IT was honesty, but a foolish piece of honesty. That was what McPacken said. It cost Tom Laylander his case. If he had burned that note when he found it beside the bandits' campfire along with other discarded notes, bonds and papers, he'd have won back his cattle. Any sensible man would have burned it, said the public of McPacken. There was such a thing as carrying this honesty game too far.
There was nothing for the judge to do, under the law, but decide the case against Tom. There was the note in evidence, notations on the back of it in indelible pencil made by the hand of Cal Withers, recording payment of interest within five years, thus keeping it from becoming invalid by limitation. The judgment was entered accordingly, and the herd ordered sold at public auction by the sheriff.
Withers's lawyer passed Tom as he was leaving the courtroom in a slow, dazed way. The lawyer carried books under his arm, as lawyers of his calibre always do. He looked at Laylander with a sort of baffled curiosity, glowing with pride in his good fee and easy victory.
"Why didn't you tear that note up, Laylander?" he asked loudly. "Then you'd 'a' had us."
"No gentleman would have thought of it, sir," Tom replied, with dignity and severity alike lost on a conscience that never had been big enough to give its owner any trouble.
Louise was not in court to hear the case go against Tom, it being a Saturday afternoon, with many ranchers in to pay their taxes. Besides, it was Maud Kelly's last day in the office. She was closing up her affairs preparatory to taking her two weeks' vacation, at the end of which time Louise was to succeed her. Tom was rather glad than sorry that she had not been present to witness his defeat. He returned to the hotel with a smile for Mrs. Cowgill on the bench beside her door, the void of his great disappointment and loss hidden under his cougar-skin vest.
"Well, Tom, did you beat him?" Mrs. Cowgill inquired, lively interest in her thin face.
"No ma'am, I didn't beat him yet."
Tom stopped before her, hat off in his respectful way that Mrs. Cowgill admired sa greatly, and prized all the more highly when she was the object of it, so few marks of deference falling in her barren life.
"Didn't the judge decide it yet?"
"Yes, he decided it, ma'am. Colonel Withers won this throw. The judge ordered the sheriff to put my herd up for sale at public auction ten days from today."
Mrs. Cowgill looked at Tom with consternation making her gaunt eyes wide. It appeared as if he had brought her news of a personal loss, her perturbation and concern so far outweighed any outward indication of his own.
"Can't you stop them? 'Are you goin' to let that old rascal beat you out of your cattle that way?"
"I can stop the sale for a while if I appeal. But Mr. Weaver, over at the bank, says he don't believe it would do a bit of good to appeal the case. It looks like I'm knocked out for a little while."
"Well, you take it mighty easy!" she said. "They say them cattle's worth twenty thousand dollars, if a cent. I guess if I was to lose twenty dollars you could: hear me from here to the court house."
"Ladies are a little different, I reckon, ma'am," Tom allowed.
"You ought 'a' called for a jury—that's what Myron said at dinner, and he reads the papers, he knows that, if he don't know much else. It oughtn't never 'a' been left to the judge. If you'd 'a' had a jury you'd 'a' sure beat him, with folks in this town knowin' what you've done for them, bringin' back all that money—my-y-y Lord! They say every dollar of it was there. Windy Moore got his back, and his watch. Here he comes now."
Tom had taken a seat beside Mrs. Cowgill at her signalled invitation, where he sat in a tentative, uncomfortable way, well forward on the bench, hat in hand, as if he expected to jump up the next minute and run away. Windy Moore approached in all the refinement and elegance of his pink-striped nellygee, to which he had added a blue-and-white polkadot necktie, done in a Byronial bow with long flowing ends, and a straw hat with brim three fingers wide, hard enough to drive nails.
"Well, Tom," said Windy, coming up in breezy justification of his name, hand out in extreme affability, "I'm not like the feller that can't overlook a joke. Glad to see you back—much obliged to you for bringin' me my watch and roll."
Tom got up, beaming with pleasure. He grasped the little brakeman's hand with the grip of genuine cordiality and joy, clinging to it as if somebody who had strayed away had come back again, redeeming the desolation of his life.
"I'm sure glad to see you, Mr. Moore," he declared, clinging to Windy's hand like a politician, "I sure am mighty glad!"
"Much obliged to you for bringin' me my watch and roll," Windy repeated, bound to pay his debt in an open and public manner, and have done with it there and then, nothing left hanging over to disquiet him in days to come. He was a little superior in spite of his down-bending, a little bit lofty and off-handed, as became a brakeman on a high-ball freight.
Windy sat down on the bench, with Tom between him and Mrs. Cowgill, got out his store cigarettes, which Tom could not refuse for fear of offending him, although he bore a scornful prejudice against any but the kind a man poured and rolled for himself. Mrs. Cowgill's surprise was as great when Tom asked her permission to smoke as if her man Myron had gone to work without being told. Windy Moore looked at him curiously, too, somewhat in contempt for his airs and his weakness.
