Chapter XI: Live Freight

But Craig had learned his lesson when he was fighting Bud Gaspell, and he had reflected on it often since. The moment he had clinched with Bud, he and Bud were on the same level--with the chances in favor of Bud, for Bud would have been most willing to kill, while Craig himself was loath. It was a lesson that abided with him when he confronted the problem of taking Sancho Red in tow. A fight with Sancho would have been like a fight with a snake or a ’gator, in very truth, and all the chances, this time, on Sancho’s side.

And Craig didn’t want to die. Never had he taken such thought of life, never so regarded it as a definite and limited trust, or heritage, to be used to its utmost value.

He knew it--that he was as willing as any man to risk his life or give it outright, should the time ever come when this would be necessary. But to risk it uselessly----

He let his thought taper off, as he heard a splash of oars.

He was standing there in the pitch darkness on the edge of a narrow cut a good mile from Pahkaville. The cut was so narrow that he could have jumped across it had he cared to, or had he been able to see the other bank. But the water in it was deep enough to float the pirogue. He heard soft voices as the pirogue entered the cut.

“Are you sure you know the way?” That was Sancho.

“Sure!” That was Mr. Sanders.

“Why don’t you stick to the open water?”

“I’m afraid we’ll be followed.”

“They won’t find out what you done till to-morrow.”

“Maybe some of the company’s shoo-fly cops have got wise.”

“They’d ’a’ pinched you.”

“No, they’d have doped out a better plan.”

“What?”

“Laid for me out in the woods, so’s to shoot me and get the swag for themselves.” There was a silence.

Craig wondered if that rudimentary brain of Sancho’s wasn’t occupied, just a little bit, with the bloodstains on the wall, the shooting pains that had disturbed his sleep.

He heard the sheep-herder’s brother speak again:

“I think they’ve been suspecting me, anyway.”

“You never told me so,” said Sancho softly.

“I was skeert you’d back out,” said the little man. “No one likes to get a bullet through his chest.”

“Shut up!”

“It makes him spit blood.”

“Not so loud.”

“Like a brother of mine.”

“Where?”

“New Mexico.”

“Shut up--and pull.”

“I’m pullin’; but I can’t forget him as I found him in the rocks at daybreak. Some one had flashed a light in his eyes----”

“Hah!”

Right then there was a flash of light in Sancho’s eyes. It struck him and bathed him like a bath of cold fire. It held him as he groped up with his hands in a blinded effort to shut the light out. At the same time the little man who had been rowing the boat swung over with an oar and brought it down, crashing on Sancho’s head. And that settled Sancho for a while.

“I told you not to hit him so hard,” said Craig.

“I couldn’t help it,” said Mr. Sanders. “I was thinking about my brother.”

“You may have killed him.”

“Oh, wouldn’t that be fine! God bless you!”

“Hold on,” said Craig. “I think he’s coming to. Now, bring his other hand up behind him like this. Now his feet.”

They trussed up Sancho Red as Craig had once seen alligator hunters truss up a big bull of a saurian they had taken alive--not only his hands and his feet were tied, but half-hitches every few inches were thrown over his arms and legs.

It was just as well. Sancho made some unreasoning efforts to free himself, as soon as he had his consciousness back. He doubled his great body and flopped about like a fish. He had the same sort of life in him that all such animals have, low in the scale of creation. Life, and the instinctive struggle for life was implanted in every cell, not all concentrated in the brain, as happens when the top of the ladder of creation is reached.

Once they were sure that the cords would hold, they let him flop. They watched him curiously. Dispassionately they listened to his blasphemies. It suited them that he should weaken himself.

They had brought him far beyond the last of the cypress slashings, to a camp Craig himself had established. It was on a little knoll, or hummock, right in the midst of the deep swamp--a place of mystery and charm, full of slanting light and green shadows, perfumed with wild orange, gay with bird song, and touched with the spectral passage of silent butterflies.

Here Craig slept four hours, and let his spirit go out in his dreams over the long, back trail to San Pedro, and the girl who was there. Then he watched four hours while Mr. Sanders slept. It was going to be watch-and-watch like that all the time that they were on the trail with this wild animal captive of theirs. But they would tame him.

Sancho, however, was to display his enormous resistance. For almost two whole days he even refused water--gurgling and cursing when they poured water into his mouth. He would take no food. He would lie quiet for hours, then they would see his great body writhing again. Once, in that first forty-eight hours, Craig loosed Sancho’s bonds, and Sancho almost escaped. So Craig drew the ropes tight again.

The pirogue brought the three of them out of the cypress country at last. It was not more than a week later when a small man, cross-eyed, appeared before the station agent of Bayou Crossing and told him a story. He said that he had a mule of value that he wanted to take back home, to San Pedro, some five or six hundred miles to the north; and, to this end, he wanted to hire a box car.

“That’s easy,” said the station agent. “All you’ll need is the price.”

The little man was evidently well supplied with money. He ought to have been. What money had been Sancho’s was now his, and he was using it--for Sancho’s own good. The store had not been robbed.

