Brown turned away, pretending to consult a time card hung behind the wicket. Really he was looking out the window, hoping to see the familiar form of the constable.
“Well, ain’t you curious about me?” demanded his visitor. “How do you think I got here?”
“Beat a freight, I suppose,” Brown hastily guessed. “That’s against the rules, but I always have a lot of sympathy for a man like you. What’s your trouble?”
“Broke!” said his visitor, tersely. “I ain’t had nothing but hard luck these last five years.”
In the distance the whistle of the flyer tooted. The man in blue eyed a stack of bills in the open cash drawer.
“I don’t know whether to beat it or to--to visit a while with you,” he murmured, glancing at the station door, and then back again at the cash drawer.
Brown consulted the time card again--and looked out the window, inwardly breathing a prayer. Sure enough, there was the constable, trudging down the road toward the station, a bit behind schedule but not speeding to make up lost time.
“I guess you--you’d better--stay!” said the agent.
Brown went through a few tense moments after that remark, that he said later he wouldn’t experience again “if they made me president of the road.”
The constable took up his stand, not on the station platform, as usual, but a couple of hundred feet away. Stolidly he watched the flyer pass, then looked undecidedly toward the station. He seemed to be debating whether or not to forego his routine visit with the agent. Twice he turned his back and started away, only to halt, wheel and resume his meditation. A Niagara of sweat coursed down Brown’s cheeks as he waited. The man in blue was standing close to the wicket, still peering into the drawer. His right hand was in his hip pocket.
Brown dared direct his gaze out the window no longer. He stood silently watching his blue-clad visitor, waiting to see what would be in his hand when it came from the bulging hip pocket.
Then the station door opened. In it stood the constable. He took in the significance of the blue figure as Brown’s sinister visitor wheeled, and the Denville police revolver, rusty with age, but loaded, flashed from his pocket.
Ten minutes later Matthew Starn, escaped “lifer,” who had worsted the restraining walls of Joliet, was held securely a prisoner in the amateurish village calaboose.