Verily, I was being persecuted to the end.
PART II
CHAPTER I
SIDETRACKED
Hunted out of honest employment, I found myself very much in the position of the pursued rabbit; therefore I was compelled to seek the first cover that presented itself. I had been robbed of every dollar of my hard-earned fortune. A fugitive from justice, there was a reward proclaimed abroad for my arrest, though I was an innocent man. All this was awful to realize, the bitterness of it eating still deeper into my soul. What would the end be?
Anxious to begin life afresh, I had sought a strange city and under a new name had attempted to do it, but fate was horribly, relentlessly cruel. What would I do? where could I turn? I had only five dollars in the world, and that wouldn’t carry me far. Alas, I was not unlike the hunted rabbit. I had been the victim of a cruel game of life. It was a most critical period at which I had arrived. The fatal line must soon be crossed. Good and evil would fight out their battle. In the jail at Keene I had been besieged by thoughts that made me shudder, but the evil that battered my soul now was as the blackness of hell in comparison. Bitterness was rapidly eating into my worst nature; the tender words of a fond father and the sweet prayers of a loving mother were fast becoming far-off sounds in my dulled ears. Recollections of the sort that sear consciences came to the fore, uppermost being the words I had heard from the lips of an old conductor of the Fitchburg railway, not far from my home. I had often been with him on his trips and talked with him, for he was well known to me in my youthful days. How well I remembered the words. They burn in my brain even to-day, as well they should, for they played a strong part in the influence which sent me on to a life of reaching out for that which was not lawfully mine.
“See that fine property?” this conductor said to me one day, as he pointed out a big country residence; and when I nodded assent, he added, “Well, I’ve got a first mortgage on that.” Presently he said, with a meaning I could not misunderstand, “We conductors have the name of knocking down fares, so we may as well have the game.”
Twice on the trip he made that remark. For several years the meaning of the words “name” and “game” lay dormant in my mind, but how freshly it came back to me in the moment of my standing balanced between the narrow path of rectitude and the broad road of crime. Homeless, desolate, hunted like a real criminal, a reward hanging over my head, made a good soil in which the seeds of evil deeds might take quick root. To whom in this extremity might I turn? I asked this question of myself many times, and the only reply was the echo of my own words. There was a Boston man in the city with whom I was well acquainted, and who knew my side of the case thoroughly, and whose sympathy I had. I must have some money, therefore I appealed to him, and he loaned me twenty dollars. This, with five I had, constituted my cash capital. The remainder of it was my brain, and it shall be seen to what purpose I put it, ere many days passed.
There was another man in New York I knew—Shinburn’s friend Matthews; Billy, he called him. I remembered that his address was 681 Broadway, so I determined to look him up. Knowing Shinburn, I ought not to have been surprised at anything in Matthews, but I was actually dumfounded when I learned that 681 Broadway was a notorious gambling house kept by one Harvey Young, and that Matthews was a faro dealer there. Young’s place was at that time an attractive resort for the younglings of New York’s rich men, thousands of whose dollars passed over the green cloth every night. I now knew why Mr. Wheeler, the assistant prosecutor, in summing up at the Keene trial, had pointed out Matthews and asked the court in scornful tones to look upon the sort of man “they bring from the reeking hells of New York to be a witness in a New Hampshire court of justice.” Undoubtedly the New York detectives had known that much of Matthews and had told it to Mr. Wheeler.
But I had reached and passed the fatal line now, and it seemed to me that I wasn’t sorry to learn what this man Matthews was,—an employee in a gambling den. Even if he were a criminal like Shinburn, I felt that I didn’t care. When I rang the bell, a man who looked like a servant answered it, and to my inquiry said Matthews wasn’t in, but would be that night. I said I would come again, and did several hours later. I had only met Matthews speaking with Shinburn in the jail at Keene, altogether perhaps a half-dozen times. He was a dapper, earnest little fellow, and seemed in all ways a better man than I imagined a gambler could be. I was greeted heartily by him, and he told me that my escape wasn’t news, an account of it having been in the newspapers. My face must have been a delineator of my determination to do something desperate, for he asked me if he could assist me in any way. I told him he might, and that there could be none too much haste to suit me.