NO trace of Reb Santee’s profound reluctance was revealed in his manner as he walked into the court room on the morning of his trial. Men spoke to him kindly; the bailiff poked him in the ribs and cracked a joke. But for him these things were like a dream, he was so intent on the questions he asked himself.
Would Ronda Cameron be present to-day? What would he see in Billy Farragoh’s glance? To think that he should ever have known these two at all, and have the association come to this, made him feel wretched.
But it was Judge Hamer’s eye that Reb found heavy on him when the jurist walked in and took the bench. The murmuring and low laughter ceased; boots scraped and a man cleared his throat explosively in the taut quiet. Hamer stabbed Reb once with a bleak, unreadable glance that served unmistakable notice: whatever you are, whoever you know, you get simple justice here, no more, no less. Hamer could not have said it plainer.
Reading it, Reb did not know whether to rejoice or sorrow. As far as the rustling charge went, he felt he ought to clear himself easily; but he hadn’t an idea how deep Hamer’s promised justice would cut. If it went to the heart of the matter he might get life and a day; and in the travail of his heart he was not above admitting that in all probability he deserved it.
Ronda and her father, he soon saw, were not going to be present and he heaved a small sigh of thanksgiving for that. For Billy’s part, the boy treated Reb to a single quick look and a nod he strove mightily to make casual. There was the uprightness of a soldier obeying a fatal order in the stiffness of his back, the carefully schooled composure of his face. Then he looked away quickly, and apparently wasn’t going to look at Reb again until he had to.
Reb saw the manliness in him, fighting to conceal his deep feelings. Billy was heart-broken. For him this was an hour of pure tragedy, as it was for Santee. The scales had dropped away from his young eyes with awful completeness now; he rightly suspected that Reb had stolen the money which had helped to pay for his education; in fact, he was convinced that Reb was guilty of even greater crimes than the one on which he was being tried. Word had trickled in, unmistakable to his ears, of the intrepid smile of a man who had robbed trains and banks with reckless courage in the past few months. Billy thanked his God that men were not sentenced on such convictions of the heart.
It was a nightmare court session for the newly appointed district attorney. He stuck valiantly to his guns, however, and in short order succeeded in convicting Gloomy Jepson and two of his companions and sending them to the pen on the rustling charge.
Reb’s case, on a slightly different status, since the evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, was called. A new jury was impaneled. It was impossible not to notice that while these twelve good men and true had nodded and grinned before, in the jury box they scrupulously avoided Santee’s eye, as if aware of the danger of being corrupted by his well-known smile.
Even Billy, when he squared on Reb and began to bombard him with staccato competence, was beginning to show the lines graven on his features by the necessity to do this thing. It had been his idea to try Reb separately, for unquestioned fairness; but he did not relax his own vigor in the prosecution. Reb’s fascinated eyes dwelt on him in pity and self-condemnation; in the pathos of the moment he almost forgot to answer questions; he made irrelevant responses, until his counsel—a bony, middle-aged lawyer with a red, hard-eyed countenance—cleared his throat loudly, trying to recall him to himself, and even attempting to interrupt.
It was the sight of Lonny Logan, the Sundance Kid’s brother, seated alone in the crush of the court room with his burning gaze fixed on him, that awoke Reb to his situation. He knew the Kid was bringing pressure to bear in this trial—that he was doing all that could be done. How the Kid had escaped Sheriff Ward’s net and learned of Santee’s position; what he would be able to accomplish, Reb didn’t know. But Rasher, the lawyer, had been sent to him by a mysterious agency, evidently the Kid’s man, though it had not been mentioned. Rasher was putting up a stiff fight, too.
But to little avail. The Wind River country was getting cynical and hard-headed about these things. Reb’s stout defense of himself crumbled when he refused to declare where he was and what he was doing at the time of the Star A rustling. He honestly did not remember. Prop after prop Billy knocked out from under him—establishing his intimacy with Doc Lantry, proving that Lantry had quite evidently fled, making it darker and darker for Reb until Rasher ranted in anger, weakening his own position.
With the case turned over to the jury, and those men charged by the judge, Billy Farragoh wiped his forehead with a kerchief and sank into a seat, weak and white. Reb knew it was not feigned. Billy had done his duty like a man and the puncher felt sorrier for him than he did for himself.
Judge Hamer evidently had a good idea the verdict would not be delayed, and court was not adjourned. It was just as well. In twenty minutes the jury filed back to the box and a hush descended over the room.
