“It is farther than I thought,” he said to his guide.
“That’s mostly the way in Idaho,” replied the man.
Secor was wondering how they were to cross that mighty torrent, for it was evident that the ranch must be beyond the river — there were no signs of habitation, no rolling meadow lands, no shady orchards, no green alfalfa fields within his ken upon the river’s hither side. He realized, of course, that the season precluded a full consummation of his dream, but there would at least be plenty to suggest the beauties of the Spring and Summer when they should come upon his home.
The guide drew rein upon a little knoll beside the river.
“Wanna get out?” he asked.
“What for?” questioned Secor.
“We’re here.”
Secor looked at him searchingly. Already the truth was leering at him with a contemptuous grin.
“Is this it?” he asked, nodding his head in a half swing that took in the surrounding desert.
“Yep,” said the guide. “‘Tain’t much good. You ain’t got no water.”
Secor laughed — a weary, mirthless laugh.
“Oh,” he said, “I think it’s a pretty good place.”
“Whafor?” asked the guide in surprise.
“To take a drink,” said Secor, pulling the flask from his overcoat- pocket.
The guide grinned. “An’ you don’t need no water for that,” he said.
“No,” replied Secor, “water’d spoil it.”
For weeks Secor frequented the Q. P. saloon at Goliath, emerging occasionally to eat and sleep. Every time he ate he was reminded of the waitress at the Palace Lunch Room, but he didn’t go there. He wondered, when his mind was not entirely befogged by drink, why the girl should cling so tenaciously to his memory, and what cause there could be for the uncomfortable feeling that accompanied recollection of her warning — for warning it evidently had been.
One night Secor was sitting in a stud poker game. The gentleman next to him developed a crouching manner of inspecting his buried card, placing his eye on a level with the table and barely raising the corner of his own card. This permitted him to inspect Secor’s buried card at the same time. A dozen hands were dealt before Secor discovered why he always won small pots and lost the large ones. Then he saw that his worthy opponent not only looked at Secor’s buried card, but immediately thereafter passed obvious signals across the table to a crony upon the other side.
At the following deal Secor did not look at his buried card at all. He merely remained in on the strength of what he had in sight. From the corner of his eye he saw that the sly one was becoming nervous. Secor bad an ace and two deuces up — there was still one card to be dealt.
At the betting, Secor raised for the first time, then, purposely, he turned his head away from his cards and the man at his left to take a drink that stood at his right band. He guessed what would happen. When the drink was half way to his lips he turned suddenly to the left to discover the sly one in the act of raising his, Secor’s, buried card to learn its identity.
Like a flash Secor wheeled, dashing his glass with its contents full in the face of the cheater. With the same move he came to his feet. The other whipped a revolver from beneath his coat. The balance of the players scattered, and the loungers in the saloon ran for the doorway or dived over the bar for the security its panels seemed to offer.
If Secor had been a foot further away from his antagonist he would doubtless have been killed. As it was his very proximity saved him. There is no easier weapon to parry at close range than a firearm. The slightest deviation of aim renders it harmless.
As the gun flashed beneath the electric light, Secor’s left arm went up to parry it as if it had been a clenched right fist aimed at his jaw. The bullet passed harmlessly past him, and with the report of the exploding cartridge his own right landed heavily upon the point of the cheater’s chin.
The man went backward over his chair, his head striking heavily upon a massive pottery spittoon. Then he lay perfectly still.
Ogden Secor stood with wide eyes gazing at the prostrate form of his antagonist — dazed. The bartender poked his head above the sheltering breastwork of the bar. Seeing that the shooting appeared to be over he emerged. His first act was to remove the gun from the nerveless fingers of the supine man. Then he turned toward Secor.
“Got a gun?” he asked.
Secor shook his head negatively. A moment later the players and the loungers returned to bend over the quiet form upon the floor. With them came the sheriff and a doctor. The former, after questioning the bartender, took Secor into custody, as several men carried the injured gambler into a back room.
