The convict, giving no heed to this, shambled out with a guard and the surgeon.
The warden sat alone in the prison office with No. 14,208. That he at last should have been brought face to face, and alone, with the man whom he had determined to kill, perplexed the convict. He was not manacled; the door was locked, and the key lay on the table between the two men. Three weeks in the hospital had proved beneficial, but a deathly pallor was still in his face.
"The action of the directors three weeks ago," said the warden, "made my resignation necessary. I have awaited the appointment of my successor, who is now in charge. I leave the prison to-day. In the mean time, I have something to tell you that will interest you. A few days ago a man who was discharged from the prison last year read what the papers have published recently about your case, and he has written to me confessing that it was he who got your tobacco from the captain of the guard. His name is Salter, and he looks very much like you. He had got his own extra, and when he came up again and called for yours the captain, thinking it was you, gave it to him. There was no intention on the captain"s part to rob you."
The convict gasped and leaned forward eagerly.
"Until the receipt of this letter," resumed the warden, "I had opposed the movement which had been started for your pardon; but when this letter came I recommended your pardon, and it has been granted.
Besides, you have a serious heart trouble. So you are now discharged from the prison."
The convict stared and leaned back speechless. His eyes shone with a strange, gla.s.sy expression, and his white teeth glistened ominously between his parted lips. Yet a certain painful softness tempered the iron in his face.
"The stage will leave for the station in four hours," continued the warden. "You have made certain threats against my life." The warden paused; then, in a voice that slightly wavered from emotion, he continued: "I shall not permit your intentions in that regard--for I care nothing about them--to prevent me from discharging a duty which, as from one man to another, I owe you. I have treated you with a cruelty the enormity of which I now comprehend. I thought I was right.
My fatal mistake was in not understanding your nature. I misconstrued your conduct from the beginning, and in doing so I have laid upon my conscience a burden which will embitter the remaining years of my life.
I would do anything in my power, if it were not too late, to atone for the wrong I have done you. If, before I sent you to the dungeon, I could have understood the wrong and foreseen its consequences, I would cheerfully have taken my own life rather than raised a hand against you. The lives of us both have been wrecked; but your suffering is in the past,--mine is present, and will cease only with my life. For my life is a curse, and I prefer not to keep it."
With that the warden, very pale, but with a clear purpose in his face, took a loaded revolver from a drawer and laid it before the convict.
"Now is your chance," he said, quietly: "no one can hinder you."
The convict gasped and shrank away from the weapon as from a viper.
"Not yet--not yet," he whispered, in agony.
The two men sat and regarded each other without the movement of a muscle.
"Are you afraid to do it?" asked the warden.
A momentary light flashed in the convict"s eyes.
"No!" he gasped; "you know I am not. But I can"t--not yet,--not yet."
The convict, whose ghastly pallor, gla.s.sy eyes, and gleaming teeth sat like a mask of death upon his face, staggered to his feet.
"You have done it at last! you have broken my spirit. A human word has done what the dungeon and the whip could not do.... It twists inside of me now.... I could be your slave for that human word." Tears streamed from his eyes. "I can"t help crying. I"m only a baby, after all--and I thought I was a man."
He reeled, and the warden caught him and seated him in the chair. He took the convict"s hand in his and felt a firm, true pressure there.
The convict"s eyes rolled vacantly. A spasm of pain caused him to raise his free hand to his chest; his thin, gnarled fingers--made shapeless by long use in the slit of the dungeon-door--clutched automatically at his shirt. A faint, hard smile wrinkled his wan face, displaying the gleaming teeth more freely.
"That human word," he whispered,--"if you had spoken it long ago,--if--but it"s all--it"s all right--now. I"ll go--I"ll go to work--to-morrow."
There was a slightly firmer pressure of the hand that held the warden"s; then it relaxed. The fingers which clutched the shirt slipped away, and the hand dropped to his side. The weary head sank back and rested on the chair; the strange, hard smile still sat upon the marble face, and a dead man"s gla.s.sy eyes and gleaming teeth were upturned towards the ceiling.
A Game of Honor
Four of the five men who sat around the card-table in the cabin of the "Merry Witch" regarded the fifth man with a steady, implacable look of scorn. The solitary one could not face that terrible glance. His head drooped, and his gaze rested upon some cards which he idly fumbled as he waited, numbed and listless, to hear his sentence.
The more masterful one of the four made a disdainful gesture towards the craven one, and thus addressed the others:
"Gentlemen, none of us can have forgotten the terms of our compact. It was agreed at the beginning of this expedition that only men of unflinching integrity should be permitted to partic.i.p.ate in its known dangers and possible rewards. To find and secure the magnificent treasure which we are seeking with a sure prospect of discovering it, we must run the risk of encounters with savage Mexican soldiers and marines, and take all the other dangerous chances of which you are aware. As the charterer of this vessel and the leader of the expedition I have exercised extraordinary care in selecting my a.s.sociates. We have been and still are equals, and my leadership as the outfitter of the expedition gives me no advantage in the sharing of the treasure. As such leader, however, I am in authority, and have employed, unsuspected by you, many devices to test the manhood of each of you. Were it not for the fact that I have exhausted all reasonable resources to this end, and have found all of you trustworthy except one, I would not now be disclosing the plan which I have been pursuing."
