Part 2

"Marks," said Amy sententiously. "Parole in eighteen months means a perfect record right from the beginning. I thought I'd try for it, but, mercy, I've never even made high grade! Once I came within six weeks of it, but I let a dress go down to the laundry with a pin in it."

"They mark for a little thing like that?"

"My stars, yes! For less than that--buttons off, wrong apron in the recreation-room, and so on. I got my first mark for wearing my hair 'pomp.' They won't stand for it here. They want to make us as hideous as they can."

A lull threw the remarks of the girl with peculiar teeth into unsought prominence.

"Jim was a swell-looker," she was saying, "and a good spender when he was flush, but I used to tell him--"

"Delia!" The matron was on her feet leveling a rebuking finger at Jim's biographer. "You know better. Leave the room at once. All talking will cease."

The culprit scuffed sulkily out, and no further word was uttered till the end of the meal, when at a signal all rose and the matron observed in pontifical tones,

"Thou openest Thy hand!"

On this occasion Jean caught the response without difficulty. The words, "And Thou fillest all things living with plenteousness," seemed to emanate chiefly from the high-grade table, with a faint echo on the part of Amy Jeffries, in whom the ambition to eat from a cloth still persisted. At "plenteousness" one bold spirit snickered.

The file tramped up the two flights by which it had come, and scattered to its rooms. For twenty minutes Jean sat in darkness and dejection. Then the fretful bell clamored again, the doors yawned as before, the silent ranks re-formed, and the march below stairs was repeated. Their destination proved to be the recreation-room. In a dwelling this chamber would have been shunned. Here, compared with such other parts of the cottage as Jean had seen, it seemed blithesome. Potted geraniums made grateful oases of the window-sills. An innocuous print or two hung upon the walls.

As the girls found seats, the matron handed Jean a letter.

"You will be allowed to answer it next week," she said. "All letter-writing is done upon the third Friday of the month."

The girl took the missive with burning face. The envelope was already slit. The letter itself had undergone inspection, and five whole lines had been expunged. But her anger at this tampering lost itself in the unspeakable bitterness which jaundiced her to the soul as she read. Better that they had blotted every syllable.

JEAN: I hope this will find you reconciled to your cross, and resolved to lead a different life. After talking over this great affliction with our pastor, and taking it to the Throne of Grace in prayer, I have come to feel that His hand guides us in this, as in all things. I cannot understand why I have been so chastened, but I bow to the rod. If your father were alive, I should consider it a judgment upon him for his lax principles in religious matters. I never could comprehend his frivolous indifference. I am sure I spared no effort to bring him to a realizing sense of his impiety.

Amelia takes the same view that I do of all that has happened. She has not felt like going out, poor sensitive child, but.... (The hand of the censor lay heavy here. Jean readily inferred, however, that Amelia's retirement had its solace.) The first storm of the winter came yesterday. Snow is six inches deep on a level, and eggs are high.

Your devoted mother,

MARCIA FANSHAW.

The matron was reading aloud from a novel which her audience found absorbing. Jean could give it no heed. What were the imaginary woes of Oliver Twist beside her actualities!

The hands of a bland-faced clock crept round to bedtime. The reader marked her place, and, after a moment's pause, began the first line of a familiar hymn. Jean hated hymn-singing out of church. It had depressed her even as a child, while later it evoked choking memories of her father's funeral. So she set her teeth till they made an end of it.

Suggestive also of her father and of vesper services to which they had sometimes gone together, after a Sunday in the fields, were the words presently repeated by the forlorn figures kneeling about her; but she heard them with mute lips and in passionate protest against their personal application. These tawdry creatures might confess that they had erred and strayed like lost sheep, if they would. She was not of their flock. The things she had left undone did not prick her conscience. The things which she ought not to have done were dwarfed to peccadillos by the vast disproportion of their punishment.

III

Life in a reformatory is an ordeal at its doubtful best. It approximated its noxious worst under the martinet whom Cottage No. 6 styled "the Holy Terror." The absolutism of the superintendent was at least founded on a sense of duty; her imitator's was based upon whim. Jean's chimera of parole after eighteen months was promptly dissipated. Disciplined at the outset for breaking a rule of which she was not aware, her obedience became thenceforth a captive's. Scrubwoman, laundress, seamstress, kitchen-drudge--all rôles in which fate, as embodied in the matron, cast her--were one in their odiousness. She slurred their doing where she could, and scorned all such meek spirits as curried favor by trying their best. At times only the fear of the prison deterred her from open mutiny.

She learned presently that there was an inferno lower even than the prison. One day, while clearing paths after a heavy snowfall, she saw a girl dragged past, handcuffed and struggling, her head muffled in the brown refuge shawl, but audibly and fluently blasphemous notwithstanding. Jean recognized Stella Wilkes.