All night Ogden Secor sat sleepless in his bare cell. He was very sober now, and the depths to which he had sunk were revealed to him in all their appalling horridness. It was unthinkable, and yet it was true — he, Ogden Secor, a participant in a drunken, saloon brawl! tomorrow, or as soon as they should release him, he would seek out the man he had struck and apologize to him, although he knew that the fellow deserved all that he had got.
He was sorry now that the bullet intended for him had not. found him. It would have been better so, and infinitely easier than to go on living the worthless, besotted life that he was surely headed for.
About eight o’clock in the morning the sheriff entered the corridor outside his cell.
“How’s Thompson this morning?” asked Secor. Thompson was the name of the cheater.
“I guess he’s comfortable,” said the officer with a grin. “He ain’t sent back for nothin’.”
“Has he left town?” asked Secor.
“Yep,” said the sheriff. “He’s dead — you killed him.”
Secor collapsed upon the hard bench at the side of his cell. He felt as though some mighty hand had struck him heavily over the heart. There was a look in his eyes that the sheriff had never seen in the eyes of another of the many killers he had arrested during his long years of service.
It was neither fear nor horror — the sheriff could not have interpreted it, for he knew not to what heights pride of name, of family, of station, birth, and breeding may lift a man above the sordid crimes, nor how awful is the plunge from such a pinnacle to the bottomless pit of shame which Ogden Secor’s naked soul was plumbing that instant.
“You needn’t take it hard,” said the sheriff kindly. “You hit him in self- defense — there’s half a dozen witnesses to that and to the fact that you wasn’t armed. It was hittin’ the spittoon with the back of his head that killed him. There ain’t a jury in Idaho that’d find you guilty. You’d ought to have a medal, for of all the ornery cusses that ever struck Goliath that tin-horn was the most orneriest.”
After the sheriff left him Ogden Secor sat with bowed head, his chin resting in his palms. He was surprised that the thought that he had killed a fellow man should not weigh more heavily upon him. It was the debauching degradation that had led up to the killing that caused him the most suffering.
The words of the waitress at the Palace Lunch Room came back to him once more: “ — but even then he won’t succeed if he drinks.” Well, he wasn’t succeeding in anything except getting rid of his little store of money.
What in the world was there for him to succeed at, anyway? he thought. If the ranch had been any good he would have pitched in there and worked hard. There he could have led a decent life, and earned a respectable living — he had no ambition for anything greater; but the sight of the arid sage-brush wilderness which had dispelled his dreams of fertile orchard, field, and meadow land, had so discouraged him that, since, he had been able to see no brighter ray than that which is reflected from the liquid fire that crossed the bar of the Q. P. in sparkling glasses.
As he sat buried in vain regrets and sorrowful memories, weighed down by thoughts of his utter friendlessness and loneliness, he became aware of the presence of someone approaching his cell along the short corridor.
Not sufficiently interested even to loo
k up, he sat with eyes riveted upon the cold, gray cement of his prison floor. It was not until the footfalls halted before the bars of his cell that he raised his eyes. With a little start of surprise he came to his feet. Before him, smiling down into his face, stood the waitress of the Palace Lunch Room.
He looked at her inquiringly.
“I thought,” she said, “that you might be lonesome here — that there might be something I could do for you.”
If June Lathrop had required any reward for the generous impulse that had sent her to Secor’s side in the time of his adversity she was amply repaid by the expression that lighted his face at her words. He almost choked as he attempted to reply.
“And I was just thinking,” he said, “how absolutely friendless I am here. It is awfully good of you — I don’t know how to thank you; but really you ought not to be here. I’m not — not the sort of person a decent girl should. know.”
To what awful depths of self-abasement must Ogden Secor have sunk to voice such a sentiment as this! June felt the tears coming to her eyes.
