Chapter XVII: Gathering Storm

Meantime that hunt through the woods for that king of big-game animals, man himself!

The rumors that had thus far spread out as far as Clear Rapids and San Pedro, and farther yet, as a matter of fact, for this developing event in the neighborhood of Fairhaven was the news of the day for the country at large, were like lions of magnetic attraction, an attraction that ran straight to the innermost fibers of half the men who heard the reports, calling them to drop other things, awakening inside of them old atavisms of the chase and war. A man hunt was on. It was free for every one. Grab a pitchfork or a gun.

That nucleus of a mob, with the ex-warden of San Pedro at its head, was growing steadily.

A man in a Norman runabout saw a farmer with a gun on the highway and asked him what was going on. The farmer told him. The Norman became the chariot of a herald.

The driver of the rural bus carried the news into Fairhaven, and there the word spread like a grass fire.

“Got him cornered!”

“Who?”

“Masters, of San Pedro.”

“Where?”

“Right outside of town--Dingledine Woods!”

There had already been a report that one of the escaped convicts of San Pedro had been seen--Harry, the Goose--but this earlier report merely went to strengthen the later one. Harry, the Goose, was forgotten. No one had ever heard of him, anyway. Masters was the man--the Napoleon of the Underworld!

“They got him cornered!”

“Ain’t got him yet. Bet he puts up a battle!”

There was a drift out of town by all who could go--the call of excitement, the promptings of greed; but, most of all, the old lust of the chase, the man hunt.

As a thousand little events go into the fabrication of the big event, so the thousand little rumors swell the big rumor. It was that way now. Two men shot! Got him in a barn--goin’ to set fire to it! Murdered an old woman!

Loafers, day workers, high-school boys, farmers, politicians, ex-deputy sheriffs; all the hands of a suburban paper mill, the working force of a stone quarry; all the spectators and some of the players from an amateur baseball game.

Here and there some one fired a gun--with what intent only himself might know--just nervousness, most likely, but successful always in starting a new swirl of movement, a new drift, a fresh batch of rumors. The chase was at its height when it was added to by the strangers and notables from other villages and towns.

Among these were Gary Lee, from Clear Rapids, and Major Gracie, from San Pedro.

Finally they met at the Gracie home, where Joan and her Aunt Katherine had preceded them. Both Joan and Aunt Katherine had decided it would be better for them to spend the night together at the Gracie home in town. The woods, particularly in the neighborhood of the Middleton cottage, were swarming by this time. There was a crowd in the usually empty lane and in the little-frequented road.

Here the Napoleon of the Underworld had been seen. No one had the straight of it. They quested for information among themselves, each telling the other as first-hand information what each had just heard from somebody else.

There was a tense excitement even in the town itself, among those whom duty or disinclination had kept from joining the chase.

What had happened out there? What was happening now? What was going to happen?

More and more an ugly phrase was heard. Folks passed it on, half in jest, certainly without stopping to think, in most instances, what the words implied. But the phrase itself was fire, and the town was becoming a powder mill. The phrase was this:

“_He ought to be lynched!_”

Joan, with a white face and shimmering eyes, completed the confession that hitherto she had made only in part. She told her father that not only had she originally recommended that convict No. 3777 cross the valley on the farmer’s borrowed horse--which she herself had later returned, but, this time, had had Gary Lee carry the fugitive on to Aunt Katherine’s, there to remain until he had recovered his strength, and people were no longer so bent on capturing him.

“If this story comes out----” said Major Gracie, after a terrifying silence.

“That is what I said,” Gary Lee remarked.

They were in the Gracie parlor at the time. The windows were open, the curtains stirring slowly in the breeze. The breeze was scented with clipped lawns and newly sprinkled streets, for the house stood far out in a residential section of the town that was almost suburban. And it was very quiet. There were none of the noises associated with towns at all, except the occasional grind of a passing auto, the hammers and voices of carpenters at work on a house, the clang and clank of the railroad yards a quarter of a mile away.

But gradually there overcame these sounds a sort of surging murmur--something that they seemed to have noticed for quite a while before they paid attention to it.

“What is that sound?”

“Yes, I’ve been hearing it for some time.”

“It sounds like cheering.”

“There it is again.”

They looked into each other’s eyes. They knew all about that man hunt that had called its hundreds into the woods to the north of the town.

Gary turned to Joan.

“It sounds to me,” said he, “as if they had caught that friend of ours, sure enough.”

He saw the whiteness and the tensity of her face.

“Joan!” he whispered.

She disregarded him. She faced her father.

“What are you going to do?”

“Get to the sheriff as soon as I can--see that there’s no lynching.”

“I’ll go with you, sir,” said Lee.

“Stay with the ladies,” said the major, giving orders. “And you, young lady”--he turned to Joan--“I’ll ask to remain in quarters.”

“Please!” she cried.

“What!”

The major didn’t intend to, but he himself went a little white. For the first time within his memory, Joan had questioned an order. The orders, to be sure, had been few and wise.

“I tell you, this poor creature saved my life.”

“And he’ll make the most of it,” muttered Lee.

But Joan had thrown her arms about her father’s neck. He looked across the top of her head at his sister-in-law.

