The Talking Clock

Chapter Four

Griping about it never made any jail more comfortable. When you’re in, you’re in, and you might as well make the most of it. After a couple of hours of listening to Tom Quisenberry complain, Johnny Fletcher said,

“Why, look, Kid, there are mattresses on these beds. That’s something. Down in the Bloomington Illinois jail one time, I slept on a bare spring and you could play tick-tack-toe on my back for a month afterwards.”

“Yah,” Sam Cragg said “and tell him about the time we was in jail in Pacific, Missouri. You know, that rathole in which they stuck eighteen of us and it was so crowded we had to take turns standing and sitting.”

The Kid sat on one of the beds (with mattress). His chin hung almost to his knees. He said, without looking up:

“You fellows are used to it. But this is the first time I’ve ever been in a jail.”

Sam Cragg sang in a bar room bass:

Johnny Fletcher shot a dirty look at Cragg. “No one ever gets used to a jail.” He appealed to the hobo, who so far had not spoken a word. “Do they, Old-Timer?”

The only difference between Old-Timer and Pete the Tramp, the cartoon character, was that Old-Timer had a beard and looked a lot worse than Pete. Johnny wouldn’t have been surprised to see Old-Timer’s clothes get up and walk off without him.

He made no answer to Johnny Fletcher’s question. He was past the stage where it was worth answering questions put to him by anyone less than a cop.

Johnny knew that Old-Timer’s horrible example, as much as anything else, had thrown Quisenberry into his fit of despondency. But he was determined to do his Boy Scout deed for the day and he kept after the Kid. There wasn’t anything else to do in the jail, anyway.

“It’s all in the way you look at it. Here we are, four of us, in a little jug somewhere up on the Iron Range, in Minnesota… What is the name of this burg, anyway, Sam?”

Sam Cragg shrugged. “Poplar City, maybe. No — that was the other burg.”

Johnny Fletcher winced. “Where we discovered that Mort Murray had sent us the books, express collect, and we didn’t have the dough to get them out of hock. That wasn’t very kind of Mort.”

Sam Cragg scowled. “It wasn’t very kind of us not to pay Mort when we had the dough. You know Mort’s only one jump ahead of the sheriff, usually. We couldn’t even keep that one jump ahead of him.”

“My pal,” muttered Johnny. He turned to young Quisenberry. “What’re you in for?”

The boy flushed. “I was hungry. I didn’t have any place to sleep and there wasn’t anyone around and the store window was open…”

“So you climbed in and tapped the till?”

The Kid nodded, his face turning a deep crimson. “The proprietor was sleeping in the back of the store.”

Johnny said, “Burglary. That’s not so good. They might give you six months—”

“Six months!” cried Sam. “Two to five years more likely. In the state pen too, not any comfy hotel like this. Why—” He looked at Johnny and subsided.

The Kid was about ready to break into tears. Johnny wondered why the hell he had ever left home.

“You… you think they’ll give me that much?”

Johnny looked fiercely at Sam Cragg. “Nah. Sam’s kidding. But look, you got a family somewhere.”

The boy started to shake his head, then bobbed it up and down suddenly. “Yes, my — my father. I think they’ve already notified him. That’s why — what I’m worrying about. I didn’t want him to know. But they found a letter on me. I wouldn’t have minded it half so much if only Dad wouldn’t know. Or…”

“A girl?”

The Kid nodded. “I got kicked out of school and Dad raised a fuss. I told him I’d go it on my own and — well, I couldn’t make it. That’s all there’s to it.”

“Why, hell!” exclaimed Johnny. “You haven’t got anything to worry about. Your old man’ll come here and hire a good lawyer and they’ll probably get you off with a suspended sentence. You’ll be back in that college of yours while Sam and I are still doing our thirty-day road job. Right, Old-Timer?” He appealed again to the professional tramp.

Old-Timer didn’t answer. He sat on his bunk, back against the brick wall, knees drawn up to his chin. His hat was tilted over his face and he seemed asleep.

Sam Cragg took a battered pack of playing cards from his pocket and began shuffling them. Johnny groaned. His friend’s hands were better suited to breaking rocks than manipulating a deck of cards.

“Take a card, Kid,” Sam said, brightly, extending the fanned deck.

The boy shook his head. “I don’t feel like it.”

Undiscouraged, Sam held the deck out to Johnny. The latter took a card and looked at it. “All right, what do I do now?”

Sam held out half of the deck. “Lay it on there.” Johnny obeyed and Sam put the other half of the deck on top and began fumbling with the cards. One fell to the floor.

