As the snow-dusted road spun out behind him, he drew deep, gasping breaths of the cold air and felt the dimming sunshine on his face like the touch of some magical elixir, yet he was free from agitation, his mind was working clearly and coolly. The alarm would come soon. When the genial young tragedian returned to the office building, he would be likely to a.s.sume that his suggestion had been acted upon, and his clothing bestowed in another room. Subsequent inquiry might be worth a few minutes. The absence of Harry's cap and the tin pail would suggest that he had gone to his cell to eat his supper, a privilege that was his when he cared to avail himself of it--this would be good for a few minutes more. A general search of the buildings would be next in order. How soon the inquiry would embrace the watchman at the outer gate could not be guessed. Altogether he might count, perhaps, on a half-hour. He could cover few miles in that time, and telephone and the clicking wire would soon be busy. It would be the automobile that would be first traced, and the sentries on the wall would report the direction he had taken. He must rid himself of the car, and somehow double on his trail!

Far to the right, across wastes of snowy fields and numb, glittering trees, a line of telegraph poles thrust up darkly against the skyline.

A quick plan flashed to his mind. The road was topping a gentle rise now, where the wind had swept the hard ground clear of the light snow.

He stopped, and cast a glance before and behind him; no vehicle was in sight. He sprang out and pulled out the rails of the fence that lined the road, then ran the motor into the field and into a hollow of dead, rustling stalks, where stood a group of hayricks which would effectually hide it from the highway. He left the fur-overcoat and the valise in the car, replaced the fence-rails and ran across the field to the railroad track. A quarter of a mile further along stood a small country station and he turned his steps thither, making shift as he went to wipe the grease-paint from his face with John Stark's perfumed handkerchief.

The ticket-seller, who combined with his duties those of freight and express agent and general factotum, was sweeping out his tiny box of an office. "What is the next train west?" inquired Harry.

"None till nine to-night," was the reply. "There's one due in twenty minutes, but she only stops for through pa.s.sengers."

Before entering Harry had gone through John Stark's pockets; now he pushed a bill under the little wicket. "I happen to be going through,"

he said easily.

The other made out the ticket with deliberation, laboriously counted the change and leisurely went out to the platform to affix the red flag. The minutes that pa.s.sed thereafter the lone pa.s.senger was all his life to remember as a ghastly interval measured by dragging epochs that drew themselves snail-like across some incalculable duration of time. When the express came to its grinding stop cold drops of perspiration were on Harry's face. He swung himself aboard and went forward to the day-coach.

Five minutes later the train stopped at a water-tank, to refresh the thirsty engine. A half mile away, outlined sombrely against the dusky evening blue, rose a huddle of dingy yellow walls. The occupant of the seat in front of him leaned to look through the window.

"What are those buildings?" he asked interestedly of the conductor, who was pa.s.sing down the aisle.

"That's the State Penitentiary," was the answer.

As he spoke through the silence there came a deep, dull _boom_, repeated again and again--the sound of a monster bell, tolling.

"What's that?" the other asked. Windows went up along the car. Harry lifted his also, with outward coolness but with a curious spasm of the heart. The conductor stooped to peer beside him.

"It's the alarm," he said. "A prisoner must have escaped."

Amid excited exclamations the train started again, and the conductor withdrew his head. "They'll soon get him," he predicted, as he punched Harry's ticket. "The poor devil won't get far in those striped clothes they make them wear!"

"No," said Harry. "I fancy he won't."

Night had fallen, the dark relieved by the dim l.u.s.tre of a thin new moon, when Sevier rose and sauntered back to the platform. The train was pa.s.sing through a defile and laboriously puffing up a grade. He looked back into the lighted car; no one was observing him. He b.u.t.toned his coat close about him and poising on the lowest step to choose his ground, sprang off into a s...o...b..nk.

He had made his leap with all the care possible, but the speed of the train was such that only the snow and his padded clothing saved him from serious injury. As it was it was some minutes before he could regain his breath, and then it came with a keen stab that seemed a sword piercing his shoulder--a sharp complaint from the recent wound.

He rose painfully, but at the first step collapsed with a groan, realising that he had twisted his ankle badly. With lips compressed from the wretched pang, he rose again and set the injured member to the ground, forcing it to bear his weight. For a while each step was agony, then this dulled somewhat and he went steadily on, limping along the uneven ties.

When he came to the crest of the rise he stopped and looked about him.

He knew, roughly, where he was. Across the dark valley unrolling at his feet under a sky that shook with stars, he could dimly make out another darker ridge. Beyond lay a deeper valley and beyond that the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge, and there, forty miles away as the crow flies--how far by the irregular route he must take he could not estimate--lay his mountain lodge, the lonely little demesne of forest and stream, whither he had been wont to go for summer weeks of hunting and fishing, with its rough but s.p.a.cious bungalow presided over by his care-taker, old "Jubilee Jim," whose father had been a slave of his father before the Civil War.

Forty miles as the crow flies! Across a difficult and spa.r.s.ely-settled country, with now only the faint moonlight and a natural instinct of direction to guide him, in patent-leather shoes and with a sprained ankle!

He set his teeth and plunged down the declivity through the tumbled rocks and snow-drifts.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

THE CRUCIBLE

Echo stood at the gate of Midfields, her gloved hand delaying to close it, her eyes gazing down the featureless street along which yellow window-squares were beginning to spring out, and vague figures moved, now standing out sharply under the newly lighted arc-lamps at the crossing, now vanishing beyond into the chill windless dusk. Behind her lay the purpling lawn, with its tumult of leaves under the acacias, the oaks with their red-lipped foliage and the tall chrysanthemums at the edge of the frost-touched gra.s.s that stretched like the skins of young fawns about the great house with its fluted columns, dim and grey now in the deepening twilight. About her were only the quiet of the cold evening, the bewildered shadows huddling beneath the shrubs, and the faint snap of frosty tree-branches in the tightening of the first bonds of winter, above only the windless silence and a wild white moon flowing through dusky wreaths of cloud.

