He looked at me squarely but appealingly as he spoke, and suddenly I saw what the burden was which he had been carrying for fifteen years,--nearly half his life.
"I believe you," I said, and unconsciously I held out my hand. He gripped it as a drowning man clutches a spar, and a dull flush swept over his face. His hand was trembling visibly as he finally drew it away, but he tried to speak lightly.
"That's what I couldn't induce the judge or jury to do," he said. "Let me tell you how it all came about. It was in August of 1895. I had graduated in June,--I was twenty-three,--and before settling down to my new profession I went off on a vacation trip with a fellow I had come to know pretty well at the University during my last year there. He was not the sort of a friend I cared to introduce to my family, but there are worse fellows than poor Henley was. He was merely rather wild and lawless, with an instinct for gambling which grew upon him. We went off avowedly for a lark,--to see life, Henley put it. I knew his tastes well enough to guess beforehand that the society to which he would introduce me would not be creditable. The Clydes are as well known in this State as Bunker Hill is in Boston, and I felt a responsibility toward the name. So I insisted that on our travels I should be Tom Johnson."
"I see. Then when the trouble came you were known by that name instead of your own?"
"Yes. That's how I was able to come back here and to go on living my natural life."
"That was fortunate. That situation was much easier to manage than if it had been the other way around."
Clyde had picked up a paper knife and was examining it with absent attention, and instead of answering my remark directly he looked up with a frank smile.
"You can't imagine what it means to me to be able to talk this over with you," he said. "All these years I have carried it--here. Why, it is like breathing after being half suffocated."
"I understand."
"You want to know the details, though," he went on more gravely. "We were together for several weeks, going from one city to another. Henley had a special faculty for striking up acquaintance with picturesque rascals, and for a time I found it very interesting as well as novel. It was a side of life I had never before come close to. But gradually I couldn't help seeing that Henley was helping out an uncommon knack with the cards by the tricks of a sharper. We quarrelled over it more than once, and things began to grow uncomfortable. The old irresponsible comradeship was chilled, though I didn't yet feel like cutting loose from him. One night we had been playing cards in a saloon in Houston, Texas,--Henley and I and two men we had picked up. They were rough and ready Westerners, and a sort to stand no fooling. We had all been drinking a little, but not enough to lose our heads. I saw Henley make a misdeal and I told him so. He was furious, and we all but came to blows in the quarrel that followed. I left him with the others and went off by myself. That evening had finally sickened me with the swine's husks I had been eating, and I suddenly determined to quit it then and there and get back to my own life, my own name, and my own people. I walked down to the station, found that a train for the north was just about to pull out, and jumped aboard. I was an hour away from Houston before I remembered something that made me change my hasty plan. I had left my bag in the room at the hotel, and though I didn't care about the clothes or the other things, there was-- Well, there is no reason why I should not tell you. There was a girl's picture in an inside compartment, and some letters, and I couldn't leave them to chance. I had simply forgotten all about that matter in my angry passion, but the thought now was like a dash of cold water, bringing me to my senses. I got out of the train at the next stop,--a place called Lester. It was just midnight. I found that the first train I could catch to take me back to Houston would go through at five in the morning, and I walked up and down that deserted platform,--for even the station agent went off to sleep after the midnight train went through,--for five mortal hours. I had time to think things over, and to realize that I had been playing with pitch as no Clyde had a right to."