Crooked Miles

by Anna Alice Chapin

CROOKED MILES

ANNA ALICE CHAPIN

IT was dusk when Guy Madison boarded the Gilt-edged Express for Chicago, and piled his grip, umbrella, suit case, and magazines onto the forward seat of section 23. He looked at the number with grim approval as he did so.

“Just the number for me,” he told himself ironically. “Any man that has been fool enough to lose a girl three times over, deserves to draw twenty-three in every deal he tackles.”

He opened one of his windows wide, had a brief argument with the porter about it, switched on the electric light, and began to read. His magazine failed to divert him. His thoughts were nearly as somber as the flat dun levels of New Jersey through which the train was flying.

Every effort to find Eve Lansing had been fruitless. She had vanished from his ken as completely as a mirage or a dream. After the customhouse episode, when he had saved her from imprisonment for smuggling at the eleventh hour, she had written him one little note. He carried it about with him, and was not a bit ashamed of doing so, either; and now he pulled it out for the hundredth time and read its few lines over:

Thank you, and thank you, and thank you. The necklace wasn’t mine, but Claire's, so I have given it to her, but I’ll never forget what you did. You are a true knight-errant, and much too good to have ever wasted a thought on Eve.

He loved her for writing it, but he hated the little note of grave humility in it. He liked to think of Eve as a daring, spirited, unconquerable creature—and yet, in the same moment, he also wanted to conquer her—wherein he was essentially masculine—which is only another and more euphonious and roundabout way of saying that he was magnificently inconsistent.

The conductor came along at this point and Guy belligerently demanded reasons why he had not been able to get a compartment instead of a measly section in a crowded car.

The conductor mildly explained that it was because all the trains were crowded, and you couldn’t go to Chicago during a convention week without laying plans ahead. This annoyed Guy still more because it was so intensely reasonable.

He found a separate and distinct cause of aggrievement in every individual upon the car. A sanctimonious-looking person in clerical dress sat opposite, and the young man rang and ordered a cocktail in the deliberate hope of offending him. Behind, sat a fat woman much made up, and he opened a second window because she looked like the sort of person who needed fresh air but did not like it. The section in front was occupied by a slim little woman in shabby black, putting a limp handkerchief from time to time up under her heavy veil. Guy frowned at the meek back of her head, with its little knot of white hair showing under the veil, and told himself that people coming back from funerals were simply beastly to have around; but he felt uncomfortably sorry for her, just the same. The sanctimonious cleric and the fat lady were different. They glared at him from their respective seats, and he was conscious of the glares, and felt the better for them—also for the fresh air and the cocktail.

Nevertheless, he knew it was going to be a beastly trip. His father had wired him to come to Chicago immediately, and to bring certain negotiable bonds with him. It sounded rather mysterious and exciting, but then the governor was up to the neck in a lot of big new deals nowadays, and was always doing unexpected things. Guy wished that he had half the old man’s nerve and grit. Of course, he had started at once, and the bonds, worth approximately forty thousand dollars, were in his pocket now. Old Arnold Madison dealt in five figures or nothing.

It was a warm, muggy, lowering evening, with a dirty stain of red in the cloud-piled west, and a damp feeling in the cindery air that rushed in past the dust guard at the window. Lights flew by dizzily like swarms of fireflies; the smell of the coal dust seemed as pervading as life itself; the dragonlike train thundered, snorting on, with occasional shrieks of inquiry on the way. Late summer had brought heat and drought, and the country, baked and dusty and dry, showed its thirst. The overcast sky held out the first promise of rain for a fortnight.

The fat lady behind him rang for the porter and snorted about the dust. The sanctimonious gentleman began to whine about the diner. The perspiring negro seemed likely to be torn in two among the travelers. A baby began to shriek, and its mother wanted to know if she could get some hot water to mix with Somebody-or-other’s Baby Food.

Guy gave him his empty glass and half a dollar as he passed, and a faint gleam of gratitude illumined the dark and harassed countenance.

