The keyman nodded. “Strikes Leavenworth at 8.14 a.m.”
Crosby went down in his pocket and dug up a meagre roll of bills. “Give me a one-way ticket,” was all he said.
The midnight flyer of the Texas and Southern Kansas stopped at the signal of the telegrapher’s red lantern, and Crosby climbed aboard. Finding a seat in the half-lighted car, filled with bedraggled passengers asleep and half asleep, he sat all night, his eyes hot, staring through the window at the black velvet curtain that parted only occasionally to show glimpses of snow-clad hills. Came morning at last, and then bright daylight. And shortly after eight o’clock a very tired and dishevelled young attorney stepped out on the depot platform of the busy city of Leavenworth. A decrepit bus carried him out to the grey-walled penitentiary, and he walked up the gravel path that led to the warden’s quarters.
Now in the bright daylight, in the actual sight of that grim sepulchre of steel and stone, his muddled recriminations of the past night grew more clear and at the same time more poignant. Fool, fool that he had been, he reflected bitterly. Had he been a real attorney, as she claimed in her last bitter words to him; had he been what his college degree had termed him — a lawyer — instead of a pompous orator, he could have cleared her in spite of the well-defined prejudice against her in the town of Brossville.
He had to wait in the mahogany-furnished warden’s office for a full thirty minutes before that official appeared, evidently just from a warm, satisfying breakfast. The latter was a kindly-looking man of perhaps fifty years of age, with silver-grey hair and brown eyes that radiated a keen understanding of many things. Crosby lost no time in stating his own name, occupation and residence. Then, beginning at the beginning, he told briefly the complete story of Zelina Miles’ diamond ring. Concluding, he said:
“And there you have the facts of what appears to be one of the worst miscarriages of justice that we can contemplate. The hardest part of it all is that I am to blame. That’s all I can say now. As for Mrs. Miles’ story of last night, of course it will be borne out by her husband, Miles, and by Dr. Duff. And now can we go to her and tell her our good news?”
Warden Clayton leaned forward, chin in hand, his brown eyes troubledly studying those of his visitor.
“I don’t wish to be rude, Mr. Crosby, but I note that several letters bearing your name have come to Lindell Trent at intervals of every two weeks, and that each was returned to you unopened by her.”
Crosby flushed to the roots of his hair. “I can well realize now why she is so bitter against me. She must feel nothing less than contempt for me. I care more for that girl than anyone dreams. The only thing I can do now it to make it up to her by being good to her for the rest of my life, if she’ll consent to forget my miserable handling of her case.” He paused. “Can we go to her now and tell her the good news?”
Clayton leaned forward in his chair. “I’m mighty, mighty sorry,” he said regretfully, “that this development didn’t happen sooner. Mr. Crosby, Lindell Trent is no longer an inmate of Leavenworth. She is somewhere — I don’t even know where myself — on the continent of Australia on the other side of the world.”
“No longer an inmate! In Australia?” ejaculated Crosby, bewildered.
Clayton nodded slowly. “Yes. Here are the facts, however. You no doubt remember, Mr. Crosby, of the success England had combating her man shortage during the Big War by running her machine shops with women. At that time we instituted a light machine shop here at Leavenworth for some of our women prisoners. Now Lindell Trent, being a short-term prisoner, was assigned to a tiny drill press in this women’s shop. She was very bright, very willing, a remarkable little personality in every way. She had been there only a month when Governor McCloud made his annual visit of inspection to the institution. He was accompanied by his wife and little daughter. Just how it happened no one knows, but in the women’s shop the little girl strayed too close to the gears of the big milling machine. Her sleeve caught. She screamed. Lindell Trent was the first to grasp what had happened. The little one’s arm was almost between the teeth of the gears when Lindell Trent sprang to the machine and jammed in a monkey wrench. In so doing she stripped off every tooth of the gears, and burned out the motor, but she saved the arm, perhaps the life, of the daughter of the Governor of Kansas. Also she lacerated two of the fingers on her right hand.”
Crosby was silent. His face, first white, showed slowly the return of its colour. “And Governor McCloud pardoned her?” he ventured in a low voice.’
