Branded.

by Francis Lynde.

I

The Heating of the Iron

It was not until the evening when old John Runnels, who had been the town marshal in my school days, and was now chief of police under the new city charter, came into the dingy little private banking room to arrest me that I began to realize, though only in a sort of dumb and dazed fashion, how much my promise to Agatha Geddis might be going to cost me.

But even if the full meaning of the promise had been grasped at the time when my word was given, it is an open question if the earlier recognition of the possible consequences would have made any difference. Before we go any farther, let it be clearly understood that there was no sentiment involved; at least, no sentimental sentiment. Years before, I, like most of the other town boys of my age, had taken my turn as Agatha's fetcher and carrier; but that was only a pa.s.sing spasm--a gust of the calf-love which stirs up momentary whirlwinds in youthful hearts. The real reason for the promise-making lay deeper. Abel Geddis had been crabbedly kind to me, helping me through my final year in the High School after my father died, and taking me into his private bank the week after I was graduated. And Agatha was Abel Geddis's daughter.

Over and above the daughterhood, she was by far the prettiest girl in Glendale, with a beauty of the luscious type; eyes that could toll a man over the edge of a bluff and lips that had a trick of quivering like a hurt baby's when she was begging for something she was afraid she wasn't going to get. All through the school years she had been one of my cla.s.smates, and a majority of the town boys were foolish about her, partly because she had a way of twisting them around her fingers; partly, perhaps, because her father was the rich man of the community and the president of the Farmers' Bank.

She had sent for me to come up to the big house on the hill the night before this other night of old John Runnels's call. I went, taking it as a matter of course that she wished to talk to me about the trouble at the bank, and saying to myself that I was going to be iron and steel and adamant; this when I might have known that I should be only putty in her hands. She met me on the porch, and made me sit with my back to the window, which was open, while she faced me, sitting in the hammock where the house lights fell fairly upon her and I could get the full benefit of the honeying eyes and baby lips as she talked.

She had begun by saying in catchy little murmurings that I knew better than any one else what it was going to mean to her--to all of them--if her father's crookedness (she called it his "mistake") in using the depositors' money for his own speculations should be published abroad; and I did. She was engaged to young Wheeland, son of the copper magnate Wheeland, of New York, and the wedding date was set. Black ruin was staring them all in the face, she said, and I could save them, if I only would. What would be shouted from the housetops as a penitentiary offense in the president of the bank would be condoned as a mere error in judgment on the part of a hired bookkeeper.

If I would only consent to let the directors think that I was the one who had pa.s.sed upon and accepted the mining-stock collateral--which had taken the place in the bank's vault of the good, hard money of the depositors--well, I could see how easily the dreadful crisis would be tided over; and besides earning the undying grat.i.tude of the family, her father would stand by me and I would lose nothing in the end.

For one little minute she almost made me believe what she didn't believe herself--that the crime wasn't a crime. Her father, "our eminent and public-spirited fellow-citizen, the Hon. Abel Geddis," to quote the editor of the Glendale _Daily Courier_, was desperately involved. For months he had been throwing good money after bad in a Western gold mine; not only his own money, but the bank's as well. At the long last the half-dozen sleepy directors, three of them retired farmers and the other three local merchants, had awakened to the fact that there was something wrong. They didn't know fully, as yet, just what they were in for; Geddis's part of the bookkeeping was in a horrible muddle owing to his efforts to hide the defalcation. But they knew enough to be certain that somebody had been skating upon thin ice and had broken through.

"You can't help seeing just how it is, Herbert," Agatha had pleaded, with the soulful look in her pretty eyes and the baby lips all in a tremble. "If the faintest breath of this gets out, VanBruce Wheeland will have to know, and then everything will come to an end and I shall want to go and drown myself in the river. You are young and strong and brave, and you can live down a--an error of judgment"--she kept on calling it that, as if the words had been put into her mouth; as they probably had. "Promise me, Herbert, won't you?--for--for the sake of the old times when you used to carry my books to school, and I--I----"

What was the use? Every man is privileged to be a fool once in a while, and a young man sometimes twice in a while. I promised her that I would shoulder the load, or at least find some way out for her father; and when she asked me how it could be done, I was besotted enough to explain how the mining-stock business had really pa.s.sed through my hands--as it had in a purely routine way--and telling her in so many words that everything would be all right for her father when the investigating committee should come to overhaul the books and the securities.

