Evening Star Newspaper, November 8, 1931, Page 88

"T’he Man ILLUSTRATED BY STOOKIE ALLEN. OD sent this rain. He wants me l/ to get outa here.” Jake Bracker, escaping prison- er, gasped this phrase over and over as he scuttered through mud, under cover of the river bank. It was one of those sudden, drenching and resounding July afternoon thunderstorms. The working gang from which Jake had just vanished was hurrying to the sheds for shelter. It wculd soon be time to go for supper, any- how. The fugitive was half a mile away when a count ef the workers revealed his absence. A messenger was hurried to the institution with the alarm. Jake was classified there as a killer, “Must kzep off the roads.” This was the refrain as he kept to the river, crouching as he slithered along in the shallows. The chance for freedom and the soaking from the storm seemed to have cleared the cibwebs from his mind. “Must keep off the roads for God wants me to get outa here.” He was taking long, quick strides that were almost kangaroo hops. His own splashbing made him believe pursuers were close behind. Fear urged him to speed and that same fear stirred his imagination until he heard the voices and.the nois¢ of people behind and around him, intent on his capture. Jake believed he had been treated unjustly. He had killed, he admitted. But to his mind there had been ample justification. He had never thougat of the unwritten law. Yet the terms in which it is so often quoted were as elear to him as to any lawyer who ever put it forward as a plea. Jake knew that he had loved his wife, Helen, intensely. Without having heard of such a type, he was a one woman man. How he had loved Helen! Loving, he had trusted implicitly and this had always seemed reciprocated until that one terribly uhexpected morning. A red morning at dawn, meaning a storm. He had come home to find his best friend in his home, with his ;wife. He saw that she was in negligce. Before he could ask questions his eyes seemed drawn to a hatchet that felt as if it leaped into his hand. He did not remember much of what followed. When it was all over they had claimed he was crazy. Perhaps, he admitted to himself, he was for a few minutes. But he was not crazy now. Were they claiming him as a lunatic to save his life? No. Jake was sure they wanted to get him out of the way. HE storm went crashing. westward, ahead of the fugitive. Wheri the rain stopped he could still hear the almost continuous thunder, growling, fainter and fainter, as it went into the mountains. It had brought escape h_hlm and Jake was sorry to see it go, for it might also have impeded pursuit. It had other mis- sions to fulfill. Owing to the high wind and the low ceiling, an eastbound mail plane had been forced down to an emergency landing fleld in the hills. The pilot ‘would send his precious pouches and passengers on their way by rail. Still farther on, a bridge on the main highway would be washed out and trafiic hampered by a delaying detour. Of these de- tails Jake knew nothing; he concentrated omn one thing—keeping ahead of possible captors. It was dusk and he was 10 miles to the west- ward when he seemed to sense an invitation from a railroad bridge that flung itself across the water. Climbing to the track, he went on blindly, yet, with the unvarying instinct of his kind, headed for home. The one place where he was least welcome. For 19 months of smoldering rebellion against confinement, Jake had nursed a fierce faith that he would finally get away to even matters with his wife. To confront and mock her, then, at leisure, kill her, was his idea of settling the score. He blamed her for the gib- bering days and ghastly nights he had fret- ted in the Hospital for the Criminal Insane. For 19 months his mind had been a whirling maelstrom of leaping, spindrift thoughts. They had not told him he was insane, but he knew they all thought it. Liars! From the first day in that iron-framed, locked and weaponless ward he had watched the others. Some paced pantherlike and muttered. Others were flat- tened against the wall and stared with fierce, unwinking eyes. There were those who crouched on benches and covered their heads with their hands, elbows on knees. It was an inferno. All through those weary months his one thought had been to get outside. As he learned the routine he had schemed so to behave that some day he would be chosen for a working gang. How he had sweated his temper and ground his teeth when ordered to menial du- ties inside. Far back in his throat he had cursed and bitten his lips as, time after time, he was passed by for outside work. Were they afraid of him? He had tried to keep the glare oul of his eyes in the daytime, but, in bed, with his