Chapter XVI: Mere Rumors

A part, at least, of what Craig had seen with the eye of his mind was right with regard to Joan Gracie. Intuitional, passionate, with both the passion native to youth and a nature made that way; but loyal! Loyalty was the crown of her character, topping off the complex all of it as did the yellow hair on top of her complex, strong, and likewise beautiful physical presence.

This was part of what had been in Major Gracie’s brain that afternoon he had sat out there with Daniel Craig--one-time Thomas Masters, convict No. 3777--at the side of him and yet raised no hand to capture him. The major himself was loyal. But with him also--as it must have been with his daughter--this loyalty had not been so simple as he could have demanded.

Loyalty to the State! Loyalty to this man--this mere boy who had thus far so badly bungled his life!

The major hadn’t forgotten that stark terror that had been in his heart the day that the delayed special was rushing him to San Pedro. What had happened to Joan? And what might not have happened to her if it hadn’t been for this same Daniel Craig.

He understood Joan’s feelings. It hadn’t been necessary for her to give him much of a report on what she herself had done--not at first. They had learned to take each other for granted.

The fuller report had come that night, late, when she and her father were alone, and when she knew, and he knew, that Daniel Craig was miles away on the borrowed horse. It was only then that she brought out Craig’s photograph--“Thomas Masters, manslaughter, No. 3777”--and told her father the reasons that had inspired her in helping him to his precarious liberty.

The major heard her through.

A tall and thoughtful man was the major, with a curved and heavy, but short, gray mustache, a tuft of gray hair under his lower lip, short-clipped gray hair, tossed back near one temple in what used to be called a “cowlick.”

“You did this on your own responsibility?” said the major.

“Yes, sir,” said Joan, standing very straight in front of him, as she always did when talking business.

“You committed a crime.”

“It was a crime that was--right.”

The major himself had written a work on “Crime and Moral Turpitude.” But he did not smile.

“Why didn’t you trust me with this before?”

“You were involved. Your hands were tied by your oath of office.”

“I might have won him a pardon for saving you.”

“And had the whole world saying that you had staged the thing to disgrace your predecessor!”

The major saw the point. He never did have a head for politics. Joan did. Few women that have not. But the major also saw something else, dimly, a little more clearly, then more clearly yet. It was as if, at the time, he had known there would come a day when he should want to recall the picture. He was recalling it now:

A dingy courtroom where a boy was on trial for his life; a boy who was upstanding, with a fine, strong profile, a melancholy but soldierly gray eye; a boy who would speak no word in his own behalf, or tell what his name was, or from whence he came. Some one else had said that his name was Masters--Thomas Masters. Some one else had said that he had been found in the dark near where the boss of the camp was shot down; that from the place where he was there had come the flash of the shot; that at his side was the revolver with one cartridge empty, of a caliber that fitted the bullet.

The prosecutor had begged for a verdict of first-degree murder. The lawyer appointed for the defense had mumbled a perfunctory address on the lack of motive and the presence of a reasonable doubt. The jury had brought in a verdict of manslaughter. And his honor the judge:

“Thomas Masters, what have you to say why judgment of the court should not be pronounced upon you according to law?”

Still no word; no word at all from the boy through all of this.

The judge had harped on this silence in his discourse preceding the sentence. He was one of those judges who are easily hurt and savage in reprisal. “I shall therefore sentence you to twenty years in State’s prison.”

Not the palatial penitentiary, nor the reformatory, but State’s prison, San Pedro! The major himself had groaned a bit in his heart, although he was no sentimentalist at all, where lawbreakers were concerned.

“When he told me that he was innocent, I believed him,” said Joan.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said the major, out of his thoughtfulness. “Although any man in the prison would have said the same thing, though not once in a thousand times would it be the truth.”

“It was true this time. It must be true.”

The major’s mind slipped from his daughter’s words to what he had heard from No. 8888--that little old-timer named Yarmouth. He also had made a statement like this one almost word for word: “’Tis the truth this time, sir. It must be true.”

Perhaps Eddie, the Yegg, also was intuitional. Eddie, almost as the sole remaining prisoner outside the hospital at the time that the new warden of San Pedro arrived, had reported in full all that had taken place--his own oath, down there in the punishment block, an oath to obey orders as given by Three Sevens, to kill no man, and to make no effort to escape on his own account. Eddie recounted all of this with touches of pride and imagination.

