The Escape of Mr. Trimm Part 11

She sank her head in the pillow wearily, with her face turned away from him. The major stood up. Into his side coat pocket he slipped the revolver that had snuffed out the late and unsavory Rodney Bullard's light of life, and from his trousers pocket he slowly drew forth his supply of ready money. He had three silver dollars, one quarter, one dime, and a nickel--three-forty in all. Contemplating the disks of metal in the palm of his hand, he did a quick sum in mental arithmetic. This was Thursday night now. Sat.u.r.day afternoon at two he would draw a pay envelope containing twelve dollars. Meantime he must eat. Well, if he stinted himself closely a dollar might be stretched to bridge the gap until Sat.u.r.day. The major had learned a good deal about the n.o.ble art of stinting these last few weeks.

On the coverlet alongside the girl he softly piled two of the silver dollars and the forty cents in change. Then, after a momentary hesitation, he put down the third silver dollar, gathered up the forty cents, slid it gently into his pocket and started for the door, the loose planks creaking under his tread. At the threshold he halted.

"Good night, Miss La Mode," he said. "I trust your night's repose may be restful and refres.h.i.+ng to you, ma'am."

She lifted her face from the pillow and spoke, without turning to look at him.

"Mister," she said, "I've told you the whole truth about that thing and I ain't goin' to lie to you about anythin' else. I didn't come from Indianapolis, Indiana, like I told you. My home is in Swainboro', this state--a little town. You might know where it is? And my real name ain't La Mode, neither. I taken it out of a book--the La Mode part--and I always did think Blanche was an awful sweet name for a girl. But my real name is Gussie Stammer. Good night, mister. I'm much obliged to you fer listenin', and I ain't goin' to disturb you no more with my cryin' if I kin help it."

As the major gently closed her door behind him he heard her give a long, sleepy sigh, like a tired child. Back in his own room he glanced about him, meanwhile feeling himself over for writing material. He found in his pockets a pencil and a couple of old letters, whereas he knew he needed a big sheaf of copy paper for the story he had to write. Anyway, there was no place here to do an extended piece of writing--no desk and no comfortable chair. The office would be a much better place.

The office was only a matter of two or three blocks away. The negro watchman would be there; he stayed on duty all night. Using the corner of his washstand for a desk, the major set down his notes--names, places, details, dates--upon the backs of his two letters. This done, he settled his ancient hat on his head, picked up his cane, and in another minute was tiptoeing down the stairs and out the front doorway. Once outside, his tread took on the brisk emphasis of one set upon an important task and in a hurry to do it.

Ten minutes later Major Stone sat at his desk in the empty city room of the Evening Press. Except for Henry, the old black night watchman, there was no other person in the building anywhere. Just over his head an incandescent bulb blazed, bringing out in strong relief the major's intent old face, mullioned with crisscross lines. A cedar pencil, newly sharpened, was in his fingers; under his right hand was a block of clean copy paper. His notes lay in front of him, the little stubnosed pistol serving as a paper weight to hold the two wrinkled envelopes flat.

Through the loop of the trigger guard the words, Gussie Stammer, alias Blanche La Mode, showed. Everything was ready.

The major hesitated, though. He readjusted his paper and fidgeted his pencil. He scratched his head and pulled at the little tuft of goatee under his lower lip. Like many a more experienced author, Major Stone was having trouble getting under way. He had his own ideas about a fitting introductory paragraph. Coming along, he had thought up a full sonorous one, with a biblical injunction touching on the wages of sin embodied in it; but, on the other hand, there was to be borne in mind the daily-dinned injunction of Devore that every important news item should begin with a sentence in which the whole story was summed up.

Finally Major Stone made a beginning. He covered nearly a sheet of paper.

Then, becoming suddenly dissatisfied with it, he tore up what he had written and started all over again, only to repeat the same operation.

Two salty drops rolled down his face and fell upon the paper, and instantly little twin blistered blobs like tearmarks appeared on its clear surface. They were not tears, though--they were drops of sweat wrung from the major's brow by the pains of creation. Again he poised his pencil and again he halted it in the air--he needed inspiration. His gaze rested absently upon the pistol; absently he picked it up and began examining it.

It was a cheap, rusted, second-hand thing, poorly made, but no doubt deadly enough at close range. He unbreeched it and spun the cylinder with his thumb and spilled the contents into his palm--four loaded sh.e.l.ls, suety and slick with grease, and one that had been recently fired; and it was discolored and flattened a trifle. Each of the four loaded sh.e.l.ls had a small cap like a little round staring eye set in the exact center of its f.l.a.n.g.ed b.u.t.t-end, but the eye of the fifth sh.e.l.l was punched in. He turned the empty weapon in his hands, steadying its mechanism, and as he did so a scent of burnt powder, stale and dead, came to him out of the fouled muzzle. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed at it.