“You mustn’t say that,” she said. “The sheriff told me all about it, and that you — it was in self-defense.”
“It isn’t that,” said Secor. “It’s that I was there at all — gambling in a saloon — and drunk. Drunk! I should have thought that would have killed whatever natural sympathy a woman might feel for a man who had killed another, even in self-defense. And,” he continued, “do you remember the warning that you gave me the first day that I was in Goliath?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I didn’t think that you would.”
“I have, a hundred times,” he said. “And wondered why I should. I’ve wondered, too, what prompted you — did I seem as bad as that even then — or what was it?”
She did not dare tell him. He looked at her closely for a moment.
“Haven’t I known you somewhere?” he asked.
She mustered all her courage. It was less on her own account that she dreaded telling him than on his. To be befriended by her might seem the last straw — the final depth below which there was no sinking.
“My name is Lathrop,” she said; “June Lathrop.”
Secor shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t know you, but there is something mighty familiar about your face.”
12. JUST THREE WORDS
The coroner’s jury exonerated Secor. He was never brought to trial. For two weeks he remained in jail waiting the action of the grand jury. That body returned a no bill, and Ogden Secor stepped once more into the world of freedom.
During the period of his incarceration June had visited him daily. She felt, in a measure, a certain sense of obligation. This man, by a smile and a pleasant word, had set her feet back into the path of rectitude at a time when hope was gone from her life. She could do no less than exert what small influence she might wield to lead him from the path toward which he was straying.
She was glad that he had not remembered her, or at least that he had pretended that he did not. She was not sure which was the true explanation of his non-recognition. As yet she had not guessed the serious nature of the results that had followed his slugging at the hands of the cracksmen.
Between the noon and evening meals June had a couple of hours to herself, and it was at this period that she visited Secor in his cell. He came to look forward eagerly to her coming — except for a few of the Q. P.’s hangers- on, she was his only visitor.
It was June who brought him word of the grand jury’s action. The kindly sheriff, meeting her at the jail’s door, as he himself was bearing the news to the prisoner, told her that Secor was a free man, and that she might carry the cheering message to him.
“I reckon he’d rather hear it from them pretty lips, anyway,” he added, winking knowingly.
June flushed. It had never occurred to her that any one might find foundation for imagining the existence of tender sentiments between herself and Ogden Secor in her daily visits to the prisoner. So it was with an emotion akin to diffidence that she approached his cell that day.
Secor received the news of his final exoneration without any show of elation. June looked at him in surprise.
“Doesn’t it make you happy” she exclaimed. “Why, I wanted to throw up my hat and shout when the sheriff told me.”
He shook his head. “Why should it make me happy?” he asked. “What am I coming out to? Who cares whether I am in or out?” And then at the hurt look which she could not hide, he exclaimed, regretfully: “Oh, I didn’t mean that exactly — I know that you care, and it means everything to me to know that there is one good, kind heart in the world; but, Miss Lathrop, your generosity would go out the same to a yellow dog — but not your respect.
“You can’t help being kind and sweet, for your soul is pure and true — I can read it in your eyes; but even that can’t blind you to the bald and brutal fact of what I am — a drunken bum.”
The bitterness of his tone turned the girl cold.
“And what am I coming out to” he went on. “I’m coming out to the Q. P. - that ‘ll be the first place I’ll head for. There is no other place that I may go, and tonight I’ll be drunk again.”
She stretched her hand between the iron bars and laid her slim fingers on the man’s arm. Her eyes were dim with tears as she raised them to his.
“Oh, don’t,” she pleaded, “please don’t! You mustn’t throw your life away. Remember who you are — what you have been — what you may be again. Oh, won’t you promise me that you’ll never touch it again?”
The tear-filled eyes, the pleading voice, the touch upon his arm, sent a sudden thrill through every fiber of Ogden Secor’s being. Never before had he realized half the beauties of the girl’s face and soul as revealed that instant as she pleaded with him for his own honor.
