The Escape of Mr. Trimm Part 12

The governor nodded understandingly. "What sort of a record has he made here?"

"Oh, fair enough!" said the warden. "Those man-killers from the mountains generally make good prisoners. Funny thing about this fellow, though. All the time he's been here he never, so far as I know, had a message or a visitor or a line of writing from the outside. Nor wrote a letter out himself. Nor made friends with anybody, convict or guard."

"Has he applied for a pardon?" asked the governor.

"Lord, no!" said the warden. "When he was well he just took what was coming to him, the same as he's taking it now. I can look up his record, though, if you'd care to see it, sir."

"I believe I should," said the governor quietly.

A spectacled young wife-murderer, who worked in the prison office on the prison books, got down a book and looked through it until he came to a certain entry on a certain page. The warden was right--so far as the black marks of the prison discipline went, the friendless convict's record showed fair.

"I think," said the young governor to the warden and his secretary when they had moved out of hearing of the convict bookkeeper--"I think I'll give that poor devil a pardon for a Christmas gift. It's no more than a mercy to let him die at home, if he has any home to go to."

"I could have him brought in and let you tell him yourself, sir,"

volunteered the warden.

"No, no," said the governor quickly. "I don't want to hear that cough again. Nor look on such a wreck," he added.

Two days before Christmas the warden sent to the hospital ward for No.

874. No. 874, that being Anse Dugmore, came shuffling in and kept himself upright by holding with one hand to the door jamb. The warden sat rotund and impressive, in a swivel chair, holding in his hands a folded-up, blue-backed doc.u.ment.

"Dugmore," he said in his best official manner, "when His Excellency, Governor Woodford, was here on Sunday he took notice that your general health was not good. So, of his own accord, he has sent you an unconditional pardon for a Christmas gift, and here it is."

The sick convict's eyes, between their festering lids, fixed on the warden's face and a sudden light flickered in their pale, glazed shallows; but he didn't speak. There was a little pause.

"I said the governor has given you a pardon," repeated the warden, staring hard at him.

"I heered you the fust time," croaked the prisoner in his eaten-out voice. "When kin I go?"

"Is that all you've got to say?" demanded the warden, bristling up.

"I said, when kin I go?" repeated No. 874.

"Go!--you can go now. You can't go too soon to suit me!"

The warden swung his chair around and showed him the broad of his indignant back. When he had filled out certain forms at his desk he shoved a pen into the silent consumptive's fingers and showed him crossly where to make his mark. At a signal from his bent forefinger a negro trusty came forward and took the pardoned man away and helped him put his shrunken limbs into a suit of the prison-made slops, of cheap, black shoddy, with the taint of a jail thick and heavy on it. A deputy warden thrust into Dugmore's hands a railroad ticket and the five dollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He took them without a word and, still without a word, stepped out of the gate that swung open for him and into a light, spitty snowstorm. With the inbred instinct of the hillsman he swung about and headed for the little, light-blue station at the head of the crooked street. He went slowly, coughing often as the cold air struck into his wasted lungs, and sometimes staggering up against the fences. Through a barred window the wondering warden sourly watched the crawling, tottery figure.

"d.a.m.ned savage!" he said to himself. "Didn't even say thank you. I'll bet he never had any more feelings or sentiments in his life than a moccasin snake."

Something to the same general effect was expressed a few minutes later by a brakeman who had just helped a wofully feeble pa.s.senger aboard the eastbound train and had steered him, staggering and gasping from weakness, to a seat at the forward end of an odorous red-plush day coach.

"Just a bundle of bones held together by a skin," the brakeman was saying to the conductor, "and the smell of the pen all over him. Never said a word to me--just looked at me sort of dumb. Bound for plumb up at the far end of the division, accordin' to the way his ticket reads. I doubt if he lives to get there."

The warden and the brakeman both were wrong. The freed man did live to get there. And it was an emotion which the warden had never suspected that held life in him all that afternoon and through the comfortless night in the packed and noisome day coach, while the fussy, self-sufficient little train went looping, like an overgrown measuring worm, up through the blue gra.s.s, around the outlying k.n.o.bs of the foothills, on and on through the great riven chasm of the gateway into a bleak, bare clutch of undersized mountains. Anse Dugmore had two bad hemorrhages on the way, but he lived.

