Part 10
A strange exalted cruelty began to stir in Walton Pringle, the cruelty of an animal on the scene of some furtive thing pitifully intent on escape. His mood must have communicated itself, for suddenly Sam Allen fell into a silence that no amount of prodding could shatter. Well, there could be little more that bore upon the particular issue. Pringle began to think of the most expedient move. He found himself shivering. Naturally, since he had been wet to the skin.... A rusty stove huddled itself just below one of the windows, sending its pipe crazily through a shattered pane. Pringle suggested a fire; dumbly the youth assented. Together they began to collect débris from the cabin floor: crumpled newspapers, empty cartons, a handful of pine cones. Soon a cheerful blaze crackled and roared. Even Sam Allen found its warmth agreeable, but its cheer did not serve to melt his sudden reticence.
Presently for lack of fuel the fire began to spend itself and its snap and roar sank to a faint hiss. The night too seemed to have grown miraculously silent. Pringle rose and threw open the cabin door. The rain had stopped, even the wind had fallen, and through a rent in the storm clouds far to the east a faint glow gave promise of a rising moon.
Pringle closed the door and went back to his place before the stove. The situation in which he found himself made him suddenly restive. It seemed as if he could not possibly wait until morning to settle the issue that must ultimately be settled.
Walden’s Glen lay a good fifteen miles to the east, but at least it was for the most part down grade. His exhaustion of the previous hour had been swallowed up in the absorbing shock of drama. He felt like making a decisive move and yet a certain pity for Sam Allen, shrinking visibly before his questioning gaze, made him resolve to give the youth a meager choice in the matter. He sauntered casually to the table. The candle was guttering to a feeble decline, and it threw out a flickering light that touched with spasmodic fire the coins lying in a disorderly heap where Sam Allen had abandoned them. Pringle ran his hand nervously through the silver pile.
“What do you think,” he asked abruptly, “shall we strike out for Walden’s Glen now, or wait till morning?”
Sam Allen gave a gasp. Then recovering himself, he returned with slow drawling defiance, “If you’re headed that way, suit yourself.... But I set out to leave Walden’s Glen and I don’t see no reason why I should go back.”
Pringle felt himself grow ominously cool. “I dare say you don’t. But, unfortunately for you, there _are_ reasons.... In a way I’m sorry I walked into this mess. But I did walk in and I can’t shirk my responsibility. There’s the law to reckon with, you know!”
Sam Allen’s lips began to tremble. “I tell you it was an accident. Don’t you believe me?”
“No.”
“And you mean to give me up--to--to--my father?”
_Deputy sheriff for the district!_ For a moment even Pringle trembled: the picture which the youth had drawn of his sire had been too vivid. And besides, the bare situation was pregnant with disaster.
“I’m afraid there’s no help for it,” Pringle returned, trying to check any show of emotion. Sam Allen crept nearer to the table like a whipped dog. Pringle was stirred to a profound pity. “Besides,” he went on more softly, “your father can’t really touch you. You’ll have all the law on your side.”
Even in his terror the youth could not check a sneer. “Much you know about it!” he cried passionately.
“But I’ll go with you--don’t you understand--every step of the way ... I mean, I’ll stand by you till everything’s put straight.” Pringle broke off suddenly. Sam Allen’s white face seemed to draw closer to the table and his two eyes were fixed craftily upon the gun which Pringle had neglected to restore to his hip pocket.
An intense nervous silence followed; Pringle made a swift movement toward the pistol, and the next moment the candle was violently extinguished.
* * * * *
Pringle stood momentarily inactive under the shock of surprise. The slam of the door roused him. He went stumbling through the gloom, knocking down impediments in his path until he gained the open. The moon was still hidden by the thick clouds in the east, but directly overhead a few stars showed dimly through thin vapors rising from the drenched hills.
Almost at once he realized the futility of pursuit. He knew nothing about the country, and besides, the greatest service he could render was to report the situation promptly. An aroused community would deal effectively with the murderer--he wouldn’t get very far with his lack of resources and wit.
