“There’s something. What is it?
I wonder what it is.”
What strange sixth sense stirred in McTeague at this
time? What animal cunning, what brute instinct
clamored for recognition and obedience? What
lower faculty was it that roused his suspicion, that
drove him out into the night a score of times between
dark and dawn, his head in the air, his eyes and ears
keenly alert?
One night as he stood on the steps of the bunk house,
peering into the shadows of the camp, he uttered an
exclamation as of a man suddenly enlightened.
He turned back into the house, drew from under his
bed the blanket roll in which he kept his money hid,
and took the canary down from the wall. He strode
to the door and disappeared into the night. When
the sheriff of Placer County and the two deputies from
San Francisco reached the Big Dipper mine, McTeague
had been gone two days.
“Well,” said one of the deputies, as he
backed the horse into the shafts of the buggy in which
the pursuers had driven over from the Hill, “we’ve
about as good as got him. It isn’t hard
to follow a man who carries a bird cage with him wherever
he goes.”
McTeague crossed the mountains on foot the Friday
and Saturday of that week, going over through Emigrant
Gap, following the line of the Overland railroad.
He reached Reno Monday night. By degrees a vague
plan of action outlined itself in the dentist’s
mind.
“Mexico,” he muttered to himself.
“Mexico, that’s the place. They’ll
watch the coast and they’ll watch the Eastern
trains, but they won’t think of Mexico.”
The sense of pursuit which had harassed him during
the last week of his stay at the Big Dipper mine had
worn off, and he believed himself to be very cunning.
“I’m pretty far ahead now, I guess,”
he said. At Reno he boarded a south-bound freight
on the line of the Carson and Colorado railroad, paying
for a passage in the caboose. “Freights
don’ run on schedule time,” he muttered,
“and a conductor on a passenger train makes it
his business to study faces. I’ll stay
with this train as far as it goes.”
The freight worked slowly southward, through western
Nevada, the country becoming hourly more and more
desolate and abandoned. After leaving Walker
Lake the sage-brush country began, and the freight
rolled heavily over tracks that threw off visible
layers of heat. At times it stopped whole half
days on sidings or by water tanks, and the engineer
and fireman came back to the caboose and played poker
with the conductor and train crew. The dentist
sat apart, behind the stove, smoking pipe after pipe
of cheap tobacco. Sometimes he joined in the poker
games. He had learned poker when a boy at the
mine, and after a few deals his knowledge returned
to him; but for the most part he was taciturn and
unsociable, and rarely spoke to the others unless spoken
to first. The crew recognized the type, and the
impression gained ground among them that he had “done
for” a livery-stable keeper at Truckee and was
trying to get down into Arizona.
