Treasure and Trouble Therewith by Geraldine Bonner

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This time the words had their effect. He picked up the chair and brought
it to the sofa. She sat there erect, her legs curled up beside her, and
told him the story of Boye Mayer and the stolen money.

The light was behind him and against it she saw him as a formless shape,
the high, rounded back of the chair projecting above his head. The
silence with which he listened she set down to interest, and feeling that
she had gained his attention, that his wrath was appeased by this
unexpected retribution, her own interest grew and the narrative flowed
from her lips, fluent, complete, full of enlightening detail.

Once or twice at the start he had stirred, the rickety chair creaking
under his weight. Then, slouched against its back, he had settled into
absolute stillness. To anyone not seeing him, it might have seemed that
the girl was talking to herself, pauses that she made for comment passed
in silence, questions she now and then put remained unanswered. Peering
at him she made him out, a brooding mass, his chin sunk into his collar,
his hands clasped over his waist, his eyes fixed on the floor.

When she was done he stayed thus for a moment apparently so buried in
thought that he could not rouse himself.

"Well," she said, surprised at his silence, "isn't it true what I said?
Hasn't fate rounded things up for him?"

The chair creaked as he moved, heavily as if with an effort. He laid his
hands on the arms and drew himself forward.

"Yes," he muttered, "it sounds pretty straight."

"Would anything you could do beat that?"

He sat humped together looking at the floor, his powerful, gnarled hands
gripping at the chair arms. She could see the top of his head with a bald
place showing through the thick, low-lying grizzle of hair.

"Nup," he said, "I guess not."

He heaved himself up and walked across the room to the window.

"It's as hot as hell in here," he growled as he fumbled at the sash.

"Hot!" she exclaimed. "Why, it's cold. What's the matter with you?"

"It's these barred-up city places; they knock me out. I smother in
'em." He threw back the window and stood in the opening. "I'll shut it
in a minute."

She pulled up the Navajo blanket and cowering under it said with
vengeful zest:

"I guess there won't be a more surprised person in this burg than Mr.
Boye Mayer when they come after him."

"Do you know when they're calculatin' to do it?"

"Thursday or Friday. Charlie said he was going to give the Express people
his information some time tomorrow and after they'd fixed things he'd
spring the story in the _Despatch_."

"If he gives it in tomorrow they'll have him by evening."

"I don't think they'll be in any rush. Mr. Mayer's not going to skip;
he's too busy with his courting."

There was no reply, and pulling the blanket higher, for the night air
struck cold, she went on in her embittered self-torment:

"I wanted to give him a jolt myself and I tried, but I might as well have
stayed out. You and me show up pretty small when the law gets busy.
That's the time for us to lie low and watch. And he thinking himself so
safe, drawing out all the money. Maybe it was to buy her presents or get
his wedding clothes. I'd like--"

The voice from the window interrupted her.

"That paper--the one he had under the floor--Crowder said a piece was
tore out?"

"Yes, part of his correspondence letter--the last paragraph about me.
Don't you remember it? It was that one after 'The Zingara' started, way
back in August. I showed it to you here one evening. I thought maybe
Mayer had read it and that was what brought him to see me--got him sort
of curious. But Charlie thinks he wasn't bothering about papers just
then. He had it on him and used it to wrap up the money and that piece
got torn out someway by accident."

"Um--looks that way."

The current of air was chilling the room, and Pancha, shivering under the
blanket, protested.

"Say, Pa, aren't you going to shut that window? It's letting in an awful
draught." He made no movement to do so, and, surprised at his
indifference to her comfort, she said uneasily, "You ain't got a fever,
have you?"

"Let me alone," he muttered. "Didn't I tell you these het-up rooms
knock me out."

She was silent--a quality in his voice, a husky thinness as if its
vigor was pinching out, made her anxious. He was worn to the bone, the
shade of himself. She slid her feet to the floor, and throwing off the
blanket said:

"Looks like to me something is the matter with you. The room ain't hot."

"Oh, forget it. For God's sake, quit this talk about me."

He closed the window and turned to her. As he advanced the lamp's glare
fell full on him and she saw his face glistening with perspiration and
darkened with unnatural hollows. In that one moment, played upon by the
revealing side light, it was like the face of a skeleton and she rose
with a frightened cry.

"Pop! You _are_ sick. You look like you were dead."

She made a step toward him and before her advance he stopped, bristling,
fierce, like a bear confronted by a hunter.