“She was out of the prison hospital in a week, Mr. Crosby, but the signed pardon was here the second day after the accident. She left us, taking with her the ten dollars which the State gives every departing prisoner, and a gift of three hundred and fifty dollars sent to her by the Governor’s wife.”
“And she went — where?”
Clayton was silent for a moment, during which he regarded his visitor gravely. Then he turned to one of the drawers of his desk, and fumbling in it withdrew from it a letter. “I am going to let you read this letter,” he said simply. “Perhaps it will answer your questions more fully than I can do.”
Crosby reached out a hand hungrily and took the missive. As he unfolded it, a postcard photograph dropped into his lap, and before reading the letter itself he took up the picture and gazed at it. It showed Lindell Trent clad in a neat suit of dark material, with a little lace collar around the slim throat, her dainty fingers holding a peculiar handbag which appeared, in the photograph, to be made up of a number of round discs like coins. On her face was the shadow of a smile, and she seemed to Crosby to be looking straight into his own eyes. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he turned his attention at once to the letter. Written in a clear round hand, a bit immature, yet every word of which was correctly spelled, he read off:
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA.
December 4, 1923.
Warden Charles W. Clayton,
State Penitentiary,
Leavenworth, Kansas.
MY DEAR KIND FRIEND —
I am writing to tell you of myself, as you asked me to do. As I said when I left the prison, I came directly to San Francisco. I have been here a few days, living in a queer little hotel on Market and Fremont Streets, but day after to-morrow I am saying good-bye for ever to America and to the name of Lindell Trent. Over in the heart of Australia, some forty miles from a town, is a brother of my mother’s, a queer silent man who lives by himself in a little farm out in what she used to call “the bush.” He believes that electricity is a weapon and invention of the Devil, and no doubt has many other equally queer notions. He never reads the papers or has anything to do with the rest of the world. But even though he be such a queer man, I know that he will welcome me when he learns that I am his sister’s child and sees the little trinkets of mother’s which I took with me when I left Leavenworth. But oh, Warden Clayton, I shall not even dare tell him that mother married a man by the name of Trent, or that that is my name. I shall not even be able to tell him that we lived around Brossville and Prairie City, for he might write to either one of those two places. I shall have to come to him under my new name only, for that is the only way that I may be sure that even my uncle shall never know that his sister’s child was sent to an American prison for theft.
The whole thing has been heartbreaking for me, but thank God I am to leave it all behind me now. The worst part of it all to me was the part about David Crosby, the man who defended me in court. That is, he didn’t defend me, Warden Clayton; he pleaded with the jury to let me go on account of my age, and his every word was like a dagger in my heart. That David should not believe in me, that he could not see with his own eyes that I must be innocent; that he could not have fought for me when he claimed he loved me — oh, it seems so hard. I am not a lawyer, yet somehow, some way, I feel that I could have been saved from this disgrace if my case had been taken care of right.
I loved David Crosby, Warden Clayton, and there will never be another man in my life, I think
, that will be even as much to me as he was. I shall never marry now. Everything we have in life fails to live up to what we want it to. David was good, he had so many virtues. He worked so hard to put himself through college. He was so good to his mother before she died. But David could not fight for the one girl that clung to him and whom he said he cared for. This was his weak point; and young as I am myself, I see now that David will never make a success as a lawyer. He is too meek.
As for my plans Warden Clayton, you have them now. My fingers, you will be glad to hear, are practically healed up now. I have changed my name — changed it so greatly and completely that Lindell Trent will never exist again after the day after to-morrow — changed it so much that I have even had my new name and my new address in Australia engraved on the inside of my handbag, sewed on my linen, stencilled on my valise, and placed on every article that bears a name. I want to be a new person — I want to feel that I am a new person — a native of another land entirely — that I am no longer Lindell Trent who was sent to prison for a common theft.
