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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sleuth of St. James's Square, by 
+Melville Davisson Post
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Sleuth of St. James's Square
+
+Author: Melville Davisson Post
+
+Posting Date: January 2, 2009 [EBook #2861]
+Release Date: October, 2001
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SLEUTH OF ST. JAMES'S SQUARE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SLEUTH OF ST. JAMES'S SQUARE
+
+By Melville Davisson Post
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I. THE THING ON THE HEARTH
+
+II. THE REWARD
+
+III. THE LOST LADY
+
+IV. THE CAMBERED FOOT
+
+V. THE MAN IN THE GREEN HAT
+
+VI. THE WRONG SIGN
+
+VII. THE FORTUNE TELLER
+
+VIII. THE HOLE IN THE MAHOGANY PANEL
+
+IX. THE END OF THE ROAD
+
+X. THE LAST ADVENTURE
+
+XI. AMERICAN HORSES
+
+XII. THE SPREAD RAILS
+
+XIII. THE PUMPKIN COACH
+
+XIV. THE YELLOW FLOWER
+
+XV. A SATIRE OF THE SEA
+
+XVI. THE HOUSE BY THE LOCH
+
+
+
+
+
+The SLEUTH of St. JAMES'S SQUARE
+
+
+
+
+I. The Thing on the Hearth
+
+
+"THE first confirmatory evidence of the thing, Excellency, was the print
+of a woman's bare foot."
+
+He was an immense creature. He sat in an upright chair that seemed to
+have been provided especially for him. The great bulk of him flowed out
+and filled the chair. It did not seem to be fat that enveloped him. It
+seemed rather to be some soft, tough fiber, like the pudgy mass making
+up the body of a deep-sea thing. One got an impression of strength.
+
+The country was before the open window; the clusters of cultivated shrub
+on the sweep of velvet lawn extending to the great wall that inclosed
+the place, then the bend of the river and beyond the distant mountains,
+blue and mysterious, blending indiscernibly into the sky. A soft sun,
+clouded with the haze of autumn, shone over it.
+
+"You know how the faint moisture in the bare foot will make an
+impression."
+
+He paused as though there was some compelling force in the reflection.
+It was impossible to say, with accuracy, to what race the man belonged.
+He came from some queer blend of Eastern peoples. His body and the
+cast of his features were Mongolian. But one got always, before him, a
+feeling of the hot East lying low down against the stagnant Suez. One
+felt that he had risen slowly into our world of hard air and sun out of
+the vast sweltering ooze of it.
+
+He spoke English with a certain care in the selection of the words, but
+with ease and an absence of effort, as though languages were instinctive
+to him--as though he could speak any language. And he impressed one with
+this same effortless facility in all the things he did.
+
+It is necessary to try to understand this, because it explains the
+conception everybody got of the creature, when they saw him in charge of
+Rodman. I am using precisely the descriptive words; he was exclusively
+in charge of Rodman, as a jinn in an Arabian tale might have been in
+charge of a king's son.
+
+The creature was servile--with almost a groveling servility. But one
+felt that this servility resulted from something potent and secret. One
+looked to see Rodman take Solomon's ring out of his waistcoat pocket.
+
+I suppose there is no longer any doubt about the fact that Rodman was
+one of those gigantic human intelligences who sometimes appear in the
+world, and by their immense conceptions dwarf all human knowledge--a
+sort of mental monster that we feel nature has no right to produce. Lord
+Bayless Truxley said that Rodman was some generations in advance of
+the time; and Lord Bayless Truxley was, beyond question, the greatest
+authority on synthetic chemistry in the world.
+
+Rodman was rich and, everybody supposed, indolent; no one ever thought
+very much about him until he published his brochure on the scientific
+manufacture of precious stones. Then instantly everybody with any
+pretension to a knowledge of synthetic chemistry turned toward him.
+
+The brochure startled the world.
+
+It proposed to adapt the luster and beauty of jewels to commercial uses.
+We were being content with crude imitation colors in our commercial
+glass, when we could quite as easily have the actual structure and the
+actual luster of the jewel in it. We were painfully hunting over the
+earth, and in its bowels, for a few crystals and prettily colored stones
+which we hoarded and treasured, when in a manufacturing laboratory we
+could easily produce them, more perfect than nature, and in unlimited
+quantity.
