To Keep His Word

"You need not send an officer for me. I will come when I am wanted." Vincent Sutton, postmaster at Oretown, Tillamook county, was wanted for embezzlement by the ünited States authorities, says a Portland (Ore.) correspondent of the San Francisco Examiner. A plain tale, truly, and one which smacks Qf the vulgar commonplace, but mark the difference. This Sutton is a man of simple mind and to him it seemed no hann would bo done if he eked out the pittance of hls office of postmaster by adding the sums paid in for purchase of money orders, a matter of some $355 when all waa counted. He would make it good in his own time and in truth he thought it no wrong. But the United Staten does not do business that way and in due time there came an indictmenf. found by the 'Rregon grand jury. Sutton heard. He realized that he had done wrong. He was ready to meet his punishment. Nay he was ready to go to meet it at the peril of his life. Nothing prevented if he chose to leave the state. None could ñnrt him in this bitter weather did he prefer to hide in the fastnesses of his own trackless mountains, but it came home to him what he had not realized when he took the money, that he had done wrong and he alone must bear the burden. Now, this was not a matter of walking downtown to give yourself up to the pólice or the marshal. It was not even a matter of boarding a comfortable railroad coach to be hauled into Portland. Oretown is a lonely camp buried deep in the Oregon wilds, a Tound forty miles and more fron a TUroad station, with raging river; to be crossed between, and no road on which a horse may travel in this teeming wluter season, when the wholc countryside is soaked and sodden like a full sponge, deep with treacherous, unfathomed seas of holding mud. Forty-three miles on foot. swimming and swirling, wild, unbridled rivers, staggering along through clinging mud, unable to lie down and sleep in his drenched clothes lest he perish of the cold, deprived of fire and light, because the matches he carried were soaked, snatching a hungry bite by the way at the little store of fooi: Ue had in his pockets, all sodden and srasared ■with mud- this was the task that Vincent Sutton set himself because Jitltice must be done and he must bear his part, though his life be forfeit in ths doing. So it came that the simpleminded man of primitivemoldsat down and wrote a letter to Marshal Gray, in Portland, that he would come himself to the nearest station on the railroad, Sheridan, and there surrender to an officer of the law - no need to send a man to bring him in from his distant home. Let the officer come to Sheridan by a certain day and he would be there. He kept his word, albeit more than once it nearly cost him his life. Sutton has a wife. He kissed her good-by and stuffed his pockets with the food which she, poor woman, had put up for him with loving care, enough to last him two days, it mlght be, on the way to Sheridan. The Three rivers, triple thunderer in sooth, was booming with sullen, hungry roar, turbid with swirlIng mud, carrying on its angry breast sweeping logs and jagged roots, torn trom their sockets by the searching flood. Five times it had to be crossed by Sutton on hls way, swimming or vvading, or chancing nis life on a treacherous log. Once he was nearly smothered in a bottomless pit of mud as dangerous as the quiet, remorseless suck of a quicksand that never gives up its dead. It was bitter cold and ho must keep afoot or perish. But there is iron in this man's blood. He had pledged nis word and he got there. Now, when this strange tale was told to Judge Bellinger, sitting in Portland, as the representative of federal law, he, being a man, was troubled in mind, for here was one who had set his llio at the value of a pin fee that the law might have its way, and yet justice must be done and punishment meted as is set down in the books. Nevertheless there are degrees and Judgc Bellinger resolved that this was a case where it would not strain the quality of justice were it softened with mercy. Therefore he imposed the lowest penalty, which is imprisonment for six monthr. and a fine equal to the sum v.hich Sutton appropriated.