He forgot that he was Ogden Secor — that she was a waitress in a cheap lunchroom. Slowly his hand crept up until his fingers closed upon hers. He leaned forward close to the intervening bars. There was a light in his eyes that had never shone upon Sophia Weekes.
“June!” he whispered, his voice now husky with emotion. “I can stop — I can do anything for your sake. June, I l—”
Like a flash the girl snatched her hand from his. Her fingers flew across his lips as though to smother the word that he would have spoken — it seemed almost like a blow.
“No!” she fairly shouted. “Oh, God, you don’t know what you are saying! Don’t say it — don’t think it. It is too awful!” and pressing her clenched hands to her face she turned and almost ran from the jail.
For a moment Secor stood as though stunned. He had seen the horror mirrored in the girl’s eyes — and he had placed the only interpretation upon it that he could.
“God,” he muttered as he sank to his hard bench, “have I sunk so low as that?”
A few minutes later he was released from jail. He did not hesitate. With long, eager strides he made straight for the Q. P.
For a month he scarce drew a sober breath. Then he landed in jail again - this time as a plain “drunk” — he had been picked up from the gutter by a town policeman.
June heard of it, and came to his cell early the next morning. He met her look almost defiantly, but at the pain and sorrow in her face his eyes wavered and fell.
“I shouldn’t think you want to sully your name by coming to see the town drunkard,” he said; and then, bitterly, “I’d have stopped for your sake even without your love. I don’t blame you for that; but you needn’t have been so disgusted with the thought that I loved you.”
“You didn’t think that?” she exclaimed.
“What else could I think? I read it in your expression.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that,” she cried. “You must know that I couldn’t come to see you, or want so to help you, if I felt that way!”
“Then what is the reason? Why can’t I tell you that I love you, June?” he insisted. “Tell me.”
“I can’t,” she said, “and you mustn’t ask
me to tell you.”
She was close to the bars now, and again she laid her hand upon his.
“I would do anything on earth for you, Ogden,” she said, “except let you love me. Why can’t you let me help you to win back the biggest thing you have lost — your self-respect? The rest will be easy then, and when you have it once more you’ll want to get down on your knees and thank June Lathrop that she wouldn’t let you fall in love with a — waitress.”
“Would it make you any happier?” he asked.
“It would make me happier than I had ever expected that I could be again.”
“I’ll try,” he said, “for your sake; but how am I to begin — what is there for me to do?”
“Your ranch,” she returned promptly. You told me that you had a ranch down near the river.”
Secor laughed. “I went to see it when I first came out. It’s nothing but an unfenced sage-bush desert. No water, no fences, no house — nothing.”
“There’s the river,” she urged.
“And what can I do with the river?”
“With a shovel and a pan, you can get a living wage out of the gravel anywhere along the river,” she answered. “And you can live clean and decent. You’re making nothing here, and you’re living like a hog.”
Ogden Secor flushed. The words stung him, and because they stung, they did more to crystalize the good intentions that the girl’s pleas had aroused than would further pleading, for they awoke with him the fast-dying flame of his self-respect.
“I’ll do it, June,” he said, “for your sake; but give me something to hope for, if I succeed. Tell me that you may then listen to what you won’t listen to now.”
“When you are back where you should be,” she said, “I mean physically, morally, and mentally, you won’t care to have a waitress hear you tell her that you love her.”
“I’m not in love with a waitress, June; I’ve dared aspire to an angel.”
The police magistrate before whom Secor was arraigned had acquired local celebrity through the success he had made of keeping Goliath fairly free of bums and hoboes. The sheriff and the constabulary worked with him. They arrested every undesirable stranger upon the streets, and the judge forthwith put them back upon the streets, padlocked to a long chain. There they worked out their sentences until, released, they shook the dust of Goliath from their feet, nor ever thereafter ventured within her limits.
Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26) Page 718