I
he stage stopped at a disheartened-looking tavern with a sagging porch and sprawling wooden steps. A fat man with a good-natured face, tagged with a gray chin whisker, bareheaded, and without a coat—there was snow on the ground, too—and who said he was the landlord, lifted my yellow bag from one of the long chintz-covered stage cushions, and preceded me through a sanded hall into a low-ceiled room warmed by a red-hot stove, and lighted by windows filled with geraniums in full bloom. The effect of this color was so surprising, and the contrast to the desolate surroundings outside so grateful, that, without stopping to register my name, I drew up a chair and joined the circle of baking loungers. My oversight was promptly noted by the clerk—a sallow-faced young man with an uncomfortably high collar, red necktie, and stooping shoulders—and as promptly corrected by his dipping a pen in a wooden inkstand and holding the book on his knee until I could add my own superscription to those on its bespattered page. He had been considerate enough not to ask me to rise.
The landlord studied the signature, his spectacles on his nose, and remarked in a kindly tone:—
"Oh, you're the man what's going to lecture to the college."
"Yes; how far is it from here?"
"'Bout two miles out, Bingville way. You'll want a team, won't you? If I'd knowed it was you when yer got out I'd told the driver to come back for you. But it's all right—he's got to stop here again in half an hour—soon 's he leaves the mail."
I thanked him and asked him to see that the stage called for me at half-past seven, as I was to speak at eight o'clock. He nodded in assent, dropped into a rocking chair, and guided a spittoon into range with his foot. Then he backed away a little and began to scrutinize my face. Something about me evidently puzzled him. A leaning mirror that hung over a washstand reflected his head and shoulders, and gave me every expression that flitted across his good-natured countenance.
His summing up was evidently favorable, for his scrutinizing look gave place to a benign smile which widened into curves around his mouth and lost itself in faint ripples under his eyes. Hitching his chair closer, he spread his fat knees, and settled his broad shoulders, lazily stroking his chin whisker all the while with his puffy fingers.
"Guess you ain't been at the business long," he said kindly. "Last one we had a year ago looked kinder peaked." The secret of his peculiar interest was now out. "Must be awful tough on yer throat, havin' to holler so. I wasn't up to the show, but the fellers said they heard him 'fore they got to the crossin'. 'Twas spring weather and the winders was up. He didn't have no baggage—only a paper box and a strap. I got supper for him when he come back, and he did eat hearty—did me good to watch him." Then, looking at the clock and recalling his duties as a host, he leaned over, and shielding his mouth with his hand, so as not to be overheard by the loungers, said in a confidential tone, "Supper'll be on in half an hour, if you want to clean up. I'll see you get what you want. Your room's first on the right—you can't miss it."
I expressed my appreciation of his timely suggestion, and picking up the yellow bag myself—hall-boys are scarce in these localities—mounted the steps to my bedroom.
Within the hour—fully equipped in the regulation costume, swallow-tail, white tie, and white waistcoat—I was again hugging the stove, for my bedroom had been as cold as a barn.
My appearance created something of a sensation. A tall man in a butternut suit, with a sinister face, craned his head as I passed, and the sallow-faced clerk leaned over the desk in an absorbed way, his eyes glued to my shirt front. The others looked stolidly at the red bulb of the stove. No remarks were made—none aloud, the splendor of my appearance and the immaculate nature of my appointments seeming to have paralyzed general conversation for the moment. This silence continued. I confess I did not know how to break it. Tavern stoves are often trying ordeals to the wayfarer; the silent listeners with the impassive leather faces and foxlike eyes disconcert him; he knows just what they will say about him when they go out. The awkward stillness was finally broken by a girl in blue gingham opening a door and announcing supper.
It was one of those frying-pan feasts of eggs, bacon, and doughnuts, with canned corn in birds' bathtubs, plenty of green pickles, and dabs of home-made preserves in pressed glass saucers. It occupied a few moments only. When it was over, I resumed my chair by the stove.
