Chapter XXII: A Woman's Love

It is useless for me to try to picture the consternation which fell upon the four of us when the deputy warden touched me on the shoulder and spoke to me. I can't describe it. I only know that Barrett sprang up, gritting out the first oath I had ever heard him utter; that a look of shocked and complete recognition leaped into the mild brown eyes of the old metallurgist; that Polly was standing up with her arms outstretched across the table as if she were trying to reach me and drag me out of the crushing wreck of all our hopes.

When he found that I was not going to offer any resistance, Cummings was very decent--not to say kindly. He let me walk with the others out of the dining-room; made no show of his authority in the rotunda or at the elevators to point me out as a prisoner; and in the up-stairs room to which he took me, pending the departure-time of the earliest eastbound train, he let me see and talk, first with Barrett, and afterward with my wife.

In this most trying exigency Barrett proved to be all that my fancy had ever pictured the truest of friends. His first word assured me that he meant to stand by me to the last ditch, and I knew it was the word of a man who never knew when he was beaten. While Cummings smoked a cigar in the window-seat I told Barrett the whole pitiful story, beginning with the night when I had promised Agatha Geddis that I would pull her father out of the hole he had digged for himself and ending with my appearance in the Cripple Creek construction camp.

Barrett believed the story, and I didn't have to wait for him to tell me so. I could see it in his eyes.

"Jimmie!" he said, wringing my hand as if he would crush it, "you've got the two of us behind you--I'm speaking for Gifford because I know exactly what he will say. We'll spend every dollar that ever comes out of the Little Clean-Up, if needful, to buy you justice! But I wish you had told me all this before; and, more than that, I wish you had told Polly."

"My God, Bob!" I groaned; "don't rub it in!" And then I told him brokenly how I had known Polly as a little girl in Glendale, and how I was certain that her father had more than once been on the verge of recognizing me. Then, in such fashion as I could, I made my will, or tried to, telling him that Polly must have her freedom, and that he must help her get it, and that my share in the mine must go to her.

"It is the only return I can make her for the deception I have put upon her," I said; "and I want you to promise me that----"

In the midst of all this Barrett had turned aside, swearing under his breath, which was his only way, I took it, of letting me know how it was rasping him. But now he whirled upon me and broke in savagely:

"Stop it, you damned maniac! If you have lived with Polly Everton a whole month and don't know her any better than that, you ought to be shot! She is waiting now to have her chance at you, and I'm not going to take any more of her time." Then he went soft again: "You keep a stiff upper lip, and we'll get you out of this if we have to retain every lawyer this side of New York!"

Polly came so soon after Barrett left that I knew she must have been waiting in the corridor. Cummings was considerate enough to shift his smoking-seat to the other window and to turn his back upon us. All the cynics in the world to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a tender spot in the heart of every man that was ever born, if one can only be fortunate enough to touch it.

"_My darling_!" That is what she said when I took her in my arms; and for a long minute nothing else was said. Then she drew away and held me at arm's length, and there was that in her dear eyes to make me feel like the soldier who faces the guns with a shout in his heart and a song on his lips, knowing that death itself cannot rob him of the Great Recompense.

"You needn't say one word--Jimmie--_my husband_! I have known it all, every bit of it, from the first--from that Sunday morning when Daddy took me over to your mine," she whispered. "I--I loved you, dearest, when I was only a foolish little school-girl, and your sister and I have exchanged letters ever since Daddy and I left Glendale. So I knew; knew when they sent you to prison for another man's crime, and knew, even better than your mother and sister did, why you let them do it. Oh, Jimmie!"--with a queer little twist of the sweet lips that was half tears and half smile--"if you could only know how wretchedly jealous I used to be of Agatha Geddis!"

"You needn't have been!" I burst out. "But you don't know it all. Last winter--in Denver----"

She nodded sorrowfully.

"Yes, dear; I knew that, too. I knew that Agatha Geddis was using you again--against your will; and that this time she had a cruel whip in her hand. We had all heard of the broken parole; it was in the home newspapers, and, besides, your sister wrote me about it."

"And in the face of all this, you----"

She nodded again, brightly this time, though her eyes were swimming.

"Yes, my lover--a thousand times, yes! And I knew this would come, too,--some time; this dreadful thing that has fallen upon us to-day. I am heart-broken only for you, dear. What will they do to you?"

I told her briefly. They would make me serve the remaining two years of the original sentence, doubtless with an added penalty for the broken regulations.

"Dear God--two years!" she gasped, with a quick little sob; and then she became my brave little girl again. "They will pass, Jimmie, dear, and they won't seem so terribly long when we remember what we are waiting for. I'm going with you, you know--as far as they'll let me; and when things look their blackest you must remember that I'm only just a little way off; just a little way--and waiting--and waiting----"

She broke down at the last and cried in my arms, and when she could find her voice again:

"It mustn't be two years, Jimmie; it would kill you, and me, too. They _must_ pardon you--you who have done no wrong! I'll go down on my knees to the Governor, and----"

There was something in this to send the blood tingling to my finger-tips; to rouse the final reserves of manhood.

"Never!" I forbade. "You must never do that, Polly; and you mustn't let Barrett stir hand or foot in that direction. I shall come out an ex-convict, if I have to, but never as a pardoned man with the presumption of guilt fastened upon me for the remainder of my life. Promise me that you won't do anything like that!"

I don't know whether she promised or not. Cummings was stirring uneasily in his window and looking at his watch. I led Polly to the door, kissed her, and put her out into the corridor. The agony, the keenest agony of all, was over, and I turned to the deputy warden. "Whenever you are ready," I said.

Barrett was at the train when we went down, as I was sure he would be, and he seemed strangely excited.

"Give me just a minute with your prisoner, Mr. Cummings," he begged; and after the deputy warden had amiably turned his back: "I've just had a telegram from Gifford. The Lawrenceburg lawyers are offering to compromise. They say that their owners are tired of dragging the quarrel through the courts, and they offer to buy us out, lock, stock and barrel, for five million dollars."

"After they've committed every crime in the calendar to smash us? Not for a single minute!" I exploded.

"Right you are, Jimmie!--I knew you'd be with me!" he agreed defiantly. "We'll fight 'em till the last dog's too dead to bury. There's a hole in the bottom of the sea, somewhere, and we'll find it before we're through with that piratical outfit. Here's your conductor: you'll have to go. Polly will follow you in a day or two. I had a handful of it keeping her from going on this train; but, of course, that wouldn't do. Put a good, stiff bone in your back, and remember that we shan't let up, day or night--any of us--until you're free again. Good-by, old man, and God help you!"