For, in the course of his professional career, Eddie had been through a number of prison revolts and riots, and this had been different from all of them, somehow mysterious and beautiful.

Said Eddie: “’Twas the thought back of it, sir, that ought to’ve brought him the luck.”

Perhaps Major Gracie was of the same opinion.

Not so, Gary Lee. For, a couple of days after he had driven the strange man away from San Pedro in his big car by night and brought him to the refuge of Aunt Katherine’s, Lee had driven again to San Pedro and there had called on Joan and her father--particularly on Joan.

“Bad business, Joan,” he said, when he and the girl were alone.

“What?”

“Your having anything to do with getting this man away from prison. I wish that you and your father had decided to remain in Fairhaven. Confound it! When I think of you and him being mixed up with a lot of felons!”

“Felons are people, Gary,” she answered. “I dread them, and hate what they represent as much as you do. Still, you can’t generalize.”

She may have colored slightly. Her eyes failed to meet his.

“You know,” said Lee, “that there is nothing under heaven that I wouldn’t do on your account, Joan. No risk that you could ask me to take would be too great.”

“I’m grateful to you, Gary,” said Joan.

“I’m not referring, therefore, to anything that might have happened to me if I’d been caught helping that convict to escape. It’s the fact that you’d be willing to run such a risk, submit others to the risk--your father, your Aunt Katherine. No convict is worth it--not all the felons in the State.”

“I thought you said you were interested in reform.”

“I am.”

“This was humanitarian.”

“That’s the danger of this sort of stuff,” said Lee. “You let your sympathies run away with you.”

“He was ready to sacrifice himself on our account--give up his own chances of escape.”

“Noble, I’ll admit.”

“And undo the wrong he had committed. He didn’t intend to let the bad ones out, and he’s promised to bring them back.”

Lee was torn between scorn and pity, anger and desire.

“I did what you wanted me to,” he said. “I even went so far as not to look at him when it was getting light. I couldn’t tell him now from Adam. I wouldn’t know him if I met him in the street. I did all this on your account when my every instinct was to arrest him myself, or, at least, so fix his face in my mind that I could identify him and do my part as a citizen and an officer of the court--help put him back where he belongs.”

“I’m sorry--sorry!” said Joan.

“Then, marry me,” said Lee.

Her eyes finally met his.

“You said you wouldn’t ask me again unless----”

“You gave me some sign,” said Lee, with concentrated feeling. “Wasn’t this thing sign enough? Your honor and mine are at stake. They’ll arrest this cur. He’ll blab--tell what he knows--try to blackmail us both.”

She met him squarely.

“I don’t believe it.”

“Joan, I’m a lawyer. I know these vermin.”

“Don’t! Don’t!” she said. “It isn’t fair. It isn’t just.”

“Marry me,” he whispered, with a touch of desperation.

She looked at him in silence. Almost in silence he left her.

There was a danger in this situation which neither Gary Lee nor Joan Gracie had mentioned, but which both had recognized in their several ways. They had not mentioned it, although, in many respects, that same degree of almost brutal frankness existed between them as often exists between brother and sister. Like brother and sister, they were of the same caste, had known each other intimately since childhood--had squabbled, played, studied together, gone to the same parties.

That was in Clear Rapids, the principal city of the State, where Joan’s mother herself had passed her girlhood. Then, when Mrs. Gracie died, Major Gracie had returned to the home of his own youth, Fairhaven, near which place Aunt Katherine Middleton had her home.

The danger was this:

Gary Lee must have things his own way. He had always been like that. Generous, courtly, as long as his own will wasn’t interfered with, he could be as ruthless as a tiger when things went wrong.

A little strain of madness, perhaps, such as all of us are reported to possess--and, if the truth were known, the only thing that makes life worth living, perhaps. It’s like the yeast, bad in itself, a fungus, a ferment, that yet makes bread palatable; or the strain of madness that makes the poet, or the general, or the savant who passes a lifetime looking at bugs and worms.

When Lee read in the Clear Rapids _Sentinel_, incidental to the other news that was still coming out of San Pedro, that Miss Joan Gracie had returned to her home in Fairhaven, he felt a familiar surge of heat in the region of his heart. It was a feeling he had known ever since he could remember--when he was a mere infant, and the nurse wouldn’t give him a toy, when he was a cub, and they wouldn’t let him eat another piece of cake, when he was an adolescent and some girl or other, Joan as often as not, showed preference for a rival.