Just about then all the lights in the car went out. The brakeman, swearing huskily, went through with a lantern, and the porter returned on the lamp with a long lighter and a hook with which to turn on the gas. The car was soon bathed in a doubtful, discouraged-looking glow, but all hope of reading was past.

A fuse had blown out, the swearing brakeman explained, on repassing. The porter put some screens in to protect the fat lady from dust, told the cleric the diner was four forward, and brought the mother a glass of hot milk.

Guy rose and repaired to the dining car himself, determined, if there was an empty seat, to preëmpt it ahead of the sanctimonious one. As he had already surmised, it was going to be a beastly trip.

As he passed the little lady in mourning, he saw her struggling with the window.

“Let me do that for you,” he said gently.

She gave a little, soft sound which might have been a sigh of relief or an exclamation of protest, but he got the window open, and was thanked in a sobbing murmur.

“Poor little body!” he thought. “Probably just buried some child or brother or somebody. Beastly for a woman to have to travel alone when she’s in trouble like that.”

In the dining car he found a seat with his back to the engine—which, being as healthy as a young ox, he did not mind in the least—and in the course of time, the two weak-chinned little old maids who had been picking at macaroons and peach-pie, washed down by tea, departed, fluttering. Their places were taken by the santimonious gentleman in clerical dress, and a youth with whom he had forgathered—a pallid, slender fellow, whom Guy put down as a theological student.

“Or something beastly, anyway,” he added mentally. ‘Might even be a missionary. Ugh! I’d hate to be a Timbuktu cannibal!”

He left the diner as soon as he could and went to bed very early. The rain had come by that time, and he had to have one of his windows closed. Against the pane roared a deluge that sounded even above the noise of the train. The steady sound was soothing, and, not even caring that his feet were already soaking from the rain that came in at the open window, Guy tucked his big pocket case, with the bonds, under his pillow, and went to sleep.

He slept long and heavily, and woke with a curious sense of having been disturbed by something that ought not to have been. Just so a footstep will arouse one when a thunderclap will not. He was certain, as he sat up in bed, that something was not altogether right. His first instinct was to feel under his pillow for his pocket case with the bonds. The case was there, and he felt inside—yes, so were the papers. He tucked them back again, and raised the shade. It was still raining, and the dawn light stealing in had a gray and melancholy look. Guy had rarely waked to a more depressing morning, if it indeed could be called morning yet. His watch hands pointed to half past four.

Then he heard a startling sound—a sound which is unmistakable to ears that have ever heard it before: the click of a revolver being cocked. Guy made a hole between the curtains of his berth and looked out into the dimly lighted aisle.

There was only one gas jet burning, and that was at the far end of the car. The light, however, was quite sufficient to show him one of the most extraordinary pictures he had ever seen 1n his life.

The sanctimonious gentleman, sitting on the edge of his berth, was frozen apparently, in the act of passing a small packet of folded paper to the slim, young theological student. Frozen in the act, I say advisedly, for both the men were motionless and staring, paralyzed with terror, while, two feet away, steadying herself with one hand grasping the swinging green curtains of her own section, stood the lady in mourning—covering them with a revolver!

It was evident that she had not undressed for the night, for she was still all in black, but she had taken off her hat and veil, and in the dim light Guy could see her snow-white hair. Her face was in shadow, but it needed no further light to see the quiet authority of her whole air.

“That will do, Matty Burker,” she said, in a clear whisper. “And don’t try to move, McLaskey. I’ve got you both just where I want you. Hand over the papers!”

“My God!” muttered the “cleric,” with bulging eyes. “Who are you, anyhow? How d’ye know us?”

“Never mind, Burker, you haven't any time to waste. Come over, I tell you, and hurry up!”

“Gee! I know you now,” broke in the younger man. “Well, I take off my hat to you! I always said you were a peach at the game, but how you spotted this little job gets me! We had it “planted——”

“Don’t talk,” said the gray-haired woman in mourning. “This is my busy day.”

