The escape was entirely successful. At the critical moment Dorgan had overpowered the single wagon guard, leaving the man a candidate for admission to the hospital, and had made his break for liberty. We, of the inside, never knew, of course, the various steps taken in the attempt to recapture him. But they all appeared to be fruitless since Number 3126 was never brought back.
I failed utterly in an endeavor to analyze my own feelings when I recognized Dorgan and realized that an escaped man from my own prison was at work for my employers; an escaped criminal and a desperate one, at that. What was my duty in the premises? Should I bind myself, once for all, to the brotherhood of law-breakers—the submerged minority—by shielding this man and conniving at his escape? Or should I turn informer, telling the contractor-partners of the risk they ran by keeping Dorgan in the force—the risk that some night, after the money for the monthly pay-roll had been brought out from town, they would find the camp safe smashed and its contents gone?
While I was debating this question, inclined first in one direction by some new generosity on the part of one or the other of my employers, and again leaning the other way when I remembered that, in the eye of the law, I, myself, was in precisely the same category with Number 3126, I had another promotion. One evening, just after I had closed the commissary, one of the water-boys came to tell me that I was wanted in the contractors' office, a little shack at the far side of the end-of-track cantonments. Hadley, the senior member of the firm, was alone when I showed myself at the door.
"Come in, Bertrand," he invited, gruffly genial; "come in and wait a minute until I go over this estimate again. You'll find cigars in that box on the bunk."
Having nothing to do while I waited, I sat on a stool in a corner of the shack, smoking the gift cigar and silently regarding the man who had sent for me. He was a good example of the better type of Western contractor and out-door man; big-bodied, burly, whiskered like a miner, a keen driver on the work, but withal as kindly as a father when kindness was called for.
In due time he pushed the figuring pad aside and turned to me. "Drag up your stool, Jim; I want to talk to you," he began. And then: "How much experience have you had in keeping accounts?"
I told him briefly.
"In a bank, eh?" he queried, and I knew precisely what he was thinking. He was wondering what I had done to break myself. In spite of all that had happened or might happen, I believe I was ready to tell him; but to my astonishment the curt questioning which all my previous experience had taught me to expect at this stage of the game did not come.
"This is a free country, Bertrand," he said, looking me squarely in the eye. "I'm not going to ask you why you quit bank bookkeeping to come out here and swing a pick in a construction camp. Here in the tall hills we don't think much of digging up graves—the graves of any man's past. You've done well in every job we've tried you at, and that's all to the good for you."
I said I had tried to fill the bill as well as I knew how, and he took me up promptly.