“Beyond that, he is a man of many accomplishments, most of which he is at some pains to conceal. In his younger youth, if not later, he was a bit wild—too much money to spend, I take it—and the wildness, or some of its consequences, landed him in jail; no, it wasn’t a jail—it was a penitentiary.”
Maxwell’s look of amused half-triumph had changed to one of sober consternation.
“Calvin!” he exclaimed, in low tones. “You must know; you must have heard——”
“I pledge you my word, Dick; I am cutting this out of whole cloth, so far as any outside information is concerned. But let me go on. Whatever Mr. Starbuck was, or whatever he did, he was never a criminal in the true sense of the word. So far from it, I can assure you of what you doubtless know for yourself; that he is a man to tie to—a true man and a loyal friend and kinsman. I’m going to take the field with him to-morrow morning, and we shall come back brothers of the blood. That’s a measure of my regard for him.”
Maxwell put down his knife and fork and said what clansman relationship demanded.
“Listen,” he began, “and see how frightfully near you have shaved the truth in your ‘guesses.’ In his early manhood Billy was a cowpunch—in the college-graduate class, as you intimate. He discovered a mine, sold it for a fat wad, and went to New York, where he blew in the wad to the final dollar.”
Sprague nodded. “That was the wild side-step that I couldn’t quite place,” he said, and the superintendent went on.
“When his money was gone he went to work as a stenographer for a firm of brokers, and was holding the job down when the safe was tapped and a sum of money stolen. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to a term in Sing Sing, where he served his time. It was late in the first year of his freedom before a few of us who were his friends here in the West found out that he had voluntarily gone to prison to save a fellow-clerk—a half-dead, broken-down scoundrel with a wife and children, a sick mother, and a crippled sister.”
“Fine!” Sprague was beginning to say; but Maxwell interposed.
“No, hold on; you mustn’t set him down as an impossible hero. He’d be the first to object to that. I said ‘voluntarily,’ and it really amounted to that, though when Billy promised not to betray the scoundrel he had no idea that he was going to be made to suffer in his place. Nevertheless, since the promise had been given, Billy made good.”