Without a word, the “theological student” she had called McLaskey handed over the letter packet—then, with a ludicrous solemnity, he kissed his hand to it.

“Easy come, easy go,” he said, with an unresentful grin. “Say, sister, it was a low-down trick to let us pinch the swag for you!”

The lady simply nodded, lowered revolver, and pointed casually down the car.

“We're slowing up for Buffalo,” she said. “I guess this is where you get off.”

With miraculous speed, the two rascals collected their belongings and melted away. There was a humorous respect in the glance which the younger man flung at the lady crook, but the cleric still seemed stunned with surprise and terror.

“‘The biter bit!’” said Mr. McLaskey, with a bow, and they forthwith departed.

Nobody boarded that particular car at Buffalo, since it was full already, so, fairly safe from interruption, Guy wrapped a dressing gown about himself and climbed out to interview the light-fingered lady who had robbed him of his sympathies on false pretenses the evening before—robbed him as nefariously as she had robbed the two men of their “swag.”

He emerged from his berth looking eleven feet tall in the gray dressing gown, and exceedingly stern, handsome, and boyish. When the lady in mourning saw him, she gave a little moaning cry, and swayed as though she would fall. Then she held out the papers toward him.

“I knew they were going to take them,” she said simply. “The telegram from your father was a fake. I came on the same train because I knew that after they had stolen them I could frighten them into giving them up. There are the bonds—take them, for Heaven’s sake!”

Guy, utterly bewildered, took the packet she was holding out. They were in truth his father’s bonds—the same bonds which he had believed were at that moment reposing under his pillow!

“But—I looked——” he began.

“They probably had some fake papers of the same thickness,” she whispered. “Oh, please—I think I’m going to faint!”

Guy caught her in his arms, and at that moment the white wig came off.

“Eve!” he cried, forgetting to whisper; and the fat lady in section 21 snorted indignantly, and made audible remarks about people who froze people all day, and kept people awake talking to people all night.

Eve Lansing, her brown hair tumbled and disordered from the wig, clung to Guy and sobbed a little, but she did not faint, after all.

They were in the last car, and the wearied porter had gone forward and fallen asleep, and Guy led her, unmolested, to the back platform, where they stood in the damp and cindery dawn, and she told him all about it, the while they pounded around curves and the country fled past them in the ghostly half light.

“They are both thieves who have worked with Claire and—and me,” she said, as they stood on the swinging platform. “The younger one is the man who ran the automobile the time I stole the rubies. Claire planned this, too, but she weakened toward the end, and told me, and I got a wig, and a railway ticket, and a revolver, and came along. I knew about the telegram. And, oh, I’m so thankful—so thankful that I could save your property for you!”

Her gold-brown eyes were full of light; Guy could see them shining in the gray morning.

“So am I,” he said, drawing her close. “But most thankful of all because—— Eve, does it mean—most dear, does it mean that you are coming to me at last?”

There was a second’s pause, then she raised the wonderful eyes to his, and their look dazzled him a little.

“It means that, if you want it, Guy,” she said bravely; “if you are sure that you want to marry a girl who has been—a crook.”

“If I’m sure, is it?” said Guy inelegantly. “Oh, my girl, my girl! So you picked this for your last job, Eve!”

She nodded, clinging to him.

“Do you know the old ‘crooked mile’ rhyme in the nursery books?” she said. “I’ve paraphrased it into a sort of chantey about me and my doings!”

She recited, with whimsical expression:

“There was a crooked maid, and she went a crooked mile!

“Oh, there was a lot of it. I made it up ages ago, and down in my heart, even when was absorbed and excited in it, I’ve thought of my life as a distance of long, ‘crooked miles,’ winding round and round, through all sorts of wild places. Oh, my dear—I think I’ve seen the last of my crooked miles. I think we’re on the level, big, beautiful, open road at last—the road that runs quite straight!” Her voice broke, and there were tears among the gold glints in the brown eyes.

“Straight?” said Guy, as he kissed her. “Well, rather! Straight—to paradise!”