"You let me alone. You're crazy--sit down. Ain't I gone through enough
without you pickin' on me about how I _look_?"

She shrank back, scared by his violence.

"But I can't help it. The room's like ice and you're sweating. I saw it
on your forehead."

He almost roared.

"And supposin' I am? Ain't I given you a reason? Sweating? A Chihuahua
dog 'ud sweat in this d----d place. It's like a smelting furnace." With a
stiff, uncertain hand he felt in his pocket, drew out a bandanna and ran
it over his face. "God, you'd think there was nothin' in the world but
the way I _look_! I hiked down from the hills on the run to see you and
you nag at me till I'm almost sorry I come."

That was too much for her. The tears, ready to flow at a word, poured out
of her eyes, and she held out her arms to him, piteously crying:

"Oh, don't say that. Don't scold at me. I wouldn't say it if I didn't
care. What would I do if you got sick--what would I do if I lost you?
You're all I have and I'm so lonesome."

He ran to her, clasped her close, laid his cheek on her head as she
leaned against him feebly weeping. And what he said made it all right--it
was his fault, he was ugly, but it was because of what she'd told him.
That had riled him all up. Didn't she know every hurt that came to her
made him mad as a she-bear when they're after its cub?

"Will you be back tomorrow?" she said when he started to go.

"Yes, in the morning. Eight be too early?"

"No--but--" her eyes were wistful, her hands reluctant to loose his.
"Will you have to leave the city soon?"

"I guess so, honey."

"Tomorrow?"

"Maybe--but we'll get a line on that in the morning."

"I wish you could stay, just for one day," she pleaded.

"I'll tell you then. What you want to do now is rest. Sleep tight and
don't worry no more. It's going to be all right."

He gave her a kiss and from the doorway a farewell nod and smile.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE VOICE IN THE NIGHT

When Garland passed through the lobby the hall clock showed him it was
after midnight. Cushing, roused from a nap, looked up at the sound of his
step, and asked how Miss Lopez was. "Gettin' on first rate," he called
back cheerily as he opened the door and went out.

His immediate desire was for silence and seclusion--a place where he
could recover from the stunned condition in which Pancha's story had left
him. Before he could act on it he would have to get back to a clearness
where coordinated thought was possible. He walked down the street in the
direction of his old lodgings; he had a latch-key and could get to his
room without being heard. On the way he found himself skirting the open
space of South Park, an oval of darkness, light-touched at intervals and
encircled by a looming wall of houses. Here and there on benches huddled
figures sat, formless and immovable, less like human beings than ghosts
come back in the depths of night to find themselves denied an entrance
into life, and drooping disconsolate. His footsteps sounded abnormally
loud, thrown back from the houses, buffeted between their frowning
fronts, as if they were maliciously determined to reveal his presence,
wanted him to know that they too were leagued against him. He stumbled
over the sidewalk's coping to the grass and stole to a bench under the
shade of a tree.

There he burrowed upward toward the light through the avalanche that had
fallen on him.

At first there was only a gleam of it, a central glow. About this his
thoughts circled like May flies round a lamp, irresistibly attracted and
seemingly as purposeless.

"Hello, Panchita! Ain't you the wonder. Your best beau's proud of
you"--that was the glow. He saw the words traced at the end of the
column, saw a hand tearing the piece out, saw into the mind that directed
the hand, knew its conviction of the paper's value.

It was some time before he could get away from it; divert his mental
energies to this night, the hour and its necessities, and the next day,
the formidable day, now so close at hand.

From a clock tower nearby two strokes chimed out, dropping separate and
rounded on the silence. They dropped on him like tangible things, calling
him to action. He sat up, his brain-clouds dispersed, and thought. Any
information of the lost bandit would gain clemency for Mayer, and Mayer
had a clew. Knapp would remember the paper taken from his partner's coat
and buried with the money. That would lead them to Pancha. Years before
in Siskiyou he had witnessed the cross-examination of a girl, daughter of
an absconding murderer, and the scene in the crowded courtroom of the
wild mountain town rose in his memory, with Pancha as the central figure.
They would badger and break her down as they had the murderer's daughter.
She would know everything. There would be no secrets from her any more.

