Giving these arguments their just weight, I hope I may take some small credit for the perseverance which finally drove me through the swinging doors and up to the clerk's counter. For the second time that night I sought speech with the bediamonded chief lackey, and got it grudgingly. No; no one had registered within the past few minutes, and no man answering my exceedingly incomplete description had presented himself at the counter. Conscious that I must do, there and then, all that ever could be done, I persisted.
"The gentleman I speak of came in a cab and he had two hand-bags; they were brought in by one of the bell-boys," I said, thinking that this might afford the clue.
The clerk looked afar over my head. "Some guest who already has his room and had gone to fetch his grips." Then, with the contemptuous lip-curl that I had encountered too often not to recognize it at sight: "Who are you, anyway?—a plain-clothes man looking for crooks? You'll not find them in the Marlborough. We don't keep that kind of a house."
I turned away, gripping the precious treasure-trove in my pocket. For a full half-year I had kept faith with the prison authorities and the law, living the life of a hunted animal and coming at last to the choice between starvation and a deliberate plunge into the underworld. Through it all I had obeyed the requirements of my parole in letter and in spirit. But now——
The black pocketbook was warm in my hand. It was mine, if not by the finder's right, at least by the right of possession, and it contained the price of freedom. Before I had reached the corner, of the first street my determination was taken, and there had been but one instant of hesitation. This had come in a frenzied burst of red rage when I remembered that, when all was said, I owed this last downward step, as well as all that had gone before, to two old men who … I stopped short in my shuffling race to the railroad station. I had money; enough to take me to Glendale—and far beyond when the deed should be done. Years before I had sworn to kill them, and since that time they had doubly earned their blotting-out.
I don't know to this day whether it was some remaining shreds of the conventional conscience, or a broken man's inability to screw retaliatory determination to the murder point, that sent me onward to the westbound station and framed my reply to the ticket agent's curt question, "Where to?" when I thrust my money through his wicket. Be that as it may, a short half-hour later I had boarded a through westbound train and was crouching in the corner of a seat in the overheated smoking-car with a ticket to Denver in my pocket. Though I was not on my way to commit a double murder, I was none the less an outlaw. I had broken my parole.
VIII
Westward
A sleety rain was retarding the March dawn and obscuring the Middle Western farmstead landscape when the lights were turned off in the through-train smoking-car. A glance at the railroad time-table which had been given me with my ticket proved that the train was well past the boundaries of my home State, and suddenly the vile atmosphere of the crowded, night-fouled car seemed shot through with the life-giving ozone of freedom.