From Now On

by Frank L. Packard

Their story had been very plausible! Runty Mott “confessed” that, on the morning of the crime, he had overheard Bookie Skarvan and Dave Henderson making their arrangements at the race course to get Tydeman to put up the money to tide Bookie Skarvan over the crisis. He, Runty Mott, had then left at once for San Francisco, put the deal up to Baldy Vickers and Baldy's gang, and they had waited for Dave Henderson to arrive. Naturally they had watched their proposed prey from the moment of his arrival in the city, intending to rob him when the money was in his possession and before he got back to the race course that night; but instead of Tydeman turning the money over to Dave Henderson, as they had expected, Dave Henderson had completely upset their plans by stealing the money himself, and this had resulted in the prisoner's attempted getaway, and the automobile chase which represented their own efforts to intercept him.

The dark eyes were almost closed now, but the gleam was still there—only now it was half mocking, half triumphant, and was mirrored in a grim smile that flickered across his lips. He had not denied their story. To every effort to obtain from him a clue as to the whereabouts of the stolen money, he had remained as mute and unresponsive as a stone; cajolery, threats, the hint of lighter sentence if restitution were made, he had met with silence. He had not even employed a lawyer. The court had appointed one. He had refused to confer with the lawyer. The lawyer had entered a perfunctory plea of “not guilty.”

The grim smile deepened. There had been very good reasons why he had refused to open his lips at that trial—three of them. In the first place, he was guilty; in the second place, there was Bookie Skarvan, who had no suspicion that he, Dave Henderson, knew the truth that lay behind Runty Mott's story; and in the third place—there was one hundred thousand dollars. There was to be no hedging. And he had not hedged! That was his creed. Well, it had paid, hadn't it, that creed? The hundred thousand dollars was almost his now—there were only sixty-three days left. He had bought it with his creed, bought it with five years wrung in blood and sweat from his life, five years that had turned his soul sick within him. He had paid the price. Five years of sunlight he had given for that hundred thousand dollars, five years that had sought to bring the slouch of slavery and subjugation to his shoulders, a cringe into his soul, a whimper into his voice, and——

He was on his feet, his hands clenched until his knuckles cracked. And he stood there for a long time staring at the barred door, and then suddenly he shrugged his shoulders, and relaxed, and laughed in a low, cool way. But he had won, hadn't he, even on that score? It was not often that the penitentiary would do for a man what this devil's hole had done for him! He had entered it a crude, unpolished assistant to a crooked bookmaker, his education what he had acquired before he had run away from an orphan school at ten; and he could leave the place now, given the clothes and the chance, and pass anywhere for a gentleman—thanks in a very large measure to Charlie Millman.

Dave Henderson began to pace slowly up and down his cell. Millman had never understood, of course, just why he had had so apt a pupil. He had never explained to Millman that it had been from the very beginning his plan to rise to the level of a hundred thousand dollars that was waiting for him when he got out! Millman knew, of course, what he, Dave Henderson, was up for; but that was about all. And Millman had perhaps, and very naturally so, attributed his, Dave Henderson's, thirst for polish and education to the out-cropping of the inherent good that in him was, the coming to the surface finally of his better nature. And so Millman, up for two years, had proved a godsend, for there hadn't been much progress made along the lines of “higher education” until Millman had come into the prison.

He liked Millman; and somehow Millman seemed to like him. A gentleman from the tip of his fingers was Millman—and he took his medicine like a gentleman. Millman wasn't the name that was entered on the prison books—there it was Charlie Reith.

It was strange that Millman should have given him his confidence; he could never quite understand that, except that it had seemed to come gradually as their friendship grew, until finally it was almost the basis of that friendship itself. He had come to trust Millman as he had never trusted any other man, and he had come to believe in Millman as the soul of courtesy and honor. And yet he had not been quite as open with Millman as Millman had been with him; he had not spread his cards upon the table, and Millman had never asked to see them; and somehow he liked the man all the better for that. It was not that he did not trust the other; it was because his confidence was not the sort of confidence to give to an honest man—and Millman was honest. There was a queer twist to it all!

Dave Henderson smiled grimly again. It wouldn't be fair to make an honest man a party to the secret of where that money was, for instance, would it—to make an honest man an accomplice after the fact? And there was no doubt of Millman's clean-cut, courageous honesty. The prison stripes could not change that!

He knew Millman's story: A nasty bit of work on the Barbary Coast, and viciously clever. Millman, a stranger in the city, and en route for a long trip through the South Seas, had been inveigled by a woman's specious plea for help into a notorious resort on the night in which a much-wanted member of the underworld was hard put to it to give the police the slip—and Millman had unsuspectingly made himself the vehicle of the other's escape.

The details were sordid; the woman's story pitifully impressive; and Millman's chivalry had led him, innocent of the truth, to deprive the plain-clothes squad of the services of one of their best men for the period of several months—while one of the slickest counterfeiters in the United States, and the woman with him, had made good their getaway. It didn't look innocent in the eyes of the police, and Millman had stood for two years—convicted as Charles Reith—to save the name of Charles Millman, and those that belonged to him back in New York. He had been found in a very unsavory place, and no amount of explanation could purify those surroundings. Millman had never said so in so many words, but he was buying a little woman's peace of mind back there in New York with two years' hard labor. And meanwhile he was supposed to be somewhere on a trading schooner in the out-of-the-way isles of the Pacific, or something like that—maybe it was Borneo on a hunting trip—he, Dave Henderson, didn't remember just precisely how the other had fixed it. It didn't matter! The point was that they had made Millman one of the convict librarians in the prison, and Millman had become his tutor and his friend. Well, Millman was another he would miss. The day after to-morrow Millman's time was up, and Millman would be gone. He was glad for Millman's sake.