Behind the Iron by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-08-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

He woke.

Fallon did not remember returning to his bedding, or lying down, but he stared up at the nothingness before him, stretched his stiffening limbs, and stopped quickly.

He heard nothing. The small cell was completely quiet.

“You are awake,” The Mole said across the room.

Fallon relaxed. “Yes,” he said.

“I feared you might be dead, till I heard your breathing,” The Mole said.

“I thought the same of you.”

“Did I snore?”

“Very loudly,” Fallon answered, and The Mole’s laugh pleased him.

“They brought us no bread and water,” The Mole said. “That is a bad sign . . . for you.”

“I am sorry that you must suffer on my account.”

The Mole chuckled again. “I have tasted better food.”

Grinning hurt Fallon’s entire face.

The Mole said: “But if they do bring food tomorrow, pour half of your water into the bucket. And save part of your food. That is how I have managed to live, and keep on living, all this time.”

Fallon tried to imagine what The Mole looked like.

“Almost sixty years. The last sixteen in utter darkness.”

“I am sorry,” The Mole said. “What is that you said?”

Fallon wasn’t aware that he had voiced his thoughts verbally. “You could not have been sentenced for all this time just for stealing a watch,” he said.

The Mole sighed. “You are young. It was the year eighteen hundred and thirty-six, remember, and things were different all those years ago.” Fallon envisioned the long-haired, bearded man shaking his head. “Your laws are much softer now.”

That made Fallon straighten. After spending ten years in Joliet and a short stay, for the American Detective Agency, in Yuma, Fallon could not think of the laws of this day and age being soft.

“For sixty years or more,” Fallon said, “that must have been a hell of a watch.”

“It was,” The Mole said. “Or I would not have stolen it. I believe, the gentleman said, it was valued at thirty-four dollars.”

At 1836 prices, Fallon thought, that would have been a mighty fine watch.

“Still . . .” Fallon said.

But The Mole waved him off. Fallon blinked. Had he imagined that, envisioned The Mole, leaning his back against the hard, cold stone wall, waving good-naturedly at Fallon and grinning underneath that mass of hair that covered his face and head? Surely, Fallon wasn’t becoming a mole himself, able to see in the dark and blinded by the sun. Hell, he had only been in this hellhole for a day or so.

“All these long, dark years later, I do not recall how many years I was sentenced to prison for my lapse in judgment and for forgetting my Christian upbringing,” The Mole said. “It was more than two years. Maybe eight months and sixteen days. But such matters are trivial. I broke the law and was sentenced accordingly.”

Fallon felt himself frown. Two years, eight months, sixteen days for stealing a watch that wasn’t worth over forty bucks. Yes, maybe The Mole was right. Perhaps the law was much softer now than it has been back in the years of The Alamo and whatever else had happened before Harry Fallon had been born.

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