“Gentlemen, have you reached a verdict?”
“We have, your Honor.”
“Please instruct the court as to your findings.”
The jury foreman was a big man, broad-shouldered, with blunt features. He turned an inscrutable glance on Reb and said:
“We find the defendant guilty as charged.”
It was no more than Reb had expected. Innocent as he was in fact, he knew himself guilty in spirit: it was at bottom a just retribution; in fact, fate had overtaken him in a remarkably lenient mood, one such as he had no right to ask. He found no comfort in it. It was acid to his soul to stand up before Judge Hamer, under Billy Farragoh’s eyes, and listen to the level, impartial voice:
“You are sentenced to serve one year at hard labor in the penitentiary at Laramie City.”
Hamer paused deliberately, then added on another note: “I’m not sure, Santee, but what this is the best thing that could happen to you.”
That was the human note creeping in, which few of these men had lost for him despite their adherence to the hard ritual of justice. It made Reb feel more wretched than ever. But there was more of it. Now that the trial was over, his duty done, Billy Farragoh came to Reb without hesitation, placed a hand on his shoulder. The pain in his eyes was unashamed, his voice husky:
“Forgive me, Reb!”
It took Reb off his guard completely. For a moment he fought for control of himself. Then his old grin flashed through, indomitable. “Shore, Billy.” His bitterly mastered tone was easy to the ear. “Yuh done what yuh had to.... It was a nice job.”
He hadn’t meant to say exactly that and he could have bitten his tongue out. But it was too late to withdraw. Billy looked stricken as he turned away, all the young resilience gone out of his frame. Reb cursed himself for his clumsiness throughout the rest of the day, during the trip east with Bob Calverly by rail, south around the bend to the main line, and up to Laramie in the gray light of the following morning.
But only when the iron gates of the prison clanged to behind him did there come to Reb a full realization of his position. Then it crashed in on him like toppling walls. In the eyes of Wind River Basin he was an acknowledged and convicted felon. Ronda, Jube Cameron, Mother Farragoh, the dozens of fine friends he had made there—they all knew him for what he was—for what fate had made him, he corrected himself, never what he had meant to be.
Doc Lantry had paid the supreme price for his destruction of a man’s life, but it was too late now—Reb could never go back. With the associations he had made he could not hope to win back to all that meant the most to him in the world.
“I was a maverick,” he told himself with pitiless insight. “This is my own fault. The first man branded me that got to me—an’ I let him.”
Well, he was out of circulation for a year, now. Plenty of time to think over his wrongs and his mistakes. And nothing else to think about, as he faced the iron prison routine.
But as time dragged on he found a new care boring into his consciousness with increasing insistence. It was the deadly confinement of stone walls. Born and bred to the open sky, he came to know in time the true nature of his punishment in this intolerable place, and it was terrible. Day by day he dragged through his duties with growing dejection. His old smile, the occasional flashes of wit, were unfailing still. His fellow prisoners found in him a source of infinite relief and entertainment. The warden liked him and made his lot easier. Occasional packages, small sums of money and the like found their way in to him to comfort his hours, remembrances of the Sundance Kid. But there was nothing that anyone could do to ease the imprisonment that cankered his wild, rash heart. Stone walls, meals, work!
“God!” he groaned one night on his cot, at the end of three dreary months. “If I’d known it would be like this, Calverly never would’ve taken me alive!”
The warden, who knew range men, assured him that time would be knocked off his term for good behavior. Reb smiled and wouldn’t crack. Then one day he had a visitor. The sight of Billy Farragoh’s face at the end of the gray corridor picked him up off his cot without his awareness.
“Great Gody—Billy!”
“Reb, old man! How are you?” Billy entered the cell and reached for his hand.
It was a hard interview for them both, strange with an unaccustomed tenderness which neither would confess. Billy was his same old self, warm, deferential—if anything, more sympathetic than before. Reb wondered what had brought him here, but it was not until considerable constrained talk about the Basin, Reb’s condition and other things had been gotten over; that Billy began diffidently:
“I expect you know that Judge Hamer was preparing to run for governor at the time of your trial?”
“Why, yeh.” Reb didn’t see the connection. “I was expectin’ to vote fer him myself.” He grinned weakly. “Was he elected—?”
The gravity of Billy’s nod suddenly told Reb what this was all about, whither it tended. “Judge Hamer is to be the next governor of Wyoming, Reb. I suppose I scarcely need to tell you that I’ve already begun to work on a pardon for you.”