The night had evidently grown colder. The landlord had felt it, for he had put on his coat; so had a man with a dyed mustache and heavy red face, whom I had left tipped back against the wall, and who was now raking out the ashes with a poker. So had the butternut man, who had moved two diameters nearer the centre of comfort. All doubts, however, were dispelled by the arrival of a thickset man with ruddy cheeks, who slammed the door behind him and moved quickly toward the stove, shedding the snow from his high boots as he walked. He nodded to the landlord and spread his stiff fingers to the red glow. A faint wreath of white steam arose from his coonskin overcoat, filling the room with the odor of wet horse blankets and burned leather. The landlord left the desk, where he had been figuring with the clerk, approached my chair, and pointing to the new arrival, said:—
"This is the driver I been expectin' over from Hell's Diggings. He'll take you. This man"—he now pointed to me—"wants to go to the college at 7.30."
The new arrival shifted his whip to the other hand, looked me all over, his keen and penetrating eye resting for an instant on my white shirt and waistcoat, and answered slowly, still looking at me, but addressing the landlord:—
"He'll have to get somebody else. I got to take Dick Sands over to Millwood Station; his mother's took bad again."
"What, Dick Sands?" came a voice from the other side of the stove. It was the man in the butternut suit.
"Why, Dick Sands," replied the driver in a positive tone.
"Not Dick Sands?" The voice expressed not only surprise but incredulity.
"Yes, DICK SANDS," shouted the driver in a tone that carried with it his instant intention of breaking anybody's head who doubted the statement.
"Gosh! that so? When did he git out?" cried the butternut man.
"Oh, a month back. He's been up in Hell's Diggin's ever since." Then finding that no one impugned his veracity, he added in a milder tone: "His old mother's awful sick up to her sister's back of Millwood. He got word a while ago."
"Well, this gentleman's got to speak at the college, and our team won't be back in time." The landlord pronounced the word "gentleman" with emphasis. The white waistcoat had evidently gotten in its fine work.
"Let Dick walk," broke in the clerk. "He's used to it, and used to runnin', too"—this last with a dry laugh in spite of an angry glance from his employer.
"Well, Dick won't walk," snapped the driver, his voice rising. "He'll ride like a white man, he will, and that's all there is to it. His leg's bad ag'in."
These remarks were not aimed at me nor at the room. They were fired pointblank at the clerk. I kept silent; so did the clerk.
"What time was you goin' to take Dick?" inquired the landlord in a conciliatory tone.
"'Bout 7.20—time to catch the 8.10."
"Well, now, why can't you take this man along? You can go to the Diggings for Dick, and then"—pointing again at me—"you can drop him at the college and keep on to the station. 'Tain't much out of the way."
The driver scanned me closely and answered coldly:—
"Guess his kind don't want to mix in with Dick"—and started for the door.
"I have no objection," I answered meekly, "provided I can reach the lecture hall in time."
The driver halted, hit the spittoon squarely in the middle, and said with deep earnestness and with a slight trace of deference:—
"Guess you don't know it all, stranger. Dick's served time. Been up twice."
"Convict?"—my voice evidently betrayed my surprise.
"You've struck it fust time—last trip was for five years."
He stood whip in hand, his fur cap pulled over his ears, his eyes fixed on mine, noting the effect of the shot. Every other eye in the room was similarly occupied.
I had no desire to walk to Bingville in the cold. I felt, too, the necessity of proving myself up to the customary village standard in courage and complacency.
"That don't worry me a bit, my friend. There are a good many of us out of jail that ought to be in, and a good many in that ought to be out." I said this calmly, like a man of wide experience and knowledge of the world, one who had traveled extensively, and whose knowledge of convicts and other shady characters was consequently large and varied. The prehistoric age of this epigram was apparently unnoticed by the driver, for he started forward, grasped my hand, and blurted out in a whole-souled, hearty way, strangely in contrast with his former manner:—
"You ain't so gol-darned stuck up, be ye? Yes, I'll take ye, and glad to." Then he stooped over and laid his hand on my shoulder and said in a softened voice: "When ye git 'longside o' Dick you tell him that; it'll please him," and he stalked out and shut the door behind him.
