Chapter IX: Old Rags!

There were a scattered score of buildings in the neighborhood, most of them like the one to which he had been directed, dilapidated cottages once put up by a communistic colony of intellectual insurgents against the general scheme of things. Long since, the intellectuals had disappeared. Their property--which they disclaimed, anyway--had gradually become the home of insurgents of another strain, anarchists, mostly, enemies of society all.

A queer place for a junk dealer to come to, as Craig guessed. He looked neither to the right nor the left as the old horse drew his cart up the rutty road into the settlement, but he knew that he was watched. He also knew as well as if some one had told him so that not without guile would he ever be able to bring Bud Gaspell away from here. Bud also had fame to some extent, also money, and also, therefore, friends who would be willing to take a chance on his account.

“Old rags!”

Craig let out his call as he halted the old horse in front of the little frame cottage he had come to find.

He waited an interval. He got down from his cart. The horse nodded, flicked a fly, prepared to drowse. There was no danger of a runaway. Craig went around to the back door of the cottage. He knocked three times.

There was no answer from within. He dared not wait too long. He knew that there was a tunnel from the cellar for a quick escape in case of surprise.

“Any old rags?”

He would hate to have Bud get away from him now, with George Washington and Solly Wells waiting for him in their own hiding place twenty miles away.

Then the door opened. Without waiting, Craig slipped through.

Neither did Craig wait, once he was inside. There was just time for the tenant of the cottage to get out a gasp, for Craig had drawn as he entered. He found himself facing a blurred figure in the sudden twilight as he kicked the door shut back of him. The blurred figure resolved itself into that of a man who might have been an overgrown baboon--not very tall, hunched shoulders, but thin through the waist, agile and strong--Bud Gaspell, all right.

“What in the----” Bud began.

“Put ’em up. We’ll talk later.”

Craig stuck out his left hand cautiously, as Bud raised his own hands. Bud had a dirk in a sheath at his belt. Craig took this. Bud would also have a gun somewhere. Bud had been edging backward, inch by inch. And Craig had never ceased to strain his ears. There had been no way of telling, thus far, whether Bud had been keeping bachelor hall or not.

A draft, a badly balanced pan, a jumping rat--it must have been one of these things--caused a clicking sound off to one side. At the same time, Bud Gaspell let go his pent-up muscles as he might have released a spring. In a moment he and Craig were locked.

Bud had caught Craig’s gun hand under his left arm. At the same time, Bud had circled his right arm about Craig’s neck, got a grip on Craig’s chin. They went down in a heap, with a softly solid chug, like the fall of a single tightly loaded sack of wheat or flour. Then, silence for a while, as if both were listening for something, then a whimpering of breath and complaining speech.

It wasn’t a pretty fight. There was scarcely anything to see. No favorite describer of prize fights, no medaled war correspondent, could have made much of it.

But to one who would have known all the facts of the fight, this very static quality of the struggle would have added to the interest of it. It was like one of those struggles so common elsewhere in nature where two antagonistic growths meet and fight to the death--the strangling liana and the jungle tree, the starfish and the oyster, the king snake and the diamondback. This fight also was silent, deadly, and possibly as important to the final evolution of the world, a part of the same endless struggle for the survival of the fittest.

Which was the fittest here? No telling. Nature and man have different standards, apparently. Nature favors the weeds, man the wheat; nature the wolf, man the hound.

With that twisting, neck-breaking grip that Gaspell had on Craig’s neck and jaw, a calm observer--had there been one--would have said that the odds favored Gaspell. Craig was helpless. He couldn’t even kick, for the train robber had locked his legs into Craig’s with the same sort of a bone-cracking effort.

But in Craig’s mind there was no doubt. He couldn’t lose. He was in the right. Consciously, or unconsciously, there poured into his heart a knowledge and a purpose that Gaspell couldn’t have known. There was Joan Gracie back there in the outside world. The world was new. The world was to be his, Craig’s, and all that it contained. With a perfect sureness of what the result would be, Craig had shoved his left fist up between himself and Gaspell.

It was like trying to force his fist between two logs in a jam. But his fist won a little way, a little way more.

Silence, all this time, except for that occasional whimper--from which one of them probably neither of them knew--for the working knowledge of each of them was concentrated in this small compass of their two bodies.

Then Craig’s fist had reached Gaspell’s chin. It kept pushing. It went another inch, yet another inch.

Craig was still confident even when he discovered that he could no longer breathe, when he felt that his blood had become a boiling torrent in his head. He felt a certain confidence even when he guessed that it might be like this that he was going to die. For, after all, what did it matter whether he died or not so long as he was doing what was right? And then, as swiftly as possible the shock of death itself might have come to him, he was aware that Gaspell’s hold on his neck was relaxing and that his own fist was still pushing up--and back--under Gaspell’s jaw. And straightway it occurred to Craig that the result of the battle could never have been in doubt at all--not in the least.

