Where Your Treasure Is. Holman Day
to run away, and—”
“The way things stand now in the village you’ll be made the goat,” he insisted. “And if you get clear of the gang part there’s your uncle to reckon with. He has been stamping around the tavern and telling about you. I don’t blame him much. What in sanup did you betray own folks for?”
I couldn’t tell him.
“After what you did to him you can’t expect me and others to say nay if he takes it out of your hide. Trigging own folks in a regular hoss dicker comes nearer to being a crime than anything the judge can lay against you. So you’ve got to simplify matters by getting out of town. You mustn’t stay here and get hurt, son. Climb, I tell ye!”
So I climbed.
He led me down into a lane and pushed me into a top buggy whose curtained sides hid me well. He crawled in after me and drove off at a good dip.
“I have written that letter to my brother,” he said, after a time. “Here it is.” He put it into my hands. “How much money have you got about you?”
I was never at any loss in those days as to my exact financial standing.
“Three dollars and sixty-four cents, sir.”
“Here is ten more. You must remember to pay it back. It will take you to the city and give you a little extra to come and go on. I have backed that letter to my brother with full address and directions how to get to the Trident Wrecking Company. Mind your eye, keep your money deep in your pocket, and go straight.”
I realized that we were on the way to the railroad station at Levant Lower Comers.
“I’ll do what I can to stand up for you in the current talk that will be made, young Sidney,” said Landlord Vose. “I won’t say where you have gone, and you can bet that I won’t give it out how I helped you to go there. But I can tell folks how you have been sitting evenings with me instead of cutting up snigdom. I’ll help your name what I can.”
“I have been trying to get my tongue loose so as to thank—”
“Don’t go to spoiling a good thing at the last minute,” he snapped. “Come back and thank me when we both are sure that this jail-robbing was the best thing that could be done under the circumstances. I had only short notice and I took a chance that it was the right thing to do.”
So, after a time, we came to the railroad station, and he left me. I sneaked in the shadows till the night train came along.
After this fashion I left Levant. Looking ahead or looking behind, I did not feel especially joyous.
VI—HAVING TO DO WITH JODREY VOSE’s MAKING OP A DIVER
I SAT up in the smoking-car all night, straight as a cob, making myself as small as I could on one of the side seats nearest the door. I was not used to riding on a railroad train. At every stop, when men came in and looked at me in passing, my heart jumped. Things had been happening pretty fast in my case. In the upheaval of my feelings, I was not exactly sure just what special crime I had committed. I merely knew that I felt like a combination of coward, renegade, and malefactor.
The idea which stuck most painfully in my crop was the certain knowledge of what everybody in Levant would be saying—“He had to skip the town!”
That’s a mighty mean tag to be tied to a chap when it’s tied on by a country community; it never comes off. Even if he makes good in fine shape some old blatherskite is always ready to shift his chaw and drool, “Maybe he’s all right now—but ye have to remember that he had to skip the town!”
I had run away!
However, Ase Jepson let drop a remark once which sounded pretty good to me: “I’d never run from a bear-fight, because if you lick the bear there’s the pelt, the steak, the oil, and the reppytation. But who in blazes ever got any sensible satisfaction out of sticking to the job and licking a nestful of hornets?”
I got a little satisfaction out of thinking that I had run away from hornets, even if they would be sure to call me coward behind my back.
But what I knew of the world outside my home town could have been put in the eye of a mosquito without making the insect blink. I felt as helpless as a wooden shingle latching a furnace door in tophet. I had never seen Jodrey Vose. Either I had dreamed it or had heard that he was considered a pretty hard ticket in his early days. As a diver, a man who passed much of his time under water in the mysteries of the sea, he seemed to me like something unreal. I studied the superscription on the letter and felt as if I were carrying a line of introduction to a bullfrog.
And so I went bumping on toward somewhere, my thoughts heavy and my possessions mighty light; I hadn’t even a clean handkerchief.
If I had not so many bigger matters to hurry on to in this tale, I’d like to describe how I was all of two days locating the Trident Wrecking Company and Jodrey Vose, after I arrived in the city. The folks in Levant always seemed to think I was a cheeky youngster, and I guess I was, to a certain extent. I had plenty of temper and when I wanted a thing I always had to go and get it—it wasn’t handed to me. But in that big city I was more meeching than a scared pup in a boiler-factory.
I had no idea how large a real city was, anyway. Furthermore, all of a sudden, I found myself becoming very crafty, according to my own reckoning. I had decided that I was a fugitive from justice and that every policeman was on the watch for me. Therefore I avoided policemen, turning comers whenever I saw brass buttons. As I looked on everybody else in the hurrying multitude as a sharper, on the hunt for country picking, that left me without anybody to question. I had my nose in the air and must have sniffed the water-front after a time. At any rate, I found myself down there, dodging drays, tramping dirty alleys and as completely lost as a bug in a brush-pile.
I lived on chestnuts because I found men selling them on the street. I drank water from horse-fountains. After I walked all day and most of the night, and napped for a while, standing up against a building in a dark corner, I began to feel more or less like a horse; I had eaten so much dry fodder and had gulped so much water! There were many adventures, of course, but I have already stated why I may not deal with them.
Staggering from weariness, I fairly bumped, at last, into a door which was labeled: “Trident Wrecking Company, Anson C. Doughty, General Manager.” This was no accident. I reckon I had tramped all the waterfront and had read all the signs except that one.
I went into the outer office, holding my letter by one corner.
Nobody paid any attention to me for half an hour. There were men writing in big books behind a counter, and finally I pushed the letter over to one of them who had stopped to light a cigar. He pushed it back.
“Not here,” he said. “Doesn’t come here.”
“But where will I find him?”
“Don’t know. He’s a diver. They don’t do their diving here in the office.”
There was not a place in that office where I could sit and I was so tired I was sick. The man turned his back on me and I did not dare to ask him any more questions. I backed away from the counter and stood in the middle of the floor, swaying and blinking. I reckon I must have looked like a down-and-out bum. At any rate, when a big man came showing a caller out of a door labeled “General Manager, Private,” he bumped against me when I did not get out of the road and almost knocked me down.
I suppose it was due to my state of mind and body—but till that moment I had never felt what ugly, vicious hatred—desire to kill—meant. The feeling came up in me so suddenly that I was frightened.
The big man went right on with his friend and took no notice of me. He had hairy hands which