Pringle went back into the cabin and lighted the candle, forcing the stub out of the candlestick to prolong its life. The pile of silver had been scattered about by the impact of stumbling fingers but it appeared otherwise intact; the pistol, however, had disappeared. Pringle laughed to himself, shrugging his shoulders. It was plain that he had much to learn about the custody of prisoners. Urged by the expediency of taking stock of all emphatic details connected with the situation, he raised the candle and swept the interior with its faint radiance. This was the first comprehensive view he had taken of the room. But there was really little of fresh significance: the cot on which lay the body of Marchel Duplin, the rusting stove, the table, the one chair, the bench; and over in a corner--back of the door when it swung open--a burlap curtain screening a shallow triangle. This last item was the only detail which had previously escaped him, partly because of its neutral color and
## partly because it hung in the shadow. A faint suspicion crossed him as
he caught the movement of the curtain. He put the light down on the table. Could it be that the slammed door following on Allen’s apparent exit had been a clever ruse? He took a quick gliding step forward and thrust the curtain dramatically aside, almost expecting to find Sam Allen cowering behind it. But the space revealed nothing except a muddle of clothes and discarded boots, and a sharp current of air drifting through a wide crevice in the floor.
The reaction from the tenseness of expectation left him shivering. An impatience for the whole situation swept over him. He felt relieved that young Allen had fled, eluded him. It lifted an unpleasant duty from his shoulders and at the same time confirmed the youth’s guilt. He would have hated, now that he considered it, to be the instrument for turning an uncertain situation into an inevitable one. His testimony might have damned an innocent man--that he was now willing to concede. But Allen’s escape immeasurably cleared the issue: innocent people were never fearful. How many, _many_ times, in divers forms, had this truism been brought home to him!
Yet in spite of the emphatic case against young Allen, Pringle felt the necessity of having his own movements clear in his mind. He’d be questioned, naturally; that went without saying. Quite rapidly he recapitulated the events of the day: the start from Walden’s Glen at sunrise, the untoward rain at noon, his dawdling in the shelter of a redwood hollow against a sudden clearing; his resolve to push on when he saw no prospect of the storm’s abatement.... It all sounded so clear and simple. Once he explained his mission, any testimony he might give must gather added weight. And his credentials would render his testimony doubly valuable. His book on _Radical Movements in Relation to Post-war Problems_ would carry him past any reasonable skepticism, and then a B.A. from Yale and the prospects of a Ph.D. from Columbia ought to impress even a rural magistrate.
He decided to count the money and take it with him to Walden’s Glen. It wasn’t safe to leave it in the cabin, and besides, it had a significant bearing on the case. In a half hour, he figured, the moon would be fully risen and if the sky continued to clear he would have a brilliantly lighted path to travel back.
He drew the single chair up to the table and fell to his task. The money was in all denominations of silver, but mostly quarters and halves. He began to group them into systematic piles. A faint scraping sound made him pause.... A twig, probably, brushing against the house.... He continued counting the money. Again the sound came. This time a tremor ran through him as he stopped his task. He kept his eye straight ahead as if fearing to turn to the right or left. Then slowly, fearfully, with the inevitability of one who feels other eyes fixed ironically upon him, he turned and looked up at the window, very much as Sam Allen had done less than an hour before.... A man’s face answered his startled gaze and the next instant the door flew open.
Walton Pringle rose in his seat, again repeating the gesture of Sam Allen in a like situation. A faint, almost imperceptible sense of this analogy crept over him; he felt his heart suddenly contract.
* * * * *
The man in the doorway had an impressive bulk, a swaggering, insolent grossness that must once have been robustly virile. His coarse underlip had sufficient force to crowd upward a ragged mustache, and as he stepped heavily into the circle of light, Walton Pringle felt a glint of sardonic and unpropitiable humor leap at him from two piglike eyes.
“Where’s Duplin?” the stranger demanded.
