Chapter XIX: The Lull

There was a lull in Craig’s mind, as swift, complete, final, and impressive, as that which follows the accomplishment of any big event.

And this was a big event to Daniel Craig, the sight of Joan Gracie up there at the window, so close to him, so _with_ him when he had believed himself alone. Nothing could have been so unexpected, and yet nothing could have seemed so inevitable--so predestined, as Craig himself would have said.

There had been no lull for the surging mob, though.

Nor were the forces of law and order called together by Major Gracie aware of any lull. In about thirty seconds there was going to be a clash--a summons to halt--a volley in the air--and Heaven only knew what immediately afterward. But, at the first shot, the firemen, safely in the side streets by now, were instructed to turn the water on. No mob likes water.

Nor was there any lull for ex-Warden Green. He began to take in the situation from the moment that he saw Craig again. It wasn’t Craig who was coming as one of the prisoners. The prisoners the ex-warden recognized quickly enough--Harry, the Goose, and the organist Zabrewski. Great guns! What was this that Masters was putting over now? Even in these thunderous seconds he could see that, in some way, Masters, the escaped convict, was really at the head of the mob, the leader of it. It wasn’t he at all that the mob meant when it chanted death. And the ex-warden began to vociferate the news.

It was almost sundown. The mob was facing west. Such light as there was came slanting and red from straight ahead.

“Halt!” shouted Craig, his mind suddenly clear.

The command was repeated by the squirrel hunter and his friends who were the chief guardians of Harry, the Goose, and Zabrewski.

“Hold up!” “Stop yer shovin!” “Plenty of time, boys!”

Those at the head of the disordered procession were holding back. Even the noisy ones were aware that a crisis impended, stopped yelling, began to call for silence.

Craig spoke rapidly to those about him.

“If you want to save your reward, you’ve got to save these men.”

He spoke with authority. There was no time for argument. He spoke to Harry and Zabrewski. They had been half dead, but his words galvanized them like hot needles:

“Beat it straight ahead!”

They stumbled forward in a shambling run--the two of them.

Zabrewski fell. He was on his feet again.

Twenty policemen, with nightsticks, sprang forward as the mob gave a surge.

Some one, on the mob side, fired a wild shot, and this brought in the trail of it a swishing roar and a chaotic babble of voices in another key as the firemen answered the impromptu signal and turned the water on.

Craig was no longer one of the mob surge. He was a man again, with mastery of his mind, and his mind master of the circumstances that whirled and changed around him. His mind was clear. It perceived many things--that Zabrewski and Harry, the Goose, had been taken in charge by Major Gracie’s forces, and that they were safe. Back of him in the street through which he had just passed, the mob was like a clay bank when attacked under hydraulic pressure. Joan Gracie had disappeared from the window where he had seen her.

He fought. A flat and beefy face as full of rage as a Chinese mask appeared in front of him. He jabbed his fist into it. He saw two straining figures locked together in front of him. He pushed them over.

He had instinctively turned to the right, in the direction of that vision of his. There was a row of brick business buildings there--stores on the ground floor, and offices above. Before he was at the curb, he saw that all doors were closed, that there was likely to be no escape in this direction. But neither was there escape back of him, nor up the street, nor down the street.

He plunged against a wooden door--one of two that closed an entrance way to an office building. Locked! And a roar just back of him.

“It’s him himself!” the voice of ex-Warden Green.

Then the door opened. Craig sprang inside and slammed it shut.

He shoved the bolt back into place, he even listened for some fraction of a second before he turned. There at the side of him in the dim light of the hall he saw her as if he had known that she would be there, as if this were an appointed rendezvous.

She stood with her back against the wall, as if she were glad of the wall’s support. Seen in this comparative darkness of the hallway, she was little more than a glimmer of white and a pair of eyes. So, at any rate, she appeared to Craig--unreal, unearthly, and yet a fact as unshakable as the floor beneath his feet.