Another dead silence fell upon the group. Then a citizen on the other side of the stove, by the aid of his elbows, lifted himself perpendicularly, unhooked a coat from a peg, and remarked to himself in a tone that expressed supreme disgust:—
"Please him! In a pig's eye it will," and disappeared into the night.
Only two loungers were now left—the butternut man with the sinister expression, and the red-faced man with the dyed mustache.
The landlord for the second time dropped into a chair beside me.
"I knowed Dick was out, but I didn't say nothing, so many of these fellers 'round here is down on him. The night his time was up Dick come in here on his way home and asked after his mother. He hadn't heard from her for a month, and was nigh worried to death about her. I told him she was all right, and had him in to dinner. He'd fleshed up a bit and nobody didn't catch on who he was—bein' away nigh five years—and so I passed him off for a drummer."
At this the red-faced man who had been tilted back, his feet on the iron rod encircling the stove, brought them down with a bang, stretched his arms above his head, and said with a yawn, addressing the pots of geraniums on the window sill, "Them as likes jail-birds can have jail-birds," and lounged out of the room, followed by the citizen in butternut. It was apparent that the supper hour of the group had arrived. It was equally evident that the hospitality of the fireside did not extend to the table.
"You heard that fellow, didn't you?" said the landlord, turning to me after a moment's pause. "You'd think to hear him talk there warn't nobody honest 'round here but him. That's Chris Rankin—he keeps a rum mill up to the Forks and sells tanglefoot and groceries to the miners. By Sunday mornin' he's got 'bout every cent they've earned. There ain't a woman in the settlement wouldn't be glad if somebody would break his head. I'd rather be Dick Sands than him. Dick never drank a drop in his life, and won't let nobody else if he can help it. That's what that slouch hates him for, and that's what he hates me for."
The landlord spoke with some feeling—so much so that I squared my chair and faced him to listen the better. His last remark, too, explained a sign tacked over the desk reading, "No liquors sold here," and which had struck me as unusual when I entered.
"What was this man's crime?" I asked. "There seems to be some difference of opinion about him."
"His crime, neighbor, was because there was a lot of fellers that didn't have no common sense—that's what his crime was. I've known Dick since he was knee-high to a barrel o' taters, and there warn't no better"——
"But he was sent up the second time," I interrupted, glancing at my watch. "So the driver said." I had not the slightest interest in Mr. Richard Sands, his crimes or misfortunes.
"Yes, and they'd sent him up the third time if Judge Polk had lived. The first time it was a pocket-book and three dollars, and the second time it was a ham. Polk did that. Polk's dead now. God help him if he'd been alive when Dick got out the last time. First question he asked me after I told him his mother was all right was whether 'twas true Polk was dead. When I told him he was he didn't say nothin' at first—just looked down on the floor and then he said slow-like:—
"'If Polk had had any common sense, Uncle Jimmy,'—he always calls me 'Uncle Jimmy,'—'he'd saved himself a heap o' worry and me a good deal o' sufferin'. I'm glad he's dead.'"
II
he driver arrived on the minute, backed up to the sprawling wooden steps, and kicked open the door of the waiting-room with his foot.
"All right, boss, I got two passengers 'stead o' one, but you won't kick, I know. You git in; I'll go for the mail." The promotion and the confidential tone were intended as a compliment.
I slipped into my fur overcoat; slid my manuscript into the outside pocket, and followed the driver out into the cold night. The only light visible came from a smoky kerosene lamp boxed in at the far end of the stage and protected by a pane of glass labeled in red paint, "Fare, ten cents."
Close to its rays sat a man, and close to the man—so close that I mistook her for an overcoat thrown over his arm—cuddled a little girl, the light of the lamp falling directly on her face. She was about ten years of age, and wore a cheap woolen hood tied close to her face, and a red shawl crossed over her chest and knotted behind her back. Her hair was yellow and weather-burned, as if she had played out of doors all her life; her eyes were pale blue, and her face freckled. Neither she nor the man made any answer to my salutation.
