John Boland: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 54, No. 3, March 2009

“Aroun’ here, trespassin’ on railroad property’s an automatic ten days,” he said as he led us to a cell in the back room, “an’ Judge Pringle, he don’t like to waste the court’s time with cases of confession, an’ you boys just confessed. Consider yourselves sentenced. Automatic, ten days hard labor.”

“Don’t we get some kinda’ trial?” Orvil said.

“Cases of confession... Judge Pringle, he’ll stop by and sign the papers sometime in the next few days. Be the same thing.”

“What about Arthur?” I said as the cell door closed in front of us.

“From what you said, I guess he won’t be charged with trespassin’,” the marshal said as he turned the key and left. He thought that was funny, too, and we could hear him chuckling all the way back into the front office.

We were a long time getting to sleep that night, and the last thing I remember was Orvil muttering, “I’m goin’ to kill that bugger,” for about the fortieth time. I knew he wasn’t talking about the marshal, although I was ready to feel unkindly toward anyone who could laugh about what had happened to Arthur.

About six the next morning we were awakened by the marshal and another man who pointed a shotgun at us while the marshal outfitted us with leg irons. When he was finished, we were prodded toward the front.

“Where we going?” I asked as we left the cell.

“You’ll be hayin’ today, boys,” was the only thing the marshal said as both men led us out to a Model T sedan sitting in the street.

“Don’t we get something to eat in your jail?” I asked.

“Give him a good day’s work, he might give you a li’l somethin’,” the marshal said, nodding toward the other man.

“Shucks... we ain’t had nothing to eat for two—” Orvil started to say to the marshal.

“Don’t get too frisky now, boys,” the marshal said as the man cranked the engine at the front of the car. “The key to those irons is back in the office there, and this gen’leman here is authorized to shoot if one a’ y’ should take it in his head to wander off.” Then, he spoke to the man. “I’ll ’spect you back here about sundown.”

A nod and a wave was all the answer he got, but it seemed to be satisfactory. The man put his flivver in gear and we were off.

The man drove to a farm about a mile or so from the town. He turned off the road and drove past a house and barn directly to a large alfalfa field. The crop had been cut several days before, and it had dried enough it could be stacked on a wagon and hauled to his barn, which was what we were going to be doing. Orvil and I looked at each other as we both realized this was the “hard labor.” It wasn’t really hard compared to anything else a person had to do around a farm. I’d gladly done the same thing a year before for a couple of neighbors, and been paid for it with a silver dollar and a couple of sacks of flour. But this time we were doing it with a scatter gun pointed at us and neither of us was stupid enough to believe we were going to see any money come out of it.

In one corner of the field a hay wagon with an extra large flatbed was parked. A couple of horses harnessed to it stood there looking about as enthused about the day’s work as Orvil and I. A couple of boys were already forking hay onto the bed and doing it with as much enthusiasm as the horses. The farmer’s sons, I figured, and I was right.

As banged up as he was, Orvil wasn’t much use, but neither the farmer nor his sons complained much. In the early afternoon the farmer’s wife brought some dinner to the field and we stopped for a few minutes to eat it. His wife made sure we ate as well as the farmer’s sons, and we thanked her for it.

We were finished at the end of the second day. When the last forkful was in the barn, we were loaded directly into the man’s flivver. The first day, we’d been given supper before being taken back to jail. We hoped we were going to be invited a second time, but all that happened was the farmer stopped at the house and handed his scatter gun to his wife and told her to watch us for a minute. As soon as he was out of sight she lowered the muzzle and approached us. She looked over her shoulder and reached into the pocket of her apron. Out came a couple of apples and a big hunk of cheese.

“Better keep these out of sight on the way back to town,” she said.

We had the food tucked away in our pockets just as her husband came out the door, stuffing something into his pockets. He cranked the engine to life and we were on our way back to another night in jail.

When our cell was securely closed, the marshal and the farmer walked back to the front. As they were going through the door, I noticed the farmer take something out of his pocket and put it in the hand of the marshal. From there it went into the marshal’s pocket. It happened quickly, but I could see the glint of a few coins.

When they were gone, Orvil nudged me.

“You see that?”

“Yeah... bugger’s been rentin’ us out.”

“Can he do that?”

“This part of the country, things must be different.”

The farmer’s wife might have had some idea the marshal wouldn’t be providing us any supper because we never saw him again that evening. After we polished off the apples and cheese, we lay for a long time looking at the ceiling.

“This part o’ the country,” Orvil said, “even seems to be okay to kill people by throwin’ ‘em off boxcars. I’m goin’ t’ kill that railroad bull.”

“I’ll flip you, heads or tails, to see who does it.”

“Ain’t neither of us got anythin’ to flip.”

The other eight days went about the same, including a Sunday, and we did everything from painting a house to digging post holes and stringing fence wire. Both of us had some experience doing those kinds of things at home, the only difference being this time the marshal was getting our pay instead of us. But we usually had a couple of meals a day and the jail was some improvement over the hard ground in an alley somewhere. And Orvil’s aches and pains slowly disappeared.

From time to time one or the other of us brought up the idea of escape, and there might have been a time or two we could have tried it. But we wouldn’t have gotten far with those leg irons, and getting rid of them by ourselves would have been impossible without the tools we’d only find in a good blacksmith shop.

We thought some about California, too, but not as much as we used to. I guess our minds had become fixed on that railroad bull.

Listening to the idle talk between the marshal and others, we heard the name of the town Beater Stark lived and worked out of. He seemed to be well known in that section of the country as a vicious bugger for the way he liked to swing a club at the legs of retreating trespassers. We overheard a few tales of his club, which was actually an old baseball bat tipped with a small rusty spur gear fixed to the end with a big lag screw. The stories were told of the damage a couple of blows the end of that instrument could do, and the teller’s point of view was always that the vagrants had it coming.

We never saw that judge the whole time we were there. Or the papers he was supposed to sign. For all I know, maybe there was no judge or no papers. Maybe that’s why there was no ceremony at the end of the ten days. The marshal simply came in at six on the eleventh day, unlocked the cell door, and tossed in a paper sack with about half a loaf of bread. He left without saying a word. He also left the cell door open. We took that to mean we ought to be moving along, and we did. Neither of us said much in complaint about the experience as we walked away. I think pretty much all of Orvil’s thinking apparatus was concentrating on how we were going to kill Beater Stark.