Delphi Collected Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Illustrated) (Series Four Book 26)

by Edgar Rice Burroughs

  To this good judge Mr. Ogden Secor looked like any other drunken bum that was hailed before him. There was, it is true, that about the cut of his disheveled clothes which proclaimed a one-time smartness; but this rather militated against the defendant, for in it the judge saw more sinister signs than mere worthlessness — Eastern crooks, he knew, were ofttimes smartly clothed, or the man might have stolen the apparel, which was more likely.

  “Three days in the chain-gang,” said the judge. “Call the next case.”

  Before those three awful days were over, Ogden Secor was more thoroughly sober than ever he had been in all his life — even in the days that he did not drink. He worked with eyes bent upon the ground, never once raising them. Through his mind ran four words — the words of hope and encouragement that June Lathrop had spoken: “ There’s the river.” But now it was a grim and sinister interpretation that he put upon them.

  “There’s the river! “ He could scarce wait for the knocking of his galling fetters from his ankle. “There’s the river!” Yes, and there, too, lay forgetfulness of the hideous humiliation of these frightful days.

  June Lathrop saw him in the chain-gang, as the motley crew worked upon the streets of Goliath. She turned her head away lest he should see that she had seen, and hurrying to her room, threw herself face down upon the bed, sobbing. Her tears were for him, for the hideous laceration of his pride that she could read in the bent head and the stooping shoulders. He had looked like an old man, tottering to his grave beneath a hopeless load of shame.

  God, how it had hurt her! Yet by all the age-old traits that are ascribed to humanity she, of all others in the world, should have found sinister rejoicing in the suffering of this man. But instead, there came to her for the first time a realization of the one thing above all others that might make her life even more miserable than it had been — she loved Ogden Secor.

  She knew now that she had always loved him — since that day that he had met her in the antechamber of the grand jury room. She saw now why she had set herself the task of reclaiming him. She saw, too, why she had experienced such horror at the thought of his voicing words of love to her — it was because she had loved him, and because in all the world of men and women, he and she had the least right to love one another.

  When Secor’s time in the chain-gang was up, June was waiting for him outside the jail.

  Love had given her the power to read in the humiliation of the man she loved something of the stern resolve that had found lodgment in his mind. Intuitively she sensed what would be the first impulse of a proud man weakened by dissipation and bowed down by humiliation.

  She had been a “down-and-outer” herself. She had been on the verge of the very thing she had guessed Secor to be contemplating — it had come after that terrible morning at St. Luke’s — but the memory of Ogden Secor’s kindness to her had stayed her hand.

  Now she would repay him.

  With head still bowed and eyes upon the ground he emerged from the jail. When June fell in beside him, he did not look up, though he knew that it was she — who else was there in all the world who would be seen upon the public streets with him?

  In silence they walked side by side through the little city, down the dusty road toward the cool shadows of the tree-bowered brook that winds along that pleasant valley.

  Secor moved but with one thought in his mind — to get beyond the sight of his fellow men. They came at last to the brim of the little stream. There were no prying eyes about them.

  June touched his hand gently where it hung at his side, and then her cool fingers closed upon his.

  “Ogden,” she whispered.

  He turned dull eyes upon her, as though for the first time realizing her presence.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked; and then, without waiting for her reply, went on: “And you walked at my side through the streets — through the hideous streets where I have worked with a chain upon my ankle, fastened to vagabonds and criminals, and to — to bums — to other bums like myself — drunken bums! Every one must have seen you — Oh, June, how could you have done it?”

  His thoughts now were all for her. There could have been nothing better for his sick brain, nauseated with continual thinking of his own shame.

  “I must have been mad to let you do it,” he went on. “Your friends will jeer at you. They will link your name with that of Ogden Secor, the town drunkard—”

  She clapped her hand over his lips.

  “You mustn’t say that!” she cried. “I won’t let you say it! You are not that — you never could be that. You are making a mountain of a molehill. It is not the man who falls who receives the censure of his fellows; it’s the man who falls and won’t get up — who lies wallowing in the filth of his degradation. The world admires the man who can ‘come back’ — it hates a quitter.

  “You have told me that you love me.” She was speaking rapidly, as though everything in the world hinged upon the element of time. “You have asked me to love you. Do you expect me to love a quitter? You are thinking this minute of adding the final ignominy to your downfall; you are thinking this minute, Ogden Secor, of taking your own life. If I could love a quitter, do you think that I could love a — coward?”

  Beneath the lash of her words, the man within him awakened. His shoulders straightened a bit. He looked her straight in the eyes for the first time that day. He was trying to fathom her interest in him. Presently he seemed to awaken; a sudden light dawned upon him. Hope lightened the lines of his tired and haggard face. Not for months had he looked so much like the Ogden Secor of the past.

  He took the girl by the shoulders.

  “June,” he cried, “I have been trying to guess why you should have done for me all that you have done. There can be but one reason. You cannot deny it. Let me hear your lips speak what your acts have proclaimed. Tell me that you love me, June, and I can win back to any heights!”