There entered Lee’s mind a dark thought that this was a case of rivalry now, that there actually was a rivalry between himself--himself, Gary Lee!--and this felon.

But he conquered the thought, to some extent. Also, to some extent he conquered that feeling of heat in the region of his heart. He was aware of his weakness. As he grew older he had learned, as men must, each year a little more self-control.

Yet there was no denying it. There was Joan in Fairhaven. Five miles, not more, from Fairhaven was the cottage to which he himself had carried that man in the dark of the night. His hand trembled a little as he picked up the telephone from his office desk. He ordered his car. His stenographer looked at him with a touch of concern.

“You’re to attend a directors’ meeting at two thirty.”

“I can’t be there. Tell ’em so.”

“You were to see Mr. Strouthers at----”

“Telephone him not to come.”

“Will you sign your letters?”

“Hold them,” said Lee. “I’m called to Fairhaven. Put everything off until to-morrow.”

He descended to the street. The garage was near by. There was never any delay when he ordered his car. The car rolled up to meet him at the curb. He changed his hat for a cap, drew on a pair of driving gloves, dismissed the chauffeur. It always helped him a lot, in a mood like this, to drive as few chauffeurs would or could have driven.

He was standing there with his hand on the door of the car, when a newspaper man whom Lee knew well happened along.

“Hello, Gary,” said the journalist. “Big news.”

“Hello, Jack,” and Gary, indifferent, entered the car.

“They’ve got him,” said the newspaper man.

“Who?”

“Three Sevens, the fellow----”

“They’ve what?”

“Just got the tip at the office. They caught the fellow who put over the big play at San Pedro.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’re never sure till we know, but we got the tip from one of our own men. Phoned over from Fairhaven----”

Lee had thrown in the clutch, was on his way.

* * * * *

Major Gracie, at San Pedro, had got word also almost as soon as any one that there were matters of interest to him under way over there in the direction of his home. First that a farmer had recognized one of the escaped convicts by the name of Gosse. Three hundred dollars’ reward, in this case, and the informant wanted to register his claim for all that was coming to him. Then another informant telephoned. Next came a claim by telegram. After that, the _Sentinel_ sent word that it was not Gosse who had been seen, but Masters, the ringleader of the big escape.

The major had sent word to his daughter to their home in Fairhaven. It wasn’t a measure of discipline, exactly, but he felt sure that she had been getting a trifle too much of this prison atmosphere lately. She was too earnest, too devoted to her work as his secretary and mentor.

There crinkled into his thought a crooked little flash of light--like remote lightning, faint and devoid of thunder as yet, but possibly prophetic of storm.

Did Joan have anything to do with this? He also ordered his car, was off for Fairhaven.

Joan Gracie herself also had heard the news. It had been a day of news.

First of all, her aunt had telephoned her, as she did daily. Aunt Katherine was the volunteer probation officer of this convict she had harbored at Joan’s request. She understood Joan almost better than any one did. Joan had acted on impulse. Joan had been sure that her impulse was right. But, since then, the girl had begun to worry.

“La, he’s all right. I’ll ship him off, as soon’s you say--_if_ he’ll wait that long.”

Every day since Joan’s Return to Fairhaven Aunt Katherine had telephoned things like that, except when Aunt Katherine was coming to town, as she did two or three times a week, in the suburban bus. It was the old lady who was furnishing the strength required by the situation now, and there was also a grim humor in the situation that had made its appeal to Aunt Katherine’s bitter but wholesome nature.

So far as she knew she had never harmed a human being in the course of her long life, yet now she had become a lawbreaker by harboring an escaped convict. The whole country was interested in the discovery of a famous bad man. She alone was seeing him daily and finding him gentle and good. There was a thousand dollars’ reward out for his arrest. She had him.

But she wouldn’t let Joan come to her house, not while Craig was there. Ah, no! People talk. She herself was safe from scandal. Anyway, she was too old to mind any more. But not so, where a young girl was concerned, Joan above all.

Then, at last, this day, after those earlier rumors of a bandit chase through the woods north of town, there came a call from Aunt Katherine for Joan to come out. No explanation--everything all right.

Joan met a friend at the gate, daughter of some county official or other, and hence in touch with the courthouse.

“Have you heard!” she cried. “They say they’ve caught that famous bandit--Masters----”

“Where?”

“Out near your Aunt Katherine’s.”