head under the blanket, he had let murder run riot in his mind. He was too clever for them, he knew, for five days before the storm that gave him liberty he had been picked for the party which was changing the course of the creek that ran through the grounds of ‘the in- stitution. All this he reviewed as he went Jogging along. AKE had ventured to the highway. In his muddy overalls and big straw farm hat he looked entirely inoffensive. Even in the lessen- ing light an autoist gave him a lift. This driver was mildly sympathetic when the wayfarer ex- plained he was hurrying to his wife’s funeral. Tc¢ Jake the killing was so certain that he was already a widower. Jake hoped his wife was having a good time, that he could cut it short. The gayer her mcod when he arrived, the greater her collapse when he smiled at her with murder in his eyes. Over and over. he visualized the scene. But beyond the death of his wife his mind never wandered. Oonsejuences never entered his plan. It was the concentration of lunacy or genfus. .Once again on foot he kept jogging along. In that stillest heur of darkness, halfway be= tween midnight and dawn, like a shadow Jake fiitted into a small town. Obsessed with-the thought of making himself a widower, the win- dow of a hardware store arrested him. ‘Weapons! The cunning that trickled constantly .in his mind got him noiselessly into the place. With the patience mastered by the genius of his kind he found a revolver and a box of ammunition. With the means in his hand to carry out his one, overwhelming desire he went westward agan, tirelessly. Coming into the moonlight from the shadow of trees, the fugitive suddenly halted. He was all alert. Close to the road and not far from a large, dark building, in a great open space, something dangled from a pole. After & long scrutiny his face broke into a grin and he chuckled. “God sent the rain. Has he added this?” A windstocking billowed and crumpled in the lazy, night wind. Sure signpost of a flying field! The low building was the hangar. Jake knew nothing of the mail plane that rested there, forced down, earlier in the night, by the storm. Far off on a hilltop a revolving light winked at him and he took it for encourage- ment. He was on the mail lane for home if he followed these lights. Back in the tree shadows he kept very still, with roving eyes and listening ears. He was all alone. Lurking in the roadside ditch until he was opposite the building, Jake crossed the open space and faded into the black bulk on the far side from the moon. And there he found a window. AT the time that Jake had disappeared from his gang, his wife was happy. She had come to a decision. She was in the office of a law- yer and the mental tug of war that had har- assed her for the same 19 months her husband had fretted for liberty was ended. After the stage fright of the trial and the shadowless spotlight of publicity going with it, she had quietly sought work. Although never a whisper reached her, she sensed that many of her friends and neighbors exchanged hinting gossip which tried to put part of the blame on her. Knowing herself to be innocent and that Cloyd Graeme was slain by her husband while on a perfectly legitimate mission in her home, she carried herself well. But as time passed Helen began to doubt if she had been altogether blameless. There had been no wrong to Jake, she knew. Yet she real- ized that Her husband must have been sur- prised at the situation that morning. There had been no time for explanation. Jake be- lieved the worst, Concentrated, as he always had been, on one line of thought, the discovery of his friend with her undoubtedly made him think these meetings had been going on for a long time. Whereas it had been the first such meeting and legitimate in every way. Cloyd was looking for Jake in his home. Now, it was clear to her, she should have sent Graeme away at once, telling him to return later. But in her innocence and sense of right she had over- looked this precaution. And with what terrible results for all of them? Graeme dead. Her husband branded and bound as a crazy mur- derer. Herself perhaps pointed to as a scarlet woman ! Her one outstanding knight, who gave whole- hearted belief in her, was Officer Terry Callan, “Red” Callan, the man who had arrested her husband. She did not know the officer ad- mired her courage. Often, since that blood- stained morning, when she called to him from “Jake’s in that ' Callan, happen.” > cried “God knows what'll her door, Callan had wondered at her coolness. She had neither screamed nor fainted and no trace of hysterics showed in her throaty voice as she told him what had happened and where her husband had gone. The poison-tipped darts of