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 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.