Johnny said, “Yeah, that’s the card.”

Sam reddened. “That wasn’t the trick. I was going to put the whole pack in a handkerchief and then show you how I could force your card right through the cloth.”

“Better read your book some more,” Johnny said, sarcastically.

Muttering to himself, Sam took from his pocket the book: Twenty Simple Card Tricks.

Johnny yawned. “Me, I’m going to sleep. Tell the porter to wake me when we get to the end of the line.”

He stretched out on his bunk and fell promptly asleep.

He woke hours later. Tom Quisenberry was beside his bunk, whispering. “Mr. Fletcher,” he said, “don’t say anything. Just take this, will you? Give it back to me in the morning…” He thrust a card into Johnny’s hand and padded back to his own bunk.

Johnny waited a minute, then turned over. The Kid had settled back on his own bed. Sam Cragg’s burly form was outlined just beyond. Johnny rolled back to the other side. Yes, Old-Timer was still on his own bed. Then, why the mystery? Why should the Kid wake him up in the middle of the night, slip him a card and give him the hugh-hush act?

He was still thinking about it, when he fell asleep again. He dreamed that he was riding on a Seventh Avenue subway train and that a pickpocket, disguised as a Daily Worker newsboy, was rolling him. He hit the Daily Worker lad so hard that Joe Stalin yowled… and then he woke up and the town constable was banging on the bars of the door with a tin cup and yelling: “Rise and shine, boys! The judge is going fishing and he wants to get you fellows out of the way early. You bums, come on out and take your medicine.”

Johnny yawned at Sam Cragg across the Kid’s sleeping form. “When he talks about bums, does he mean us, Sam?”

Sam got up, stretched and said, “Yow!…”

He leaned over and shook the Kid. “Hey, Kid, wake up. The porter wants to make up your berth…” Suddenly, Sam exclaimed and bent to peer into the Kid’s face. Then his mouth fell open and an expression of horror distorted his face.

“Gawd!” he said.

Johnny Fletcher took one glance at his friend’s face, then stopped over the boy on the bed and shock rippled through him.

The boy was lying on his side, eyes glassy and bulging. Livid, red welts were on the throat. He had evidently been strangled.

By this time the constable saw that something was wrong. “What’s… what’s the matter with him?”

Johnny turned. “He’s… dead.”

“Dead? Why… why…” The constable’s eyes fluttered wildly, then he turned the big key in the lock and pulled the door open. He started to come into the cell but didn’t, for what happened was so sudden and unexpected that even Johnny Fletcher, alert as he usually was, was caught flatfooted.

Old-Timer, the tramp, came up from his bunk and made a rush for the door. A knife flashed in his hand and he struck at the constable. Johnny saw the expression on the constable’s face, heard his cry of pain, and catapulted through the door after the tramp.

Old-Timer was bolting through the street door, and in passing reached out a hand and slammed the door in Johnny’s face. By the time Johnny got it open and hit the street, Old-Timer had a fifty-foot start on him.

It suddenly dawned on Johnny then, that there was something terribly wrong about Old-Timer. He was running as no man of his years or appearance had ever run before. He was gaining on Johnny, on a straightaway track.

Behind Johnny, Sam Cragg yelled hoarsely. “Johnny! Wait for me.”

A couple of the village shopkeepers, letting down awnings in preparation for a hot sun, turned from their work to watch the three men dashing down the main street of the town. But when they saw the constable stagger out of the jail, clutching his side, and heard him crying out: “Stop them! They murdered me,” they ran into their stores.

A hundred feet ahead of Johnny, the tramp whipped around a corner and when Johnny turned it, Old-Timer was in a battered flivver already shooting away.

Johnny groaned and stopped. He stared after the disappearing flivver until Sam caught up to him.

“We gotta keep going, Johnny,” Sam panted. “That goddam tramp stabbed the constable — and did for the Kid.”

“I know,” said Johnny. “And did you see him run? No sixty-year-old bum ever ran like that. Say…” He thrust a hand into his pocket and brought out the card the Kid had forced on him during the night.

He looked at it and whistled, softly. “A pawn ticket. ‘Uncle Joe, The Friend In Need. Columbus, Ohio’… I don’t get it.”

Sam Cragg exclaimed nervously. “If we hang around, they’ll get us. For breaking jail, if not murder…”

“Right you are, Sam,” Johnny said. “We’ve got to put miles behind us. Something tells me that that bum isn’t going to be easy to catch and the boys here’ll pin the Kid’s murder on whoever they can grab — namely Samuel Cragg and John Fletcher. Let’s travel…”