As for day after to-morrow, well, I sail at twelve noon on the Ocean Queen for Sydney, Australia, from which point I shall go inland by train, and stage coach. I expect to be in Sydney not later than the second day beyond Christmas, and with my uncle as soon after as I can manage to get there. The regular passage is $200, second class, but I was fortunate in the steamship offices when I went to inquire about my ticket. A young woman waiting at the counter called me outside. She told me that she had a passage and a passport, and would sell them to me for $175 as she could not go as she intended. She said she needed her money badly and would rather lose $25 than wait for a refund from the Pacific and Southern Navigation line who own the Ocean Queen. I wonder if it is wrong to travel on another person’s passport? I look near enough like the picture on it to pass for this lady, and she says that it takes a great deal of trouble to get a passport, because one has to write to Washington. She says that now that there is no war, that the passport is just a formality — that hundreds of people are travelling every day on purchased ones.
I will now say good-bye, good kind Warden Clayton. You will never hear of me again, but I shall think of two persons many many times, probably as long as I live; of you who were so kind and of David Crosby who came near being the man of my dreams. Would you care for this little picture of me? It was taken at a photograph gallery on Market Street, here in this city. It shows me with my new clothes, bought with part of Mrs. McCloud’s very sweet gift to me, and my handbag made of Australian silver sixpences. I bought it to help a poor old sailor who worked around the hotel where I have been staying, one who has given me a great deal of valuable information.
I hope that everything will be happy and prosperous for you in the coming years.
With kindest regards,
LINDELL TRENT.
Crosby looked up from the last word of the letter. He swallowed hard before he spoke. “And that is the only information you have?”
Clayton nodded. “Absolutely all. This bears a mailing date of twenty-five days past, you’ll notice. Lindell Trent must already have disembarked at Sydney two days ago.”
The younger man sat for a long moment thinking. At last he looked up. “Would you be willing to give me this letter and photograph?” he asked.
“Take it along,” was the prison official’s answer. “You’re welcome to it. I hope you can locate the girl. If by any chance I should hear from her, I’ll write you at Brossville. But I honestly don’t believe she’ll write me again.”
“No, I don’t think she will,” agreed the other in low voice. He folded up the letter and photograph and placed them safely away in his breast pocket. Then he arose. “I’m taking up your time, Warden Clayton. Thank you for this and for the kindness you’ve shown Lindell.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Clayton, rising. “I’ll let you know if by any chance I hear anything. And please do the same.”
CHAPTER IV
THE STRANGE STORY OF THE BOTTLE
MR. ENOS A. MELFORD, of Melford and Melford, ship chandlers, San Francisco, looked up from his desk as his clerk stepped into the tiny room fitted like a ship’s cabin with imitation portholes, hawsers, linchpins, marline-spikes, and a great spoked pilot’s wheel on the wall. It was the month of June, 1925. He had been reading the morning paper, and at the same time troubledly reflecting, concerning the plethora of rum-running activities detailed therein, that Melford and Melford in their business of fitting up ships were, in a sense, unwilling and unknowing aids in this great new American industry.
“That Mr. Crosby of Chicago is here again, Mr. Melford?” said the clerk. “The same young man that was in to see you yesterday.”
Mr. Enos Melford stared at the card deposited on the desk in front of him. Its neat print read:
DAVID CROSBY
Assistant
Offices of Ernst Weidekamp
Ashland Block,
Chicago.
“Weidekamp is that well-known Chicago criminal lawyer, isn’t he, Farkins?” queried Melford.
Farkins nodded. Melford, with a sigh, put away his morning paper, and shoved away two great ledgers that blocked up his desk. “Show him in, Farkins.”
Farkins withdrew, and Enos Melford looked up a moment later to see a young man of perhaps twenty-eight years of age, dressed in blue serge, brown hair topping a pair of steel-blue eyes standing by his desk. He rose and placed a chair near by.
“Be seated, Mr. Crosby.” He bowed. “My clerk tells me that you have been in twice to see me. I am sorry that I have been out. What can I do for you, Mr. Crosby?”
The young man cleared his throat. He dropped his straw hat on a near-by stand.
“Mr. Melford, I’ve come to you to get an accurate estimate of the cost of a certain project I have in mind.”
“Just what sort of a project had you in mind?”