With no great relaxing of the tension, he worked his arm slowly from under Gaspell’s arm. But there was no occasion either to strike or shoot. Craig saw that he had fought better than he knew. Perhaps there was an inspiration in fighting--as there was, or as there was reported to be, in the writing of great songs. Anyway, he saw it now--he had been pressing, not Gaspell’s chin so much as Gaspell’s throat, the vital cartilage of his Adam’s apple.

Thus, in the brief time that the fight had lasted, Gaspell’s thick and hairy hawser that moored him to the shores of life had been reduced to a single, fragile thread.

Those furtive neighbors of Gaspell’s had heard no sound. Presently they had seen the junk dealer come from the cottage alone. He led his old horse and cart with no great haste around to the back of the cottage. Again he entered. When he emerged the next time, it was with something wrapped in burlap--a staggering load--one that might have been the body of a man, or a dozen mail pouches done into a package, or nothing at all but a mattress.

It was evident that nothing had happened--nothing of consequence. The smoke still rose peacefully from the chimney. And Gaspell was not the man to receive visitors unless he cared to.

They suspected nothing amiss on the following day, when the chimney showed no smoke, nor later, when it gradually became known by the underground telegraph that served them for much of their social interchange that Gaspell had departed.

Neighbors were continually drifting away like that. It wasn’t considered unneighborly that he hadn’t said good-by.

But, in the meantime, Craig had joined Solly Wells and the black deputy in the woods where he had left them. And then, there began one of the strangest treks in the history of any men. For Craig held on to the old horse and wagon. To some extent he remained the old-rag merchant. He was famous. Or, at least, Three Sevens was famous; and no detective, unless he possessed more than the usual lot of imagination, was going to look for Three Sevens in a business like this.

All the while he came back, closer and closer, to the prison from which he and these others had escaped.

Bud Gaspell made the ride in the bottom of the wagon. All of the time Bud was tied. A part of the time he was gagged. But they made it as easy as possible for him. And, at that, he was but little more uncomfortable than were George Washington and Solly Wells much of the time. For there were periods when they had to play “old rags,” too--face down in the bottom of the cart, a coverlet of old burlap over them. With a touch of poetry, a touch of symbolism, to it all--as if they were old rags, sure enough, bound for some paper mill of the gods, where they were to be made over, belike, into something clean, something new, so Craig told them.

However, it may have been when he was having that fight of his with Bud Gaspell, and earlier yet, when that revolution in San Pedro was first dawning in his mind, Craig did have his flights of inspiration now.

In another way than any newspaperman had ever represented, he had become a leader of men--leader of himself, for one, and of these others for the rest.

He understood their waverings, their shudderings, their black haunts and sudden panics as they drew nearer and nearer to their journey’s end. He felt these things himself--down in the dark subcellar of his being--which was like the punishment block of the old San Pedro itself. For was not this where were sent the rebel thoughts, the untamable, the fierce, the blasphemous thoughts, like so many prisoners?

It was why, at a little crossroads store, with San Pedro not more than ten miles away out across the arid country he remembered so well, that Craig left the camp guarded by his deputies and went to have a talk with the new warden of San Pedro by telephone.

For his own part, Major Gracie also meditated. Was this a trap? He had talked to a man with a pleasant voice, a man of education, who gave his name as Daniel Craig.

No, it could be no trap. Daniel Craig was suggesting that the major bring as many guards with him as the major might desire--to a certain gully not far from the prison where there were a number of stunted willow trees.

What for? A conference.

“About the surrender of certain fugitives,” came the explanation. “I am Daniel Craig. You have no record concerning me. I may ask you to assure these men that I am bringing with me that they’ll not be mistreated--that they’ll get a square deal.”

The major was honest. Said he:

“What if I should recognize you? And what if it should be my sworn duty to arrest you.”

“I’ll be masked.”

Everything is simple when explained--almost everything. Event follows event, like links in a chain, each event welded into the event that precedes and the link that follows. There are no sudden gaps, no miracles of results without causation.

The new warden of San Pedro, with some strain of the artist in him, perhaps--that quality which gave him both a love for things as they ought to be and for the picturesque--had ordered his horse saddled, had ridden out into the sun-cooked plain that stretched from San Pedro to the south. There, on a crest of rock near his place of rendezvous, he had seen appear the single figure he was expecting; and he rode forward to meet this man with a certain tingling of admiration as well as of curiosity, although the man was masked.

