Chapter XIII: Ship and Beacon

Craig was the first to speak. Perhaps it was because he had already done his thinking, had decided to accept the one course that appeared to be clear to him.

“I’ve come to see your father,” he said.

He dared not address her otherwise. All that old equality of theirs was gone, so far as Craig was concerned. In a few minutes now he would be the prisoner again. So he was telling himself. He was telling himself that he was the prisoner already.

“My father?” breathed Joan.

She was looking at Craig. But also she was seeing Eddie Yarmouth. On Eddie’s face was a look that was stricken, yet not minus hope, for Eddie, emboldened by the need of the moment, was giving her a signal of distress, an appeal to stand by. So was Sanders.

Joan spoke rapidly to these latter.

“Eddie,” she said, “you and this gentleman may go and see about having the car pushed into the yard. Get some men to help you.” She drew an inspiration from their misery, sought to comfort them. “I’ll arrange everything here. Everything will be all right.”

She scarcely knew what she was saying. She scarcely heard the sound of her own voice. If Craig had been like a ship driving along a dark coast, she was suddenly become the beacon--shining, doing the right thing, and not questioning beyond this present necessity. The right thing was not to involve others. And everything would be all right.

She saw Craig changed. She saw him free. She saw him very much a man--a young man, tall and strong, roughly dressed. He was dressed as any young engineer might have been dressed when engaged on a rough job, for he had outfitted himself down there in the swamps. It made her head reel and her heart gasp like a fish, the mere thought of taking this man and locking him into a cell.

“You mustn’t see my father,” she said.

There were tears in her voice, none in her eyes. They were liquid clear.

“I must.”

“Why?”

“To give myself up.”

“Why must you give yourself up?”

“I’ve let myself in for it--the only thing I can do.”

“You mean because your presence is suspected here.”

“By Green and others.”

“They’ve seen you?”

“No.”

“Then----”

“But they’ll see me if I try to get away.”

“Still you can get away.”

“Not without their knowing that either you or your father have helped me. Joan--Joan! I am willing. Where is your father?”

“No, no! You mustn’t see him.” She ran over to the door through which her father had disappeared. She stood there for a moment listening and still trying to get a grip on her thoughts. “Why--why----”

Craig read her thoughts.

“I wanted to show you how strong I was, how clever I was,” he began, with a touch of self-contempt. But his mood softened, even toward 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.