Mr. David Crosby of Chicago stared out of the window a moment before he spoke. “Mr. Melford, what, in your estimation, is the number of small uninhabited islands — atolls, I think they’re sometimes called — in the South Pacific Ocean, that are unmarked on the maps?”
Melford shook his head puzzledly. “Their number is legion,” he said authoritatively. “I’d say there are at least two thousand, varying from a quarter mile to three miles in diameter, and spaced all the way from 20 to 200 miles apart in a pattern so intricate that no two charts in the world coincide except regarding the very large ones.”
“And these are mostly arid and uninhabited?” asked Crosby.
The veteran ship chandler nodded. “Most of them are mere volcanic peaks that have stuck from the water for centuries. Some have a bit of grass or moss on them. Some of them have pools of rain water, but practically none of them any food.”
“What, in your estimation then, Mr. Melford, would be the cost of an expedition consisting of one ship to explore every one of those uninhabited volcanic islands in this region for — say — two male skeletons and some ten or eleven pieces of gold and silver jewellery?”
Enos Melford spun sharply in his swivel chair. He scrutinized his visitor closely, his curiosity growing every second.
“What — ”he began, but Mr. Crosby of Chicago was opening up a leather billfold from which he took some seven or eight newspaper clippings of various lengths, and then handed one of the longer ones to Melford.
“Suppose you look over this clipping first,” he suggested. “Then I can make things clearer. I don’t know whether you read of this matter in the San Francisco papers or not, but it’s probable that you have.”
Enos Melford took the clipping, and adjusting on his nose a pair of round-lensed hornshell glasses which hung from his vest, read it through. Its contents ran:
CAREER OF NOTED SOUTH AFRICAN CROOK COMES TO END IN GHASTLY MANNER
MAKES SAFETY ONLY TO DIE OF STARVATION AND THIRST
(Associated Press.)
San Francisco, June 3, 1925: The following illiterate message, its deta
ils corroborated by the log and records of the Pacific liner Ocean Queen, written crudely in indelible pencil on the front of a sun-bleached cotton shirt, and picked up by the British schooner Vulcan in the Pacific Ocean off Southern California in a whisky bottle sealed with tar in which it had travelled for seventeen months on perverse ocean currents, tells graphically the ultimate fate of two men, one of them — ”Cape Town “Eddy Courney who made a dramatic mid-ocean escape a year and a half ago from the largest ship of the Pacific and Southern Navigation Company of San Francisco. It portrays vividly the fate which overcame this much wanted criminal character who carried to his own death an ignorant and innocent stowaway on the same steamer.
The message, painfully written off word by word by a man evidently himself suffering from a shortage of water and food, slightly rambling in places and dated almost a year and a half ago, is here reproduced in its entirety.
Decembr. About 29. 1923.
In gods name Send help. We our on Iland. Volkanic. No gras no water no fud. No Water only in jug. No food now 3 Days. He is Ded. dide day befor Yestrday. He said befor he dide he was Edwurd Courney From Caip Town. Calld Caip Town Eddy Courney. I was stoway on Ocean Queen, bound Sydney from San Francsco. He found me wen we was sevn dais out. I was in life bote No 7 with biskuts an watr. He came nite of Decembr 19. Pointd gun. Ship standin still. Made me lowr bote in Darknes. Thot Currants wud take us Samoa or cook Ilands. We ben flotin dais and dais. Swep on this Iland. Bote recked. Cant patch it. Gettin weeker daily. No life, No Gras nothing. He Stole Jewlry nite we left. All here. 1 Gold wach, 1 diamon wach, 4 stones, 2 diamon rings, 3 messh bags gold, 1 messh bag made silver sixpenses, 1 messhbag silver, 1 dog coller, 3 rubeys, three hunderd dollars bills and coins. he Sed offcers Pacific an Suthren company let crooks work botes on 50–50. I Herd 2 offsers talk by lifebote where hiddn. Says all botes traps for fire. Says Boilers Kondemed By govermint inspektors started Up after Botes leave docks. Says Seems leaking for 3 years. Lifebote leeked hour after it went down into water. Baled day and Nite. In gods Name Help me. cant eat gold and silver. Oh god how Sun beats down. Sen help. Cant last only Week more.
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