Pringle pointed to the cot. The visitor strode up to it and drew down the quilt. “Dead, eh!” He bent over closer. “Ah, a tolerable blow on the head.... Neat job, I’d say.” He flung back the quilt over the face of the corpse with a gesture that showed an absolute indifference, a contempt even for the presence of death. “Well, stranger, suppose you tell me who you are?” There was an authority in his drawling suaveness which brought a quick answer. “Pringle, eh?... And just what are you doing here?”
Pringle stiffened with a rallied dignity. “I might ask you the same question. And I might ask your name, too, if I felt at all curious. As a matter of fact, I’m not, but I must decline to be cross-examined by a man I don’t know.”
A grim humor played about the protruding under-lip. “Correct, stranger, correct as hell! My name happens to be Allen--Hank Allen. That don’t mean nuthin’ to yer, does it? Well, I’ll go further. I’m deputy sheriff for this county and I’ve got a right to question any man I take a notion to question. It ain’t exactly a right I work overtime, but when I come into a man’s cabin and find that man dead and a stranger pawin’ over his money, I guess I just naturally calc’late that I’d better get on the job.” He threw a pair of handcuffs on the table. “Why I happen to be here don’t matter much, I guess. A man sometimes goes hunting for jack rabbit and brings home venison. You get me, don’t yer?”
Walton Pringle stood motionless, trying to still the beating of his heart. He understood something now of Sam Allen’s terror, Sam Allen’s fear of being turned over to his father. But he knew also that a betrayal of fear would be one of the worst moves he could make.
“You don’t have to tell me why you’re here,” he said quietly, “now that I know your name. There’s a runaway lad mixed up in it somewhere, if I’m not mistaken.”
The barest possible flash of surprise lighted up the features of Hank Allen, destroying for a moment their brutal immobility. “I ain’t saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to that,” he half laughed, recovering his careless manner. “But I don’t figger how that answers the question at hand.”
Pringle smiled a superior smile. “Perhaps you’re not the only one to look through the window at a stranger sitting before this table _pawin’_ over a dead man’s money. Perhaps I wasn’t the first in the field. Perhaps there is more than you fancy to connect up a runaway lad with the question at hand. Who knows?”
Hank Allen’s shoulders drooped forward with almost impalpable menace and his brows drew down tightly. “Look here, Pringle, I ain’t accustomed to movin’ in circles. When I shoot, I shoot straight. What’s more, I usually set the pace. In other words, let’s have no more riddles. Good plain language suits me. What’s on your mind?”
Pringle shrugged his shoulders with a hint of triumph and proceeded to tell his adversary just what was on his mind in good plain language that he felt would suit Hank Allen down to the ground. But as he progressed he found an uneasiness halting the glibness with which he had opened fire: Hank Allen’s impassivity became as inscrutable and sinister as a tragic mask whose inflexible outlines concealed a surface animate with fly-blown depravity. He finished upon a note of pity for the youth and rested his case with a tremulousness of spirit which disclosed that he was pleading his cause rather than Sam Allen’s; and pleading, as Sam Allen himself had done, to a tribunal that had already reached its verdict.
“I’m not saying the boy meant to do it, mind you,” he repeated, stung to a reiteration by Allen’s ominous silence. “And I’m right here to do all I can to pull him out of a hole. _My_ testimony ought to have some weight.”
Allen ignored Pringle’s egotistic flourish. “Let’s see,” he mused coldly, “what time did you strike out from Walden’s Glen?”
“At seven this morning.”
“And it took you until nearly nine at night to make this cabin?... You’re a mighty slow walker, if you ask me.”
“The rain came on shortly after one o’clock. I thought it might let up, so I dodged into the shelter of a redwood stump near Preston’s Flat. But it only grew worse. At five I decided to push on.”