"They tell me they beat you on that cattle case," said Windy, his trousers pulled up at the knees so high that he looked like a poodle dog about the legs.
"Yes, I lost on this throw," said Tom, speaking as if he had something in reserve, as he had spoken to Mrs. Cowgill a little while before.
"It's a darn stinkin' shame!" said Windy, whose diction was not so elegant out of the newspaper as it was in it. "I'd fight it to the supreme court if it was my case; I wouldn't throw down my hand for no decision like that. If you want money to carry it up, us fellers here in McPacken we'll see that you get it, and that ain't no lie!"
"I appreciate what you say, Mr. Moore; I appreciate it past all words. But I'm told I wouldn't gain anything but delay by makin' an appeal. The higher court couldn't do a thing to help me."
"Where you made your mistake," said Windy, with the largeness of extraordinary sophistication looking down on weakness almost to be despised, "was when you handed that note over to them fellers. If you'd 'a' put a match to it that would 'a' been the end of it. You'd 'a' had your cows, right now."
"That's what I said when I heard of it," Mrs. Cowgill hastened to throw her stone of condemnation on this poor, bruised, pitiful little act of honor and honesty. "Let me get my hands on a note I've given anybody, and see what'll happen to it!"
Tom looked at her with a grin, which was a weak attempt to discredit her declaration, trying to tell her that he knew very well she'd hand it back to the owner and pay him like a little man, although he felt under the skin that she wouldn't do anything of the sort.
"Maybe I was kind of foolish," he admitted, "but I always was that way."
Tom wanted to get away from them, and the discussion of his loss. Their regretful condemnation of what, to him, was merely a simple act of honesty, was hard to bear in silence. Yet he knew that any attempt to defend his ethical code would only subject him to further pitying correction. According to the view of Mrs. Cowgill and Windy Moore, which might be accepted as the view in epitome of all McPacken, a man who lacked the sense to be dishonest to his own profit ought to be looked after and taken in hand.
Mrs. Cowgill relieved him of her presence and her comments after a while, but Windy Moore stuck. To Tom's great-satisfaction Windy turned the talk to himself and his new consequence as soon as. Mrs. Cowgill left them, keeping it up until the shops' whistle sounded the close of the working day. He advised Tom to get out of the cattle business, now that mischance seemed to have put him out, and get a job as brakeman. He offered to go with him to the superintendent and boost for him from the eminence of his influence.
Tom was grateful for the suggestion and offer of friendly service. After a while, when the law got through with his cattle, he'd be glad to consider it, he said. Right now he was not going to try for any kind of a job. Maybe, after all, he'd have to go to the range, for he didn't seem to have the railroading streak in his blood.
All of which Windy Moore argued down and out, enlarging on the respectability, the manliness, the importance to the national welfare, of a railroad job. Meaning by a railroad job, a job of no lower grade than brakeman, to be sure.
Windy had played his hand to hold Tom there beside him for the swelling satisfaction of being seen in his company by the shop mechanics and roundhouse men when they came in for supper. The news of the cow jerry's return with the money stolen from the bank had found its way into every ear in McPacken long before the whistle blew. Nearly everybody felt a personal interest in the event, for the question of the ability of the bank to make good the depositors' loss had been an open one, with a doubtful issue. The recovery of the money made everybody secure. It was a happy day.
The railroaders were frank in their praise, hearty in their handshakes, from all of which Tom would have escaped if he could. But Windy Moore had him on exhibition at the hotel door, presiding over the affair with a bearing of proprietorship. One might have concluded that Windy had been the leading spirit in that long and perilous pursuit, concerning which no man was able at that time, nor ever after, to draw one word out of Tom Laylander's mouth.
Tom got away from them at last, for gratitude is quickly expressed and done with, but hunger in the gizzard of a railroad man requires steak and onions to appease. He was going toward the court house in quest of Louise when he met her. They returned together to the hotel.
"I'm sorry, Tom," she said.
"I knew you would be, dovie," he replied.
"This ends it, I suppose?" she ventured. "They say up at the court house an appeal wouldn't do any good."
"It only begins it, Louise. He's won the first hand; that's all."
"Why, Tom,"—eagerly, a big hope lighting in her eyes, her hand on his arm—"what are you going to do? What is there you can do?"
Tom looked down into her eyes with a great tenderness in his pink, boyish face.
"I'm goin' to wait till the law gets through with my' herd, Louise," he replied, so much more unsaid than said, yet altogether clouded in his mysterious reticence.
"We'll talk it over at supper," she said, flitting off upstairs as light on her feet as Banjo Gibson had calculated her when he first saw her on McPacken's street.