“And I’ve got a friend who’s goin’ with me,” said the little man. “We’re goin’ to travel and sleep in the car.”

There _was_ a mule. It was a mule that the little man had bought in a neighboring parish. A fairly good mule, but it made the station agent laugh a little when he saw it. Funny what exalted values the owners of live stock put on their animals at times--almost as if the mule, or the horse, or the cow, or whatever it happened to be--was a member of the family. But, shucks! Hadn’t he seen fairly good men shot in a dispute over the possession of a mere houn’ dog? He had.

He billed the car and the mule through to San Pedro. He didn’t see that other bit of live stock that was put into the car that night.

The idea that there might have been some such thing never occurred to the station agent at all--not until almost a week later, when a couple of strange detectives who had been hanging around Pahkaville showed up and asked him questions about a man who might have looked like the famous bandit, Three Sevens.

On the strength of what the station agent told them, the detectives began to use the telegraph.

It may have been that ex-warden Samuel Green of San Pedro came the nearest of any one to solving the mystery that enveloped Three Sevens. Once the big man with the beard had had a daughter of his own. He no longer claimed her as his own, wasn’t sure, as a matter of fact, whether she was still alive or not. But this he knew, that there had been no change since Solomon’s day of the way of a man with a maid.

A word here and a word there, and he had come to imagine, or see with the eye of his mind--something of what had passed that day when the new warden’s daughter and convict No. 3777 had been in the prison practically alone. A word here and a word there, and he had got a glimmering of the truth concerning the return of those other convicts--George Washington, Solly Wells, and Bud Gaspell.

The warden, all by himself, through a mental process all his own--never having read a book in his life--had found an adage of his own to take the place of that famous phrase in French criminal procedure: “_Cherchez la femme!_” Mr. Green’s version was: “There’s a woman in it!”

To be quite frank about it--as the ex-warden was frank with himself--he hoped for the worse. Wouldn’t a bit of scandal like that be great? Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that blot out, as with a thick cloud, his own ignominious wind-up at San Pedro?

Then, just a little too late, the ex-warden got a tip. It was a tip given him by a railroad telegrapher at Banner Junction with whom Green had conserved friendly relations.

The telegrapher showed him a telegram he had received, which told of a certain box car that had been billed through to San Pedro.

The warden’s mind began to work--began to play, first of all, around that pet theory of longing of his of some sort of scandalous relationship existing between the present warden’s daughter and this fugitive. Three Sevens was taking this means of coming back to see the girl.

But there was something the matter with this theory, too. If the girl was in love with the fellow, she would have run off and joined the fugitive where they would have been safer. Girls were like that. He knew. Didn’t he have his own daughter, Amy, to go by?

There was something else the ex-warden didn’t understand. He knew Masters and he knew Sancho Red--knew them in certain aspects better than any man did. And, there was no denying it; the two men weren’t mates, never could be. Maybe they both were man-killers. That made no difference. They were not the twain to go riding around the country together, trusting each other, helping each other to outwit detectives.

Then there crept into Mr. Green’s mind an additional ray of light. He recalled that interview of his with Three Sevens the day of the big get-away--what Masters had said about freeing those only who deserved to go free.

He saw the truth. He saw it even when, like many another man confronted by the truth, he wouldn’t admit that it was the truth. No! No! No! The idea that convict No. 3777 should now be risking his skin merely to turn in another convict, and this convict one of the most dangerous of them all--that, too, was absurd.

Nonetheless, the ex-warden got busy. He was not without friends and influence in the county where he had lived so long and turned over petty graft and favors of a sort for so many years. He organized a posse all his own, by phone and telegraph.

What was the big idea? Was he expecting another jail delivery? Why should he want the boys to surround San Pedro so secretly, and wait, and wait? Green wouldn’t explain. He himself started for San Pedro.

Less than an hour ago the accommodation freight had, sure enough, dropped a box car at the San Pedro siding. The car was still there. From the half gate guarding the open door of the car a mule stretched out an intelligent, interrogating head.

The ex-warden was sitting in a small and rusty auto which he used for his longer jaunts about the country, although he preferred a horse. He was a fine figure on a horse--much finer than when crumpled up in his little automobile. But he had no thought now for his appearance at all. He sat in his auto and looked at the freight car and the mule. There they were, as if confirming all those suspicions and half-formulated theories and longings that were squirming in his heart and brain.

While the ex-warden of San Pedro looked and looked, so did Craig.

He was still in the car. In the end of it, near the roof, there was a little square window. The wooden shutter of this was tilted up an inch or so. Under this he could see the wide, gray prospect of the prison wall, and then, pasted against this like a poster, the dusty little auto with the big ex-warden in it.

For a moment or so there seemed to be a great silence--a silence so intense that it seemed to Craig as if he were back in the dark cell again, listening to the reverberating hum of the prison power plant.

Wouldn’t it be strange if the dark cell should receive him again? Yet, didn’t the bright dream of every life after a manner, end like that--in the grave?