+
+Now, if you want to understand what I am printing here about Rodman,
+you must think about this thing as a scientific possibility and not as
+a fantastic notion. Take, for example, Rodman's address before the
+Sorbonne, or his report to the International Congress of Science in
+Edinburgh, and you will begin to see what I mean. The Marchese Giovanni,
+who was a delegate to that congress, and Pastreaux, said that the
+something in the way of an actual practical realization of what Rodman
+outlined was the formulae. If Rodman could work out the formulae,
+jewel-stuff could be produced as cheaply as glass, and in any
+quantity--by the carload. Imagine it; sheet ruby, sheet emerald, all the
+beauty and luster of jewels in the windows of the corner drugstore!
+
+And there is another thing that I want you to think about. Think about
+the immense destruction of value--not to us, so greatly, for our stocks
+of precious stones are not large; but the thing meant, practically,
+wiping out all the assembled wealth of Asia except the actual earth and
+its structures.
+
+The destruction of value was incredible.
+
+Put the thing some other way and consider it. Suppose we should suddenly
+discover that pure gold could be produced by treating common yellow clay
+with sulphuric acid, or that some genius should set up a machine on the
+border of the Sahara that received sand at one end and turned out sacked
+wheat at the other! What, then, would our hoarded gold be worth, or the
+wheat-lands of Australia, Canada or our Northwest?
+
+The illustrations are fantastic. But the thing Rodman was after was a
+practical fact. He had it on the way. Giovanni and Lord Bayless Truxley
+were convinced that the man would work out the formulae. They tried,
+over their signatures, to prepare the world for it.
+
+The whole of Asia was appalled. The rajahs of the native states in India
+prepared a memorial and sent it to the British Government.
+
+The thing came out after the mysterious, incredible tragedy. I should
+not have written that final sentence. I want you to think, just now,
+about the great hulk of a man that sat in his big chair beyond me at the
+window.
+
+It was like Rodman to turn up with an outlandish human creature
+attending him hand and foot. How the thing came about reads like a lie;
+it reads like a lie; the wildest lie that anybody ever put forward to
+explain a big yellow Oriental following one about.
+
+But it was no lie. You could not think up a lie to equal the actual
+things that happened to Rodman. Take the way he died!....
+
+The thing began in India. Rodman had gone there to consult with the
+Marchese Giovanni concerning some molecular theory that was involved in
+his formulas. Giovanni was digging up a buried temple on the northern
+border of the Punjab. One night, in the explorer's tent, near the
+excavations, this inscrutable creature walked in on Rodman. No one knew
+how he got into the tent or where he came from.
+
+Giovanni told about it. The tent-flap simply opened, and the big
+Oriental appeared. He had something under his arm rolled up in a
+prayer-carpet. He gave no attention to Giovanni, but he salaamed like a
+coolie to the little American.
+
+"Master," he said, "you were hard to find. I have looked over the world
+for you."
+
+And he squatted down on the dirty floor by Rodman's camp stool.
+
+Now, that's precisely the truth. I suppose any ordinary person would
+have started no end of fuss. But not Rodman, and not, I think, Giovanni.
+There's the attitude that we can't understand in a genius--did you ever
+know a man with an inventive mind who doubted a miracle? A thing like
+that did not seem unreasonable to Rodman.
+
+The two men spent the remainder of the night looking at the present that
+the creature brought Rodman in his prayer-carpet. They wanted to know
+where the Oriental got it, and that's how his story came out.
+
+He was something--searcher, seems our nearest English word to it--in
+the great Shan Monastery on the southeastern plateau of the Gobi. He was
+looking for Rodman because he had the light--here was another word that
+the two men could find no term in any modern language to translate; a
+little flame, was the literal meaning.
+
+The present was from the treasure-room of the monastery; the very carpet
+around it, Giovanni said, was worth twenty thousand lire. There
+was another thing that came out in the talk that Giovanni afterward
+recalled. Rodman was to accept the present and the man who brought it to
+him. The Oriental would protect him, in every way, in every direction,
+from things visible and invisible. He made quite a speech about it. But,
+there was one thing from which he could not protect him.
+
+The Oriental used a lot of his ancient words to explain, and he did not
+get it very clear. He seemed to mean that the creative Forces of the
+spirit would not tolerate a division of worship with the creative forces
+of the body--the celibate notion in the monastic idea.
+
+Giovanni thought Rodman did not understand it; he thought he himself
+understood it better. The monk was pledging Rodman to a high virtue, in
+the lapse of which something awful was sure to happen.
