Ladies and Gentlemen

by Irvin S. Cobb

Sixty miles farther along, a brakeman booted the supposed tramp off into the outskirts of a sizable British Columbia community. He walked into the municipal center and found a lunch-wagon. He spent a solid hour eating orders of ham and eggs and never missed a stroke. The chain of sequences between the man who dodged the avalanche in Scalded Peak basin and the man, a much thinner and a much dirtier man with half a week’s beard on his face, who gulped down food in this owl wagon, now had a wide missing link in it.

Still, to make sure, he journeyed briskly on, paying his way this time, to the coast. In Vancouver he stayed two weeks and accumulated a wardrobe and had some dental work done. He had a different name and a different face, for he let his whiskers grow. At Vancouver, where he lodged in a cheap hotel, he posed as a timber cruiser on a vacation. He had cut timber as a young fellow and knew the jargon.

Feeling perfectly secure of his disguise and his new identity, he presently drifted over to his own side of the line, making a way down the Pacific across Washington and Oregon to California and thence by slow stages into Arizona. En route he earned money at various odd jobs—helping to harvest alfalfa, picking fruit, working in a vineyard, in a cannery. He enjoyed his vagabondage after spending so many uncongenial years in a dead hole of a North Dakota county-seat.

He enjoyed it all the more upon reading in a Los Angeles paper a dispatch from Helena wherein it was set forth that the insurance company after considerable backing and filling, eventually had flinched at the prospect of a lawsuit and had conceded his death and settled in full with his wife. He didn’t begrudge her the money. He, the deceased, was having a pretty good time of it himself. A bunch of wise guys, those insurance guys had been, to pay up. They’d saved themselves lawyers’ fees and court costs. Juries nearly always sided with a widow. It was a cinch any jury would have sided with his widow. His widow—he liked that. Gee, how he did like that! It meant he was absolutely safe.

So safe did he reckon himself to be that within four months he married the daughter of an Arizona rancher on whose place he had been working as a sheep-hand. Probably the girl liked his sophisticated ways, and his white even teeth, shining through his crisp black beard when he grinned. Probably she didn’t know some of the teeth were false teeth until after the marriage. Whether he liked her or not the fact remained that within sixty days he deserted this wife. He knew now that he wasn’t cut out to be a husband, at least not for long. He had the gipsy’s callus on his heel.

So one night, feeling restless, he just up and went. Next morning his father-in-law’s adobe was a hundred miles of desert behind him.

Another night—this was months later, though—he was killing time with some associate loafers in a poolroom in El Paso. His name now was Harper; his Arizona name had been Hayes. Harper wore a mustache but no chin beard. The original owner of the face, away back yonder, had been smooth-shaven. It was a great convenience to be able to take on a new personality either by using a razor or by letting it be. Harper owned a brace of razors.

This night in the poolroom a heavy-set, sort of countrified guy, a guy who didn’t look at all as a detective should look, came in and flashed a badge and a warrant on him and called him Chaney—Herbert H. Chaney, that way, in full, to prove there was no mistake, and told him he was under arrest.

Chaney was never the one to start a jam; the stranger had shown the butt of an automatic when he was showing the badge. There was no trouble whatsoever. With an admirable docility he submitted to being pinched. His captor escorted him to a second-rate American-plan hotel and took him up to a room on the third floor. Here after Chaney had stripped to his undershirt and drawers, the other man handcuffed him by the left wrist to the iron side-rail of one of the twin beds that were in the room and Chaney lay down; then the officer took off his coat and vest and collar and took a chair and sat down to talk the thing over with him.

Almost the talk ran through a friendly groove; really across stretches of it you might call it downright friendly. The stranger was jubilant over his coup, having made the arrest so deftly with no mussiness or cutting up. It seemed that there had been a long stern chase leading up to this present culmination and he wanted a breathing space in which to get his wind back, so to speak, and congratulate himself.