XXIV—HOW SWEET IS THE HOME-COMING, EH?
MY thoughts, fears, and hopes went galloping ahead of me during that ride back to the East. It’s all a blur of memory—wheat-fields, prune-orchards, tunnels, peaks, and prairies—and the old judge sitting beside me, twisting his withered hands and cracking his bony knuckles. It was lucky for both of us that the slow part of the journey was at the start and that we had the clang of mile-a-minute rails under us for the last two days of that race.
Well, I thought the thing over. It was just as much of a nightmare then as it seems now when I am setting it down.
How I ever undertook such a crack-brained, daredevil trip and hoped for anything tangible to fall to me by such a hundred-to-one shot I do not understand even now in clear fashion, in spite of the explanation I have given. We talk about hunches in this world! If I had not obeyed some sort of suggestion I certainly would not have chased those renegades. Only by meeting with them did I stand a chance of recovering any money. That thought and my hankering to use my knowledge about the Pratt-Dawlin gang influenced me a great deal, I suppose. And the conviction that I couldn’t spin a thread by seeking money in any other way pried me out of Levant, of course.
I have had something to say about the force of circumstances!
I was not in a comfortable frame of mind at all, though the money in my pockets should have given me considerable cheer. I did not feel that it was my money—any of it. I could not make it seem like anything which belonged to me or convince myself that I had earned it. I had picked a man’s pocket for part of it and the rest of that cash had been jammed into my pockets, so to speak. I was not wasting a moment’s time on questioning the morality of any of my acts. I reckoned if Pratt’s wallet had been stuffed with twice as much I would have kept the plunder.
I pondered on another point.
Judge Kingsley, provided we got under the wire in season, could be saved from the charge of criminality, but he still had his salvation, financially, to work out. He needed all that money and more—and I had volunteered—had forced myself on him as combination courier and savior. It was all settled in my mind, according to my private code, that I must hand over the cash.