Next morning McAvoy was much easier but he felt weak, he said, and drowsy. Given a full twelve hours of rest, though, he thought he would be able to go on guard when the nightfall came.
So he lay in his berth, and the special agent occupied an end of the drawing-room sofa. The trapped fugitives sat smoking cigarets, and when the officer was not too near, talking among themselves.
Mainly they talked in English, a language which Gaza the Spaniard and Lafitte the Frenchman spoke fairly well. Verdi or Green, as the case might be, had little English at his command, but Gaza, who had spent three years in Naples, spoke Italian; and so when Verdi used his own tongue, Gaza could interpret for the Frenchman’s benefit. They were allowed to quit the drawing-room only for meals.
When dinner hour came on that second evening of their trip, McAvoy was in a doze. So the Department of Justice man did not disturb him.
“Come on, boys,” he said to the three aliens; “time to eat again.”
He lined them up in front of him in the corridor and they started the regular processional. It was just at that moment that the train broke its rhythmic refrain and began to clack and creak and slow for that unscheduled stop outside that New Mexico town. By the time they had reached the second car on ahead, she’d almost stopped and was lurching and jerking.
In the vestibule beyond that second car the special agent was in the act of stepping across the iron floor lip of the connection when a particularly brisk joggle caused him to lose his hat. He gave a small exclamation and bent to recover it. Doing so, he jostled Gaza, the third man in the line and therefore the next to him.
The agile Spaniard was quick to seize his chance. He half turned, and bringing his chained wrists aloft, sent them down with all his might on the poll of the officer’s unprotected skull. The victim of the assault never made a sound — just spraddled on his face and was dead to the world.
No outsider had been witness to the assault. No outsider came along during the few seconds which were required by the late prisoners to open an off-side car door and make their escape after the fashion which already has been described for you. Nobody missed them — for quite a while nobody did.
It wasn’t until nearly nine o’clock, when McAvoy had roused up and rung for the porter and begun to ask questions, that a search was made and an alarm raised.
Penned up together through that day, the aliens had matched stories, one story against another. A common plight made them communicative; a common peril caused each to turn with morbid reiteration to his own fatal predicament.
Said the Frenchman to the Spaniard: “He” — indicating his recent cellmate, the Italian — “he knows how with me it stands. With him, I have talked. He speaks not so well the English but sometimes he understands it. Now you shall hear and judge for yourself how bad my situation is.”
Graphically, this criminal sketched his past. He had been a Marseilles dock hand. He had killed a woman. She deserved killing, so he killed her. He had been caught, tried, convicted, condemned. While lying in prison, with execution day only a few weeks distant, he had made a getaway.
In disguise he had reached America and here had stayed three years. Then another woman, in a fit of jealousy, betrayed him to the police. He had been living with that woman; to her he had given his confidence. It would appear that women had been his undoing.
“Me, I am as good as dead already. And what a death!” A spasm of shuddering possessed him. “For me the guillotine is waiting. The devil invented it. It is so they go at you with that machine: They strap you flat upon a board. Face downward you are, but you can look up, you can see — that is the worst part. They fit your throat into a grooved shutter; they make it fast. You bring your head back; your eyes are drawn upward, fascinated. Above you, waiting, ready, poised, your eyes see the — the knife.”
“But only for a moment do you see it, my friend,” said the Spaniard, in the tone of one offering comfort. “Only a moment and then — pouff — all over!”
“A moment! I tell you it is an eternity. It must be an eternity. Lying there, you must live a hundred lives, you must die a hundred deaths. And then to have your head taken off your body, to be all at once in two pieces. Me, I am not afraid of most deaths. But that death by the guillotine — ah-h!”
The Spaniard bent forward. He was sitting alone facing the other two, who shared a seat.
“Listen, Señor,” he stated. “Compared with me, you are the lucky one. True, I have not yet been tried — before they could try me I fled away out of that accursed Spain of mine.”
“Not tried, eh?” broke in the Frenchman. “Then you have yet a loophole — a chance for escape; and I have none. My trial, as I told you, is behind me.”
“You do not know the Spanish courts. It is plain you do not, since you say that,” declared the Spaniard. “Those courts — they are greedy for blood. With them, to my kind, there is not mercy; there is only punishment.
“And such a punishment! Wait until you hear. To me when they get me before them they will say: ‘The proof is clear against you; the evidence has been thus and so. You are adjudged guilty. You took a life, so your life must be taken. It is the law.’
“Perhaps I say: ‘Yes, but that life I took swiftly and in passion and for cause. For that one the end came in an instant, without pain, without lingering, yes, without warning. Since I must pay for it, why cannot I also be made to die very quickly without pain?’
“Will they listen? No, they send me to the garrote. To a great strong chair they tie you — your hands, your feet, your trunk. Your head is against a post, an upright. In that post is a collar — an iron band. They fit that collar about your neck. Then from behind you the executioner turns a screw.
“If he chooses he turns it slowly. The collar tightens, tightens, a knob presses into your spine. You begin to strangle. Oh, I have seen it myself! I know. You expire by inches! I am a brave man, Señores. When one’s time comes, one dies. But oh, Señores, if it were any death but that! Better the guillotine than that! Better anything than that!”
He slumped back against the cushions, and rigors passed through him.
It was the Italian’s turn. “I was tried in my absence,” he explained to the Spaniard. “I was not even there to make my defense — I had thought it expedient to depart. Such is the custom of the courts in my country. They try you behind your back.
“They found me guilty, those judges. In Italy there is no capital punishment, so they sentenced me to life imprisonment. It is to that... that — I now return.”
The Spaniard lifted his shoulders; the lifting was eloquent of his meaning.
“Not so fast,” said the Italian. “You tell me you lived once in Italy. Have you forgotten what life imprisonment for certain acts means in Italy? It means solitary confinement. It means you are buried alive. They shut you away from every one in a tight cell. It is a tomb, that is all. You see no one ever; you hear no voice ever. If you cry out, no one answers. Silence, darkness, darkness, silence, until you go mad or die.
“Can you picture what that means to one of my race, to an Italian who must have music, sunshine, talk with his fellows, sight of his fellows? It is in his nature — he must have these things or he is in torture, in constant and everlasting torment. Every hour becomes to him a year, every day a century, until his brain bursts asunder inside his skull.
“Oh, they knew — those fiends who devised this thing — what to an Italian is a million times worse than death — any death. I am the most unfortunate one of the three of us. My penalty is the most dreadful by far.”