Chapter XXI: Parley

That first Sunday out of Fairfield, Craig had earned his dinner by pumping the organ in that church where he had slept--making it a night and a day to recall his stern upbringing, and awaken the faith of his ancestors.

After that, he had struck north, for no other reason than that he knew that from Chicago came Ben Jarvis, and that Ben’s name was next in that red ledger of his. He would have to take Ben. But his plans were vague.

They were, until he came upon the deserted section of a Chicago newspaper--part of a Sunday edition--and found therein two pages devoted to himself. Three Sevens! Napoleon of the Underworld! He was becoming legendary now. There was not only a lurid, but fascinating, story of the great San Pedro revolution, and a corresponding account of what had happened in Fairhaven, but all sorts of crimes and orgies had been attributed to him as well.

He was reported to have broken the heart of an heiress in New York. He was supposed to be the real brains back of a certain big bank robbery in New Orleans. He owed his immunity not only to his own unfailing wit and courage. An army of lesser crooks were ever at his beck and call.

Craig didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. There was one thing, though, that he had salvaged from the wreck of his career in college, and that was a rudimentary knowledge of how to think--how to round up a problem and get it started as a first step in its solution. He did this now. Here was the problem: To use this fame of his to the squaring of the red ledger.

His mind was like a spider, working day and night, spinning on a web the design of which he had no preknowledge, and yet with the spider’s persistence--with something also, had he only known it, of the spider’s close adhesion to some universal law.

Thinking, perpetually thinking!

It was like the thinking he had done immediately after his disgrace in college, again when he had permitted himself to be condemned for another’s crime, again when he was in the dark cell. From one dark cell he had merely escaped into a bigger one. The bigger dark cell was composed of these present circumstances in which he found himself. But, out of this cell also he would think his way and work his way to the final freedom.

There were thoughts like this in his mind one afternoon while he was piling cordwood in a wood yard far out in the outskirts of Chicago. It was a large yard, covering a couple of acres, surrounded by a board fence, with an office and a wide gate at one corner of it. The place had seemed so open and safe, the work of a kind calling for so little mental effort, and the world in general so friendly and peaceful, that he had let himself go in his thinking altogether.

He was so occupied with the spinning of his mind that he never noticed that a small and muddy auto had arrived at the gate of the wood yard, that a man had got down from it, and that this man was ex-Warden Green of San Pedro. The ex-warden had gone into the office.

“Why, let’s see,” said the proprietor of the place. “Yes, there was a fellow I hired this morning that answers your description.”

The two of them had gone to the door.

“There he is. What did you say he’s wanted for?”

Green didn’t say. There was a dance of death inside of him, but his exterior was stolid enough--big, bearded. He looked across the yard shimmering in the June sunshine. There was the man who had shackled him, made him the laughingstock of the country. He drew back.

Finally he went out to the muddy little auto and got a sawed-off shotgun.

“You ain’t going to shoot him, are you?” demanded the proprietor of the yard.

“Not unless I have to.”

“But you can’t shoot a man like that.”

“I’ve got a license and a warrant,” said Green. “He’ll come, all right. Don’t you worry about that. But I haven’t followed him, foot by foot, all the way from Fairhaven to let him get away from me now.”

Craig, still busy with his thought, turned a corner of the woodpile on which he was working. As he did so, he was almost knocked from his feet by a thrust of steel against his breast.

“Don’t move!”

He saw the double muzzle of the shotgun. Those black holes were ready to spout fire. He saw Green looming just back of the gun. It was Green who had spoken. Green wasn’t so stolid any more. The hands that held the gun had a tremor in them, but it was the tremor of restraint. The hammers of the gun were back. There was a finger on the triggers. Just a little pressure, and Green would have that vindication he was panting for.

Curious; but, even so, Craig was aware that his brain was spinning again--placidly, as if aware that even this was part of the accepted plan.

“If you shoot me,” said Craig softly, as if speaking with the internal voice of his mind, “you’ll shoot an innocent man.”

“Stick ’em up,” said Green.

Craig did so, slowly, not very high. He heard voices and a sound of running. In a couple of minutes there was going to be an audience. He was willing. Green was the man to shoot him here back of the woodpile so long as they were alone. He was not the man, perhaps, to do it if there were others there to see.

“Green, you’re a fool,” said Craig.

The fire blazed in the other’s eyes. He mouthed an epithet through his beard, as if to justify in his own mind the act he secretly meditated.

“The truth will come out.”

“You’re damn right!”

“About--some one--dear to you.”

“I’ll make you keep your trap shut, you----”

“And you’ll wish you’d shot yourself instead. Do you know----”

“Turn round, and keep your hands up!”

“--why I went to prison?”

“Yes.”

“Ask your soul if you’re certain.”

There was no telling what response may have come back to Green from his soul. It was something that caused his hand to shake. He was remembering, moreover, in this connection, certain queer remarks, certain unforgettable hints, that convict No. 3777 had dropped that day of the great delivery. Curiosity, secret dread--these things existed in the soul of Green as much as, and maybe a trifle more, than they exist in the souls of most men who go up and down the earth.