When I got up to go, she went to the front steps with me, and at the last yearning minute a warm tear had splashed on the back of my hand.

At that I kissed her and told her not to worry another minute. And this brings me back to that other evening just twenty-four hours later; I in the bank, with the accusing account books spread out under the electric light on the high desk, and old John Runnels, looking never a whit less the good-natured, easy-going town marshal in his bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned uniform and gilt-banded cap, stumbling over the threshold as he let himself in at the side door which had been left on the latch.

I had started, half-guiltily, I suppose, when the door opened; and Runnels, who had known me and my people ever since my father had moved in from the farm to give us children the advantage of the town school, shook his grizzled head sorrowfully.

"I'd ruther take a lickin' than to say it, but I reckon you'll have to come along with me, Bertie," he began soberly, laying a big-knuckled hand on my shoulder. "It all came out in the meetin' to-day, and the d'rectors 're sayin' that you hadn't ort to be allowed to run loose any longer."

The high desk stool was where I could grab at it, and it saved me from tumbling over backward.

"Go with you?" I gasped. "You mean to--to _jail_?"

Runnels nodded. "Jest for to-night. I reckon you'll be bailed, come mornin'--if that blamed security comp'ny that's on your bond don't kick up too big a fight about it."

"Hold on--wait a minute," I begged. "There is nothing criminal against me, Uncle John. Mr. Geddis will tell you that. I----"

The big hand slipped from my shoulder and became a cautionary signal to flag me down.

"You mustn't tell me nothin' about it, Bertie; I don't want to have to take the stand and testify against your father's boy. Besides, it ain't no kind o' use. You done it yourself when you was up at Abel Geddis's house las' night. Two of the d'rectors, Tom Fitch and old man Withers, was settin' behind the window curtains in the front room whilst you was talkin' to Miss Agathy on the porch. You know, better'n I do, what they heard you say."

For a second the familiar interior of the bank went black for me. I was young in those days; much too young to know that human nature in the lump is neither all saint nor all devil; that a man may be a second father to you for years, and then turn and hold your head under water until you drown when he is fighting for himself. It had been a trap, deliberately set and baited with Agatha. I remembered now that she had not spoken loud enough to be overheard; while I, with my back to the open window, had talked in ordinary tones. Fitch and Withers had heard me say that the investigating committee would find nothing against Abel Geddis, and they had naturally taken it as a confession of my own guilt.

I remember that I went quite methodically about putting things away while Runnels waited, though every move was dumbly mechanical.

Something seemed to have died inside of me, and I suppose the psychologists would say that it was the subconscious Bert Weyburn who put the books in the vault, locked the iron door, set the high desk in order, and turned off all the lights save the one we always left turned on in front of the vault.

Afterward, when we were in the street together, and Runnels was walking me around the square to the police station, the dead thing inside of me came alive. It had gone to sleep a pretty decent young fellow, with a soft spot in his heart for his fellow men, and a boy's belief in the ultimate goodness of all women. It awoke a raging devil. It was all I could do to keep from throttling unsuspecting John Runnels as we tramped along side by side. I could have done it. I had inherited my father's well-knit frame and serviceable muscles, and all through my office experience I had kept myself fit with long walks and a few bits of home-made gymnastic apparatus in my room at Mrs. Thompson's. And the new-born devil was ready with the suggestion.

I have been glad many times since that old John never knew; glad that the frenzied curses that came boiling up out of that inner h.e.l.l were wordless. I contrived to hold in while Runnels was hurrying me through the station office and past the sleepy sergeant at the desk. But when the cell door had opened and closed for me, and old John's heavy footsteps were no longer echoing in the iron-floored corridor, the newly hatched devil broke loose and I made a pretty bad night of it.

II

The Searing Touch

Out of the first twenty-four hours, when my little raft of respectability and good report was going to pieces under me, I have brought one heart-mellowing recollection. In the morning it was old John Runnels himself who brought me my cell breakfast, and he did it to spare me the shame of being served by the police-station turnkey. Past that, he sat on the edge of the iron cot and talked to me while I tried to eat.

