In lieu of a left hand, the one-armed justice of the peace had a steel hook, which he managed with an address that Royal could but admire. He carefully examined our poet’s possessions; his purse, food, poems, matches, wristwatch, toothbrush, Iliad, flashlight. The purse, poems, and food he regarded as negligible. The Iliad received from him both respect and scorn; respect because it was print, scorn because it was print he couldn’t read.
“Your Koran, ain’t it?” He asked the question with the irony he thought due to those who gave false addresses. Royal trembled when hand and hook turned those Homeric pages. His father’s bookplate might give the whole show away. But fortunately that telltale emblem escaped the hook-and-eye of justice. And the man’s idea of calling the book a Koran had in it something that appealed strongly to the inventor’s own imagination; he played upon the theme with alliterative variations.
“Kid carries Koran,” he ejaculated while pulling out a rickety settee for the repose of the accused. Hooking up Royal’s flashlight, he discovered a tattered blanket belonging to the movie-man, and this he threw over the settee, still improvising. “Koran concealed on Courteous Kid.” Perhaps that fancy of his softened his fibre. He had pocketed Royal’s matches, and was about to confiscate his flashlight also, when a humane thought occurred to him. For our humor may at times produce humanity in ourselves, if not in those whom we expose to it.
“Well, kid, I guess I’ll leave you your light to read your Koran by. Sorry we can’t give you a prayer-rug too, but our finest Orientals are in storage, this season.” (He’d show the young fella ’t givin’ false addresses was a game two could play at!) Royal was relieved when at last the justice really locked the door, and departed. Something to tell old Peter, this.
He wondered what Peter, the practical genius, would do in that ill-smelling hole. Peter, he concluded, would explore things. Royal’s flashlight revealed two flimsy packing-cases; the movie-man was his Providence, that night. He waited until midnight, by his watch. He then set one box on the other, and by cautious climbing, managed to reach the tiny barred window, high in the wall. The bars were ancient in their shallow sockets; Royal was lean, even leaner than usual; in a twinkling he had leaped down crashing into some mournful sumac trees, and after that, escape was easy, along the adjoining church and churchyard. Surely the leprecauns were on his side! All of a sudden he realized that his act of self-preservation from so-called justice was one of the most practical bits of work he had ever performed in his life. He had a momentary gleam of shame for his impractical, un-Peter-like past, and even gave a thought to his father, in his hot city studio, working for the wherewithal. But that mood soon passed. The ecstasy of escape from the troubles he had brought on himself gave him wings. Until nearly dawn, he swept straight ahead, under a favoring moon. He was composing a Sonnet to Some Sumacs.
“A prisoner pent, I flew to your fond arms,
And maybe broke a few of them, my dears”;—
A wonderful beginning! It would require some fine work with charms, harms, alarms; with fears, cheers, reveres. But Royal was perfectly happy; and no one can say that his inspiration was not authentic.
Not twenty miles from his own home with its bacon-and-eggs breakfasts, he saw a belated or else be-earlied furniture-van approaching from a wooded road that met the highway. Its driver, so Royal judged as a bearded face emerged out of the morning mist, was one of those how-could-I-help-it persons who are always a little late or a little early, a type toward which he felt drawn. He waited there, at the heart of the crossroads. The man hailed him, and Royal, in his character-part of young man out of work, accepted the proffered lift, and ate heartily of the rude liberal bread and cheese that tasted of the leather seat. They chatted at ease of brakes, tires, clutches, and children, as they rode quietly into the morning. Royal contributed most of the listening; he was quite as much at home among elderly workers for a living as with frivolous persons of his own age.