“You’re in charge of your Aunt Katherine,” he said.

He drew himself up. So did the others. There was no mistaking that distant mob music. The man hunters were ready for the kill.

Those sounds of a growing mob had been frequent enough even before Craig and Craig’s prisoner, Harry, the Goose, had left the edge of their dry watercourse. The woods were being overrun.

Craig had only one thought, and that was to keep the chase going until night. He saw that, even before night, he and Harry would have a good chance to put the region behind them. There were only a few in the crowd who could have recognized either him or Harry, anyway, but he knew the instinct of the small-town crowd and the country crowd for strangers.

He and Harry were strangers. That was enough. They would have to keep out of sight until the sun went down, or, if seen, stave off suspicion as best they could until they were out of sight again. Violence would do no good. In most of the crises that Craig could think of, he knew that the revolver he had taken from Harry would be worse than useless.

One shot against a hundred. He would, indeed, rather spend it on himself than on some innocent farmhand doing his best, according to his own lights, to serve his country by running down an escaped convict to earth.

He found a mossy hollow where there was water. He let Harry drink. But he himself didn’t drink. In addition to his other worries he had Harry to watch. He put no faith in Harry--no faith of any kind. Harry was a coward. Harry was cruel. It would be just like him to think that he was forwarding his own welfare by killing Craig--if he got the chance.

They rested in a cedar copse until they heard a stealthy tread. They could see an old party with chin whiskers moving through the beech trees a little lower down. He carried a squirrel rifle. He might have been hunting squirrels--he was so soft-footed, and he was looking down, as a squirrel hunter might, for sign. Then sign of some sort he must have found. He gave a slight start. His goatee snapped down, then up. He turned and beckoned.

It was not until then that they saw that he was followed by two other men. One of these was a mere overgrown boy, armed with an old horse pistol of a type used long before the Civil War. But the other hunter looked businesslike, a dark and stocky-bearded man with a shotgun over his shoulder. These two hurried up. They looked at the sign the old man had found.

“Hisn,” said the old man.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure’s shootin’. Them’s his shoes. I studied ’em right whar the schoolmarm pointed ’em out to me.”

The overgrown boy with the horse pistol turned and stared at the cedars so intently that Craig felt his own heart sicken a little. Harry had been ready to break and run, but he had gripped him.

The two of them began to edge back together.

“They’re close,” the old trailer said.

The dark man with the shotgun threw his weapon forward.

Harry, the Goose, turned a white and sweaty face to Craig. His lips moved with the all-but-silent speech of his prison days.

“Shoot! Shoot the stiffs--why don’t you?”

“Steady,” said Craig, also silently. “There’s some one over there back of us.”

Suddenly, off not more than a hundred yards or so beyond the place where the squirrel hunter and his friends had found the thing they were looking for, a scream went up--a scream that was savage and exultant.

“Ki-yi! Here he is, fellers.”

There was an interval when even the woods seemed to listen, then a crash of branches, a shot.

“Stop! Stop!”

The squirrel hunter let out a whinny.

“Gosh dang! Somebuddy’s got him first!”

But the dark-faced man with the shotgun spoke never a word. He jerked around in the direction of the noise. He was ready to fire. He trotted off, and this time the others were following him--the old man with the squirrel rifle, the boy with the horse pistol, each cocking his weapon as he ran.

“Now is the time,” Harry chattered.

Now was the time, if ever! There where the original outbreak had occurred there was a mixture of cries and laughter, whoops, whistles. Some of the hunters had been in pairs, some in groups. It must have been that all of these had arranged signals among themselves, or had signals that they knew their friends would understand. Suddenly, the chase was over. Those in at the blood were calling the other human hounds.

It didn’t matter much now to Craig whether he was seen, so long as it would be by no one likely to recognize him--like ex-Warden Green, for example. Where was Green? But Craig had no fear of such pictures of himself as might have been sent abroad. When these were taken, he was smooth shaven. Now he had a fuzzy, nascent beard--not much of a beard. Still, not for six weeks had his face known a razor. And when those pictures of his were taken, moreover, he was new to prison, ignorant of dark cells, ignorant of suffering, almost--suffering as he had come to know it.

But, every now and then, out of those cries and other noises that came from over there among the trees, he heard the voice of some one who pleaded, who reasoned, who argued, who denied.

“Come with me,” he said to Harry, “and, listen! What I said a while ago still holds. Try a break and I’ll maim you.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see who it is they’ve caught. Shut up! Go on!”

But hardly had they come to the edge of the cedars before the crowd was breaking through the brush beyond the beeches. In the midst of them they saw the man who had been caught by mistake.

Sick, haggard, frightened, unshaven, in rags--it made Harry laugh to see him, made Craig want to weep, especially when he remembered the music this man had made. It was Zabrewski, the organ player.

Then, to Craig, it seemed as if this storm that had been gathering for so long flashed into lightning and thunder in his brain. He couldn’t see Zabrewski frightened, mistreated like that. Zabrewski was a genius, albeit a genius gone wrong.

Craig had flung Harry, the Goose, before him. He let out a cry that made even the crowd go silent, stand, and stare. It was a snarl like a lion’s:

“_Har!_”