"They was aimin' to telegraph the sheriff and have you railroaded slap up to the county seat las' night, but I told 'em nary," he confided.

"I wasn't allowin' to have 'em jerk you out of your home town before you'd had a chance to pick a lawyer and talk to your friends; no sir-ee, I wasn't."

"I guess I haven't any friends any more," I was still bitter enough to say. And then: "Tell me, if you can, Uncle John, just what the charge against me is."

"I reckon you know a heap better'n I do, Bertie," was his sober rejoinder, "but I can tell you what I heard. They say you've been takin' the bank's money to put into a gold mine somewheres out yonder in the Rocky Mountains."

"Who swore out the warrant for my arrest?"

"Ab Withers."

Abner Withers, town miser, note-shaver and skinflint, was the one man on the board of directors of the bank whom I had always most cordially detested. Back in my childhood, before my father had got upon his feet, Withers had planned to foreclose a mortgage on the home farm, making the hampering of my father so that he could not pay the debt a part of the plan. More than once I had half suspected that he was in with Geddis on the mining deal, but I had no proof of this.

"You say they were getting ready to railroad me out of town last night: I suppose they will do it to-day, won't they?"

"Not if I can help it, Bertie. I'm goin' to try to hold you here till you've had time to kind of straighten yourself around and ketch up with the procession. I don't know what in Sam Hill you wanted to go and bu'st yourself up for, this way, but I'm owin' it to Amos Weyburn dead to help his boy get some sort of a fair show for his white alley. You ask me anything in reason, and I'll do it."

I considered the most necessary requirements hastily. My mother and sister were absent on a visit to a distant relative in the far-away Saskatchewan wheat country, and I thanked G.o.d for that. It was altogether unlikely that they would see any of the home newspapers, for some time, at least, and any anxiety on that score might be dismissed, or at all events postponed. The most pressing need was for a lawyer, and since lawyers do not serve without fees, I was glad to remember that my savings, which were still reposing in Abel Geddis's bank vault, would enable me to pay as I went.

By this time, in bitter revulsion from grat.i.tude to fierce enmity, I was determined to defend myself tooth and nail. At one stroke Abel Geddis had cancelled all my obligations to him. At the very moment when I was promising his daughter to help cover up his criminality, he had been deliberately plotting to make me his scapegoat.

"I need a lawyer, of course," I told Runnels; and then I made the first and worst of a long series of wretched mistakes. "Send word to Cy Whitredge and tell him I'd like to see him."

If anybody had asked me five minutes after Runnels went away why I had chosen Cyrus Whitredge to be my counsel I doubt if I could have offered any justifiable reason. Whitredge was known throughout our end of the State as a criminal lawyer, shrewd, unscrupulous, and with a reputation built up entirely upon his singular success in defeating the ends of justice. Before a jury of farmers and small merchants, such as I was likely to have, I had prejudiced my case at the very outset.

I was completely and thoroughly convinced of this a little later when Whitredge came to see me. He was a lean man, leather-faced, and with an eye like that of a fish. To my consternation and keen disheartenment he a.s.sumed my guilt from the moment the cell door was locked upon him and he had seated himself upon the iron-framed cot to nurse a knee in the locked fingers of his bony hands.

"You've got the wrong idea of things, altogether, Weyburn," he criticised, after I had tried to tell him that I was being made to hold the bag for some one else; and his use of the bare surname, when he had known me from boyhood, cut me like a knife. "You can't expect me to do anything for you unless you are entirely frank with me. As your counsel, I've got to know the facts; and you gain absolutely nothing by insisting to me that you are not guilty."

There was more of it; a good bit more in which I stubbornly a.s.serted my innocence while Whitredge used every trick and wile known to his craft to entrap me into admitting that I was guilty, in the act if not in the intention.

"You can't deny--you don't deny--that you knew these mining sharps, Hempstead and Lesherton, pretty intimately, that you saw them frequently and talked with them in the way of business, and that you knew all about the capitalization scheme they were trying to put over,"

was Whitredge's summing up of the situation. "You'll have to loosen up, Weyburn, if you expect to get any help. I'll come around again this afternoon, and maybe by that time you will have taken a tumble to yourself."

He got up, rattled the door for the turnkey, and then wheeled upon me with a sharp question.