Amy, who was working near, said in furtive undertone:

"I heard she'd cut loose again. She'll get all that's coming to her this time."

Jean eyed the nearest black-clad watcher before replying.

"But she's in prison, anyhow," she commented, with Amy's trick of the motionless lips. "She can't get much worse than she has already."

"Can't she, though! It's the guardhouse this trip."

Jean questioned and Amy answered till the matron's approach stopped communication. It was a lurid saga of the days before the state abolished corporal punishment, handed down with fresh embellishments from girl to girl. The air was full of such bizarre folk-lore, she discovered--tales of superintendents who failed to govern; of matrons, wise and foolish; of delirious riots and hairbreadth escapes. Amy Jeffries was always the channel which conveyed these legends to Jean's willing ears.

From all others Jean held herself aloof. Amy alone seemed a victim of injustice like herself. Jean invited no confidences, and made none; but bit by bit, as the winter passed, the story of this pretty moth, whose world, more than her pleasure-loving self, seemed out of joint, pieced itself together. It was a common story, too hackneyed to detail, though it signified the quintessence of tragedy to its narrator. Of itself, it struck no kindred chord in Jean. Its passions, its temptations, its sin were without glamour or reason; but she divined that nature, rather than Amy, had wrought this coil, and that, after the fashion of a topsy-turvy universe, one was again expiating the lapse of two.

The coming of spring at once brightened and embittered Jean's lot. Outdoor work was no hardship. She knew the times and seasons of all growing things; which soil was fattest; when plowshare, harrow, spade, and hoe should do their appointed parts; when the strawberry-beds should be stripped of their winter coverlets; when potatoes, shorn of their pallid cellar sprouts, should be quartered and dropped; when peas and green corn should be sown; when the drooping tomato plants should be set out and fostered; and she entered upon this dear toil with a zest which nothing indoors had inspired. But she knew also--and here was the pang--precisely what was transpiring out there in the forest which all but touched the refuge boundary. With a heartache she visualized the stir of shy life in pond and field and tree-top; caught in memory the scent of the first arbutus; spied out the earliest violet; beheld jack-in-the-pulpit unbar his shutter; saw the mandrake bear its apple, the ferns uncurl, the dogwood bloom.

The call of the woods rang most insistent when she lay in her iron cot at twilight, for bedtime still came as in the early nights of winter, at an hour when the play of the outside world had just begun. She could see the bit of forest from her narrow window, and in fancy made innumerable forays into its captivating depths with rod or gun. It was these imaginary outings, ending always behind locks and bars, which first set her thoughts coursing upon the idea of escape.

There were precedents galore. The undercurrent of reformatory gossip was rich in these picaresque adventures. But cleverly planned as some of them had been, daringly executed as were others, all save one ended in commonplace recapture. The exception enchained Jean's interest. Amy Jeffries had rehearsed the tale one day when the gardener, concerned with the ravages of an insect invasion of the distant currant bushes, left the lettuce-weeding squad to itself.

"I never knew Sophie Powell," Amy prefaced; "she skipped before I came. But they say she was something on your style--haughty-like and good at throwing a bluff. I heard that the men down at the gatehouse nicknamed her the 'Empress-out-of-a-job.' What she was sent here for, I can't say. She was as close-mouthed as you. Mind you, I'm not criticising. It's risky business, swapping life histories here. You're the only girl that's heard my story. If you never feel like telling me yours, all right. If you do, why, all right, too. I didn't mention names, and you needn't either. I wonder if _he_ would do as much for me!"

Jean checkmated Amy's maneuver without ceremony.

"I've no man's name to hide," she returned bluntly. "But never mind that. It's Sophie Powell I want to hear about."

Amy took no offense.

"My," she laughed admiringly; "you _are_ a riddle! Well, as I say, Sophie had a way with her, and knew how to play her cards. She got high grade within a year, and worked her matron for special privileges. The matron let her have the run of her room a good deal, for Sophie knew to a T just how she liked everything kept; and she wasn't over

## particular about locking Sophie's door, which was handy to her own.

One spring night, earlier than this, I guess, for it was still dark at supper, she played up sick. She timed her spasm for an hour when the doctor was generally busy at the hospital, and let the matron fuss round with hot-water bags till the supper bell rang. Then the matron went downstairs, leaving the door open to give poor Sophie more air. As soon as she heard the dishes rattle, the invalid got busy. She hopped in next door, pinched the matron's best black skirt and a swell white silk shirt-waist she kept for special, grabbed a hat and veil and a long cloak out of the wardrobe and the big bunch of house-keys from a hiding-place she'd spotted, tip-toed downstairs and let herself out of the front door."

Jean drew a long breath.

"But the guards?" she put in.

"She only ran into one--the easy mark at the gate."

"The gate!"