  She pushed him gently from her. Her heart ached to be pressed close in the arms of the man she loved; yet she knew that it could never be. If her love would save him, she had no right to deny it, though she knew that such an avowal could bring nothing but misery and shame to them both; there never could be any consummation of a love between Ogden Secor and June Lathrop.

  “I could not deny it now,” she said at last, “and if it will help you any to hear me say the thing I have no right to say, or that you have no right to hear, I can do it for your sake; but beyond the saying of it, Ogden, there can be nothing. That we must both understand. Why, I cannot tell you — I dare not. Do not ask me.”

  “It will be enough for now,” he said, “to hear you say it. Afterward we shall find a way; love always does, you know.”

  And so she said the thing he wished to hear, nor never in all his life had words sounded sweeter to Ogden Secor than those three from the lips of the waitress from the Palace Lunch Room.

  13. “FOR THE MURDER OF—”

  For a year Ogden Secor toiled at his lonely camp beside the big river.

  His shovel and his pan and his crude rocker were his only companions. With the little money that had remained to him after his wasted days in Goliath he had purchased material and tools for the construction of a frail shack on his land close to his placer diggings, and had furnished it with such bare necessities as he could afford.

  Once a week he walked the ten miles that lay between his camp and Goliath for a few hours with June Lathrop. These were red-letter days for them both - the sole bright spots in their lonely lives peopled by vain regrets.

  At first lie had tried to wring from the girl an explanation of her refusal to listen to a suggestion of their marriage; but finding that the subject caused her only unhappiness, he desisted. The Q. P. knew him no more during these days, and the change that was wrought in him by abstinence and healthful, outdoor labor was little short of marvelous. He grew to take a keen pleasure in his physical fitness, and with renewed health of body came a return of his former mental efficiency �
�� what the surgeons, tinkering with his hurt skull, had been unable to accomplish, nature did; slowly, it is true, but none the less effectively.

  As his vigor of mind increased, his memory returned in part, so that he was constantly haunted by a growing conviction that somewhere, some place far from Goliath, he had known June Lathrop, and that she had been intimately associated with that other life that was once again taking concrete form in his recollections.

  Not that he had ever entirely forgotten his past, for he had not. Rather, he recalled it as through a haze which confused and distorted details so that he was never quite sure of the true identity of what he saw back there in the years that were gone.

  But after all else was plain the figure of the June Lathrop of the past still remained little else than an intangible blur. There was something needed to recall her more distinctly than his unaided memory could do — nor was that thing to be long wanting.

  The gold that Secor washed from the gravel of the old river bar was barely sufficient to meet his daily needs. As a result his ranch — he always laughed as he referred to the bit of sage-brush desert as “my ranch” — was sold for taxes. The time was approaching when, if he would regain it, he must act; but having no money, he was forced to remain helpless as the time approached.

  One day while he was in Goliath he mentioned the thing to June.

  “Of course the land is not worth the taxes,” he said; “but somehow I have grown attached to it — it’s the only ‘home’ I have. I shall hate to see it go, but I’ll be as well off, I suppose.”

  “Not worth the taxes?” she exclaimed. “Why, Ogden Secor, where have you been for the last six months? Didn’t you know that the new government reclamation project is at last an assured fact, and that your land will jump from nothing an acre to something like a hundred dollars an acre overnight?”

  Secor looked at her blankly.

  “I didn’t know it came as far down river as my holdings,” he said.

  “Why, your land is right in the center of it — there is every chance in the world that the new town will be located there, and if that happens you’ll be wealthy.”

  He smiled ruefully.

  “Not I,” he said; “for I couldn’t raise the money to redeem the ranch if my life depended on it.”

  “How much is necessary?” she asked.

  He told her. The next day, Monday, she drew her savings from the bank and turned them over to Secor.

  At first, when she had suggested this thing, he had refused flatly, but after talking with several men who were well posted, he had seen that there was no question but that the land would increase in value immensely and that he should be able to repay June in the near future.

  The same day word came of the exact location of the proposed town — it brought definite information to the effect that a large portion of Secor’s holdings would lie directly in the business center of the town, and the balance on the gentle rise back from the river that had been set apart for residential purposes.

  June and Ogden were so elated they could scarcely contain themselves. Nothing would do but that they must celebrate with a dinner at the Short Line Hotel — the most pretentious hostelry of Goliath. At first June demurred, but Ogden was insistent, and so she asked for the afternoon and evening off.

  They strolled together beside the little stream where he had wrung from her lips an avowal of the love she had no right to harbor for Ogden Secor. Once again he revived the subject that had long been taboo, urging her to forget whatever to him unfathomable scruples kept her from him; but she only shook her head sadly, and when he saw how unhappy it made her he tried to drop the subject, though he found it most difficult to drop.