It was good to be young. The man of the mask was young. He must be. What older man would have undertaken this fool’s errand than he who had tried, without warrant of law, to set the wrongs of the law aright? For the major would not listen to the voice inside of him. But this voice was persistent, all the same. What it said was this:

“You’re a pretty warden! Going out to meet a man with a mask on his face! And this man with a price on his head! Three Sevens!”

But this inner voice of the major’s grew less insistent before very long. The warden was listening instead to the voice of this man he had come to see. This man was telling him how there was a colored man named George Washington, who was not bad at heart, only a bit undisciplined, and how George was coming back to San Pedro of his own free will because he--George--believed in prisons, when prisons were good. And, next, the man was telling about Solly Wells, who had wanted to die in the open air, but also was returning to prison because--well, maybe the law had been vindicated in Solly’s case, and there would be a pardon. And then, there was Bud Gaspell.

“And how about Bud?” asked the major.

He had dropped the bridle over his horse’s head, dismounted, and now he and Craig were squatted side by side in the bright sunshine like a couple of friendly rangers. Off up the gully three or four hundred yards away, only partly hidden by the stunted willow trees, the major saw an old horse hitched to an old wagon. Also the major had seen those lurking figures back of the wagon--a small man heavily bearded, a big colored man. But the major’s glance had been casual.

His glance was casual now, as he glanced at the man at his side. The gray eyes were calm and bright. They gazed away.

“Bud’s a hard case,” said the man who had given his name as Daniel Craig.

Maybe the major was thinking of the reticences of his daughter when she had spoken of the man who had organized the San Pedro jail delivery. The major had not sought to question too far. He had faith in his daughter. He had faith in humanity in general. To the major, privately, this was Thomas Masters, late convict No. 3777. To the major, as warden of San Pedro, this man at his side was Daniel Craig, a man whom he had never heard about, a man who was innocent of all wrongdoing--even if he did have a handkerchief tied over the lower part of his face.

It was a confusing situation. Major Gracie solved it by sticking to the essentials of the present situation.

“Bud’s a hard case,” said Craig, “but even so, I don’t believe I’d ever have brought him back if I hadn’t known that San Pedro had changed.”

“It’s changed all right,” said the new warden.

“That’s what I kept telling the boys, but I’m glad to hear you confirm it. That’s going to make me feel a lot better when I go about the rest of the work I have to do--which will be plenty.”

“A good deal has been left to my discretion,” said the major. “I may come asking board for myself some day.”

It was curious to hear them talking like this, friendly and intimate. It would have been still more curious to one who looked at them--this man with a handkerchief tied over the lower part of his face seated there on the ground at the side of the governor’s friend.

They talked a while about Bud. He was a hard problem as Craig had said. Bud hadn’t wanted to come back to San Pedro. It was only after long persuasion that he had confessed where he had hidden his loot from train No. 93.

“And you----”

“Yes, we brought that with us, too.”

“And what is your idea now, Daniel Craig?” asked the major.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Craig. “I thought that maybe you would think it a nice thing, and something in favor of these boys, if you just let them come back to San Pedro without escort--saving the State the expense of the rewards, and so forth. This is where they belong--prison’s where they do belong, but let it be somehow, as if they were coming home!”

That part of it turned out as Craig and the major agreed that it should before they parted. And, somehow or other, a part of the story did leak out and get into the papers, where it was treated as bordering on the miraculous.

Two of the fugitives from San Pedro, said the papers, had appeared at the prison one day bringing Bud Gaspell, the train robber, with them, and also an old horse and wagon, with Bud’s most recent loot in it.

All very mysterious--and rightly so, for any one not in possession of all the facts. But, even in possession of all the facts, could one have explained that glow of excitement and pride in Joan Gracie’s heart when she heard of the adventure? Excitement and pride on her father’s account, of course. But then, why should she have ridden out into the desert space back of San Pedro, that day of her father’s conference, and gazed and gazed away into the distance? Not even she herself could have told.

She was on the top of a rising bit of ground when she saw an old horse appear trailing a shaky old wagon. Driving the horse was a man who coughed. Seated in the back of the wagon was a man who seemed to have his hands tied. Back of the cart a big negro flat-footed along with a step not devoid of the singing quality of his race.

Then she saw another man. He had come from a hollow. He shook hands with the driver of the cart. He shook hands with the negro. He watched them go. He stood there until they were out of sight.

Then, for the first time he saw the girl who had been watching him. There must have been a good half mile between them. But who can tell what tricks other than that of mere telepathy the mind can play? There for an interval it may have seemed to both Joan Gracie and Daniel Craig that they were once more face to face.

She waved her hand. He answered her. There were tears in her eyes as she wheeled her horse and started back to San Pedro. Still, she must have known that they were to meet again and again--until the debts of the little ledger were paid.