the attorneys at the trial had not scratched her dignity. When her husband screamed death threats at her she had not cringed. Cal- lan admired a woman like that. Just the right height for him to look down into her eyes and as they were the blue he admired, he took every chance to look into them. She had black hair and-that, with the blue eyes, reminded him of the Skibbereen girls he had known in the Southwest of Ireland when he went visiting the home of his forefathers. And he knew, this afternoon, she had gone to a lawyer to see about a divorce. If she weie once free , . . well . . . who can say? 11| INDER the circumstances, securing the de- cree will be merely a matter ~* routine,” said the attorney, as he reised his * ad to take another look at Helen. In thc pause that fol- lowed -he wondered to himself why it was that the women mixed in such tragedies were always attractive and throaty voiced. His wife was shrill and buxom and he himself personified irreproachable respectabilitv. His wildest time had been one spellbound hour when he waited in the wings of a burlesque theater, amid fig- leafed living statues, for the supper one of his clients gave in honor of the verdict he had ob- tained. That banquet on the stage he never forgot. It was his ideal of wild revelry. “How did it come, that morning, that you escaped his fury? Usually, you know——" He was fumbling for words that would not be too raw. Helen jumped to his rescue. “I think Jake forgot I was there. He had only one thing on his mind and that was what he did. Consequences meant nothing to him. I don't imagine he had even thought of escape. I was not afraid of him. Horror of what I had seen wrenched me. I knew I had lost him forever. I sensed that if I were there when he r.turned I would not be safe. So I called Officer Callan.” She paused and looked out of the window. The lawyer was quibbling again with himself over the wording of another question when she resumed. “Jake was always strange. I don’t mean any- thing bad. He didn’t seem to know anything except being a machinist. Although he was considered an expert with gas engines, he rarely drove a car and never flew a plane. Yet he can handle both. I often thought his mind was small and held only one thing at a time. When he thought of me he was overwhelmingly kind and when his mind was elsewhere I did not exist. He could have big ideas in that small mind, but he never seemed to see over the brim of his mind—if you catch what I'm trying THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHI Who Forgot Consequences—AG a4 N . to make clear. He seemed to eoneentnd'g much on one thing that he saw none h surroundings . . . consequences we nothin to him until he was up against them. h terrible morning, after the—when poor Graem his friend, was dead—it took him a long tim to think of taking the body to the Iro track to make it look like an accident. I don!' imagine he thought of arrest until Officer C lan went to him.” : “He's practically a lifer now. He can’t away from where he is.” Just then the storm broke, the same storn that a little earlier had proved that Jake cou get away—the same storm that had forc down the airmail. Now it came in floods th tore away a bridge and made the bus, on whic)] Helen went home, take a long detour which brought her back late. Having accomplished all they could, the' thunderings died out in mutterings, the sky cleared and the full moon came out. “Have you been away all afternoon?” Callan as he met Helen on the corner. As smiled assent he continued: “Then you've no message?” Having spoken so much of her husband afternoon, she thought firft of him. He mi be dead! “Good or bad?” she asked. “Jake got away from up there.” “00-0-Oh!” in a long drawn gasp. Her hand went out, gropingly, and he caught it on b forearm. She leaned on his sypport. p “And, if I know anything, he’s headed here.”| “Terry, if he comes—I can humor him—uill—[ till they get him again.” “Ye’re not goin’ to stay in the house tonight, though I don’t think he can get here until late tomorrow or the day after.” “I must be here when he comes. Hell be tired and hungry- i “Yes, hungry for you. Hungry with the threats I heard him scream in court.” “He’ll have forgotten, Terry.” “They never forget. It’s the one thing he’s nursed. I won’t let you g0 home. And I'm telephoning in to be given the detail to stay around until he shows up. I'd know him on sight.” “Terry, I vowed to take care of him.” “Gongs an’ Griddles! Ye can’t beat a woman at her own game. Always they are the 19-to-1 shot gamblers. <Always the martyrs. Go home. But I'll be close to the front door, all right. Remember that.” Terry had no difficulty in being released from his beat and taking .