“Stallin’, are you?” demanded Green coarsely, and he forced his laugh. “Turn round, you pup.”

“You’ll never laugh again,” said Craig, himself remembering what he had said on a former occasion. “Murder--such black murder! When the truth comes out.”

Was this fellow referring, somehow or other, to Amy? The man with the shotgun wondered. Strength was dribbling from him as from a leaky pail. But he summoned his strength into solider shape--something frozen and cold, like ice.

But Craig himself was as an intelligence disembodied, all mind. There had been a score of men at work in the yard, mostly about some coal piles on the other side. A couple of these cautiously appeared from around a woodpile back of Green. A teamster climbed on the pile itself at the side of Craig.

“Keep ’em up, and turn round,” said Green.

“Murder,” Craig repeated, and didn’t move. The audience was growing. He had spoken just now for the others.

“What’s this?” demanded the teamster on the woodpile.

“I’m an officer of the law,” said Green.

“Prove it,” said Craig.

He could see without looking that the teamster on the woodpile was gripping a stick of cordwood. The teamster might have been as pure as the driven snow, but, again, he himself might have served a prison sentence. He was a type of man Craig recognized--impulsive, whole-hearted, especially when it came to serving the underdog, brave as a lion. Maybe the ex-warden of San Pedro also recognized the type.

“Men----” he began.

Right then the tension broke. There had been a slight unflexing of the hand controlling the triggers. Craig struck--down! There was the suspended flash of fire, a roar. But the charge had passed Craig’s knee, kicked up chips and dust on the earth as he sprang back.

Even so, Green might have got him with the other barrel, but the teamster banged down his stick of wood just as the gun roared again. Then Green was snatching at his revolver.

Craig went. He took the fence. He followed the fence around to a corner where he saw a couple of men running toward the wood yard from a corner saloon. Up the unbuilt street he saw a policeman turn and stare.

There was a path leading down through deep weeds to a belt of marsh partly filled in with ashes and other débris. Craig went through the weeds and looked back. He saw that others were scaling the fence and looking about them. Before he could get out of sight, some one saw him, let out a whoop.

He ran out across the filled-in land and plunged over the edge of it. For a while he was following the slope of it. He couldn’t turn back. He dared not try the bog. It looked too treacherous. But, at the same time, from the sounds that reached him, he knew that the chase had begun, and that some of his pursuers were headed to cut him off.

He took a chance and stepped out into the bog where it looked as if it might be solid enough to hold him. The first step sent him down into the mud almost to the knees, but he floundered on.

Now it was a little better, now it was worse. But with every step he was losing seconds. He heard shouts not far back of him, then something that sounded like a command.

There was a shot--a revolver shot, this time. But whether it was Green or the policeman who was using him for a target he didn’t stop to investigate. He struggled on.

That first shot had been sent high, most likely. He hadn’t heard the bullet. He was hearing bullets now. Some of them plumped in the mud. Some whined past his head. He gained a bit of ground that was solider than that through which he had just passed. There was an old log of a fallen tree. He crawled back of this for a breathing spell.

He saw that he wouldn’t have much farther to go before reaching the edge of a muddy stream--whether river or drainage ditch, canal or open sewer, he didn’t care. The stream was an ally.

Beyond the stream there was a level acreage of railroad tracks, these covered with cars--freight cars and passenger cars. Once across the stream and among those cars he would be like a mouse in a wheat field.

With only a glance and scarcely a thought for those back of and to either side of him--they were all distant--he plunged on ahead through the remainder of the morass. Again the bullets “plopped” or whined. But there was only one thing that worried him, now, even for a moment. It was the fear that the mud on the edge of the stream would be so soft and the water so shallow that he wouldn’t have a chance to swim.

Even this fear was no sooner flickering in his mind than it had flickered out. On the bank of the stream nearest him was a derelict barge. He gained this, slid out into deep water.

* * * * *

The papers carried a bit of this story also that evening. The stories and the headlines differed with the different papers, but what was in one was typical of them all--“Wild West Scene in Chicago Suburb!” “Rube Sheriff Uses Shotgun!” “Masters, Famous Bandit, Swims to Freedom!”

Craig read this and much else in the corner of a crowded saloon well within the frontiers of the big town of the lakes. He had come to Chicago on a criminal chase of his own. But now he knew that the police of Chicago were looking for him. He himself had heard here and there while on the road that here in Chicago were the favorite haunts of other such men as Trick O’Ray, Ben Jarvis, and even the famous swindler, Taylor Leamy.

But what were any of these compared to himself--his mythical self--Masters, Three Sevens, the man who had cut himself from an iron box and accomplished the greatest jail delivery in all history!

He kept his eye on the crowd about him--tramps and other hangers-on of the railroads, mostly. Was he doomed to pass his life among such as these? Then he perceived a small difference in one part of the crowd--something that was hard to define. It was as if the interest in the room, say, had been fluid, but in this one particular place had coagulated or solidified.

He heard a sibilant whisper:

“Me mither’s ghost! If it ain’t Three Sevens himself!”