Under the full moon of a white and flawless night before Christmas, Shem Dugmore's squatty log cabin made a blot on the thin blanket of snow, and inside the one room of the cabin Shem Dugmore sat alone by the daubed-clay hearth, glooming. Hours pa.s.sed and he hardly moved except to stir the red coals or kick back some ambitious ember of hickory that leaped out upon the uneven floor. Suddenly something heavy fell limply against the locked door, and instantly, all alertness, the shock-headed mountaineer was backed up against the farther wall, out of range of the two windows, with his weapons drawn, silent, ready for what might come.

After a minute there was a feeble, faint pecking sound--half knock, half scratch--at the lower part of the door. It might have been a wornout dog or any spent wild creature, but no line of Shem Dugmore's figure relaxed, and under his thick, sandy brows his eyes, in the flickering light, had the greenish s.h.i.+ne of an angry cat-animal's.

"Whut is it?" he called. "And whut do you want? Speak out peartly!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: HE DRAGGED THE RIFLE BY THE BARREL, SO THAT ITS b.u.t.t MADE A CROOKED FURROW IN THE SNOW.--_Page 197._]

The answer came through the thick planking thinly, in a sort of gasping whine that ended in a chattering cough; but even after Shem's ear caught the words, and even after he recognized the changed but still familiar cadence of the voice, he abated none of his caution. Carefully he unbolted the door, and, drawing it inch by inch slowly ajar, he reached out, exposing only his hand and arm, and drew bodily inside the sh.e.l.l of a man that was fallen, huddled up, against the log door jamb. He dropped the wooden crossbar back into its sockets before he looked a second time at the intruder, who had crawled across the floor and now lay before the wide mouth of the hearth in a choking spell. Shem Dugmore made no move until the fit was over and the sufferer lay quiet.

"How did you git out, Anse?" were the first words he spoke.

The consumptive rolled his head weakly from side to side and swallowed desperately. "Pardoned out--in writin'--yistiddy."

"You air in purty bad shape," said Shem.

"Yes,"--the words came very slowly--"my lungs give out on me--and my eyes. But--but I got here."

"You come jist in time," said his cousin; "this time tomorrer and you wouldn't a' never found me here. I'd 'a' been gone."

"Gone!--gone whar?"

"Well," said Shem slowly, "after you was sent away it seemed like them Tranthams got the upper hand complete. All of our side whut ain't dead--and that's powerful few--is moved off out of the mountings to Winchester, down in the settlemints. I'm 'bout the last, and I'm a-purposin' to slip out tomorrer night while the Tranthams is at their Christmas rackets--they'd layway me too ef----"

"But my wife--did she----"

"I thought maybe you'd heered tell about that whilst you was down yon,"

said Shem in a dulled wonder. "The fall after you was took away yore woman she went over to the Tranthams. Yes, sir; she took up with the head devil of 'em all--old Wyatt Trantham hisself--and she went to live at his house up on the Yaller Banks."

"Is she----Did she----"

The ex-convict was struggling to his knees. His groping skeletons of hands were right in the hot ashes. The heat cooked the moisture from his sodden garments in little films of vapor and filled the cabin with the reek of the prison dye.

"Did she--did she----"

"Oh, she's been dead quite a spell now," stated Shem. "I would have s'posed you'd 'a' heered that, too, somewhars. She had a kind of a risin' in the breast."

"But my young uns--little Anderson and--and Elviry?"

The sick man was clear up on his knees now, his long arms hanging and his eyes, behind their matted lids, fixed on Shem's impa.s.sive face.

Could the warden have seen him now, and marked his att.i.tude and his words, he would have known what it was that had brought this dying man back to _his_ own mountain valley with the breath of life still in him.

A dumb, unuttered love for the two shock-headed babies he had left behind in the split-board cabin was the one big thing in Anse Dugmore's whole being--bigger even than his sense of allegiance to the feud.

"My young uns, Shem?"

"Wyatt Trantham took 'em and he kep' 'em--he's got 'em both now."

"Does he--does he use 'em kindly?"

"I ain't never heered," said Shem simply. "He never had no young uns of his own, and it mout be he uses 'em well. He's the high sheriff now."

"I was countin' on gittin' to see 'em agin--an buyin 'em some little Chrismus fixin's," the father wheezed. Hopelessness was coming into his rasping whisper. "I reckon it ain't no use to--to be thinkin'--of that there now?"