When he came I observed that the guard had been changed since Miss Montell’s visit. The new man was a lean, sour-faced trooper. To my surprise he took my letter and then stood peeping in past me to where Barreau lay on his bunk. After a few seconds he walked away, smiling queerly. In a minute or so he was back again, taking another squint. This time Barreau turned over facing the door, and when the trooper continued his promenade past our cell he got up and stood before the barred window, completely shutting off my outlook. I could not see, but I could hear. And by the sound of his booted feet the guard passed and repassed several times.
After a little he tired of this, it seemed, for I heard him stalking away to the front of the guardhouse, and immediately thereafter the creak of a chair as he sat down. Then Barreau sat down on his bunk again.
“Try this, kid,” he said, and tossed a package of tobacco and cigarette papers to me. I fell upon the forbidden luxury like a starving man upon food. He rolled himself one out of material in his hand, and in the midst of my puffing changed to my side of the cell—it was but a scant three feet to move—and sat down between me and the door.
“Fate smiles at last,” he whispered. “Blackie passed me in a little tobacco. And—see, here in my hand.”
I glanced down at what he was snuggling down out of sight between us, a heavy-bladed knife, a tiny saw, not more than six inches in length, and a piece of notepaper marked with what my reason told me must be a ground plan of the very place we were in.
“The tools of my deliverance,” said Barreau in an undertone. “I am for the blue sky and the sun and the clean, wide prairies once more.”
[CHAPTER VIII—BY WAYS THAT WERE DARK]
Looking back I marvel at the ridiculous ease with which the thing was accomplished. Still more do I marvel at my own part in it. Brought up as I had been, shielded from the ill winds of existence, taught the perfunctory, conventional standards of behavior that suffice for those whose lives are lived according to a little-varying plan, I should have shrunk from further infraction of the law. Indeed it is no more than could have been expected had I refused absolutely to lend myself to Barreau’s desperate plan. Conscious that I had done no wrong I might have been moved to veto an enterprise that imperiled me, to protest against his drawing me further into his own troublous coil. But I did nothing of the sort. It did not occur to me. My point of view was no longer that of the son of a St. Louis gentleman. And the transition was so complete, so radical, and withal, so much the growth of the past three weeks, that I was unaware of the change.
I know of no clearer illustration of the power of environment. Indubitably I should have looked askance at a man who tacitly admitted himself more or less of a criminal, making no defense, no denial. The traditions of my class should have kept me aloof, conscious of my own clean hands. This, I repeat, was what might have been expected of me: Put to me as an abstract proposition, I would have been very positive of where I should stand.
But without being conscious of any deviation from my previous concepts of right and wrong, I found myself all agog to help Slowfoot George escape. For myself, there was no question of flight. That, we agreed upon, at the outset. I could gain nothing by putting myself at odds with Canadian law, for the law itself would free me in its meteing out of justice. But with him it was different; he admitted the fact. And even so I found myself making nothing of the admission. He conformed to none of my vague ideas of the criminal type. In aiding him to be free I seemed to be freeing myself by proxy, as it were; and how badly I desired to be quit of the strange tangle that enmeshed me, none but myself can quite appreciate.