  As they approached the hotel where they were to hold their modest celebration the Limited from the East lay along the platform, up and down which the passengers were strolling. To reach the dining-room it was necessary to walk past a part of the long line of Pullmans and as they did so Secor was suddenly confronted by a trim little man with outstretched hand.

  “My dear Secor,” he exclaimed, “what in the world are you doing here? We have all wondered what could have become of you.”

  And then turning toward the open window of a drawing-room he called, “Oh, Sophia, see whom I have discovered!”

  Sophia Welles Pursen looked from the window — she and the Rev. Mr. Pursen were on their bridal trip. She saw Ogden Secor and beside him she saw another whom she recognized. Coldly she barely inclined her head, turning away from the window immediately.

  Then Mr. Pursen looked at Ogden Secor’s companion for the first time. He, too, recognized her.

  “My gracious!” he exclaimed. His eyes went wide in holy horror. “My gracious! Excuse me, Secor, but the train is about to start.” And without a backward glance be hastened toward his car.

  The sight of Sophia Welles and the Rev. Mr. Pursen, and the glances of contempt they had shot toward June Lathrop, had done in an instant what months of vain attempt at recollection had failed to do. With the suddenness of an unexpected slap in the face there returned to Ogden Secor the memory of the last time he had seen these three together.

  As clearly as if it had been but yesterday he saw the figures about his bed as he lay propped up upon his pillows at St. Luke’s.

  He saw Sophia Welles and the Rev. Mr. Pursen. He saw Stickler, nervous and unstrung, and he saw Doarty, his heavy hand upon the arm of the girl from Farris’s.

  Slowly a dull red crept across his face. He turned toward June. The look of misery in her eyes showed that she realized that memory had returned.

  “Now you understand at last,” she said in a dull voice.

  He took her by the arm and led her into the dining-room. She scarce realized what she was doing when she permitted herself to go with him. He found a table in a corner, seating himself across from her.

  “The cad,” he said— “the dirty, little, hypocritical cad!”

  She looked at him in astonishment.

  “You mean—” she started.

  “I mean Pursen.”

  “But he was right — he couldn’t recognize me,” she replied wearily. Then she rose from the table. “I’ll go now,” she said “I don’t know why I came in here — I must have been — stunned. I knew that you would find out some day — but I didn’t know that it would be so dreadfully terrible.”

  Her lips trembled.

  He reached across the table and forced her gently back into her chair.

  “The only terrible thing about it,” he said, “is that there should be such people as the Rev. and Mrs. Pursen in the world. That, and the fact that they have made you unhappy.’’

  “You mean that you don’t hate me, now that you remember?” she asked.

  “I have guessed for a long time, June,” he replied, “that there was something in your past life that you thought would make our marriage impossible if I knew of it. You have misjudged me. I do not care what you have been or what you have done. That is past — it can’t be helped now, or undone. All I know is that I love you, and now that I know all there is to be known, there can be no further reason why you should hesitate longer.”

  The old smile lighted his face. “Oh, June,” he said, “can’t you see that it is only our love that counts? If you can forget what I have been — if you can forget the saloon brawls — if you can forget the chain-gang — what have you done that I may not forget? For you were but a young girl, while I was a strong man. Nothing that you may have been can exceed in ignominy the depth to which I sunk.”

  “You do not remember all, then,” she said sadly. “You have forgotten what Doarty accused me of — giving the combination to the man who robbed the safe.”

  “I remember everything,” he replied, “but I do not believe it — no, I do not want you even to deny it, for that would imply that I could believe it.”

  “I am glad that you don’t believe it,” she said, “for that, at least, was not true! But the rest is true — about Farris’s.”
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  He could not help wincing at that, for he was still a Puritan at heart.

  “Let’s not speak of it,” he said. “It doesn’t change my love for you. I am sorry that it had to be so, but it is, and we must make the best of it, just as we must make the best of the memory of what I became here in Goliath — the town drunkard. I want you, June, and now there is nothing more to keep you from me. Tell me, dear, that there is nothing more.”

  She was about to reply when a broad-shouldered man arose from a table behind them. As he approached June was the first to see his face. At sight of him she turned deathly pale — it was Doarty. He stepped to her side and laid his hand upon her shoulder.

  “Well, Mag,” he said, “I’ve had a devil of a time finding you; but I’ve got you at last.”

  Ogden Secor leaped to his feet.

  “What does this mean?” he cried. “Who are you? What is it, June? What does he mean?”

  Mr. Doarty did not recognize Mr. Ogden Secor, whom he had seen but once or twice and then under very different circumstances and in widely different apparel.

  “It means, bo,” said Mr. Doarty, “that your lady friend is under arrest for the murder of John Secor four years ago.”

  14. SOME LOOSE THREADS

  The case of the People versus June Lathrop, alias Maggie Lynch, came to trial in the old Criminal Court Building. Since her arrest June had persistently refused to see Ogden Secor, though he had repeatedly endeavored to have word with her. She felt that his desire to come to her was prompted solely by gratitude for her loyalty to him when their positions had been reversed — when he had been the prisoner.