“How’d you know where I was?” Nolan asked.
The man laughed.
“Why, we’ve known where you were ever since you were let out on parole. We heard how you’d tried to wreck another train, and then lighted out for the south; we heard about your roustabouting on the wharves at Mobile, and stealing a case of tobacco from a warehouse and trying to sell it and coming so near getting pinched that you had to get out of that place in a hurry, and start back north again. Why, we’ve got friends who, at a word from us, would have done for you a dozen times over—they knew what you’d done; but we were reserving that pleasure for ourselves, Daniel. And when we heard that you had stopped here, we decided to pay you a little visit on our way out of the State, and had this place fixed up for us, and here we are. But you don’t look a bit glad to see us!”
Dan, following the speaker with painful attention, caught a glimpse of an underworld whose existence he had never suspected—a confederacy of crime to which he, as a mere novice and outsider, had never been admitted. The one unforgivable crime to this association was to turn traitor, to “peach”—that is, to inform against one’s accomplices in order to escape oneself. That was exactly what Nolan had done, and he was now to pay for it.
The four men, as by a single impulse, rose to their feet, and one of them picked up a coil of rope which lay at the foot of the nearest pillar.
“Get up,” said one of them roughly, to Nolan.
But Nolan was paralyzed by fear, and incapable of movement, for he believed that they were going to hang him.
“Get up,” his captor repeated, and seizing him by the shoulder, jerked him to his feet.
Nolan clutched for support at the pillar against which he had been leaning. He saw now that it was of coal, and he suddenly understood where he was. He had been brought to one of the abandoned workings of the mine; he knew there were many such, and that no one ever ventured into them through fear of the deadly fire-damp which almost always gathers in such neglected levels. And he knew there was no hope of rescue.
“Why, look at the coward!” cried his captor, disgustedly. “He’s as weak as a rag. It’s enough to make a man sick!”