Chapter VII: The Promise

The girl said a number of things in the course of this day that were to remain with Craig always, just as would the presence of her as she said them--soft-voiced, clear-eyed, brave. She was only eighteen or so, but she had talked so much with her father that she talked like a man plus a woman’s instinct to soothe and heal:

“You’ve had a dream that turned out bad--but that is no reason why you shouldn’t dream again. Half the tragedies of this world were caused by dreamers, but so also all of the world’s progress. My father’ll set things right here in San Pedro. The courts’ll put you in a cell for life if you stay here. You can be of more use outside. Outside you can offset the evil you’ve let loose.”

She was urging him to flee.

“If I should bring them back?” said Craig.

“Bring them back?”

“Ben Jarvis, Bud Gaspell----”

Among the papers that had been left on the chapel table by the convict who had acted as clerk of that curious, improvised court of the morning, was a little red memorandum book. The girl seized this. She meditated. She looked at Craig.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “The small and the weak--they don’t matter. They’ll be herded back here like sheep, when the posses get a start. It’s the men like Bud Gaspell, train robber and highwayman, and Ben Jarvis, who kills for pleasure, and ‘Trick’ O’Ray.”

The two of them worked over the records like a pair of students in a library. They added name after name to the list in the little red book. There were those on the list whom Craig had never seen nor known. But the girl knew them, by reputation. She had been her father’s secretary--and, for that matter, almost his sole companion, since her mother’s death two years before.

Sinister, cruel, perverse; men who were as deadly as moccasin snakes, and as ruthless, as concentrated in the satisfaction of their own needs and appetites. Wild men, like “Sancho Red,” “of the arid hills, who tortured as well as killed”--their names, and, when necessary, their descriptions, all went into the little red ledger, put there by this girl with blue eyes and the shimmering hair, written out in a schoolgirl hand.

There was no time to waste. Craig himself had now sent the news of what had happened in the prison by telephone and haltingly, by telegraph, to the outside world.

Craig had told the girl the purport of that first telephone message that had reached him after he and she had left the chapel when the riot began. Major Gracie himself had been wounded by Ben Jarvis. Nothing much. A mere scratch. Father and daughter had later talked together over the telephone. And now Major Gracie had resumed his interrupted run by special train and would be here in less than an hour.

Craig had told the girl about his past--all of it. There was no more formality between them than if the two of them were on a life raft on a stormy sea at night. But at that, she was taking much for granted. She trusted him. She understood what he meant when he said that he would bring back to prison the enemies of society he had unwittingly set free. It was she who referred to the little memorandum book as his ledger--the one in which they had written out his debt.

When he would have faltered on her account, it was she who bravely encouraged him.

“You started out to do a great thing, and an original thing. Do it yet. In the meantime I’ll get my father and I’ll do it myself. We’ll prove your innocence, get you a pardon.”

Night was closing down. Back of the prison, a quarter of a mile away, there was a dry gully with a few stunted willows in it. She had noticed this when she was riding to the prison. To this place she sent Eddie with the horse. Craig was to ride this horse. He was to leave it at a certain place where the farmer who owned it could get it later.

She thought of everything. She lived in Fairhaven. Four or five miles out of Fairhaven, she had an aunt--a Miss Katherine Middleton--eccentric, but with a heart of gold, who lived in a cottage near some big woods.

Her voice came fitfully, or so Craig, his head momentarily skipping and whirling, heard her. He broke in:

“You’re getting yourself into trouble, helping a convict!”

“Don’t say the word,” she cried. “You’re not a convict--not in your eyes, or mine. Don’t you suppose I know what you tried to do? Hasn’t my father been trying to do the same sort of thing all his life--only in a different way with different luck? You’re a brute to make me talk this way--when I’m trying so hard to--see straight, do right----”

Craig was stricken with pity and awe. This girl had been acting like a soldier, like a man. For nothing at all she again had tears in her eyes, had a quivering lip.

“Forgive me,” he said, without knowing what it was he had to be forgiven for.

The girl steadied herself, looked at the little red book. She had covered several pages of it with her writing.

“This is the list,” she said.

He put out his hand.

“Wait,” she said.

She wrote something else in it:

This book is given to Daniel Craig by Joan Gracie.

She looked at him with an expression that was not a smile exactly, although he always remembered it as a smile. In pain and danger, and in the blackest despair, he remembered this look she was giving him now as the most beautiful smile he had ever seen. It was a look of illumination, vision, faith.

“There,” she said. “If they find it now, there will be no doubt as to where it came from.”