The three others, who had been gazing at the crestfallen one, now stared at their leader with a startled interest.
"The final test of a man"s character," calmly pursued the leader, "is the card-table. Whatever there may be in him of weakness, whether it be a mean avarice, cowardice, or a deceitful disposition, will there inevitably appear. If I were the president of a bank, the general of an army, or the leader of any other great enterprise I would make it a point to test the character of my subordinates in a series of games at cards, preferably played for money. It is the only sure test of character that the wisdom of the ages has been able to devise."
He paused, and then turned his scornful glance upon the cringing man, who meanwhile had mustered courage to look up, and was employing his eyes as well as his ears to comprehend the strange philosophy of his judge. Terror and dismay were elements of the expression which curiously wrinkled his white face, as though he found himself standing before a court of inscrutable wisdom and relentless justice. But his glance fell instantly when it encountered that of his judge, and his weak lower lip hung trembling.
"We have all agreed," impressively continued the leader, "that the one found guilty of deceiving or betraying the others to the very smallest extent should pay the penalty which we are all sworn to exact. A part of this agreement, as we all remember, is that the one found derelict shall be the first to insist on the visitation of the penalty, and that should he fail to do so--but I trust that it is unnecessary to mention the alternative."
There was another pause, and the culprit sat still, hardly breathing, and permitting the cards to slip from his fingers to the floor.
"Mr. Rossiter," said the leader, addressing the hapless man in a tone so hard and cold that it congealed the marrow which it pierced, "have you any suggestion to make?"
The doomed man made such a pitiful struggle for self-mastery as the gallows often reveals. If there was a momentary flash of hope based on a transient determination to plead, it faded instantly before the stern and implacable eyes that greeted him from all sides of the table.
Certainly there was a fierce struggle under which his soul writhed, and which showed in a pa.s.sing flush that crimsoned his face. That went by, and an acceptance of doom sat upon him. He raised his head and looked firmly at the leader, and as he did so his chest expanded and his shoulders squared bravely.
"Captain," said he, with a very good voice, "whatever else I may be, I am not a coward. I have cheated. In doing so I have betrayed the confidence of all. I remember the terms of the compact. Will you kindly summon the skipper?"
Without any change of countenance, the leader complied.
"Mr. Rossiter," he said to the skipper, "has a request to make of you, and whatever it may be I authorize you to comply with it."
"I wish," asked Mr. Rossiter of the skipper, "that you would lower a boat and put me aboard, and that you would furnish the boat with one oar and nothing else whatever."
"Why," exclaimed the skipper, aghast, looking in dismay from one to another of the men, "the man is insane! There is no land within five hundred miles. We are in the tropics, and a man couldn"t live four days without food or water, and the sea is alive with sharks. Why, this is suicide!"
The leader"s face darkened, but before he could speak Mr. Rossiter calmly remarked,--
"That is my own affair, sir;" and there was a fine ring in his voice.
The man in the boat, bareheaded and stripped nearly naked in the broiling sun, was thus addressing something which he saw close at hand in the water:
"Let me see. Yes, I think it is about four days now that we have travelled together, but I am not very positive about that. You see, if it hadn"t been for you I should have died of loneliness.... Say! aren"t you hungry, too? I was a few days ago, but I"m only thirsty now. You"ve got the advantage of me, because you don"t get thirsty. As for your being hungry--ha, ha, ha! Who ever heard of a shark that wasn"t always hungry? Oh, I know well enough what"s in your mind, companion mine, but there"s time enough for that. I hate to disturb the pleasant relation which exists between us at present. That is to say--now, here is a witticism--I prefer the outside relation to the inside intimacy. Ha, ha, ha! I knew you"d laugh at that, you sly old rogue! What a very sly, patient old shark you are! Don"t you know that if you didn"t have those clumsy fins, and that dreadfully homely mouth away down somewhere on the under side of your body, and eyes so grotesquely wide apart, and should go on land and match your wit against the various and amusing species of sharks which abound there, your patience in pursuing a manifest advantage would make you a millionaire in a year? Can you get that philosophy through your thick skull, my friend?
"There, there, there! Don"t turn over like that and make a fool of yourself by opening your pretty mouth and dazzling the midday sun with the gleam of your white belly. I"m not ready yet. G.o.d! how thirsty I am! Say, did you ever feel like that? Did you ever see blinding flashes that tear through your brain and turn the sun black?
"You haven"t answered my question yet. It"s a hypothetical question--yes, hypothetical. I"m sure that"s what I want to say.
Hypo--hypothetical question. Question; yes, that"s right. Now, suppose you"d been a pretty wild young shark, and had kept your mother anxious and miserable, and had drifted into gambling and had gone pretty well to the dogs. Do sharks ever go to the dogs? Now, that"s a poser.
Sharks; dogs. Oh, what a very ridiculously, sublimely amusing old shark! Dreadfully discreet you are. Never disclose your hand except on a showdown. What a glum old villain you are!