Several railroad men collected quickly about Tom, many of them familiar with his name whom he never had seen before, or had forgotten as incidentals in the general railroad pattern of the town. Some whom he knew to be conductors and engineers, who never had tipped him as much as a nod when he served on the section under Orrin Smith, greeted him like a member of the brotherhood now. That they were sincere about it Tom did not doubt, and would have been wrong if he had admitted such a thought into his ingenuous head.
He was a man who had been in bad company through innocence, rather than depravity, their attitude seemed to say, when he had labored on the section. That was all past and forgiven. The taint of jerry was no longer on his hands.
They repeated, with great earnestness and the pulling out of wallets, the declaration of Windy Moore that all the funds he might need to appeal his case were ready to his hand. More than that; if he wanted to organize a crowd to raid Cal Withers and shoot him off the face of the earth, they were with him; or to ride out and take his cattle away from the sheriff, load them and ship them out of the state, they were ready to get their guns and go. That they meant it, was as plain as the buttons on their coats.
Louise came down while they stood around Tom, their wallets and their rolls in their hands. And that was the interesting juncture at which Banjo Gibson emerged from the dining-room, the shine of chicken gravy on his chin.
"Why, hel-l-l-o, Tom!" Banjo greeted him, nearly bursting the buttons off his stiff-bosomed shirt with his swelling. He came forward offering his hand, his resonant voice loud in the office.
Laylander met his friendly advance with a peculiar kindling of humor and affront in his ruddy countenance. Banjo was before him, full of voluble expostulations of his unbounded joy, his notable banjo-picking right hand offered in jubilant salute. Laylander reached into the pocket of his cougar-skin vest, and bestowed some trifle in the hand of Banjo Gibson with as much indifference as he would throw a base coin to an aggressive beggar. He turned then with a soft word of excuse to the new friends, and genuine, who had come forward in his hour of need, held the dining-room door open to Louise, and left Banjo Gibson looking foolishly at a dime in the palm of his famous banjo-picking palm.
"The presence of that ornery little man, wantin' to shake hands with me!" said Tom. "Only a little while ago he snubbed me like I was a nigger when I come in from work on the section."
Banjo Gibson's loud, resounding, merriment-contagious laugh seemed to answer from the office. He was not to be humbled, not to be outdone. He was passing it off before the engineers and conductors as a rare and mighty joke.
The new girl, heavy as a plow-horse, came to wait on Louise and Tom as they sat at his old table in the far corner by the window. Myron was engaged with a scythe among the tall weeds on the back of the hotel lot; a smell of fresh-cut jimson and cockleburr came in on the breeze.
The court decision weighed heavier on Louise than Tom. She was downcast and sad; tears were at the brim of her eyes. But indignation against the injustice of the matter was stronger in her breast than grief. She flushed to a fighting heat as they talked it over, Tom glad that she was too generous to arraign him for his weakness, as McPacken in general considered it, in surrendering the note.
"They say Withers will be the only bidder when the cattle are put up under the judgment for sale," she said.
"That's generally the case," Tom told her, having seen many such judgments satisfied in his day. "It would be foolish for me to bid on my own property, and nobody else would want to speculate ten thousand dollars and costs on that herd right now. Withers will pay the costs and take the herd over. That's the way they work it."
"But what are you going to do, Tom?"
"I'm goin' to wait till the law gets through, Louise," he replied, and would reveal no more of his intention than that.
"Ye-es-s," sighed Louise, mournfully regretful, "if you hadn't given up that note!"
Tom felt his heart go down like a bucket in a well; down until it struck the cold water, chilling the little flower of gratitude that had sprung in him for her avoidance of that subject. It struck him harder than the loss of his cattle, sharper than the biggest disappointment he ever had suffered in his life. He had thought her too generous to mention that, at least in that long-drawn cadence of regret and blame. He had hoped that if she spoke of it, she would do so with commendation and a little praise.
"I'm sorry, Miss Louise," he said.
"It doesn't do any good now, Tom. It's always better to be safe than sorry, they say."
"I mean I'm sorry you don't approve what I did, Miss Louise. I'm not sorry for handin' the note to the judge. There wasn't anything else for an honorable man to do."
"You're too easy, Tom; you'll have to get over it."
"Yes, Miss Louise."
"Please don't 'Miss Louise' me, Tom."
"No, ma'am."
"You could have torn the note up, you could have left it there—you could have done anything but bring it back and turn it over to them."
"I could," Tom granted, his eyes downcast, his thinlined light eyebrows drawn in his troubled way of fixing his whole soul upon a thing. "Yes, I could, Miss Louise—ma'am."