The child looked up into the man's face and shrugged her shoulders with a slight shiver. The man drew her closer to him, as if to warm her the better, and felt her chapped red hands. In the movement his face came into view. He was, perhaps, thirty years of age—wiry and well built, with an oval face ending in a pointed Vandyke beard; piercing brown eyes, finely chiseled nose, and a well-modeled mouth over which drooped a blond mustache. He was dressed in a dark blue flannel shirt, with loose sailor collar tied with a red 'kerchief, and a black, stiff-brimmed army-shaped hat a little drawn down over his eyes. Buttoned over his chest was a heavy waistcoat made of a white and gray deerskin, with the hair on the outside. His trousers, which fitted snugly his slender, shapely legs, were tucked into his boots. He wore no coat, despite the cold.
A typical young westerner, I said to myself—one of the bone and sinew of the land—accustomed to live anywhere in these mountains—cold proof, of course, or he'd wear a coat on a night like this. Taking his little sister home, I suppose. The country will never go to the dogs as long as we have these young fellows to fall back upon. Then my eyes rested with pleasure on the pointed beard, the peculiar curve of the hat-brim, the slender waist corrugating the soft fur of the deerskin waistcoat, and the peculiar set of his trousers and boots—like those of an Austrian on parade. And how picturesque, I thought. What an admirable costume for the ideal cowboy or the romantic mountain ranger who comes in at the nick of time to save the young maiden; and what a hit the favorite of the footlights would make if he could train his physique down to such wire-drawn, alert, panther-like outlines and—
A heavy object struck the boot of the stage and interrupted my meditations. It was the mail-bag. The next instant the driver's head was thrust in the door.
"Dick, this is the man I told you was goin' 'long far as Bingville. He's got a show up to the college."
I started, hardly believing my ears. Shades of D'Artagnan, Davy Crockett, and Daniel Boone! Could this lithe, well-knit, brown-eyed young Robin Hood be a convict?
"Are you Dick Sands?" I faltered out.
"Yes, that's what they call me when I'm out of jail. When I'm in I'm known as One Hundred and Two."
He spoke calmly, quite as if I had asked him his age—the voice clear and low, with a certain cadence that surprised me all the more. His answer, too, convinced me that the driver had told him of my time-honored views on solitary confinement, and that it had disposed him to be more or less frank toward me. If he expected, however, any further outburst of sympathy from me he was disappointed. The surprise had been so great, and the impression he had made upon me so favorable, that it would have been impossible for me to remind him even in the remotest way of his former misfortunes.
The child looked at me with her pale eyes, and crept still closer, holding on to the man's arm, steadying herself as the stage bumped over the crossings.
For some minutes I kept still, my topics of conversation especially adapted to convicts being limited. Despite my implied boasting to the driver, I had never, to my knowledge, met one before. Then, again, I had not yet adjusted my mind to the fact that the man before me had ever worn stripes. So I said, aimlessly:—
"Is that your little sister?"
"No, I haven't got any little sister," still in the same calm voice. "This is Ben Mulford's girl; she lives next to me, and I am taking her down for the ride. She's coming back."
The child's hand stole along the man's knee, found his fingers and held on. I kept silence for a while, wondering what I would say next. I felt that to a certain extent I was this man's guest, and therefore under obligation to preserve the amenities. I began again:—
"The driver tells me your mother's sick?"
"Yes, she is. She went over to her sister's last week and got cold. She isn't what she was—I being away from her so much lately. I got two terms; last time for five years. Every little thing now knocks her out."
He raised his head and looked at me calmly—all over—examining each detail—my derby hat, white tie, fur overcoat, along my arms to my gloves, and slowly down to my shoes.
"I s'pose you never done no time?" He had no suspicion that I had; he only meant to be amiable.
