Chapter VIII: In San Pedro

As for Joan Gracie, there in San Pedro awaiting the arrival of the train that was to reëstablish her connection with the world as she had always known it before that surprising day, she also had felt as if she had been through a miracle--something painful, a miracle of new birth, enthralling, like a grip on new life.

“Why? Why?” there came a question in her heart. Why had she dressed this man’s wounds and helped him to get away, when it would have been so simple to do what he himself had told her to do--lock herself in the prison office and await developments--telephone for help--anything other than what she had done?

True, in her mind’s eye, she could see him again as she had first seen him, there in the chapel, a man with one of the most astounding dreams that had ever entered the brain of a man--so futile, and yet so beautiful--a mortal portrait set to organ music! And then when he was fighting for her and she had thrilled with a true perception of just how great her danger was!

He had fought like a hero--fought for her. What else could she have done than to care for his wounds? And, once she had heard his story and recognized it was true, for no man would have invented a story of such exalted folly, what could she do but guide him as a sister or a mother would have guided him?

Three short blasts from the rushing special. Her father was coming on that train. What would he say?

Now the train was so close that she could hear the thunder of the wheels and the escaping steam. She left the man Eddie in charge of the hospital, where she had lingered to the last instant. She rushed away to meet her father at the prison gate.

It was true. His wound had been a mere scratch. Fifteen miles back Major Gracie’s auto had been held up by three highwaymen--one of them recognized as Ben Jarvis. It was Jarvis who had fired in a free way he had, seeing how close he could come to his victims without killing them. The bandits had stolen the auto and fled.

There had followed for the major and the three men who accompanied him a tramp to the nearest railroad station, the call for the special train. Now, here he was, master of a prison that was all but emptied.

All this on a Sunday when the whole world had been as still as a mill pond, apparently. But out of space, like a meteorite out of the sky, something had fallen into the pond with a splash that was to echo far, send out its widening circles no one could tell how far.

The newspapers not only of this State, but of other States, were going to have a rare sensation on the following morning.

As the story dribbled out, it was Masters whose renown outshone that of all the others. The journalists dug back into their files for the story of his trial. Nothing but a dozen lines, and yet, in these dozen lines, a satisfying hint of mystery--a doubt as to his identity, and where he had come from, and why he had killed Beekman, the foreman of the Stonehill construction job.

That was enough. They could imagine the rest. Overnight, a new Napoleon of the underworld had swam into the public ken.

There were details that set the whole world talking: Masters, after the break, had organized a convict Thanksgiving. Masters had timed his revolt to celebrate Lincoln’s Birthday, whereby he had shown that he was not only a killer but a dreamer.

Now, curiously enough, all this was accepted as the truth not only in many fine houses, and crowded trains, and offices in big buildings; but also in those quarters where knowledge of crime is real and intimate: in the police stations, in the dives and backrooms where the professionals of crime are found.

“Three Sevens!”

The name, and the fame that went with it, spread like magic, although often heralded in whispers. Single-handed, Three Sevens had cut his way out of an iron box and captured a prison.

“What manner of man is this!” It was an exclamation paraphrased in all the haunts of drugs and cheap cigarettes, dim lights and bad liquors, in the “jungles” and “hangouts” of thieves and tramps out along the railroad lines; as well as in the offices of police and marshals--especially when the governor himself let it be known that he would pay one thousand dollars’ reward for the privilege of seeing this man.

Joan Gracie trembled when she heard of this offer of a reward. She trembled a little, also, when she heard Samuel Green, the deposed warden of San Pedro, swearing that he would devote his life to the tracking down of this man who had humiliated him. The ex-warden had sought for and obtained a commission in the State constabulary. It was a roving commission--and one that he expected to turn to financial profit, as well, for Three Sevens wasn’t the only fugitive from San Pedro with a price on his head.

One week passed, then another.

Joan was in her father’s office one afternoon when the telephone bell rang. She was at her father’s side. She herself picked up the instrument. There was a “Hello!” Even at that first word she had a thrill. She recognized that voice. She knew that it was a voice that she had been waiting for.

“This is the warden’s office.”

She wondered if she had been mistaken. Again, she wondered if some one else were recognizing her voice. There came the answer:

“This is Daniel Craig.”

Joan turned to her father. She dared not say more than she had said. She surrendered the instrument to her father’s outstretched hand.

“It’s--he,” she said.

And to save herself from she scarcely knew what--just embarrassment, perhaps, self-betrayal, disappointment, sorrow--she hurried from the room.

Was he giving himself up? What had happened? Wouldn’t the papers gloat! She went to an open window. It was the window where Craig and she had stood together on that surprising, somewhat unearthly day of her arrival in this place.

Craig himself had learned of this sudden and extraordinary fame of his before he had been away from San Pedro a week. During this week he and the big black man who had become his follower and friend had traveled much of the time at night far from the usual lines of traffic.

In the daytime they camped. They had plenty of food of sorts. George Washington, like so many members of his race, was a natural hunter, with no dependence on the inventions of the white man. This life in the open developed his native qualities, made of him more of a primitive than ever. The waxing moon became a hunting moon for him. The ’possums were out. The rabbits danced. The poke-weed was like asparagus. In the quiet places of the streams the big suckers fanned lazily.

Nature was preparing her annual banquet, and they were the first guests to arrive. Under this régime of such food as he had craved for months, and the open air and the long sleeps--and more yet, perhaps, in response to the stimulus of a great construction job ahead of him, which was the reconstruction of his own life, Craig got back his health and strength with an amazing celerity.