"Sure. Sophie didn't propose to muss her new clothes climbing a ten-foot fence. She marched over to the gatehouse, bold as brass, handed in her keys as she'd seen the matrons do, and was out in no time. Why, the guard even tipped his hat--so he said before they fired him. That was the most comical thing about it all."

Jean threw a glance over her shoulder. The gardener was still beyond earshot.

"Go on," she said eagerly. "How did she manage outside? That's the part I want to hear."

"Then came smoother work still. Sophie hadn't a cent--she missed the matron's purse in her hurry--but she had her nerve along. She streaked it over into town, and asked her way to the priest who comes out here twice a month for confession. She banked on his not remembering her, for she wasn't one of his girls; and he didn't. His sight was poor, anyhow. Well, she told him she was a Catholic and a stranger in town, looking for work, and that she'd just had a telegram from home saying her mother was dying. She pumped up the tears in good style, and put it up to him to ante the car fare if he didn't want her heart to break. It didn't break."

Jean absently fashioned the moist earth beneath her fingers into the semblance of a priest's face, which she instantly obliterated when it stirred Amy's interest.

"Why couldn't they trace her?" she asked.

"Because she was too cute to stick to her train. She must have jumped the express when they slowed up for their first stop."

The fugitive bulked large in Jean's meditations. It occurred to her that possibly the needless rigor of her own treatment in Cottage No. 6 might originate in her chance resemblance to Sophie Powell. She wondered how it fared with the girl; whether she had had to make her way unbefriended; to what she had turned her hand. Was she perhaps living a blameless life, respected, loved, in all ways another personality, yet forever hag-ridden with the fear of recapture? She did not debate whether such freedom were worth its cost, for just then the pungent invitation of the woods was borne to her across the lettuce-rows.

A bit of refuse crystallized her resolve. She spied it toward the end of her day's toil--a large rusty nail half protruding from the loam--and knew it instantly for the tool which should compass her release. Her mind acted on its hint with extraordinary lucidity, and her fingers were scarcely less nimble. Not even Amy at her side saw her slip the treasure trove into the concealing masses of her hair. From that moment till the bolts were shot upon her for the night she was absorbed in her plans.

To duplicate Sophie Powell's exploit was, of course, out of the question. Her own door was never left unlocked; the Holy Terror's graceless clothes, for all practical uses, might as well hang in another planet; while even were these impossibilities surmounted, she could scarcely hope to hoodwink the men at the gate. She must secure a disguise somehow, but she cheerfully left that detail to chance. To escape was the main thing, and if by a rusty nail she might cross that bridge, surely she need borrow no trouble lest her wits desert her afterward.

A tedious-toned clock over in the town struck twelve before she dared begin her attempt. The watchman had just gone beneath her window on his hourly round, and with the cessation of his slow pace upon the gravel the peace of midnight overlay everything. For almost two hours thereafter Jean labored with her rude implement at the staples which held the woven-wire barrier before her window. The first staple came hardest, but she had pried it loose by the time the watch repassed. In a half-hour more she had freed enough of the netting to serve her end, but she deferred the great moment till the man should again have come and gone. It was a difficult wait, centuries long, and anxiety began to cheat and befool her reason. She questioned whether she had not lost count of time. Suppose she had let him come upon her unheeded! Suppose he had caught some hint of her employment! Suppose he were even now lurking, spider-like, in the shadows!

Then the clock struck twice in its deliberative way, the measured footfall recurred, and her brain cleared. Five minutes later she bent back the netting and calculated the distance to the ground. She judged it some sixteen or eighteen feet, all told, or a sheer drop of more than half that space as she would hang by her finger-tips. There could be no leaving a telltale rope of bedclothes to dangle. Such folly would set the telephone wires humming within the hour. She must drop, and drop with good judgment; since the grass plot, which she counted upon to break her fall, gave place directly below to an area, grated over to be sure, but undesirable footing notwithstanding.

She tossed her brown shawl to the ground first, and noted, with some oddly detached segment of her mind, that it spread itself on the sward in the shape of a huge bat. A romping girlhood steadying her nerves, she let herself cautiously over the sill, and for an instant hung motionless, her eyes below. Then, gathering momentum from a double swing, she suddenly relaxed her hold, cleared the danger-point, and alighted, uninjured and almost without sound, upon the springing turf.

IV

For a moment Jean crouched listening where she fell. No sound issuing from within, she caught up her shawl and stole quickly toward the point where she planned to scale the high fence which still shut her from freedom. There was no moon, but the night was luminous with starshine, and she hugged the shadows of the cottages. These buildings shouldered one another closely in most part, but she came presently to a gap in the friendly obscurity where a site awaited a structure for which the state had vouchsafed no funds. It was bare of any sort of screen whatever, and lay in full range not only of the quadrangle, which it broke, but of the gatehouse beyond.

