From Now On

by Frank L. Packard

It was Barjan, Lieutenant Joe Barjan, of the 'Frisco plain-clothes squad. It was the scene of five years ago. That was exactly what Barjan had said then: “Hello, Dave!” And he had answered: “Hello, Joe!” But he did not answer now.

“This is a little irregular, Dave,” said Barjan pleasantly; “but I wanted to have a quiet little chat with you, you know, before”—he stepped forward and clapped his hand on Dave Henderson's shoulder, and laughed—“well, before you changed your address.” Dave Henderson made no reply. He moved back from the other, and sat down on the edge of his cot.

“There's a couple of things I want to say to you,” said Barjan, still pleasantly. “And the first of them is that I want to tell you on the level just where you stand. You're going out of here pretty soon now, Dave. I guess you've got a better line on that than I have—eh?” He laughed again good-humoredly. “Got the days counted, haven't you, Dave?”

No answer. Dave Henderson's eyes were fixed on the ungainly lines of the toe of his prison boot.

“Oh, come on, now, Dave!” Barjan's tones were still hearty and jocular, but the heartiness and jocularity, as though disconcerted, lacked some of their original spontaneity. “Loosen up! You've been a clam for five years. That's long enough. I've come up here to-night to play square with you. You know that whatever I say goes with both of us. I know you aren't holding anything against me personally just because I happened to be the one who put the bracelets on you, and back of that we used to be pretty good friends. I haven't forgotten the tips you used to give me in the old days—and don't you think I have, either! Remember when that old skeleton with the horse-hair cover pranced away with a forty-to-one shot? Bonnie Lass, her name was—or was it Boney? Remember? She got the hee-haw—but my missus got the swellest outfit of gewgaws and fixings the old girl ever had before or since. You wised me up to that, Dave.”

No answer. There seemed to be something curiously significant in the uncouthness and the coarseness of that boot toe—but the significance was irritatingly elusive in its application.

There was silence for a moment. Barjan walked the length of the cell, and back again.

“All right,” he said, halting in front of the cot. “Maybe we'll get along better on another tack. I'm not beating about the bush, Dave”—his voice was a little harder, crisper, sterner—“I want to know where that hundred thousand dollars is. But I told you that I'd put you straight first on where you stand. Now, listen! We've played both ends to the middle. We believed that the story Runty Mott and Baldy Vickers told was true; but both men had a record, and you can't be sure of a crook on his own say-so. We didn't take any chances, and so we're sure now. Those men were watched—not for a couple of weeks, or a couple of months, but for the last four years. They don't know where the money is, and they never did know what you did with it after you handed them that automobile smash and beat it for the woods. Get that? It's up to you! And now, get this: I told you in the hospital that day, you remember, that you could never get away with it, and that's as true as I'm standing here talking to you now. You've got some brains, Dave—use 'em now for your own sake. From the moment you step outside these walls you're a marked man, and not for just a little while either, but for all your life. They'll never let up on you, Dave. Let that sink in! And it ain't only just old Joe Barjan you've got to fool. Talking racey, Dave, your number's up on the board on every police track in this country from one end to the other. You can't beat that kind of a game. I'm talking straight, and you know it. Come on now, Dave, pry them lips of yours apart, and come across!” Dave Henderson's lips parted—but it was only to touch them with the tip of his tongue. They were dry. His eyes were still on that coarse, ungainly toe. Its significance had taken concrete form now. He knew now what it meant. It typified a living hell of five long years, a ghastly hell and a ghastly price paid for that hundred thousand dollars—years that had left a stench in his nostrils that would live as long as he lived—years that piled the daily, never-ending details of petty persecutions, of loathsome associations, of miserable discomforts, of haggard dreariness, of heart sickness, of bitterness that was the bitterness of gall, into one overwhelming mass of horror from which the soul recoiled, blanched, seared, shrivelled. And it went back further than that. It went back to a night of the long, long ago, eternities ago, a night when, in physical torture and anguish from his wound, his teeth had sunk into his lips, and he had become blood-fanged like the hunted animal at bay he was, and he had endured until the blackness came. That was what it meant, this rough, heavy ungraceful clod of a prison boot upon his foot! It meant that he had gone the limit, that he had never hedged, that he had paid the price, all of it—all of it—except only the sixty-three days that were left.

“Ain't you going to say anything, Dave?”

Tony Lomazzi must have shuffled his way back to the bars of his cell door. The old Italian was whispering and muttering again. If one listened very intently, one could hear him. There was no other sound.