It had been many a long day since the major had had that smell in his nostrils--many a long, long day. But there had been a time when it was familiar enough to him. Even now it brought the clamoring memories of that far distant time back to him, fresh and vivid. It stimulated his imagination, quickening his mind with big thoughts. It recalled those four years when he had fought for a principle, and had kept on fighting even when the substance of the thing he fought for was gone and there remained but the empty husks. It recalled those last few hopeless months when the forlorn hope had become indeed a lost cause; when the forty cents he now carried in his pocket would have seemed a fortune; when the sorry house where he lodged now would have seemed a palace; when, without prospect or hope of reward or victory, he had piled risk upon risk, had piled sacrifice upon sacrifice, and through it all had borne it all without whimper or complaint--fighting the good fight like a soldier, keeping the faith like a gentleman. It was the Smoke of Battle!

The major had his inspiration now, right enough. He knew just what he would write; knew just how he would write it. He laid down the pistol and the sh.e.l.ls and squared off and straightway began writing. For two hours nearly he wrote away steadily, rarely changing or erasing a word, stopping only to repoint the lead of his pencil. Methodically as a machine he covered sheet after sheet with his fine old-fas.h.i.+oned script.

Never for one instant did he hesitate or falter.

Just before one o'clock he finished. The completed ma.n.u.script, each page of the twenty-odd pages properly numbered, lay in a neat pile before him. He scooped up the pistol sh.e.l.ls and stored them in an inner breast pocket of his coat; then he opened a drawer, slipped the emptied revolver well back under a riffle of papers and clippings and closed the drawer and locked it. His notes he tore into squares, and those squares into smaller squares--and so on until the fragments would tear no finer, but fluttered out between his fingers in a small white shower like stage snow.

He shoved his completed narrative back under the roll-top of Devore's desk, where the city editor would see it the very first thing when he came to work; and as he straightened up with a little grunt of satisfaction and stretched his arms out the last of his fine-linen s.h.i.+rts, with a rending sound, ripped down the plaited front, from collarband almost to waistline.

He eyed the ruined bosom with a regretful stare, plucking at the gaping tear with his graphite-dusted fingers and shaking his head mournfully.

Yet as he stepped out into the street, bound for his lodgings, he jarred his heels down upon the sidewalk with the brisk, snapping gait of a man who has tackled a hard job and has done it well, and is satisfied with the way he has done it.

Under a large black head the major's story was printed in the Fourth of July edition of the Evening Press. It ran full two columns and lapped over into a third column. It was an exhaustive--and exhausting--account of the Fall of Vicksburg.

VI

THE EXIT OF ANSE DUGMORE

When a Kentucky mountaineer goes to the penitentiary the chances are that he gets sore eyes from the white walls that enclose him, or quick consumption from the thick air that he breathes. It was entirely in accordance with the run of his luck that Anse Dugmore should get them both, the sore eyes first and then the consumption.

There is seldom anything that is picturesque about the man-killer of the mountain country. He is lacking sadly in the romantic aspect and the delightfully studied vernacular with which an inspired school of fiction has invested our Western gun-fighter. No alluring jingle of belted accouterment goes with him, no gift of deadly humor adorns his equally deadly gun-play. He does his killing in an unemotional, unattractive kind of way, with absolutely no regard for costume or setting. Rarely is he a fine figure of a man.

Take Anse Dugmore now. He had a short-waisted, thin body and abnormally long, thin legs, like the shadow a man casts at sunup. He didn't have that steel-gray eye of which we so often read. His eyes weren't of any particular color, and he had a straggly mustache of sandy red and no chin worth mentioning; but he could shoot off a squirrel's head, or a man's, at the distance of a considerable number of yards.

Until he was past thirty he played merely an incidental part in the tribal war that had raged up and down Yellow Banks Creek and its princ.i.p.al tributary, the Pigeon Roost, since long before the Big War. He was getting out timber to be floated down the river on the spring rise when word came to him of an ambuscade that made him the head of his immediate clan and the upholder of his family's honor.

"Yore paw an' yore two brothers was laywaid this mawnin' comin' 'long Yaller Banks togither," was the message brought by a breathless bearer of news. "The wimmenfolks air totin' 'em home now. Talt, he ain't dead yit."