In an uprush of despair his life unrolled before him, all, it now seemed,
progressing to this climax. Step by step he had advanced on it, builded
up to it as if it were the goal of his desire. Wanting to keep her in
ignorance he had created a situation that had worked out worse for her
than for him. He could fly, leave her to face it alone, enlightenment
come with shame and ignominy. It wasn't fair, it wasn't human. If it had
only been himself that he had ruined he wouldn't have cared, he would
have been glad to end the whole thing. But under the broken law of his
conduct he had held to the greater law of his love. It was that he would
sacrifice; be untrue to what had sustained him as his one ideal. He could
have cried to the heavens that to let her know him for what he was, was a
retribution too great for his sins. Death would have been a release but
he could not die. He must live and make one final fight to preserve the
belief that was his life's sole apology.

That determination toughened him, his despair past, and wrestling with
the problem he came upon its solution and with it his punishment.

He would tell the man, give him warning and let him go. There was plenty
of time; the authorities were not yet informed; no one was on the watch.
Mayer could leave the city that morning and make the Mexican border by
night. It was the only way out and it dragged his penance with it--Pancha
unavenged, the enemy rewarded, the prison doors set wide for the flight
of their mutual despoiler.

Three strokes chimed out and he rose, trying to step lightly with feet
that felt heavy as lead. It was very silent, as if the night and the
brooding city were at one in that conspiracy to impress him with a sense
of their hostility. The houses were still malignly watchful, again took
up and tossed about his footsteps, echoed them from wall to wall till he
wondered doors did not open, people did not come. On the main street he
shrank by shop window and closed doorway, gliding blackly across a gush
of light, slipping, a moving darkness, against the deeper darkness of
shuttered lower stories. He had it almost to himself--a policeman
lounging on a corner, a reveler reeling by with indignant mutterings, one
or two night workers footing it homeward to rest and bed.

At the door of a drugstore he stopped and looked in. A frowsy woman was
talking across the counter to a clerk whose bald head shone, glossy as
ivory, above the gray fatigue of his face. In a corner was a telephone
booth. Garland opened the door, then started as a bell jangled stridently
and the bald-headed man craned his neck and the woman whisked round.

"Telephone," he muttered, tentative on the sill.

The clerk, too listless for words, jerked his head toward the booth and
then handed the woman a package. As Garland entered the booth he heard
her dragging step cross the floor and the bell jangle on her exit.

While he waited he struggled for a closer control on the rage that
possessed him. He had decided what he would say and he cleared his throat
for a free passage of the words that were to carry deliverance to one he
longed to kill. He had expected a wait--the man, confidant in his
security, would be sleeping--but almost on top of his request for Mr.
Mayer came a voice, wide-awake and incisive:

"Hello, who is it?"

His answer was very low, the deep tones hoarse despite his effort.

"Is this Mr. Boye Mayer?"

"Yes. What do you want? Who are you?"

The voice fitted his conception of the man, hard, commanding, with
something sharply imperious in its cultivated accents. He thought he
detected fear in it.

"It don't matter who I am. I got somethin' to say to you that matters.
It's time for you to skip."

There was a momentary pause, then the word was repeated, seemed to be
ejected quickly as if delivered on a rising breath:

"Skip?"

"Yes--get out. You've got time--till tomorrow afternoon. They'll be
lookin' for you then."

Again there was that slight pause. When the voice answered, trepidation
was plain in it.

"Who's looking for me? What are you talking about ?"

It was Garland's turn to pause. For a considering moment he sought his
words, then he gave them in short, telegraphic sentences:

"End of August. The tules--opposite the Ariel Club. Twelve thousand.
Whatcheer House, Sacramento. Harry Romaine."

The pause was longer, then the voice came breathless, shaken:

"What in hell do you mean by this gibberish?"

"I guess that's all right. You don't need to play any baby business. You
know now and _I_ know, and by tomorrow evening the Express company and
the police'll know."

A stammering of oaths came along the wire, a burst of maledictions,
interspersed by threats. Garland cut into it with:

"That don't help any. You ain't got time to waste that way. You want
to make the Mexican border by tomorrow night and to do that you got to
go quick."

The man's anger seemed to rise to a pitch of furious incoherence. His
words, shot out in a storm of passion and fear, were transmitted in a
stuttering jumble of sound, from which phrases broke, here and there
rising into clearness. Garland caught one: "Who's turned you loose on
this? Who's behind it?" and the restraint he had put on himself gave
way. He laid his hand on the shelf before him as something to seize and
wrenched at it.

"If _I_ was there you'd know--I'd make it plain. And maybe you guess. You
thought you'd struck someone who was helpless. But she could pay you back
and she _has_."

