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and white, or I'll fire you out, warrant or no warrant!"
When we reached the street I said I wanted to go around by way of my boarding-house for a change of clothing.
"That's all been 'tended to," said the surly deputy, with a jerk of his thumb toward a suitcase in the seat beside the driver of the hack carriage. "You get in and keep quiet; that's all you've got to do."
After this he said nothing and made no further move until we were jouncing along on our way to the railroad station. Then, without warning, he turned upon me suddenly and tried to snap the hand-cuffs on my wrists.
It was all I was waiting for; something to pull the trigger. In a flash the savage, which, in the best of us, lies but skin-deep under the veneer of habit and the civilized conventions, leaped alive. There was a fierce grapple in the interior of the darkened carriage--fierce but silent--and the blood sang in my veins when I found that I was more than a match for the scar-faced deputy. With fingers to throat I choked him into submission, and when I had taken his pistol and hand-cuffed him with his own manacles, the step that made me a criminal in fact had been overpassed.
"One yip out of you, and you get a bullet out of your own gun!" I warned him; and then I got speech with the driver, a squat, thickset Irishman, whose face and brogue were both strange to me.
"Drive to the Farmers' Bank--side door--and be quick about it!" I called to him over the lowered window-sash.
"I'm hired to go to the train. Who's payin' me for the side-trip?" he queried impatiently.
"I am," I snapped; adding: "There's money in it for you if you put the whip on."
He obeyed the order with what might have seemed suspicious readiness, if I had been cool enough to consider it, and a minute or two later the hack ground its wheels against the curb at the side door of the bank building. With the pistol at his ribs I pushed the deputy out ahead of me. My keys were still in my pocket--Runnels hadn't searched me for anything--and I opened the door and entered, driving Simmons a step in advance.
The bank was untenanted, as I knew it would be if Geddis should not be there, since we had never employed a night watchman. At that time of night there was nothing stirring in the town, and in the midnight silence the ticking of the clock on the wall over Abel Geddis's desk crashed into the stillness like the blows of a hammer. I made the deputy sit down under the vault light while I worked the combination. The lock had not been changed, and the door opened at the first trial.
Again pushing Simmons ahead of me, I entered the vault. It was a fairly modern structure; Geddis had had it rebuilt within the year; and it was electric-lighted and large enough to serve the double purpose of a bank strong-room and a safety deposit. Shoving the deputy into a corner I opened the cash-box and took out the exact amount of my savings, neither more nor less. Simmons stretched his neck and leered at me with an evil grin.
"You're the fine little crook, all right enough," he remarked. "They was sayin' over at Jefferson that you was a Sunday-school sup'rintendent, or somethin' o' that sort. Them kind is always the flyest."
It struck me suddenly that he was taking his defeat pretty easily, but there was no time for a nice weighing of other men's motives.
"I'm fly enough to give you what's coming to you," I said; and with that I snapped off the electric light, darted out, slammed the vault door and shot the bolts. For a few hours at least, during the latter part of which he might have to breathe rather bad air, the deputy was an obstruction removed.
My hurriedly formed plan of escape would probably have made a professional criminal weep; but it was the only one I could think of on the spur of the moment. In the next county, at a distance of thirty-odd miles, there was another railroad. If I could succeed in bribing the Irish hack-driver, I might be far on my way before the bank vault would be opened and the alarm given.
The Irishman took my money readily enough and offered no objections when I told him what I wished to do. Also, he claimed to be familiar with the cross-country road to Vilasville, saying that he could set me down in the village before daylight. Oddly enough, he made no comment on the absence of the deputy, and seemed quite as willing to haul one passenger as two. With my liberal bribe