The Sky Line of Spruce. Edison Marshall
loss of hope kept him from looking ahead.
It had been this way for months now—ever since the night the policeman had found him, the "jimmy" dropped from his hands, in the alley. Heaven knows what he had done, what madness had been upon him, before that time. But as Sprigley had said, that night had marked a change. It was true that so far as facts went he was no better off: when he had come to himself he had found his mind a blank regarding not only his career of crime, but all the years that had gone before. Even his own name eluded him. That of Kinney had an alien sound in his ears.
The past had simply ceased to exist for him; and because it is some way the key to the future, the latter seemed likewise blank—a toneless gray that did not in the least waken his interest. Indeed the only light that flung into the unfathomable darkness of his forgetfulness was that which played in his dreams at night. Sometimes these were inordinately vivid, quite in contrast to the routine of prison life.
He felt if he could only recall these dreams clearly they would interpret for him the mystery of his own life. He wakened, again and again, with the consciousness of having dreamed the most stirring, amazing dreams, but what they were he couldn't tell. He could only remember fragments, such as a picture of rushing waters recurring again and again—and sometimes an amazing horizon, a dark line curiously notched against a pale green background.
They were not all bad dreams: in reality many of them stirred him and moved him happily, and he would waken to find the mighty tides of his blood surging fiercely through the avenues of veins. Evidently they recalled some happiness that was forgotten. And there was one phase, at least, of this work in the road gangs that brought him moving, intense delight. It was merely the sight of the bird life, abounding in the fields and meadows about the towns.
There had been quite a northern migration lately, these late spring days. The lesser songsters were already mating and nesting, and he found secret pleasure in their cheery calls and bustling activity. But they didn't begin to move him as did the waterfowl, passing in long V-shaped flocks. That strange, wild wanderer's greeting that the gray geese called down to their lesser brethren in the meadows had a really extraordinary effect upon him. It always caught him up and held him, stirring some deep, strange part of him that he hardly knew existed. Sometimes the weird, wailing sound brought him quite to the edge of a profound discovery, but always the flocks sped on and out of hearing before he could quite grasp it. When the moon looked down, through the barred window of his cell, he sometimes felt the same way. A great, white mysterious moon that he had known long ago. It was queer that there should be a relationship between the gray geese and the cold, white satellite that rode in the sky. Ben Kinney never tried to puzzle out what it was; but he always knew it with a knowledge not to be denied.
The last of the waterfowl had passed by now, but the northern migration was not yet done. The sun still moved north; warm, north-blowing winds blew the last of the lowering, wintry clouds back to the Arctic Seas whence they had come. And because the road work the convicts were doing brought them, this afternoon, in sight of the railroad right-of-way, Ben now and then caught sight of other wayfarers moving slowly, but no less steadily, toward the north. The open road beckoned northward, these full, balmy, late-April days, and various tattered men, mostly vagabonds and tramps, passed the gang from time to time on this same, northern quest.
Ben thought about them as birds of passage, and the thought amused him. And at the sight of a small, stooped figure advancing toward him up the railroad right-of-way he paused, leaning on his pick.
Because Ben had paused, for the first time in an hour, his two guards looked up to see what had attracted his attention. They saw what seemed to them a white-haired old wanderer of sixty years or more; but at first they were wholly at a loss to explain Ben's fascinated look of growing interest.
It was true that the old man scarcely represented the usual worthless, criminal type that took to vagabondage. As he paused to scrutinize the convict gang neither insolence nor fear, one of which was certainly to be expected, became manifest in his face. They had anticipated certain words in greeting, a certain look out of bleary, shifty eyes, but neither materialized. True, the old man was following the cinder trail northward, but plainly he did not belong to the brotherhood of tramps. They saw that he was white-haired and withered, but upright; and that undying youth dwelt in his twinkling blue eyes and the complexity of little, good-natured lines about his mouth. Poverty, age, the hardships of the cinder trail had not conquered him in the least. He was small physically, but his skinny arms and legs looked as if they were made of high-tension wire. His face was shrewd, but also kindly, and the gray stubble on his cheeks and chin did not in the least hide a smile that was surprisingly boyish and winning. And when he spoke his cracked good-natured voice was perfectly in character, evidently that of a man possessing full self-respect and confidence, yet brimming over with easy kindliness and humor.
Both guards would have felt instantly, instinctively friendly toward him if they had been free to feel at all. Instead they were held and amazed by the apparent fact that at the first scrutiny of the man's outline, his carriage and his droll, wrinkled face, the prisoner Kinney was moved and stirred as if confronted by the risen dead.
The old man himself halted, returning Kinney's stare. The moment had, still half concealed, an unmistakable quality of drama. In the contagion of suppressed excitement, the other prisoners paused, their tools held stiffly in their hands. Kinney's mind seemed to be reaching, groping for some astonishing truth that eluded him.
The old man ran, in great strides, toward him. "My God, aren't you Ben Darby?" he demanded.
The convict answered him as from a great distance, his voice cool and calm with an infinite certainty. "Of course," he said. "Of course I'm Darby."
II
For the moment that chance meeting thrilled all the spectators with the sense of monumental drama. The convicts stared; Howard, the second guard, forgot his vigilance and stared with open mouth. He started absurdly, rather guiltily, when the old man whirled toward him.
"What are you doing with Ben Darby in a convict gang?" the old wanderer demanded.
"What am I doin'?" Howard's astonishment gave way to righteous indignation. "I'm guardin' convicts, that's what I'm a-doin'." He composed himself then and shifted his gun from his left to his right shoulder. "He's here in this gang because he's a convict. Ask my friend, here, if you want to know the details. And who might you be?"
There was no immediate answer to that question. The old man had turned his eyes again to the tall, trembling figure of Ben, trying to find further proof of his identity. To Ezra Melville there could no longer be any shadow of doubt as to the truth: even that he had found the young man working in a gang of convicts could not impugn the fact that the dark-gray vivid eyes, set in the vivid face under dark, beetling brows, were unquestionably those of the boy he had seen grow to manhood's years, Ben Darby.
It was true that he had changed. His face was more deeply lined, his eyes more bright and nervous; there was a long, dark scar just under the short hair at his temple that Melville had never seen before. And the finality of despair seemed to settle over the droll features as he walked nearer and took Darby's hand.
"Ben, Ben!" he said, evidently struggling with deep emotion. "What are you doing here?"
The younger man gave him his hand, but continued to stare at him in growing bewilderment. "Five years—for burglary," he answered simply. "Guilty, too—I don't know anything more. And I can't remember—who you are."
"You don't know me?" Some of Ben's own bewilderment seemed to pass to him. "You know Ezra Melville—"
Sprigley, whose beliefs in regard to Ben had been strengthened by the little episode, stepped quickly to Melville's side. "He's suffering loss of memory," he explained swiftly. "At least, he's either lost his memory or he's doing a powerful lot of faking. This is the first time he ever recalled his own name."
"I'm not faking," Ben told them quietly. "I