And she quoted her father again--something to the effect that a lot of suffering in the world was due, also, to the fear so many people had of appearing to be foolish, of not seeming respectable.

“Joan,” said Craig.

“Daniel,” said she, and it was the first time that he had heard himself so addressed for more than two years; it stirred his heart within him.

“May God and His angels bless you,” said Craig, his own eyes reaffirming the words.

“Just promise to do your best,” said the girl. “You’re going out to battle. You’re going out to fight for your country. That’s what my father says. Every criminal’s a traitor. You’ve got a debt to pay. So has every one. Yours is written out in the little red ledger. And when you’ve settled that, there’ll be other debts.”

“I’ll pick out the worst man first, and turn him in----”

“No, not that,” the girl interrupted him. “Take them as you find them. Oh, be careful!” Her thought crystallized. “All the time, you’ll be between two fires. Don’t you see--the law on one side, the outlaws on the other----”

“I’ve thought of that,” said Craig.

“Listen,” said the girl, now speaking more out of her heart than out of her brain. Her eyes wavered, came back to his. “You’re on probation. You’ve got to report to me. I don’t know how. But you’ve got to report.”

“You’ll hear from me--‘Three Sevens,’” said Craig. “Until my debt is paid, I’ll be Three Sevens.”

Then, through the vast silence of the prison and the San Pedro country there sounded the hooting wait of a rushing train. The might and the majesty of retributive law!

To Daniel Craig, riding away from San Pedro on the horse that had been furnished him by Joan Gracie, along the road that she had indicated, there came a feeling at once so sad and so joyful that he could have cried aloud. No words could express the feeling. It was too overwhelming for words.

Ticketed and wrinkled, but clean enough, he had found the clothing that he had worn when the sheriff had brought him to San Pedro two years ago from the city where he had been tried and sentenced. But he was no longer the man--or the boy--who had worn that clothing then. As surely as it had happened to that certain man of Bethany, he also had died, been entombed, and now was alive again.

His wounds hurt him. The bandages might have been burial cloths. He had an agonizing sense--still as Lazarus might have had--that this new lease of life was too good to be true, could not last.

He took off his familiar old felt hat. He raised his face to the night.

Thus his mind surveyed the past.

Mostly poor, introspective, oversensitive, often unhappy--that had been his lot up through boyhood, as he perceived it. Yet always some lurking faith was there in a happiness to come, a happiness to be fought for and won. Was this the beginning of the final campaign?

He had no family. Even the stern and pious old grandmother who had reared him was dead. He had started to work his way through the State University. He was going to be an engineer. No other calling seemed big enough. There were deserts to water, swamps to drain, chasms to bridge. Then came his expulsion--one of those tragedies of college life that seem too small to the outside world. It had all started as a joke on a certain crabbed old professor, a chance to steal his examination papers, and Craig accused of cheating.

There swept in upon him even now the old sense of having been disgraced for life, a whiff of that morbid sickness that had almost driven him to suicide.

It was with this mental sickness upon him, and a willingness to die, that he had tramped into a strange labor camp and there found that other boy whose tragedy surpassed his own--a sister crying her heart out back home, the boss of this camp “the guilty man,” a boyish sense of honor calling for retribution. Then the shot in the dark, Craig’s promise to say nothing, the flight of this other youth, Craig himself arrested for murder.

There was no wise old friend to tell him that he was a fool for feeling the way he did at what had happened in college, that the world forgets, that no man is perfect, that every one goes wrong some time or other, and that now he was by way of committing suicide indeed. Anyway, he had thought that the real slayer would return; he had thought that he would be let off. He had believed that maybe this was an intended atonement for his “sin” in college. He had thought many things.

But now, Craig, with his hat in his hand, and his face still up, got a message out of the night that Joan Gracie understood his tale of folly and suffering.

How strange it had seemed to him before that he had been sent to San Pedro--San Pedro of all prisons! But now, hadn’t a part of the plan--the Plan--been revealed to him since it was at San Pedro that he had met Joan Gracie? Wasn’t there, after all, an immutable truth in what the great and gentle Emerson had written about compensation?

On a ridge, only a mile or so from San Pedro, he had paused to watch the arrival of the special train. It wasn’t much of a train, merely a locomotive and a caboose--a few twinkling lights, and a flash of firelit steam. Faintly, through the puffing of the engine, Craig heard a sound of excited voices. There was going to be some quick action. He was sure of that. Still, his soul was tranquil. He felt no need of hurry. Whatever would happen was bound to happen, whatever should happen was bound to be good.

