisted so that they could look in that
direction. And, for a static moment, so they remained--a picture of
two brothers embracing each other, ready to kiss.
A group of men, also momentarily static, were out there at the head
of the lane.
Harry, the Goose, let out a whimper.
“They were follerin’ me!”
It was true, as Craig himself divined. Harry, the Goose, was no
top-liner, like Count Wolf, or even Trick O’Ray, to fool the sleuths
for very long, not even the country sleuths. Over beyond the woods,
somewhere, he had held up a country school-teacher--a girl--and
robbed her of fifty cents besides almost frightening her to death.
Then a farmer who came up had got busy on the telephone.
There they were now, a dozen farmers, some of them mounted--some
armed with pitchforks, most of them armed with guns.
These, though, Craig saw as more details of the landscape. There
was a central figure to the landscape, and him alone could Craig
distinctly see. It was his former master, big and bearded--ex-tyrant
of San Pedro, ousted, disgraced, smarting with the pain of it all,
lustful of revenge: Warden Green!
At sight of him, Craig felt the strength go out of his arms. His
heart stood still. What if these men should arrest him here, find out
that he had been working for Aunt Katherine, near relative of the new
warden of San Pedro.
What of her? What of Joan Gracie and her father? What of Gary Lee,
the aristocrat, who had brought him here?
He was willing to take the chance of the posse out there capturing
Harry Gosse.
He whirled and stooped. He ran crouchingly, to keep the cover as much
as possible of these friendly flowers he had come to love. He rounded
the house, back the way he had come, through the back garden, over
the back fence, into the woods.
He wasn’t frightened on his own account. Aunt Katherine’s worries
were all that worried him. These woods he knew. No Indian captive,
with a hostile tribe at his back, could have gained these woods with
a greater assurance of escape.
A sinking in his heart told him that this was so even when a complex
bellow told him that he had been discovered again, that the crowd was
starting in pursuit. That was Warden Green’s voice booming through
the others as a horn booms through the lighter instruments of an
orchestra.
“Git’m, boys! The first one! Three Sevens himself! Thousand dollars’
reward!”
“I’m running,” said Craig, “with a price on my head.”
It seemed strange that this should be so, yet another major link in
his chain of great events. Stranger yet it seemed to him that he
wasn’t frightened.
He wasn’t frightened until, as he was about to slacken his pace in
a mossy little dell where the water dripped all about and queer
little bell-like flowers grew, thick and waxy white. Here where he
had dreamed so often, since his second escape from San Pedro, he
heard a thudding footfall back of him, a rending of brush, a gasp of
exhausted lungs.
Some one had almost overtaken him. And it was then that it occurred
to him how easy it would be for this other to shoot him in the back.
This other was armed. He was not. He dared not stop. He dared not
turn. The panting pursued him. Each gasping breath might mean that
the runner would stop running, in despair, and begin to shoot.
Back there where the race began, a number of the men, Warden Green
among them, had paused for a moment to inquire of Miss Middleton if
she had seen any other than these two about.
She said yes. She said they knew her--how she always gave work and
a mouthful to eat to every one who came along, and how one of these
boys had been lingering around here for quite a while, and that she
had been expecting him back at any minute. She rambled on, until they
lost patience with her, and also a fraction of invaluable time--which
is always enough to win or lose a race.
So they murmured among themselves and scattered at top speed, and
Aunt Katherine picked up the blood-red rose which, as one might say,
had been shed in her honor. A hard old woman, and as much a man as a
woman in some respects, but Aunt Katherine was all woman, right at
that particular moment, with the tears dropping down her wrinkled
cheeks.
“God save you, Danny!” she whispered, under her breath--she who had
always treated this ex-convict, who had been thrust upon her, with a
certain wholesome bitterness.
Craig ran. He plunged downhill. He jumped into gullies. There was no