But she felt no soothing influence in the hush.

Her mind was far away, in another city and state; her thought had entered again the gloomy prison which she had visited with Nancy Langham and Malcolm--on a day when a prisoner had intervened to save the Warden's life. The peace of autumn evenings brought no comfort to that place, save it were the mere rest of wearied bodies. A city of itself, it was as alien to that city so near it, of comfortable homes and pleasant people which she had visited, as the deep life of the coal-miner is alien to that of the free hunter who breathes the sweeter air a thousand feet above the other's sunless toil. Outside of those walls folk were eager and merry; inside lights were dim, life itself sluggish and inept; there were sore hearts, sterile hopes, smouldering hatreds, an oligarchy of despotism ruling with slow cruelties, a community of apathy and despair.

Since her return from the Langhams she had moved, so it seemed to her, in a kind of sombre dream in which her daily duties were mechanical and involuntary and her only real life that inner consciousness which had writhed and struggled unceasingly. A sense of actual, personal guilt bound her, by a bond stronger than steel, to that unknown prisoner in the Penitentiary, weighing upon her spirit as heavy as a promise to the dead.

What should she--what was she bound to do? Which way should she turn?

There was Mason's opinion, based upon a long and sensitive intercourse, that the man was no criminal; that, had he been absolved of attempted murder, he could have cleared himself of the baleful a.s.sociation. But that, after all, was only Mason's opinion. He might be wrong. And if so, though the man had not fired the shot, he was a partner in his comrade's iniquity, a party to the greater guilt. An enemy to society, his penalty was just and right. Was she called upon, on such an empty hypothesis, to take upon herself a horrible mantle of notoriety? So she had reasoned, but the self-accusation had remained, not to be argued back by casuistry, a stern visitant that stood insistently before her, pointing the stern finger of denunciation.

As she stood by the gate in the dusk, she shivered as though the still cold penetrated beneath her furs. She must tell the truth! Whatever the result, she must disclose the part she had played. She had no thought that this might be accomplished without publicity, or that testimony which might be basis for executive action could be secret.

In imagination she pictured herself standing before the same tribunal by which an innocent man had been condemned, telling her story to the impartial and impersonal Law--telling it openly, before all the world!

The world? It was not this thought which in this moment of harrowing decision seemed to scratch her soul like an etcher's needle. She was thinking now only of Harry Sevier. He stood out alone, sharply, clearly defined against the meaningless mult.i.tude. She could no longer take refuge in her pride; that had vanished long ago in the misery of his absence. She wanted him, and him only, desired him with all the strength of her woman's love, which had been sharpened and deepened by the experiences through which she had been pa.s.sing. When he returned, it would be to find her the centre of an open scandal, sprung to new and sensational life--the "mysterious woman" who had been blazoned in a hundred headlines, her name no longer spotless, but cheapened by tawdry mystery and smirched by innuendo! Would it not kill any vestige of love his heart might still hold for her?

And yet beneath her dread and apprehension there had come to her in her struggle the awakening of something as deep and imperative as her love--the insistent "Thou shalt!"--the nascent must of truth and honour, fruit of generations of clean ancestry, which brought clearer vision and resolve.

She turned from the gate at length, her step dragging as if from weariness. She had a strange feeling that in that final hour of decision she had grown physically and mentally old.

As she neared the house, there came from the placid street the raucous _honk_ of a motor and the sound of masculine voices lifted in a song whose refrain solicitously inquired as to the whereabouts of a certain dog named Rover. The chording was somewhat uncertain, but any lack was more than made up by laughter and noise. She recognised the baritone as that of her brother, Chisholm.

Chilly jumped down at the gate, and as the automobile turned and sped back, its occupants calling jovial good-byes, he ran after her up the drive. Overtaking her, he leaned to kiss her cheek, as she caught a familiar odour upon his breath. She turned her face aside.

He noted this with a little laugh. "Come, prunes and prisms," he said, "out with it! Yes, I've had a drink--numerous ones, in fact. Now on with the lecture; let joy be unconfined!"

"When did I ever lecture you, Chilly?" Echo answered, dully.

"You _have_ been pretty decent, that's a fact, Echo," he responded, with humorous lugubriousness. "I wish father took after you more!"

They had reached the porch now and he stole a quick glance through the window. "I discern the shadow of my doting parent aforesaid," he remarked flippantly, "and having a due regard for the proprieties--and peace--I think I'll slip in the side-door and give the prodigal a wash-up and a clove before he enters the lion's den."

He nodded laughingly and left her to enter the front door alone.

A few minutes later, divested of coat and furs, she came into the drawing-room where her father and mother sat, the former with his magazine and the latter perusing the evening paper. Mrs. Allen withdrew her lorgnette and looked up.

"By the way, Echo," she said. "Here's the closing chapter of the adventure you and Nancy had at the jail." She turned the page and read aloud:

"It became known to-day that a dangerous criminal escaped day before yesterday and got clean away from the Penitentiary of our sister state.

The prisoner, who was serving a term of twenty years for burglary, a few months since shot down Mr. Cameron Craig, the well known financier, in his library at midnight. It is to be hoped that there will be a close examination into what appears to be a glaring exhibition of lax methods and unpardonable carelessness on the part of the prison authorities."

Echo could not have had a deeper sensation of amazement and relief. A wave of excitement had pa.s.sed over her, leaving her cool and self-possessed, and able to take a natural part in the conversation that followed. But in her heart she was saying over and over:

"I am safe--safe! There is no question now of my telling! The secret is mine--mine--mine!"