He recalled a dozen times in his life when black despair had clawed and gnawed at his heart like a bloody-fanged vampire.

No more. He had gone down into the gates of hell and had come out again. And, even in the gates of hell, there had still been hope, had he only known it. He knew it now. He would always know it--that men were fools to worry, to succumb to fright.

Suddenly, he heard a soft cry, saw a dim form surging up in front of him. Then, as Craig snatched at his revolver:

“Boss! Don’t shoot!”

It was George Washington, late of the dark cells.

He was a big negro, counted bad, in more than one jail and labor camp. Even now, he was checking that first movement of recognition, drawing back for a possible attack. He was armed.

“Is it you?” he queried in his soft voice.

“Me--Three Sevens,” Craig answered.

“Bless God!”

The negro came up to Craig’s bridle. Craig told him something of what had passed. Washington had been one of the first to get away, but he had slept the day through on the warm earth.

Craig saw in the negro a possible ally. He would need an ally for a while. George Washington was willing. He also needed an ally. Toward morning they tied the horse in the corner of a field, where the owner would find it. Then they came to a stream--Craig staggering--where they drank their fill. There were wild hills all about them. They picked their way up a rocky gulch where even a hound would have had a hard time to trail them. They came to a platform of rock, where they could command a view for miles back in the direction whence they had come.

Craig slept.

It was late afternoon when he awoke. And now he felt not so much like a man who had come back from death as one who was going to die. The negro was gone. But just when Craig was beginning to realize what it might mean to him to be all alone here in the hills now, tracked, weak, without food or the means of acquiring it, there was his black friend again. He had a hatful of eggs.

“Where’d you get them?” Craig asked.

The negro told him. Five or six miles from where they were there was a big stock farm. There, George had found a barrel with bran in it, and he was so hungry he was going to eat a mouthful of bran. But when he had shoved his hand into the bran, he found that the bran was full of eggs, put there by some thieving farmhand, no doubt, to keep them fresh until he should have enough of them to make it worth while to take a trip to market on his own account.

They ate the eggs, raw.

Night found them on their way again, out across the houseless, treeless prairie that appeared to be a deserted cattle range. The night like the one before, was radiant and clear, with a waxing moon.

They talked about religion. They talked about justice. Then Craig asked George if he didn’t think that prisons were right, and George said that, yes, he did think that prisons were right if they were good prisons, and that was why he had sworn his oath, when Craig asked him to, not to abuse the liberty that he was going to receive.

“How much longer did you have to serve?” asked Craig.

“One more year.”

“If you knew that, during this year, you’d get good treatment, good food, and time off for good conduct, would you go back?”

“White man, what you aimin’ at?”

Craig told him. He showed George the red ledger.

“You got me frighten’,” said George.

“You needn’t be frightened,” said Craig, “except of all the people you’ll ever pass in the road, and each time that you lie down to sleep, and every time that you want a mouthful of food----”

“Man! Man!”

“I’m talking for your own good, George. I’m trying to help you because I’m going to need your help.”

“What you want me to do?”

“I want you to swear another oath--here under the stars.”

George swore. And Craig had not only an ally, but a deputy. There were a dozen names set down in the little red book that Joan Gracie had given him. Twelve names, each like a sum charged against him by society. He would have to pay off each sum by returning the escaped convict to prison. There could be no delay, for with every day of delay there would be an increment of interest.

These men that the daughter of the new warden of San Pedro had charged up against Craig in this little red ledger were not likely to remain idle, now that they were free. They would be hungry before long. They would begin their quest for prey, as two of them already had done.

“Man! Man!” said the negro, as Craig discussed his plans.

“I’m going to arrest them myself and bring them back or see that they are taken back,” said Craig. “When I organized the revolution I meant that none of them should get away--none except those who, like you, had been punished enough and who would take the oath to do no wrong when the jury turned them loose.”

“And when you done bring these men back?”

“I’ll return to San Pedro myself,” said Craig. “You can’t fool with the law, George. The law is too big, too old.”

“Ain’t you breakin’ the law now?” asked George, with native cunning.

“Not the higher law,” said Craig. “I’m working for the law. I’ve made a mistake. I’m going to try and right that mistake. I will right it--so help me God!”

But it was of Joan Gracie that he thought.

Softly, his black deputy repeated some of those names from the red ledger, fearsome names, repeated fearsomely in the black man’s mellow voice:

“Bud Gaspell! Trick O’Ray! Sancho Red! Man! Man! They’s bad. And Ben Jarvis! Count Wolf!”

“I’ll get them,” said Craig, with his thought on the girl.