“Jimmy Lovell will get us a lawyer who’d argue us out of the gates of hell. Don’t go and make a fool of yourself, Joe, and let the rest of us into the hot soup. Take your time.”
“Suppose that Lovell decides to forget us and grab that coin for himself?” demanded Joe Mantry.
“He knows the rule of the gang,” said Bray. “One for all, and all for one. He won’t forget that we carried him along to-day, and put ourselves into the soup for his sake. He looks like a rat, but he’s a man, after all.”
That was why they stood there with their hands over their heads, while the men of Elkdale swarmed about them and put the handcuffs over their wrists.
Two thirds of the party followed Wayland when a way had been found so that they could clamber to the upper level of the valley above the cliff. For three days Wayland hunted through the mountains. But he did not even know the face of the man he was pursuing. He merely had vague ideas about the build of him. The rest of the men from Elkdale gave up the chase, and at last Wayland himself surrendered the hunt and came gloomily back to Elkdale.
There he found the doors of the bank closed, and the significant sign which he had known he would find was posted over the doors.
Unshaven, haggard, he went to the house of Rucker. The banker himself, almost as unkempt as his cashier, opened the door and stood staring at him with a frozen face.
“Well,” said Wayland foolishly, “I didn’t catch him.”
“No?” said Rucker, and a sardonic smile pulled at his lips.
He kept his hand on the door, blocking the way, staring.
“I suppose you’re through with me?” asked Wayland.
Rucker smiled again.
And as the world spun about the eyes of Wayland, he said, “Can I see May?”
After a moment, still blocking the way, Rucker turned his head and called out:
“May!”
A voice answered far off. Footsteps came hurrying. A door opened, and there she was, moving through the dimness of the hall.
“Here’s Wayland, wanting to know if he can see you,” said Rucker.
The girl halted. Like her father, she said nothing. She was white. In the dark of the hallway it seemed to Wayland that the white of her face was like a pearl shining against black velvet.
The silence held for a frightful moment, and then Rucker slammed the door in Wayland’s face.
He turned and went down the steps to the street. It was not empty. Children were playing half a block away, running through the dust and yelling and laughing. In the solemn chamber of his soul the voices echoed mournfully.
It was a good, brisk trial. The evidence was all there, laid out smoothly. But Wayland was not attending the sessions of the court. He was sitting in the little one-story hospital at the edge of the town, tending to Hal Parson, who was dying. The doctors had said that Parson could not live a day. He ended by living ten. But he could not eat. And gradually the strength went out of him.
He endured a constant agony with wonderful courage. He seemed to have only one regret.
“I let you down,” he said to Wayland. “If I hadn’t been slowed up with the booze, I would ‘a’ got that gun out and plastered one of the thugs. Maybe I would ‘a’ got the whole gang of ‘em on the run. You can’t tell. But I fell down on you after you trusted me!”
“If I’d put up a man’s fight,” Wayland told him, “there wouldn’t have been a need of you. I’m not a man. I’m a yellow dog. That’s all!”
“You?” said Hal Parson. He tried to laugh, but the pain stopped him. “You’re a better man than you know your own self,” he managed to gasp at last.
Ten days after the robbery they buried Hal Parson.
Rucker came to the funeral, and May Rucker brought flowers for the grave. Neither she nor her father would look at the white, drawn face of Wayland, who had arranged everything.
He saw the earth heaped over the grave, and then stalked back into the town to the courtroom, where he could barely find standing room to squeeze himself in. He heard the last piece of evidence. He heard the faltering, rather casual appeal of the lawyer who had been appointed by the judge to defend the criminals. The result was a foregone conclusion.
For Jimmy Lovell, after all, had proved himself more of a rat than he was a man; he had not come to the aid of his friends in need as they had come to his.
Wayland, standing with a cold stone for a heart, saw the judge put on the black cap, heard him pronounce the words, “To be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead!”
All three of the men were to hang. That made little difference to Wayland. It seemed to him as though he were himself already dead and ready for the grave.
IV—IN THE DEATH HOUSE
The death house in the Atwater prison should be celebrated for its view. It stands above the rest of the building, rising like a tower between the inner and the outer yard. The windows peer down on the outer walls and look beyond them at the Ballater Mountains. That being the southeastern face of the Ballater Mountains, there isn’t a tree or a shrub in sight; they are nothing but wind-sculptured rock whose flutings and hollows are painted blue, or brown, or rosy-gold, according to the time of day. There is a moment before noon where hardly a shadow is seen, for the sun strikes right against the average slope of the range and sets the crystals of the granite gleaming like intolerably bright little stars.
The beauty of the mountains was generally unnoticed by the men who were spending time in the death house, but on this occasion one of the prisoners was an aesthete who could not overlook scenery. As the evening crept up from the plain like water, submerging the feet of the peaks, Dave Lister had summoned his companions. They crowded their heads beside his in order to look out through the little barred window.
“A perfect picture, and a perfect evening to remember this earth by,” said Dave Lister. “I hope you fellows will appreciate it.”
Joe Mantry, the jokester, and Phil Bray, the leader, looked grimly on their companion. The three should not have been permitted to occupy one cell, but Jefferson Bergman, the warden, knew that no man had ever escaped from the death house, and it seemed pretty apparent that no man ever would escape. So the warden decided to reward these three for the unanimity of mind and the resolution of spirit with which they had stood together during the chase in which they had been captured, and the trial in which they had perjured themselves with a perfect singleness of heart. Since they were to hang at dawn, Jefferson Bergman was pleased to allow them to spend the last night of their lives in the same cell in the death house. That was the reason they were able to crowd their heads together at one window and listen to the slow, emotional voice of David Lister.
Joe Mantry laughed.
“Are you going to enjoy the scenery we’ll have in hell?” he asked. “Are you going to call us to admire down there, Dave?”
Phil Bray did not laugh. He never laughed. But his big mouth stretched a little in a grin.
“No matter what the scenery is,” he said, “we’re going to have a chance to enjoy it together.”
“To the devil with the mountains, and let’s get back to seven-up,” said Joe Mantry. He was handsome, and dark, and slender, and a little too sleek. “But why,” he added, “d’you think that we’ll all stick together in hell? Won’t we be shuffled apart?”
“They can’t,” said Phil Bray. “Even in hell they can’t pry partners loose.”
Dave Lister had gone back to his end of the table, where he was writing his last words with careful phraseology and with a still more careful pen. Dave was a forger of note, and he had selected at his hand for these last important words, the exact script of a celebrated traveler, millionaire, and poet whose handwriting Dave had studied long ago, and not in vain. That study had enabled Dave Lister to cash several important checks in the past; now it was permitting him to express himself in the strong, flowing characters of a poet of some note. But he suspended his pen above the paper and ran his pale fingers through the silken length of his hair while he answered the last remark.