Suddenly Pringle stopped, chilled by the fact that Hank Allen’s air of sneering incredulity was rendering devoid of substance the simplest and most truthful statements. Even in his own ears they rang out falsely. He desperately recovered himself and again took up his defense. It was terrifying how hollow even his credentials sounded, let alone the story of the day’s events: a Yale B.A., a Ph.D. from Columbia, the author of _Radical Movements in Relation to Post-war Problems_--every statement he made grew more incredible, more fictitious, more hopeless. It was as if the monumental skepticism of Hank Allen were capable of destroying all reality. When he had finished, Hank Allen cleared his throat significantly.
“You’ll have a mighty interesting story to tell the judge,” he half-sneered, half-chuckled.
The brevity of Hank Allen’s comment was packed with presage, and yet for a fleeting moment Walton Pringle took courage. A judge--precisely! A judge would be quite a different matter. Really, the situation was little short of absurd! In answer Hank Allen merely turned his gaze toward the disheveled cot, and he continued to tap the table significantly with the empty handcuffs.
* * * * *
In the portentous silence which followed Walton Pringle’s thoughts leaped to Sam Allen. Had his own skepticism of the previous hour also flattened the youth’s defense? If he had listened with an open mind would the boy’s far-fetched statements have held germs of reasonability? After all, what was there so extravagant in Sam Allen’s tale? It could have happened just as he had said. But there was the youth’s absurd escape. What point did any man have in damning himself with any move so suspicious--so futile?
As for Allen senior, what did he really think? It was almost incredible to imagine that he fancied Walton Pringle guilty. Then why the pose? Did some smoldering clan spirit in him rouse instinctively to his own flesh and blood in its extremity? Or would his son’s disgrace expose his own delinquencies? The story that Pringle had listened to must merely have scratched the surface of his father’s infamies. No, it was patent that Allen senior was in no position to invite the law to review his private record.... Yet he must know that he could but postpone the inevitable. What would happen tomorrow when the proper magistrate heard the real truth? The thought, spinning through Walton Pringle’s brain, gave him a sudden feeling of boldness. After all, what had _he_ to fear? He rose in his seat, all his confidence recaptured.
“Mr. Allen,” he said clearly, “you are quite right. I _have_ an interesting story to tell the judge. Therefore, I think the sooner I tell it the better. Shall we start back to Walden’s Glen at once?”
A sardonic smile fastened itself on Pringle. He picked up the handcuffs. “If you will oblige me--” he nodded toward Pringle’s folded arms.
The faint suggestion of a chill crept over Pringle. “Do I understand, Mr. Allen, that you intend to put me to the indignity of handcuffs?” Allen shrugged. “No, I won’t have it! I’ll be damned if I will!”
“You won’t have it? Come now, that ain’t pretty talk. And it ain’t reasonable talk, neither.” He narrowed his eyes. “Resisting an officer of the law is sometimes a messy job, stranger.”
Pringle’s resistance died before the covert snarl in Allen’s voice. He put out his wrists and in the next instant he felt a cold clasp of steel encircling them and heard the click of the lock. At the moment he remembered the words of Sam Allen: “_I’ve seen him beat ’em, too, over the head, with the butt end of a pistol--or anything else that came handy._”
And in a swift, terrible moment of revelation he knew that that was just what Hank Allen intended to do.
* * * * *
He fell back on the bench utterly helpless and without defense. Every story of the law’s brutality that had ever reached his ears seemed to beat mockingly about him. He remembered now that not one of these tales had ever concerned an unshackled victim. No, what petty tyrants liked best was something prostrate which they could kick and trample with impunity. That was always the normal complement of bullying, but in this case corruption gave the hand of authority an added incentive. Hank Allen would murder him not only for the pleasure of the performance but to save his own hide. A man struck down for resisting an officer would tell no tales. And how neatly the situation would be cleared up: a suspected murderer paying the penalty of his crime without process or expense of law. A bit of sound judicial economy, to tell the truth, in a community not given to rating life too dearly. And he thought that he had managed it all so cleverly!
