Good Samaritan

At 1 o'clock one morning last week, two Texas state highway patrolmen spotted a flashy new green Mercury hardtop convertible barreling into the shadowed outskirts of Houston with a "suspicious" young man at the wheel. They pulled him to the side of the road and peered into the car. A blonde girl of 15 was sitting beside him. The driver, one Alton Franks, 19, explained that the girl was his wife. The cops grunted noncommittally and asked for his driver's license. He had none. Then they spotted a .38-caliber pistol on the back seat. They hauled Franks, his car, his girl and his gun into headquarters.

The cops quickly decided that their suspicions had been justified: Franks had been out of the Huntsville State Prison less than three weeks, after serving 17 months for car theft. Where did he get the green hardtop? Bought it, said Franks, with ill-concealed, sassy satisfaction. Then he proved it: he not only had a legitimate bill of sale but deposit slips showing that he had $13,000 in a Houston bank. Where did he get the money? It was, he said happily, a gift.

The tale grew even more incredible as he told it: a rich old rancher named Jimmy C. Henderson, who is doing 50 years for shooting his common-law wife, had befriended Franks in prison and had given.the boy a total of $19,000 to "help him go straight." Checking proved that the whole story was good as gold, and that Franks had already dribbled away about $6,000 of the money. (Sample investment: a big red & white teddy bear for his ninth-grade bride.)

Back at the prison, Henderson, a man who owns 23,000 acres of Texas cattle and oil land and believes himself worth approximately half a million dollars, clung stubbornly to his old theory that young Franks was made of worthwhile stuff.

"Out of the thousands of men I've met in my years of confinement, he's the only one I had, and still have, confidence in. I'll back him up one hundred percent." Was it true that he had given $10,000 to another convict last year? Henderson admitted that he had. "I don't know what happened," he added wistfully. "I never heard from him." But Franks, he was cer tain, was different. "He was like my own son. If he squanders it away, well . . . it's his money. But I still have faith in him."

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