From a dry spot behind a log Anse lifted his rifle and started over the ridge with the long, shambling gait of the born hill-climber that eats up the miles. For this emergency he had been schooled years back when he sat by a wood fire in a cabin of split boards and listened to his crippled-up father reciting the saga of the feud, with the tally of this one killed and that one maimed; for this he had been schooled when he practised with rifle and revolver until, even as a boy, his aim had become as near an infallible thing as anything human gets to be; for this he had been schooled still more when he rode, armed and watchful, to church or court or election. Its coming found him ready.

Two days he ranged the ridges, watching his chance. The Tranthams were hard to find. They were barricaded in their log-walled strongholds, well guarded in antic.i.p.ation of expected reprisals, and prepared in due season to come forth and prove by a dozen witnesses, or two dozen if so many should be needed to establish the alibi, that they had no hand in the ma.s.sacre of the Dugmores.

But two days and nights of still-hunting, of patiently lying in wait behind brush fences, of noiseless, p.u.s.s.y-footed patrolling in likely places, brought the survivor of the decimated Dugmores his chance. He caught Pegleg Trantham riding down Red Bird Creek on a mare-mule. Pegleg was only a distant connection of the main strain of the enemy. It was probable that he had no part in the latest murdering; perhaps doubtful that he had any prior knowledge of the plot. But by his name and his blood-tie he was a Trantham, which was enough.

A writer of the Western school would have found little in this encounter that was really worth while to write about. Above the place of the meeting rose the flank of the mountain, scarred with washes and scantily clothed with stunted trees, so that in patches the soil showed through like the hide of a mangy hound. The creek was swollen by the April rains and ran bank-full through raw, red walls. Old Pegleg came cantering along with his rifle balanced on the sliding withers of his mare-mule, for he rode without a saddle. He was an oldish man and fat for a mountaineer. A ten-year-old nephew rode behind him, with his short arms encircling his uncle's paunch. The old man wore a dirty white s.h.i.+rt with a tabbed bosom; a single s.h.i.+ny white china b.u.t.ton held the neckband together at the back. Below the b.u.t.ton the s.h.i.+rt billowed open, showing his naked back. His wooden leg stuck straight out to the side, its worn bra.s.s tip carrying a blob of red mud, and his good leg dangled down straight, with the trousers. .h.i.tched half-way up the bare shank and a soiled white-yarn sock falling down into the wrinkled and gaping top of an ancient congress gaiter.

From out of the woods came Anse Dugmore, bareheaded, crusted to his knees with dried mud and wet from the rain that had been dripping down since daybreak. A purpose showed in all the lines of his slouchy frame.

Pegleg jerked his rifle up, but he was hampered by the boy's arms about his middle and by his insecure perch upon the peaks of the slab-sided mule. The man afoot fired before the mounted enemy could swing his gunbarrel into line. The bullet ripped away the lower part of Pegleg's face and grazed the cheek of the crouching youngster behind him. The white-eyed nephew slid head first off the buck-jumping mule and instantly scuttled on all fours into the underbrush. The rifle dropped out of Trantham's hands and he lurched forward on the mule's neck, grabbing out with blind, groping motions. Dugmore stepped two paces forward to free his eyes of the smoke, which eddied back from his gunmuzzle into his face, and fired twice rapidly. The mule was bouncing up and down, sideways, in a mild panic. Pegleg rolled off her, as inert as a sack of grits, and lay face upward in the path, with his arms wide outspread on the mud. The mule galloped off in a restrained and dignified style until she was a hundred yards away, and then, having snorted the smells of burnt powder and fresh blood out of her nostrils, she fell to cropping the young leaves off the wayside bushes, mouthing the tender green shoots on her heavy iron bit contentedly.

For a long minute Anse Dugmore stood in the narrow footpath, listening.

Then he slid three new sh.e.l.ls into his rifle, and slipping down the bank he crossed the creek on a jam of driftwood and, avoiding the roads that followed the little watercourse, made over the shoulder of the mountain for his cabin, two miles down on the opposite side. When he was gone from sight the nephew of the dead Trantham rolled out of his hiding place and fled up the road, holding one hand to his wounded cheek and whimpering. Presently a gaunt, half-wild boar pig, with his spine arched like the mountains, came sniffing slowly down the hill, pausing frequently to c.o.c.k his wedge-shaped head aloft and fix a hostile eye on two turkey buzzards that began to swing in narrowing circles over one particular spot on the bank of the creek.

