It Might Have Happened Otherwise

Author of “The Chelsea Vase,” “The Crimson Track,” etc.

The growth of the thing in his mind had been gradual. When it had obtruded upon his consciousness at first he had drawn back in mingled fear and anger. By degrees, however, he tolerated the thought, only always at a distance, and concluded by allowing it to make a rendezvous of his idle meditations, receiving it much as one might welcome an unwholesome but highly fascinating acquaintance. All the time he knew its real name was Theft.

For three years Parsly had served as station agent and telegraph-operator at the Junction. Each day he had observed the transient bustling by the long platform, the spectacle never varying. Long vestibuled trains halted impatiently, and always the same curious or apathetic faces peered out at him from the Pullmans.

It was the branch line, tapping the lumber country, that contributed humanism, consisting of a nodding acquaintance with timber operators and forlorn commercial travelers. The first were always in a hurry to make the big city connection; the latter lingered in his company for the sake of gaining an audience while they cursed the country.

The last because the Junction was not the liveliest place in the world to put in an hour or two of waiting. Situated where the engineering problem had been the simplest, it was surrounded by blueberry plains, dotted at intervals with scrub pine. As the locomotives annually set the pines afire, the immediate foreground continuously presented a dead, charred appearance. Far-off, the objective point of the Pullmans, loomed the cool silhouettes of mountains, guardians of inland lakes and famous fishing.

More than once Parsly compared himself with Robinson Crusoe in his isolation; only he had no man Friday to enliven his dull routine. He saw much of the passing world but was never of it. Thus, at the end of three years, the hurrying by of the heavy trains aroused a species of resentment. Everyone was at liberty to take flight but him. Then again, fifty dollars a month for his combined duties was hardly a compensating solace.

It was the matter of salary that caused the idea to germinate while he was sullenly working the semaphore one day. He had just received from the night branch some four hundred dollars express money which he must deliver to the agent on the morning city-passenger. Having just received his monthly wages he could not help but contrast its meager total with the bulking roll in his hip-pocket.

If he had four hundred dollars, all his own, he would throw up the job and use it in one delicious round of travel. By the time it was exhausted he could obtain another position in a pleasing environment. In logical sequence he decided he might as well allow his imagination a wider range and play at taking a vacation with the largest sum ever entrusted to his care for a single night. He remembered this to be an even thousand dollars, sent down by a big operator in payment for horses in the lumber camps.

A thousand dollars offered his fancy vastly more possibilities to work with. The four hundred became insignificant. As his duties permitted him much time for reflection, he carried the thought back to his dingy office and entertained it by consulting maps in the railroad folders. In this fashion he took a hurried excursion across the continent and spied out the land. Then he became critical and weighed and balanced different localities.

The Southwest, free from cold, gray Autumnal rains, howling snows and Spring inundations, finally appealed to him as being ideal. Of course, there might be two thousand dollars entrusted to him any night, especially now that it was Autumn and the lumbermen were stocking up for the Winter campaign.

It was at that precise point that his cheek reddened and he felt a touch of alarm as he angrily told himself such imagining was immoral, for it was based on the suggestion that he steal the money. He condemned the suggestion wrathfully as he walked a quarter of a mile to the lonely home where he boarded, and yet he was more downcast than ever over his colorless place in life.

On returning to the station to close up for the night, which meant a weary wait for the up-passenger to pull in, he returned to the suggestion abruptly and recklessly. It was the sight of the porters making up the berths, the comradeship in the smoking compartment, that plunged him into full revolt; only now he proceeded on the theory the money was legitimately his.

“Well, I guess I’ve earned it. What if I should take it, providing I could get away with it? How would I spend it?”

This surrender eased him much. Of course he wouldn’t take it, not a penny; but it’s impossible to picture a career of spending until the imagination has logically furnished the requisite possession. Now he had mentally satisfied his imagination as to possession, although the technique was illegal. Fortunately there is no law punishing a man for inwardly discussing the possible assets of a crime.

Of course, Parsly merely intended to pursue his day-dreams unhampered by any irritating self-criticism. He had systematically arranged his data and could spend a million a day, should he choose. That was where he erred. His imagination became a hard taskmaster, very exacting. Once he accepted the suggestion that the money was to come to him through theft, his methodical mind insisted on reviewing the possibilities of detection before permitting him to enjoy the fruits.

“Wouldn’t you be caught and arrested before you could make a beginning?” was the cautious query he was forced to put to himself.

Such nagging is very annoying, and to satisfy his mysterious Pyrrhonist and continue with his Spanish architecture, he set himself about planning how the trick could be done without his being detected.

This was a hopeless morass at first, and very unpleasant; for instead of picturing innocent expenditures he found himself sweating and struggling with the problem of how he could keep the money once he secured it. The more he labored the more nimble became his other self in raising pertinent objections, exploding seemingly sound theories and ridiculing his most astute hypotheses.

To merely appropriate the money and disappear was quickly shown to be the height of idiocy. That spelled a life of slinking and fear, the flying from phantoms. It took some thought to clear the foreground of discarded theories and plans and approach the realm of finesse; but at last he seemed to be building on a firmer foundation.

Probably the frequent raids by yeggmen on rural post-offices and isolated railroad stations stimulated this office of his imagination. For in reading the paper, presented him gratis each evening by the newsboy on the up-passenger, he noted the yeggmen always securely tied whoever stood between them and loot, cut the tell-tale wires and escaped.

Then came the great idea; and slapping the paper he glanced apprehensively around the small office, and whispered:

“If I faked a holdup the yeggs would get the credit and I’d get the dough. It would be a cinch, if a man wanted to play crooked.”

Stay! Was it so easy? The various precautions necessary for counterfeiting a robbery, each simple in itself, quickly loomed into mountains. Then he derided on just how the furniture should be broken and overturned to approximate realism; just when the wires should be cut; whether the station door should be left open or closed, and the condition of his clothing and pockets. As there was no safe in the office the agent carried the moneys upon his person. At first he imagined his pockets turned inside out, then repudiated the thought as being too clumsy.

But what about the tying-up portion of the programme? Could a man tie himself so as to convince his rescuers that his predicament was genuine? Of course, there was a chance, rather a good one, too, of his landlord, foreman of the section crew, coming to his aid and cutting the cords without making any particular observations. Still, only perfection of detail would satisfy his exacting critic.

Now, Parsly, if slow of thought at times, was dogged in his persistence once he grappled with a problem. He now gave his spare time to studying ropes and knots.

The newspapers had charged up the various robberies to Fresno Red and his gang, and had dwelt at length on the method used in each case in tying up watchman or agent. Invariably one end of the rope was made fast about the feet and ankles of the captive, then parsed up and around the waist, the hands being caught and tied behind the back; the loose end finally being made fast about the captive’s neck in a slip-noose.

It was done very quickly, each victim had averred, and so hampered a man that the more he struggled the more he endangered his life by self-strangulation. It was a method worthy of the redoubtable Fresno Red, and one Parsly now attacked to satisfy his insistence on correct detail.