From Now On

by Frank L. Packard

The guard's voice snapped again.

“You're wanted!” said the guard curtly. “There's a visitor to see you.”

Dave Henderson turned away from the bench, and followed the guard; but the act was purely mechanical, born out of the years of discipline and obedience. A visitor—for him! There was no one in the outside world, not a soul, who cared for him; not many even, to whom his existence was of enough interest to cause a second thought—except Barjan. And Barjan had visited him yesterday. Another visitor—to-day! Well, whoever it was, the visitor had been in no hurry about it! The little attention was certainly belated! His lips thinned bitterly. Whoever it was had waited almost five years. He had never had a visitor before—except the police. It was an event! The bitterness grew deeper, and rankled. He had asked for no human touch, or thought, or consideration; he had asked for none, and he had given none; he had made his own bed, and he had not whined because it had proved to be a rack of torture. He was not whining now, and he had no desire to change the rules of the game that he himself had elected to play. This was no visitor—it was an intruder!

But curiosity, as he crossed the prison yard and entered the main building, tempered the sullen antagonism that had flared up in his soul. Who was it that was waiting for him there along the corridor in the wire-netted visitor's room, where, like some beast with its keeper pacing up and down in front of the cage, he was to be placed on exhibition? He searched his brain for an answer that would be even plausible. Not Square John Kelly. Kelly might have come if Kelly had been left to himself, but Kelly was the one man he had warned off from the beginning—there was that matter of three thousand dollars, and caution had prompted him to avoid any sign of intimacy between them. There was no one else. Even Kelly, perhaps, wasn't a friend any more. Kelly would, perhaps, simply play square, turn over the three thousand dollars—and then turn his back. It wouldn't be Tooler. The only thing that interested Tooler was to see that he collected his room rent regularly—and there would be some one else paying rent now for that front room at Tooler's! No, there was no one else. Leaving a very keen regard for old Tony Lomazzi aside, he had only one friend that he knew of whom he could really call a friend, only one man that he could trust—and that man was a convict too! It was ironical, wasn't it?—to trust a convict! Well, he could trust Millman—only it wouldn't be fair to Millman.

He lagged a little behind the guard as they approached the visitor's room, a sudden possibility dawning upon him. Perhaps it was Millman! Millman's time was up to-morrow, and to-morrow Millman was going away. He and Millman had arranged to say good-by to one another at the library hour to-day after work was over; but perhaps, as a sort of special dispensation, Millman had obtained permission to come here.

Dave Henderson shrugged his shoulders, impatient with himself, as the guard opened a door and motioned him to enter. It was absurd, ridiculous! Who had ever heard of one prisoner visiting another in this fashion! There wouldn't have been any satisfaction in it anyhow, with a guard pacing up and down between them! Well, then, who was it?

The door closed behind him—he was subconsciously aware that the door had closed, and that the guard had left him to himself. He was also subconsciously aware that his hands had reached out in front of him and that his fingers were fiercely laced in the interstices of the heavy steel-wire netting of the enclosure in which he stood, and that faced another row of steel-wire netting, separated from his own only by the space that was required to permit the guard to pace up and down between the two—only the guard hadn't come in yet from the corridor to take up his station there. There was only a face peering at him from behind that other row of netting—a fat face—the face was supposed to be smiling, but it was like the hideous grin of a gargoyle. It was the same face, the same face with its rolls of fat propped up on its short, stumpy neck. There wasn't any change in it, except that the red-rimmed gray eyes were more shifty. That was the only change in five years—the eyes were more shifty. He found that his mouth was dry, curiously dry. The blood wasn't running through his veins, because his fingers on the wire felt cold—and yet he was burning, the soul of him suddenly like some flaming furnace, and a mad, passionate fury had him in its grip, and a lust was upon him to reach that stumpy neck where the throat was, and—and—— He had been waiting five years for that—and he was simply smiling, just as that other face was smiling. Why shouldn't he smile! That fat face was Bookie Skarvan's face.

“I guess you weren't looking to see me, Dave?” said Skarvan, nodding his head in a sort of absurd cordiality. “Maybe you thought I was sore on you, and there's no use saying I wasn't. That was a nasty crack you handed me. If Tydeman hadn't come across with another bunch of coin on the jump, those pikers down at the track would have pulled me to pieces. But I didn't feel sore long, Dave—that ain't in me. And that ain't why I kept away.”

The man was quite safe, of course, on account of these wire gratings, and on account of the guard who was somewhere out there in the corridor. It was very peculiar that the guard was not pacing up and down even now in this little open space between Bookie Skarvan and himself—very peculiar! Bookie was magnanimous—not to be sore! He wanted to laugh out in a sort of maniacal hysteria, only he would be a fool to do that because there were sixty-two days left before he could get his fingers around that greasy, fat throat, and he must not scare the man off now. He had a debt to pay—five years of prison, those days and nights and hours of torment when he had been a wounded thing hounded almost to his death. Certainly, he owed all that to this man here! The man had cunningly planned to have him disappear by the murder route, hadn't he? And he owed Bookie Skarvan for that too! If it hadn't been for that he would have got away with the money, and there wouldn't have been five years of prison, or those hours of physical torment, or——

He lifted his hand and brushed it heavily across his forehead. He was quite cool now, perfectly in control of himself. The man didn't have even a suspicion that he, Dave Henderson, knew these things. He mustn't put the other on his guard—there were still sixty-two days during which these prison walls held him impotent, and during which another, warned, could get very far out of reach. Yes, he was quite cool now. He was even still smiling, wasn't he? He could even play the man like a hooked fish. It wasn't time to land the other yet. But it was strange that Bookie Skarvan should have come here at all. Bookie wasn't a fool; he hadn't come here for nothing. What was it the man wanted?