Chapter VI: Just and Unjust

There was a sound of cheering from the prison yard, and this brought the two of them again to their feet. Craig was stricken. In his own mind he was like a crazy man. He was a man who had committed a stupendous crime. There was no righting of it. Glimpsingly, he looked back on himself as he had been in the cell, and found that it was then he had been blessed without knowing it--serving a term on behalf of another, on behalf of a lad he had scarcely known, but whom he had pitied. Then, his conscience had been clear. Now, he was already seared with the fire eternal. And this, or most of it, must have been in his eyes as they met hers.

Craig picked up the revolver he had discarded when she had begun to bandage him. He handed this to her.

“Take this,” he said. “As soon as I’m through that door, lock it. There’s the telephone. Use it as you will. You can. The exchange in Pine City will help you.”

She took the revolver. She understood the possible necessity of it. She shuddered.

“Where are you going?”

“Out there.”

“You may be killed. They’re out of hand.”

“They’re out of hand,” he said. “That’s why I go. There’ll be wholesale murder next. The old warden--the guards! Locked up! Men who have sworn to kill----”

There was another outburst of cheering. No, cheering is not the word. It was the howl of a mob.

“Fire!” the girl gasped.

Through the window that overlooked the yard there had come a curl of smoke. There slanted across the yard a shadow as from a cloud, and she knew that the sky was cloudless. She hurried across the room to look out. She turned. Craig was gone.

How strangely she had remembered the facts of his case as soon as he had mentioned the name of Thomas Masters. She and her father had looked up this case particularly when the major was still making up his mind whether or not he should accept the almost martyrdom of an appointment to San Pedro--exchange his residence, well equipped, luxurious, even, for the squalid quarters which were all that San Pedro would have to offer; exchange the society of his friends for the society of Nature’s misfits and throwbacks, her human failures and freaks. But San Pedro had offered an appeal all its own--that ancient riddle of Evil, and of Good.

“No man is consistently evil; no man is consistently good,” Jerome Gracie had said. “Now, here is the case of this Thomas Masters. See! They have him at San Pedro--twenty years--for murder. Now, I happened to be present at his trial. He might have saved himself had he spoken. He didn’t kill that man, Beekman, for robbery, nor, apparently, for revenge, nor yet, certainly, for sheer wantonness. What was the motive?”

What was Joan Gracie’s motive now when, instead of locking herself in this room where she would be safe, she ran out to follow Craig? Him, the all-but-nameless convict? Him, whose work this was?

No answer, except, perhaps, that she was her father’s daughter. So Jerome Gracie himself would have done. Or, that simpler answer yet; that she was feminine--that this convict had fought in her defense and that she had nursed his wounds, and that, therefore, by the oldest law of the world--but one which she would have instantly denied--this man to some extent was hers and she was his.

She sped down the stairs. The iron gate that guarded the bottom of them was still closed and locked. She went back through a corridor. Here was an open door. This way he had passed. She found another door and stumbled through it into the brightness of the yard.

How fast he had gone! She saw him crossing the yard--a gaunt and shaky figure in bandages. He was making toward a band of men who turned to greet him. And once more, unaccountably, the girl felt for him a spasm of pity; of more than pity--of sympathy, of anguish and admiration.

But Craig himself had moved with a strength that was not his own. So he himself would have testified. So far as he was concerned, his prayers had been answered, and he had died, and this thing that he called himself was the mere ghost of the Daniel Craig who had once lived, and moved, and had his being in the vast freedom of the world.

Like that he moved upon the merrymakers who had started the fire. It wasn’t much of a fire as yet, but smoky--the paint house, happily detached. Had Craig been a ghost in all reality not otherwise would the cheerful bandits have looked at him. For Craig had that supernatural look about him that most men have when they have passed above natural fear.

“Choke off that fire, you fools!”

Not loud. He didn’t have to raise his voice.

“Shut the door,” some one cried softly.

The door of the paint house was shut, and they that had set the fire now ran this way and that like rats out of a demolished barn.

In this the groping convicts had been able to act swiftly, at last. There were a few who had lingered, after the scene in the chapel--lingered with some idea of loot, some hankering for revenge, but it was Freedom that was calling to them the loudest. They had begun to scatter. The scatter had become a rush. No longer than it had taken Craig to get the girl to the office, and the girl there to bandage his wounds, and the brief time required for such other things as had there transpired, than the prison had begun to be abandoned.

Only the former officers remained, locked up; and only a few wretches who had been hurt in the rioting.

Craig and the girl went here and there about the prison.

They found Eddie, the Yegg, of the tragic eyes, unhurt. He whispered that he had sequestered the horse on which the girl had come riding to the prison.

“You could have taken it and ridden away,” said Miss Gracie.

Eddie had no word for that. He wasn’t used to speaking to women. He merely looked at Craig with a haunted smile.

“He knew that he wouldn’t get far,” said Craig.

Eddie nodded.

“Few of them will,” said the girl. “It’s always that way. They’ll be rounded up--almost all of them----”

She broke off and communed with herself, as one will who has got hold of a thought that leads off into channels not yet clearly seen.

“I did this,” said Craig, “as an act of justice--justice! In the world I was living in there was no justice! The innocent suffered with the wicked! I knew that it shouldn’t be! I wanted to set things right!”

He was half out of his head.

Perhaps they all were out of their heads a little bit. There was a grotesquerie in the world itself that wasn’t rational at all. This was a beautiful Sunday, now warming to late afternoon, yet it was shot full of nightmare. This was a prison. In it the only prisoners were those who should have been the masters.

The three of them--Eddie, Craig, and the girl--succored the wounded. They gave water to the men whom Craig himself had caged. Craig would have let them out, but the girl prevented him, Eddie abetting. There were those among the guards who would have killed Craig and Eddie, too, as their first act on getting out.