Reb’s face lighted up, then clouded. “Yuh oughtn’t to do it, Billy,” came from him after a moment. He swallowed hard. “Yuh done yore duty an’ it ought to be let go that way.” It cost him a good deal to say and nothing but his loyalty to the stalwart young man before him would have induced him to do so. But Billy saw it a different way, shaking his head.
He said: “The state’s satisfied, Reb. Nothing in the world need hinder the governor’s pardoning you, if he sees fit. I’ve seen to it that Mr. Hamer realizes your word is as good as your life.”
Reb was looking at him steadily. It hurt him that Billy did not refer to the rustling charge on which he had been sent up. If he would only ask in confidence whether Reb was guilty or not, it would be so easy to set his mind at rest on this one point at least. Reb found himself jealous of every scrap and shred of honor, now, before this boy.
All this passed through his mind in a moment. Another part of him was grappling with Billy’s meaning. It eluded him.
“Your pardon,” Billy went on evenly, “depends on your word, I’m sorry to say. I couldn’t manage it otherwise.”
“What do yuh mean, Billy?”
The other’s tone was studied. “I’ve got Mr. Hamer to consider granting a pardon on the grounds that you agree never to molest the State of Wyoming again.”
The moment dragged out and Reb said nothing. There seemed nothing that he could say. The very wording of Billy’s statement—the drift of its meaning—told him the worst. He was considered a confirmed evil-doer. What the terms of this proffered pardon suggested was not rehabilitation, not a return to better things, but simple amnesty.
Billy must have seen something of this in his face. “That’s easy enough to guarantee,” he attempted to soften the blow. “You know cows, Reb. I heard about the offer Jube Cameron made you. I don’t know how he feels now, but if you want, I’ll see to it that you get a good position in some other—” He halted miserably, feeling worse every second.
Reb came to his rescue. “No,” he said; “I reckon I don’t know jest what I’ll do if I get out. But thanks all the same, Billy. Yuh can tell Judge—that is, Governor Hamer, I said ‘yes’ to what he proposes.... An’ I’m mighty grateful to yuh for goin’ to all this trouble.”
They talked it over at some length. Reb’s face told nothing of his feelings, now that he had got a grip on himself, saw where he stood. Billy spared him the truth—that to persuade the state executive to consent to a pardon on the mentioned terms, he had assured Hamer that Reb was potentially responsible for most of the worries of stockmen and others. Not even the governor had any doubt that Reb would keep his word in this fantastic promise—it was a day when such things were valid, the one way men of widely different status, but of one caliber, could deal with each other and preserve a mutual respect.
At last Billy got up to go. “Mind, I don’t want to promise anything, even now,” he pointed out. “I’ll admit I’m the prime mover in this. The Judge isn’t even in office yet. But I think I can bring it off. Nothing would afford me greater satisfaction, Reb.” He spoke with the dignity and caution of an older man.
They were stiff and a little formal with each other now, without meaning to be. There was too much between them to be taken lightly. They shook hands, looking away, and Reb’s grip said a lot.
The turnkey unlocked the cell. Billy stepped out. Reb stared at his back. “Billy—” he exclaimed suddenly, as if it was dragged out of him.
Billy turned. “Yes, Reb?”
Santee made a hopeless gesture. “Never mind....”
Billy Farragoh, who was no fool, had an inkling of what was in his mind and he thought about it as he walked soberly out of the jail. All during their talk Ronda’s name had not been mentioned. Reb had burned to ask after her, to know what was in her heart toward him. More than once he started to speak. But in the end he found himself unable to speak the words.
The days passed once more and became weeks. Billy did all he could, and Reb waited. He grew in time to believe that his friend had failed. It came as a surprise to him, not immediately significant, when one afternoon early in the third week following Billy’s visit a keeper accosted him at his work with the announcement that the warden desired to see him immediately.
Something familiar in the warden’s face greeted him as he stepped in the prison office—the look of a man glad that he is able to do something for someone he likes.
“Well, Santee,” he opened up gruffly; “here’s somethin’ that’ll make good readin’ for yuh!” He handed over a legal document.
Even as he opened its folds, Reb knew what it was. Billy Farragoh had succeeded in procuring his pardon. He read a few words and his grin widened—the same old grin that made him friends wherever he went; that made it seem more than worth while to do these things for such a man.
“Free!” was all that he said, but it expressed much.