"You wouldn't have been dishonest, you'd only have been wise. It would have been different if it had been a good note, belonging to an honest man. Who knows when Withers wrote those dates on the back of that note? Well, I'll bet it wasn't more than a month ago, maybe not that long. The scheme for working you out of your remnant of cattle struck him when he was down there in Texas buying up stuff, and not a minute before."
"I expect that's so."
"That note was outlawed years ago, even if it never was paid."
"I haven't got a bit of doubt of it, Miss Louise."
"I wanted to yell at you when you handed the note to the judge, but it happened so unexpectedly, and was done so quickly, I couldn't get my breath to say a word."
"You knew it wouldn't have been right to try to turn me from a little act of plain honesty," Tom said, looking into her eyes with as much tender admiration as if she had done something to deserve it. "It was Colonel Withers's property; it wasn't cancelled, it wasn't crossed out and marked paid. It was as much his, in the face of any proof I could bring to show it had been paid off, as the money in that sack belonged to the bank. What would you have thought of me if I'd headed on south with that, in place of comin' back?"
"That's something different, altogether different," she insisted.
"It's just the same to me," said Tom.
Tom looked out at Myron, hacking away at the big weeds with his scythe, leaving a green confusion behind him. There was a cloud of sadness in Tom's face, as if he felt himself suddenly bereft, and left without consolation in an unfriendly land.
Louise reached over and touched his arm. The heat of indignation had subsided out of her face. She was white, and sorry, and penitent for the pain she had given him by her adherence to this worldly interpretation between right and wrong.
"You are right, Tom; it would have been just the same," she said.
The sun was out again in a burst of gladness for Tom Laylander, the earth was made a bright and happy place. A word is so much when a man needs it; so much more, indeed, than the nearest of his all can always understand Mrs. Cowgill came through the swinging door from the office, showing in Judson Weaver. Instead of putting him down at one of the tables reserved for guests of such consequence, she headed straight for the obscure corner where Tom and Louise were finishing their custard pie. There Mrs. Cowgill stopped, spreading her hands in a gesture of delivery, her eyes lively with expectancy, her smile as broad as it would go.
"Sit still, sit still," Banker Weaver protested, as Tom started to rise. "I'm not going to stop, I just ran in on my way home for a word with you."
"Yes, sir," said Tom, standing half up and half down, about as awkward and embarrassed a young man as ever came off the Texas range.
"Our directors voted you a little expression of our appreciation this afternoon, Tom, which it is my great pleasure to put into your hand," the banker said.
It was a check for a thousand dollars. The banker put it on the corner of the table, seeing that Tom seemed to have no hand under control to reach out and take it. Mrs. Cowgill leaned over and looked at it, lifted her hands in her gesture of absolute surrender, opened her mouth in soundless astonishment, and stood posed that way, waiting for Tom to pick it up.
"Why, sir, I couldn't begin to accept of it!" said Tom.
"My-y-y lands!" Mrs. Cowgill said.
"We realize that money can't pay you for the service you've done us," the banker continued, trying to make it easier for Tom, it seemed. "Our appreciation goes with the check, our unbounded admiration and respect."
"That's worth more to me than any amount of money, sir," Tom replied, with simple dignity, simple sincerity. "Please hand this check back to the directors with my thanks. I couldn't think of accepting of it, sir."
"My-y-y lands! but you're easy!" Mrs. Cowgill said.
Louise took up the check, seeing the banker's embarrassment, and handed it back to him with a smile.
"Please put it on deposit to his account, Mr. Weaver," Louise requested, such a red rush of blood Tising to her face that the last tear in her eyes must have been evaporated as if dropped on Mrs. Cowsgill's range.
"Good!" said the banker. "Endorse it for him," offering his pen with a broad smile. "Now, that settles it."
"I couldn't begin to think of ever drawin' on it," Tom protested.
"Keep still," the banker advised, "and let your manager do the talking when there's any to be done. You need one as bad as anybody I ever saw, and I'm glad you've got a good one."
He gave Tom a slap on the shoulder, and Louise a knowing look, going his way with a grin, deaf to Tom's protestations that he never would touch a cent of it.
"Well, you are easy!" Mrs. Cowgill said, hurrying off after the banker as if the thousand dollar check in his pocket were a magnet that would draw her to the end of the world and over the edge.
Tom knew that she meant he was a bigger fool than she had thought any man of his size could possibly be. Louise looked at him tenderly. Tom felt that it was just as Judson Weaver had said. He was entirely in her hands.
"Get your hat," Louise directed him. "Let's take a walk down toward the river."
"Yes, Miss Louise."
"Oh, don't 'Miss Louise' me, Tom," she corrected, but with such great tenderness for his lubberly ways that it was almost a caress.
"No, ma'am," said Tom, contritely, coming up very red with his hat.