At this point he noticed that Hank Allen was intent on investigating a menacing six-shooter and his mind moved alertly past all the futile movements he could make toward defense. Where was Hank Allen planning his latest atrocity--here in Marchel Duplin’s cabin or somewhere on the trail to Walden’s Glen? Here in the cabin--or he missed his guess--with a litter of broken furniture to add confirmation to a tale of resistance.
His gaze swept the room with a sudden hunger for even a drab background to life, as if his soul longed to carry a homely memory with it into the impending darkness. He saw the tumbled cot, the rusting stove, the table before him with a sudden passionate sense of their rude symbolism. Even the guttering candle, almost spent, took on significance. It was the candle, blown into untimely darkness, that had paved the way for his predicament. If only his pocket flash had worked! Upon such trivialities did life itself depend! A flickering candle ... a flickering candle ... a flickering-- The rhythmic beat of this reiteration snapped. Unconsciously he had looked past the gleam of light to the closed door and the burlap curtain, screening its shallow triangle, swaying gently in the half darkness. Abruptly candlelight, doorway, and curtain became fused into a unit--startling and lucid. Would it be possible? The prospect left him as breathless as a dash of cold water; he could hear himself gasp. Hank Allen fixed him with a suspicious glance.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded brutally.
Pringle’s mind cleared to a point of supreme intuition.
“I’m--I’m ill!” he gasped. “Would--would you mind opening the door--it’s suffocating in here.”
Hank Allen hesitated, then a diabolic humor seemed to move him to compliance. He threw back the door with a chuckle and resumed his seat. It was as if he had said, “Try it, my friend, if it amuses you!”
For a brief moment Walton Pringle closed his eyes; then quite suddenly opened them, took in a deep breath, and with a quick upward leap he blew out the candle.
* * * * *
Drawing himself flatly against the wall, Pringle felt the impact of the door swinging back before Allen’s stumbling pursuit. It was inconceivable that a man on such good terms with subterfuge could have been tricked by anything so obvious as a slammed door. But how long would he remain tricked? He wouldn’t search the hills all night, nor would he be likely to strike out for Walden’s Glen without returning to the cabin. Pringle’s first elation at the extraordinary success of his ruse fell before the realization of his plight. What chance had a handcuffed man in any case? And his attempt to escape--how beautifully that colored his guilt! _Innocent people were never fearful._ The memory of this mental deduction bit at him sharply. Yet with all the odds against him he felt that he must plan something and that quickly. Cautiously moving back the open door he peered over its rim. At first his vision could not pierce the gloom, but suddenly a flood of moonlight released from the imprisonment of dispersing clouds made a path of silver into the cabin. Pringle listened: everything was extraordinarily still.
All at once the silence was cracked by a keen report. A snapping fusillade answered Pringle’s mental interrogation.... He heard a shrill cry, clipped and terrible. Then the silence fell again.... Presently the soft beat of cautious footfalls drifted toward the cabin. Pringle withdrew to the curtain’s shelter. Something fluttered on the threshold. Then slowly, warily, the door was closed.
Pringle leaned sidewise, the tail of one eye thrust past the curtain’s edge. Moonlight was flooding now even through the grimy windowpane. A shadowy form crept stealthily toward the table, halted as if sensing a living presence, turned sharply and revealed the unmistakable outlines of Sam Allen’s ineffectual face.
Walton Pringle gave a cry of mingled relief and surprise and stepped from his hiding place.
The youth shrank back. “I--I wondered where you were,” he gasped. He gave a little hysterical flourish with his right hand and Pringle saw that he held the stolen pistol. “Well, I’m a murderer _now_!” he spit out with quivering venom.
In a flash Pringle knew everything, and yet he could only stammer out in stupid conventional protest:
“You don’t mean ... _not your father_!”
The youth’s face grew ashen. “Who else did you think?” He gave a scraping laugh. “Would _you_ stand up and let him get you, if you had a chance to shoot first? I guess not.... Well, what are you going to do about it?”
Pringle brought his shackled wrists into the moonlight. “Damned little, I fancy.”