“Look out! He’s armed!” This from outside, muffled by the closed doors.

Craig heard the words, but he only heard them with the surface of his brain, so to speak. And the surface of his brain was telling him that there wasn’t a moment to lose, that already some elements of the mob and of the force that had been opposed to the mob were uniting against him, would soon be storming this fragile fortress of his.

But he paused.

“You!” he whispered.

There was a look in the girl’s eyes of fright, relief, of something else. It was like a look of pure emotion that could be divided into all the elements of feeling, that embraced them all.

“Hurry,” she whispered.

She was no longer the masterly creature she had appeared that day in San Pedro. She was more like a child. But if she was like a child, so was Craig. He himself felt that way--a rush of carelessness, happiness, such as he had not experienced since his remotest past.

It was a mood that came and was gone in a second. And what had happened during this second? It was a question that was to haunt pretty much the remainder of his life.

His memory of it was to remain expansive and complex, yet oddly dreamlike, a jumble of impressions.

Then, Joan was running up the stairs to that office where she had left her aunt, and Craig himself was ghosting back through the hall, knowing that there was a way out, back there, and an alley that would bring him to an unfrequented street, but with this other shred of information in his brain overriding all other information, and as necessary to his life:

He had kissed her!

He hurried, but he was as indifferent to the mob he had put behind him, and all its various elements--police, Green, lynchers--as if he had been a spirit and they with no power over him whatsoever. They didn’t belong to his order. They were of a different and inferior race.

It must have been Joan who had told him about the alley and the street beyond, but he couldn’t remember her having told him. He merely knew what to expect. That was all. He hurried through the alley. He came to the street. He slanted across this--fast enough, but not too fast to arouse suspicion--and came to an unfenced area of unimproved land that had been used, betimes, as a ball field.

Every one seemed to be absent, as if this part of the town were under a spell. Every one had hurried away, apparently, to watch the excitement, the noises of which still reached him, indistinct and confused. And beyond the ball field he saw a freight train trundling into speed.

While this was taking place, Joan Gracie must, herself, have experienced some such thing as had befallen the spirit of Daniel Craig.

She fled up the stairs. At the head of the stairs, she stood for a moment with her hand on her heart. She ran forward to the door of the office she had quitted when instinct told her that Craig was coming this way. At the door of the office she stopped again. She was frightened--not frightened so much as touched with awe; and in her awe there was a riot of something strangely like joy.

She entered the office, and there was no sign that any one had noticed that she had been missing. They were all banked about the windows. No one turned to look at her, not even her Aunt Katherine. She was grateful. She guiltily told herself that not even did it matter much that her own father was out there in the crowded and disordered street.

As for Craig, he was still on the freight train when the night came on, and he was rolling through a country that was strange to him.

A brakeman passed along the running board at the top of the cars, and when he was safely gone, Craig came up from the bumpers and sat there and looked up. He was like a prophet on a mountaintop, this mountain rumbling along by some special magic. But he looked at the stars as any prophet may have looked at them--with that feeling of prophecy that comes to all men when out in the night alone.

One of the slowly accumulated heritages of the human race, no doubt, this power to draw consolation and wisdom from nocturnal solitude. To this men have always fled when they needed it most; or have been driven to it even when they themselves didn’t recognize the healing value of it. Back through the ages the stars have looked down on them all--the dying warriors, the man lost in the desert, the drunkard reeling home, the slave in the canebrake, the fugitive prince.

Toward dawn, the train was going through a region of flat pine woods, and the weather had changed. It was coming on to rain. Faintly in the distance Craig saw a white building that he took to be a schoolhouse. This dawning day was Saturday, he reflected, and so the building would give him shelter and seclusion. He was almost dead with fatigue.

He let himself off the train. He was rather more satisfied than not when he discovered that his building was a church. He tried the door. It was unlocked. The place was in keeping with his mood.

The escape, the kiss, the resolves and the hopes that these had inspired, were the mental elements of another sort of dawn.