Branded. Lynde Francis

have been glad many times since that old John never knew; glad that the frenzied curses that came boiling up out of that inner hell were wordless. I contrived to hold in while Runnels was hurrying me through the station office and past the sleepy sergeant at the desk. But when the cell door had opened and closed for me, and old John's heavy footsteps were no longer echoing in the iron-floored corridor, the newly hatched devil broke loose and I made a pretty bad night of it.

II

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The Searing Touch

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      Out of the first twenty-four hours, when my little raft of respectability and good report was going to pieces under me, I have brought one heart-mellowing recollection. In the morning it was old John Runnels himself who brought me my cell breakfast, and he did it to spare me the shame of being served by the police-station turnkey. Past that, he sat on the edge of the iron cot and talked to me while I tried to eat.

      "They was aimin' to telegraph the sheriff and have you railroaded slap up to the county seat las' night, but I told 'em nary," he confided. "I wasn't allowin' to have 'em jerk you out of your home town before you'd had a chance to pick a lawyer and talk to your friends; no sir-ee, I wasn't."

      "I guess I haven't any friends any more," I was still bitter enough to say. And then: "Tell me, if you can, Uncle John, just what the charge against me is."

      "I reckon you know a heap better'n I do, Bertie," was his sober rejoinder, "but I can tell you what I heard. They say you've been takin' the bank's money to put into a gold mine somewheres out yonder in the Rocky Mountains."

      "Who swore out the warrant for my arrest?"

      "Ab Withers."

      Abner Withers, town miser, note-shaver and skinflint, was the one man on the board of directors of the bank whom I had always most cordially detested. Back in my childhood, before my father had got upon his feet, Withers had planned to foreclose a mortgage on the home farm, making the hampering of my father so that he could not pay the debt a part of the plan. More than once I had half suspected that he was in with Geddis on the mining deal, but I had no proof of this.

      "You say they were getting ready to railroad me out of town last night: I suppose they will do it to-day, won't they?"

      "Not if I can help it, Bertie. I'm goin' to try to hold you here till you've had time to kind of straighten yourself around and ketch up with the procession. I don't know what in Sam Hill you wanted to go and bu'st yourself up for, this way, but I'm owin' it to Amos Weyburn dead to help his boy get some sort of a fair show for his white alley. You ask me anything in reason, and I'll do it."

      I considered the most necessary requirements hastily. My mother and sister were absent on a visit to a distant relative in the far-away Saskatchewan wheat country, and I thanked God for that. It was altogether unlikely that they would see any of the home newspapers, for some time, at least, and any anxiety on that score might be dismissed, or at all events postponed. The most pressing need was for a lawyer, and since lawyers do not serve without fees, I was glad to remember that my savings, which were still reposing in Abel Geddis's bank vault, would enable me to pay as I went.

      By this time, in bitter revulsion from gratitude to fierce enmity, I was determined to defend myself tooth and nail. At one stroke Abel Geddis had cancelled all my obligations to him. At the very moment when I was promising his daughter to help cover up his criminality, he had been deliberately plotting to make me his scapegoat.

      "I need a lawyer, of course," I told Runnels; and then I made the first and worst of a long series of wretched mistakes. "Send word to Cy Whitredge and tell him I'd like to see him."

      If anybody had asked me five minutes after Runnels went away why I had chosen Cyrus Whitredge to be my counsel I doubt if I could have offered any justifiable reason. Whitredge was known throughout our end of the State as a criminal lawyer, shrewd, unscrupulous, and with a reputation built up entirely upon his singular success in defeating the ends of justice. Before a jury of farmers and small merchants, such as I was likely to have, I had prejudiced my case at the very outset.

      I was completely and thoroughly convinced of this a little later when Whitredge came to see me. He was a lean man, leather-faced, and with an eye like that of a fish. To my consternation and keen disheartenment he assumed my guilt from the moment the cell door was locked upon him and he had seated himself upon the iron-framed cot to nurse a knee in the locked fingers of his bony hands.

      "You've got the wrong idea of things, altogether, Weyburn," he criticised, after I had tried to tell him that I was being made to hold the bag for some one else; and his use of the bare surname, when he had known me from boyhood, cut me like a knife. "You can't expect me to do anything for you unless you are entirely frank with me. As your counsel, I've got to know the facts; and you gain absolutely nothing by insisting to me that you are not guilty."

      There was more of it; a good bit more in which I stubbornly asserted my innocence while Whitredge used every trick and wile known to his craft to entrap me into admitting that I was guilty, in the act if not in the intention.

      "You can't deny—you don't deny—that you knew these mining sharps, Hempstead and Lesherton, pretty intimately, that you saw them frequently and talked with them in the way of business, and that you knew all about the capitalization scheme they were trying to put over," was Whitredge's summing up of the situation. "You'll have to loosen up, Weyburn, if you expect to get any help. I'll come around again this afternoon, and maybe by that time you will have taken a tumble to yourself."

      He got up, rattled the door for the turnkey, and then wheeled upon me with a sharp question.

      "I take it you've got a little ready money hid away somewhere, haven't you?" he demanded.

      I told him I had; but when I added that my savings were all in the bank he swore impatiently.

      "That will mean an order from the court before you can even pay your counsel's retainer—always providing your account hasn't already been attached to apply on the shortage," he snapped; and at that the corridor officer came to let him out and he went away.

      Having lived in Glendale practically all my life, I had a good right to expect that at least a few of my friends would rally to my support in the time of trouble. They came, possibly a half-dozen of them in all, between Whitredge's visit and old John Runnels's bringing of my dinner at one o'clock.

      Who they were, and what they said to me, are matters which shall be burled in the deepest pit of oblivion I can find or dig. For the best of them, in the turning of a single leaf in the lifebook, I had apparently become an outcast, a pariah. One and all, they had already tried and condemned me unheard, and though there were clammy-handed offers of assistance they were purely perfunctory, as I could see, and there was never a man of them all to say heartily, "Bert Weyburn, I don't believe it of you." It wasn't the fault of any of these cold comfort bringers that the milk of human kindness didn't turn to vinegar in me that day, or that I did not drink the cup of bitterness and isolation to the very dregs.

      I know now, of course, that I was boyishly hot-hearted and unfair; that I was too young and inexperienced to make allowances for that deathless trait in human nature—in all animate nature—which prompts the well to recoil instinctively from the pest-stricken. Later on—but I needn't anticipate.

      It was along in the latter part of the afternoon, and before Whitredge's return, that Agatha came. Her appearance in my cell was a total surprise. I was standing at the little grated window when I heard footsteps in the corridor. I thought it was Whitredge coming back, and was morose enough not to turn or look around until after the door had opened and clanged shut again. Then I wheeled to find myself looking straight into the man-melting eyes.

      "Oh,