The following day Anse sent word to the sheriff that he would be coming in to give himself up. It would not have been etiquette for the sheriff to come for him. He came in, well guarded on the way by certain of his clan, pleaded self-defense before a friendly county judge and was locked up in a one-cell log jail. His own cousin was the jailer and ministered to him kindly. He avoided pa.s.sing the single barred window of the jail in the daytime or at night when there was a light behind him, and he expected to "come clear" shortly, as was customary.

But the Tranthams broke the rules of the game. The circuit judge lived half-way across the mountains in a county on the Virginia line; he was not an active partizan of either side in the feud. These Tranthams, disregarding all the ethics, went before this circuit judge and asked him for a change of venue, and got it, which was more; so that instead of being tried in Clayton County--and promptly acquitted--Anse Dugmore was taken to Woodbine County and there lodged in a s.h.i.+ny new brick jail.

Things were in process of change in Woodbine. A spur of the railroad had nosed its way up from the lowlands and on through the Gap, and had made Loudon, the county-seat, a division terminal. Strangers from the North had come in, opening up the mountains to mines and sawmills and bringing with them many swarthy foreign laborers. A young man of large hopes and an Eastern college education had started a weekly newspaper and was talking big, in his editorial columns, of a new order of things. The foundation had even been laid for a graded school. Plainly Woodbine County was falling out of touch with the century-old traditions of her sisters to the north and west of her.

In due season, then, Anse Dugmore was brought up on a charge of homicide. The trial lasted less than a day. A jury of strangers heard the stories of Anse himself and of the dead Pegleg's white-eyed nephew.

In the early afternoon they came back, a wooden toothpick in each mouth, from the new hotel where they had just had a most satisfying fifty-cent dinner at the expense of the commonwealth, and sentenced the defendant, Anderson Dugmore, to state prison at hard labor for the balance of his natural life.

The sheriff of Woodbine padlocked on Anse's ankles a set of leg irons that had been made by a mountain blacksmith out of log chains and led him to the new depot. It was Anse Dugmore's first ride on a railroad train; also it was the first ride on any train for Wyatt Trantham, head of the other clan, who, having been elected to the legislature while Anse lay in jail, had come over from Clayton, bound for the state capital, to draw his mileage and be a statesman.

It was not in the breed for the victorious Trantham to taunt his hobbled enemy or even to look his way, but he sat just across the aisle from the prisoner so that his ear might catch the jangle of the heavy irons when Dugmore moved in his seat. They all left the train together at the little blue-painted Frankfort station, Trantham turning off at the first crossroads to go where the round dome of the old capitol showed above the water-maple trees, and Dugmore clanking straight ahead, with a string of negroes and boys and the sheriff following along behind him. Under the shadow of a quarried-out hillside a gate opened in a high stone wall to admit him into life members.h.i.+p with a white-and-black-striped brotherhood of shame.

Four years there did the work for the gangling, silent mountaineer. One day, just before the Christmas holidays, the new governor of the state paid a visit to the prison. Only his private secretary came with him.

The warden showed them through the cell houses, the workshops, the dining hall and the walled yards. It was a Sunday afternoon; the white prisoners loafed in their stockade, the blacks in theirs. In a corner on the white side, where the thin and skimpy winter suns.h.i.+ne slanted over the stockade wall, Anse Dugmore was squatted; merely a rack of bones enclosed in a shapeless covering of black-and-white stripes. On his close-cropped head and over his cheekbones the skin was stretched so tight it seemed nearly ready to split. His eyes, gla.s.sy and bleared with pain, stared ahead of him with a sick man's fixed stare. Inside his convict's cotton s.h.i.+rt his chest was caved away almost to nothing, and from the collarless neckband his neck rose as bony as a plucked fowl's, with great, blue cords in it. Lacking a coverlet to pick, his fingers picked at the skin on his retreating chin.

As the governor stood in an arched doorway watching, the lengthening afternoon shadow edged along and covered the hunkered-down figure by the wall. Anse tottered to his feet, moved a few inches so that he might still be in the suns.h.i.+ne, and settled down again. This small exertion started a cough that threatened to tear him apart. He drew his hand across his mouth and a red stain came away on the knotty knuckles. The warden was a kindly enough man in the ordinary relations of life, but nine years as a tamer of man-beasts in a great stone cage had overlaid his sympathies with a thickening callus.

"One of our lifers that we won't have with us much longer," he said casually, noting that the governor's eyes followed the sick convict.

"When the con gets one of these hill billies he goes mighty fast."

"A mountaineer, then?" said the governor. "What's his name?"

"Dugmore," answered the warden; "sent from Clayton County. One of those Clayton County feud fighters."