I shuddered at the cold-blooded suggestion, yet I did not utter one word of refusal, and must have led Gottlieb to believe that I was of a mind with him, for he slapped me on the shoulder and bade me good luck. Good luck! Was ever a man of decent birth and education forced upon such an errand? The convoying of a drunken criminal to—where? I knew not—somewhere whence he could not return.
Thus I set forth into the night upon my bicycle, my money bulging in my pocket, my pistol knocking against the seat at every turn of the wheel, my trousers catching and tearing in the pedals. At last I crossed the bridge and turned into the wastes of Queens. Gas- houses, factories, and rotting buildings loomed black and weird against the sky. I pedaled on and at last found myself upon a country road. I dared not ask my way, but luckily I had stumbled upon the highway to Port Washington, whence there was a ferry to the Connecticut shore. As I stole along in the darkness, my ear caught far ahead a voice roaring out a ribald song—and I knew that the time had come to take personal charge of my wretched client— the "old man of the sea" that my own stupidity had seated upon my shoulders. Soon I overtook them, the Italian stolidly driving his weary horse and Hawkins sitting beside him with the sack wrapped around his shoulders. I halted them, threw my bicycle in among the vegetables, and climbed up to where they sat. Hawkins gave a great shout of laughter when he saw who it was and threw his arm around my neck, but I pushed him away and he nearly fell under the wheels. My gorge rose at him! Yet to him I was shackled as tightly as ever a criminal was to his keeper!
The thought of the remainder of that night and of the ensuing three days and nights sickens me even now. In the early dawn we crossed the ferry with dozens of other produce-laden wagons and landed on the opposite side of the Sound, where we caught a local train for Hartford. I had made no arrangements for communicating with Gottlieb, and was in utter ignorance of whether or not our escape had been discovered. We sat in the smoking-car, Hawkins by this time ill and peevish. The air was stifling, yet I could not, arrayed as I was or in the company of my client, go into the regular passenger coach. At Hartford we changed for Springfield and I purchased a New York paper. There was nothing in it relating to the case and I breathed more easily; but, once in Springfield, I knew not which way to turn, and Hawkins by this time was crazy for drink and refusing to go farther. I gave him enough liquor to keep him quiet and thrust him on a way train for Worcester. Already I had exhausted my small bills and when I tried to cash one for a hundred dollars the ticket agent in the station eyed me with suspicion.
That night we slept in a single bed, Hawkins and I, in a cheap lodging-house—that is, he slept a sordid, drunken sleep, while I lay tossing and cursing my fate until, burning with fever, I rose and drained part of the water in the pitcher. Yet, in the early morning hours there came to me the first ray of hope throughout that dreary space since I had left New York—the Quirks! The Quirks! Twenty years had passed since I had heard from them. They might be dead and gone long ago without my knowing it; yet, were they alive, I felt that one or other of them would hold out a friendly hand for auld lang syne. Before daybreak, I stole forth, hired a horse and buggy, asked the way to Methuen and, rousing Hawkins, bundled him, whining and fretting, into it.
Slowly we drove in the growing light through the country lanes I had known and loved so well as a lad—the farmland which was the only friendly thing in my disconsolate boyhood. It was in the early spring and the apple-trees along the stone walls by the roadside were showered with clustering blossoms. Dandelions sprinkled the fields. The cloud shadows slowly moved across rich pastures of delicate green. A sun-warmed, perfume-laden breeze blew from the east, tinged with a keen edge that sent the blood leaping in my temples. Tiny pools stood in the ruts glinting blue toward the sky. The old horse plodded slowly on and the robins called among the elms that stood arching over white farm-houses with blinds, some blue, some green.
With a harrowing sense of helplessness, the realization of what I had thrown away of life swept over me. I turned from the sodden creature beside me in disgust. Hawkins had slumped back in his seat, so that his head rested upon the hood, and had fallen sound asleep, with his mouth wide open. How I wished that I had the courage to strangle him—and then it came to me that, after all, it was not he who had ruined me, but I who had ruined him!
About noontime we came to a landscape that seemed familiar to me, although more heavily wooded and with many more farms than I remembered; and at a turn in the road I recognized a couple of huge elms that marked the site of the homestead occupied in my boyhood by the Quirks. There was the brook, the maple grove upon the hill, the old stile by the pasture, and the long stone wall beside the apple orchard, radiant with white. Yet the house seemed to have vanished. My heart sank, for somehow I had assumed that the Quirks must still be living, just as they had always lived. And now, as we drew near the turn, I saw that the place where the homestead had stood was empty, and all that remained was a heap of blackened stone and brick thickly overgrown with brambles.
Fifty yards farther down the road we came upon an old man sitting on the fence, smoking a pipe. He wore a tattered old brown felt hat and overalls, and his long gray hair and beard were tangled and unkempt. I passed the time of day and he answered me civilly enough, although vacantly; and I saw that his eye had the red film of the drunkard. When I asked him for Quirk, the schoolmaster, who used to live thereabout he gave a mirthless chuckle.
"My name's Quirk," said he; "but it's fifteen years since I taught school. How did you come to know of me?"
Could this be Quirk—this aged and decrepit old man! Somewhere beneath that mat of hair and beard, did there remain traces of those good-natured lineaments that were wont to set the boys in a roar? I scanned his face closely. The man was a stranger to my recollection.