Nor was this all. Drifting round the last sheltering corner came the reek of a pipe. Jean's heart sank. After all, the trap! Then second thought told her that a foe in ambush would not smoke, and she gathered courage to reconnoiter. Across the quadrangle she made out the motionless figure of the watch. He was plainly without suspicion. He had completed his circuit and was lounging against a hydrant, his idle gaze upon the stars.

So for cycling ages he sat. Yet but a quarter of an hour had lapsed when the man knocked the ashes from his pipe, yawned audibly, and turned upon his heel. The instant the door of the gatehouse swallowed him, Jean sped like a phantom across the open ground, skirted the hospital, the tool-sheds, and the hotbeds, and plunged into the recesses of the garden. All else was simple. The high fence had no terrors; her scaling-ladder was a piece of board. The asperities of the barbed wire she softened with her shawl. When the town clock brought forth its next languid announcement she heard it without a tremor. She was resting on a mossy slope a mile or more away.

She made but a brief halt, for the East, toward which she set her face, was already paling. It was no blind flight. She struck for the hills deliberately, since behind the hills ran the boundary of another commonwealth. All fellow-runaways, whose stories she knew, had foolishly held to the railroad or other main-traveled ways, and, barring the brilliant Sophie, had for that very reason come early to disaster. Jean reasoned that they were in all likelihood city girls whom the woods terrified. Their stupidity was incredible. To fear what they should love! She took great breaths of the cool fragrance. She could not get her fill of it.

Nevertheless, it was not yet her purpose to quit the tilled countryside utterly. She hoped first to compel clothing from it somehow--clothing, and then food, of which she began to feel the need. The fact that she must probably come unlawfully by these necessaries gave her slight compunction. In some rose-colored, prosperous future she could make anonymous amends. She haunted the outskirts of three several farmhouses, but without success. At none of them had garments of any kind been left outdoors over night. Some impossible rags fluttered from a scarecrow in a field of young corn; that was all. Things edible, too, were as carefully housed. Near the last place she found a spring with a tin cup beside it. She drank long, and took the cup away with her.

It was too light now for foraging, and Jean took up her eastward march, avoiding the highways and resorting to hedgerows, stone walls, or briers where the woods failed. As the day grew she saw farmhands pass to their work, and once, in the far distance, she caught the seductive glitter of a dinner pail. She was ravenous from her long fast, and nibbled at one or two palatable wild roots which she knew of old. They seemed savorless to-day, almost sickening in fact; and her fancy dwelt covetously upon the resources of orchard, garden, and field, that the next month but one would lavish. Nevertheless, she harbored no regret that she had taken time somewhat too eagerly by the forelock.

Noon found her beside a lake well up among the hills. She knew the region by hearsay. People came here in hot weather, she remembered. Somewhere alongshore should stand log-camps of a species which urban souls fondly thought pioneer, but which snugly neighbored a summer hotel where ice, newspapers, scandal, and like benefits of civilization could be had. These play houses were as yet tenantless, of course--and foodless; but the chance of finding some cast-off garment, possibly too antiquated for a departing summer girl, but precious beyond cloth of gold to a fugitive in blue-and-white check, buoyed Jean's spirits and lent fresh energy to her muscles. Equipped with another dress, be its style and color what they might, she felt that she could cope fearlessly with fate.

She had followed the vagrant shore-line for perhaps a mile when two things, assailing her senses simultaneously, brought her to an abrupt halt. One was the smell of frying bacon; the other was a baritone voice which broke suddenly into the chorus of a rollicking popular air. Jean wheeled for flight, but, beguiled by the bacon which just then wafted a fresh appeal, she turned, cautiously parted the undergrowth, and beheld a young man swaying in a hammock slung between two birch trees. He held in his lap a book into which he dipped infrequently, singing meanwhile; and his attention was further divided between the crackling spider and a fishing-rod propped in a forked stick at the water's edge. Jean viewed his methods with disapproval. It was neither the way to read, sing, fry bacon, nor yet fish.

Possibly some such idea suggested itself to this over versatile person, for he presently rolled out of the hammock and centered his talents upon the line, which he began to reel in as if the mechanism were an amusing novelty. The stern critic in the background perceived the hand of an amateur in the rebaiting, and predicted sorrier bungling still when he should essay the cast. Her gloomiest forebodings, however, fell far short of the amazing event. She expected the recklessly whirling lead to shoot somewhere into the foliage, but nothing prepared her for its sure descent upon herself. There was no disentangling that outlandish collection of hooks at short notice, and she did not try. But neither could she break the line. The bushes separated while she struggled, and a vast silence befell.

Jean straightened slowly.

"You're a prize angler," she said.

The young fellow's bewilderment gave way to an expansive smile.