Then, one night, after careful consideration, Craig, bidding his friend and ally to await developments in case of a misplay, had made his way into a camp they had discovered near an abandoned mine.

There were a dozen men seated about a camp fire. He had recognized one of them as Solly Wells, that late inmate of the San Pedro hospital who had sent the saws to Chi Slim with the aid of which Craig had effected his escape from the cell.

Solly was shriveled and bent. He was now heavily bearded. It was chiefly Solly’s cough that had given Craig his clew to Solly’s identity, and knowledge that Solly could not be long for this world that decided Craig to resume Solly’s acquaintance.

It was from Solly that Craig learned of the fame that had come to him. Solly didn’t say so right out. In fact, while others were about, no sign of recognition passed between Craig and Solly at all--none that any one but themselves could have noticed.

Solly had been talking to a grizzled tramp who intermittently hammered at the heel of one of his old shoes with a set of metal knuckles of a kind known to the profession as “London dusters.”

“What do you know about Three Sevens?” Solly asked.

“Him?” said the tramp. “He’ll be our first president when us grafters comes into our own. I’m on my way to the hobo congress now, if I can ever get this damn heel fixed.”

And he hammered away again at his cobbling with his London dusters, as any honest man might do.

“Who’s this man Three Sevens?” asked Craig.

His own advent in the crowd about the camp fire had attracted only a mild notice. For the most part they were just ordinary tramps. But, at this question of his every one looked at him with astonishment. The cobbler paused in his work. Solly coughed and laughed and almost strangled. Where’d he hail from? Where’d he been keeping himself? But the cobbler put down his knuckles and brought a sheaf of old newspaper clippings from an inside pocket of his ragged coat.

Craig took off his hat and scratched his head. It was the signal for George Washington to come in from the shadows. There was a reason for this. Solly had found occasion to slip another sort of signal to Craig. The old tramp was not what he seemed.

“A dick,” said Solly, meaning a detective.

The three of them--Solly, Craig, and Washington--had crept out of the camp as soon as the others appeared to be asleep.

“And he knew me?”

“Sure. Before I did. He might have jumped you, at that, if you hadn’t called George in. He’ll forget all about Bud Gaspell, now that he’s picked up your trail.”

“Bud Gaspell?”

“It was him this dick was tailing--ever since Bud held up the express the night of his get-away. Bud passed this way two days ago.”

“Where is he now?”

“I know where he was headin’ for,” said Solly.

“Where are you heading for, Solly?”

Solly coughed. He said that all he wanted was to die in the open air, and that could be none too soon to satisfy him.

“You’re foolish,” said Craig. “You ought to go to a hospital. You could live a long time yet.”

“It’s a hospital that done this to me,” said Solly, coughing.

“Maybe I can work a pardon for you.”

“How?”

“By your helping me to turn Bud Gaspell back to San Pedro.”

Solly averred that San Pedro was a shade worse than the place where he hoped Warden Green and all his underlings would go when they died.

“But there’s a new deal there,” said Craig. “If I’d known what was coming off, I wouldn’t have started this thing you helped me to start. Take you, for example, and George, here. Both of you would be better off back there with the new warden than out here getting chased through the woods.”

“How can we work it?” Solly asked. “What’s the lay?”

Fame, scoffed at by certain philosophers ever since some Nimrod of the Stone Age killed the last dinosaur, nonetheless has remained alluring to the hearts of men, and with a reason. She comes with gifts in her hands, as Craig was quick to discover. The gifts are money, power, and privilege. He enjoyed all these gifts within the next three days.

He was traveling alone, then. Solly and the faithful George he had established in a hidden camp in the woods. To them there he sent an emissary with food and other things for their comfort. He could have sent them a thousand dollars--a thousand dollars apiece--if he had wanted to.

Thanks to Fame. For Solly had told him about a certain neighboring town, and a certain notorious citizen who lived there. Craig called on the notorious citizen--a man who had once served a term in prison on his own account, deservedly--and had changed nothing much but his name on getting out. This man conducted a sort of employment agency, for want of a better term, for those still under the shadow of the law. He could furnish men to either side, or both, in a labor-and-capital dispute, or a political campaign, or could keep a stolen painting hidden for a dozen years--he was an amateur of painting; all this besides financing a first-class gambling house and other enterprises.

“Three Sevens!”

This man was almost for treating Craig as an equal. They could be of vast and mutual benefit to each other later on. So Craig borrowed as much money as he guessed he would need. But best of all, he got the private address of Bud Gaspell, found that Bud was at that address now, and that the place was less than five miles away.

Early the next morning, a trifle before dawn, to be exact, some dwellers in this town that Craig had visited in the night, may have sworn a little when they were awakened by the passing of a junk cart, its passage advertised by a string of jingling sleigh bells. They didn’t know that this junk cart was the property of a “fence”--a kind old gentleman who lent the wagon at times to clients of his. They would never have suspected that the kind old gentleman had now lent the wagon to that most famous of all modern criminals, Three Sevens, the new “Napoleon of the Underworld.”

But while the sun was still red in the trees, Craig, to the music of the jingling bells--music of the bygone clean and frosty days and nights of his boyhood--discovered the house he had been looking for.

Bud Gaspell was there, as Craig could tell from the blue smoke that streaked up from the chimney. He drew a long breath.

He had come to the first debt set down in the red ledger. What would the payment be?