"No," I said, with equal simplicity, meeting him on his own ground—quite as if an attack of measles at some earlier age was under discussion, to which he had fallen a victim while I had escaped. As he spoke his fingers tightened over the child's hand. Then he turned and straightened her hood, tucking the loose strands of hair under its edge with his fingers.
"You seem rather fond of that little girl; is she any relation?" I asked, forgetting that I had asked almost that same question before.
"No, she isn't any relation—just Ben Mulford's girl." He raised his other hand and pressed the child's head down upon the deerskin waistcoat, close into the fur, with infinite tenderness. The child reached up her small, chapped hand and laid it on his cheek, cuddling closer, a shy, satisfied smile overspreading her face.
My topics were exhausted, and we rode on in silence, he sitting in front of me, his eyes now so completely hidden in the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat that I only knew they were fixed on me when some sudden tilt of the stage threw the light full on his face. I tried offering him a cigar, but he would not smoke—"had gotten out of the habit of it," he said, "being shut up so long. It didn't taste good to him, so he had given it up."
When the stage reached the crossing near the college gate and stopped, he asked quietly:—
"You get out here?" and lifted the child as he spoke so that her soiled shoes would not scrape my coat. In the action I saw that his leg pained him, for he bent it suddenly and put his hand on the kneecap.
"I hope your mother will be better," I said. "Good-night; good-night, little girl."
"Thank you; good-night," he answered quickly, with a strain of sadness that I had not caught before. The child raised her eyes to mine, but did not speak.
I mounted the hill to the big college building, and stopped under a light to look back; following with my eyes the stage on its way to the station. The child was on her knees, looking at me out of the window and waving her hand, but the man sat by the lamp, his head on his chest.
All through my discourse the picture of that keen-eyed, handsome young fellow, with his pointed beard and picturesque deerskin waistcoat, the little child cuddled down upon his breast, kept coming before me.
When I had finished, and was putting on my coat in the president's room—the landlord had sent his team to bring me back—I asked one of the professors, a dry, crackling, sandy-haired professor, with bulging eyes and watch-crystal spectacles, if he knew of a man by the name of Sands who had lived in Hell's Diggings with his mother, and who had served two terms in state's prison, and I related my experience in the stage, telling him of the impression his face and bearing had made upon me, and of his tenderness to the child beside him.
"No, my dear sir, I never heard of him. Hell's Diggings is a most unsafe and unsavory locality. I would advise you to be very careful in returning. The rogue will probably be lying in wait to rob you of your fee;" and he laughed a little harsh laugh that sounded as if some one had suddenly torn a coarse rag.
"But the child with him," I said; "he seemed to love her."
"That's no argument, my dear sir. If he has been twice in state's prison he probably belongs to that class of degenerates in whom all moral sense is lacking. I have begun making some exhaustive investigations of the data obtainable on this subject, which I have embodied in a report, and which I propose sending to the State Committee on the treatment of criminals, and which"——
"Do you know any criminals personally?" I asked blandly, cutting short, as I could see, an extract from the report. His manner, too, strange to say, rather nettled me.
"Thank God, no, sir; not one! Do you?"
"I am not quite sure," I answered. "I thought I had, but I may have been mistaken."
III
hen I again mounted the sprawling steps of the disheartened-looking tavern, the landlord was sitting by the stove half asleep and alone. He had prepared a little supper, he said, as he led the way, with a benign smile, into the dining-room, where a lonely bracket lamp, backed by a tin reflector, revealed a table holding a pitcher of milk, a saucer of preserves, and some pieces of leather beef about the size used in repairing shoes.
"Come, and sit down by me," I said. "I want to talk to you about this young fellow Sands. Tell me everything you know."
"Well, you saw him; clean and pert-lookin', ain't he? Don't look much like a habitual criminal, as Polk called him, does he?"
"No, he certainly does not; but give me the whole story." I was in a mood either to reserve decision or listen to a recommendation of mercy.
"Want me to tell you about the pocketbook or that ham scrape?"
"Everything from the beginning," and I reached for the scraps of beef and poured out a glass of milk.