He stopped, realizing what he was saying. Through the singing of the
blood in his ears the answering words came as an unintelligible mutter.
With an unsteady hand he hung up the receiver, his breath beating in loud
gasps on the stillness that had so suddenly fallen on the small,
walled-in place. For a space he sat crouched in the chair, trying to
subdue the pounding of his heart, the shaking of his limbs. Then,
stealthily, like a guilty thing, he opened the door and came out. From
above a line of bottles on the prescription desk the clerk's bald head
gleamed, his eyes dodging between them.

"It's all right," Garland muttered; "I'm through," and shambled to the
door with its jangling bell.

In his room at Mrs. Meeker's he threw himself dressed on the bed. The
shade was up and through the window he could see the long flank of
the new building and above it a section of sky. He kept his eyes on
the night-blue strip and as he lay there his spirit, all spring gone,
sank from depths to depths. He saw nothing before him but the life of
the outlaw, and, mind and body taxed beyond their powers, he longed
for death.

Presently he slept, sprawled on the wretched bed, the light of the dawn
revealing the tragedy of his ravaged face.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE MORNING THAT CAME

When the voice had ceased Mayer stood transfixed at the phone, seeing
nothing. He fumbled the receiver back into its hook and, wheeling,
propped himself against the wall, his mouth slack, his eyelids drooped in
sickly feebleness. The final shock, succeeding the long strain, came like
a blow on the head leaving destruction.

He got to a chair and dropped into it, sweat-bathed, feeling as if cold
airs were blowing on his damp skin. Sunk against the back, his legs
stretched before him, his arms hanging over the sides, he lay shattered.
His mind tried to focus on what he had heard and fell back impotent,
eddying downward through darkling depths like a drowning swimmer. A vast
weakness invaded him, turning his joints to water, giving him a sensation
of nausea, draining his strength till he felt incapable of moving his
eyes, which stared glassily at the toes of his shoes.

Presently this passed; he raised his glance and encountered the clock
face on the mantelpiece. He held to it like a hand that was dragging him
out of an abyss; watched it grow from a circular object to a white dial
crossed by black hands and edged by a ring of numerals. The hour marked
slowly penetrated to his consciousness--a quarter to four. He drew
himself up and looked about; saw his notes on the desk, his hat on the
table, the matchsafe with a cigarette stump lying on its saucer. They
were like memorials from another state of existence, things that
connected him with a plane of being that he had left long ago. He had a
vision of himself in that distant past, packing his trunk, making brisk,
satisfactory jottings on a sheet of hotel paper, standing on the hearth
looking into Lorry Alston's angry eyes.

Groaning, he dropped his head into his hands, rocking on the chair, only
half aroused. He was aware of poignant misery without the force to combat
it, and knowing he must act could only remember. Irrelevant pictures,
disconnected, having no point, chased across his brain--the saloon in
Fresno where he had cleaned the brasses, and, jostling it, Chrystie's
face, just before she had wept, puckered like a baby's. He saw the tules
in the low sun, the green ranks, the gold-glazed streams, Mark Burrage
coming down the long drawing-room eyeing him from under thick brows,
Lorry's hand with its sparkle of rings holding out the letter.

That last picture shook him out of his torpor. He lifted his head and
knew his surroundings for what they were--four walls threatening to close
in on him. The necessity to go loomed suddenly insistent, became the
obsessing matter, and he staggered to his feet. Flight suggested disguise
and he went to the bedroom and clawed about in the bottom of the cupboard
for the old suitcase which held the clothes he had worn on his Sacramento
trips. As he pulled it out he remembered the side entrance of the hotel
accessible by a staircase at the end of the hall; he could slip out
unseen. There would be early trains, locals, going south; an express to
be caught somewhere down the line. By the next night he could be across
the Mexican border. It was the logical place, the only place--he knew it
himself and the voice had said so.

The Voice! Obliterated by the mental chaos it had caused, whelmed in the
succeeding rush of fear, it now rose to recognition--a portentous fact.
He stood stunned, the suitcase dangling from his hands, immovable in
aghast wonder as if it had just come to his ears. A voice without a
personality, a voice behind which he could envisage no body, a voice of
warning dropping out of the unknown, dropping doom!

His surface faculties were now obedient to his direction and
automatically responded to the necessity for haste. As he went about
collecting his clothes, tearing up letters, opening drawers, he ransacked
his brain for a clew to the man's identity, tried to rehear the voice and
catch a familiar echo, went back and forth over the words. And in the
fevered restoration of them, the last sentences, "You thought you'd
struck someone who was helpless. But she could pay you back and she has,"
brought light in an illuminating flash. "Pancha," he whispered, "Pancha,"
and stood rooted, recalling, searching the past, linking the known with
the deduced.

The man was the bandit, the old lover, the one he had supplanted, the
one who had written the message on the paper. He had heard she was
sick--come to see her--and she had told him, called upon him to avenge
her as she said she would. And the man--he couldn't--his hands were
tied. If Mayer had the paper--and the cache showed it was gone--Mayer
could direct the pursuit to Pancha and to Pancha's "best beau." So, fact
marshaled behind fact, he drew to the truth, grasped it, knew why he had
been warned and by whom.

Pancha had found out somehow--but he did not linger on that; his mind
wasted no time filling profitless gaps. Fiercely alive now it only saw
what counted. He turned and looked out of the window, a glance in her
direction. She had made good, kept her word, beaten him. The feeble
thing, the scorned thing, that he had kicked out of his path, had
risen and destroyed him. He stood for a still moment looking toward
where she was, triumphant, waiting for his arrest, and he muttered,
his gray face horrible.

Soon afterward he was ready, the old hat and coat on, the suitcase
packed. There was a look about for forgotten details and he attended to
them with swift competence. The papers on the desk--those expense
accounts--were crammed into his pockets, the shades drawn up, the bed
rumpled for the room boy's eye in the morning. Then a last sweeping
survey and he turned out the gas, opened the door and peered into the
hall. It stretched vacant to the window at the far end, a subdued light
showing its carpeted length. His nostrils caught its unaired closeness,
his ears the heavy stillness of a place enshrining sleep.

Night still held the streets, at this hour dim, deserted vistas, looking
larger than they did by day. He stole along them feeling curiously
small, dwarfed by their wide emptiness, wanting to hide from their
observation. It was typical of what the rest of his life would be,
shunning the light, footing it furtively through darkness, forever
apprehensive, forever outcast.

His heart sank into blackness, dense, illimitable. It stretched from him
out to the edges of the world and he saw himself never escaping from it,
groping through it from pursuers, always retreating, always looking back
in fear. Poverty would be his close companion; makeshifts, struggles,
tricks of deceit, the occupation of his days. The effort of new endeavor
rose before him like a mountain to be climbed and for which he had not
the strength; the ease he was reft of, a paradise only valued now it was
lost. Hate of those who had brought him so low surged in him, dominating
even his misery. He set his teeth, looking up at the graying sky, feeling
the poison pressing at his throat, aching in his limbs, burning at the
ends of his fingers.

There was a faint diffused light when he reached the corner of Pancha's
street, the first gleam of the coming day. Like one who sees temptation
placed before him in living form and hesitates, reluctant yet impelled,
he stood and gazed at the front of the Vallejo Hotel. The lamps showed up
a pinkish orange, two spheres, concrete and solid, in a swimming, silvery
unreality. Beyond the steps a man's figure moved, walking up the street,
his back to Mayer. It was very quiet; the hush before the city, turning
in its sleep, stretched, breathed deeply, and awakened.

Mayer went forward toward the lamps.

He had no definite intention; was actuated by no formed resolution; was,
for the moment, a being filled to the skin by a single passion. He felt
light, as if his body weighed nothing, or as if he might have been
carried by a powerful current buoyant and beyond his control. It took him
up the steps to the door. Through a clear space in the ground glass panel
he looked in and saw that the hall was empty. His heart rose stranglingly
and then contracted; his hand closed on the knob, turned it and the door
opened. That unexpected opening, the vacant hall and stairway stretching
before him like an invitation, ended his lack of purpose. Despair and
hate combined into the will to act, propelled him to a recognized goal.

He entered and mounted the stairs.

Cushing, having found the long vigil at the Vallejo exhausting, had
contracted the habit of slipping out in the first reaches of the dawn to
a saloon down the street. It was a safe habit, for even the few
night-roving tenants the Vallejo had were housed at that hour, and if a
belated reveler should stray in, the door was always left on the latch.
Moreover he only stayed a few minutes; a warming gulp and he was back
again, wide-awake for the call of the day. His was the figure Mayer had
seen walking down the street.

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