+
+Giovanni wrote a letter to the State Department when he learned what had
+happened to Rodman. The State Department turned it over to the court at
+the trial. I think it was one of the things that influenced the judge
+in his decision. Still, at the time, there seemed no other reasonable
+decision to make. The testimony must have appeared incredible; it must
+have appeared fantastic. No man reading the record could have come to
+any other conclusion about it. Yet it seemed impossible--at least, it
+seemed impossible for me--to consider this great vital bulk of a man as
+a monk of one of the oldest religious orders in the world. Every common,
+academic conception of such a monk he distinctly negatived. He
+impressed me, instead, as possessing the ultimate qualities of clever
+diplomacy--the subtle ambassador of some new Oriental power, shrewd,
+suave, accomplished.
+
+When one read the yellow-backed court-record, the sense of old, obscure,
+mysterious agencies moving in sinister menace, invisibly, around Rodman
+could not be escaped from. You believed it. Against your reason, against
+all modern experience of life, you believed it.
+
+And yet it could not be true! One had to find that verdict or topple
+over all human knowledge--that is, all human knowledge as we understand
+it. The judge, cutting short the criminal trial, took the only way out
+of the thing.
+
+There was one man in the world that everybody wished could have been
+present at the time. That was Sir Henry Marquis. Marquis was chief of
+the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. He had been in
+charge of the English secret service on the frontier of the Shan states,
+and at the time he was in Asia.
+
+As soon as Scotland Yard could release Sir Henry, it sent him. Rodman's
+genius was the common property of the world. The American Government
+could not, even with the verdict of a trial court, let Rodman's death go
+by under the smoke-screen of such a weird, inscrutable mystery.
+
+I was to meet Sir Henry and come here with him. But my train into New
+England was delayed, and when I arrived at the station, I found that
+Marquis had gone down to have a look at Rodman's country-house, where
+the thing had happened.
+
+It was on an isolated forest ridge of the Berkshires, no human soul
+within a dozen miles of it--a comfortable stone house in the English
+fashion. There was a big drawing-room across one end of it, with an
+immense fireplace framed in black marble under a great white panel to
+the ceiling. It had a wide black-marble hearth. There is an excellent
+photograph of it in the record, showing the single andiron, that
+mysterious andiron upon which the whole tragedy seemed to turn as on a
+hinge.
+
+Rodman used this drawing-room for a workshop. He kept it close-shuttered
+and locked. Not even this big, yellow, servile creature who took
+exclusive care of him in the house was allowed to enter, except under
+Rodman's eye. What he saw in the final scenes of the tragedy, he saw
+looking in through a crack under the door. The earlier things he noticed
+when he put logs on the fire at dark.
+
+Time is hardly a measure for the activities of the mind. These
+reflections winged by in a scarcely perceptible interval of it. They
+have taken me some time to write out here, but they crowded past while
+the big Oriental was speaking--in the pause between his words.
+
+"The print," he continued, "was the first confirmation of evidence,
+but it was not the first indicatory sign. I doubt if the Master himself
+noticed the thing at the beginning. The seductions of this disaster
+could not have come quickly; and besides that, Excellency, the agencies
+behind the material world get a footing in it only with continuous
+pressure. Do not receive a wrong impression, Excellency; to the eye a
+thing will suddenly appear, but the invisible pressure will have been
+for some time behind that materialization."
+
+He paused.
+
+"The Master was sunk in his labor, and while that enveloped him, the
+first advances of the lure would have gone by unnoticed--and the tension
+of the pressure. But the day was at hand when the Master was receptive.
+He had got his work completed; the formula, penciled out, were on his
+table. I knew by the relaxation. Of all periods this is the one most
+dangerous to the human spirit."
+
+He sat silent for a moment, his big fingers moving on the arms of the
+chair.
+
+"I knew," he added. Then he went on: "But it was the one thing against
+which I could not protect him. The test was to be permitted."
+
+He made a vague gesture.
+
+"The Master was indicated--but the peril antecedent to his elevation
+remained.... It was to be permitted, and at its leisure and in its
+choice of time."
+
+He turned sharply toward me, the folds of his face unsteady.
+
+"Excellency!" he cried. "I would have saved the Master, I would have
+saved him with my soul's damnation, but it was not permitted. On that
+first night in the Italian's tent I said all I could."
+
+His voice went into a higher note.
+
+"Twice, for the Master, I have been checked and reduced in merit. For
+that bias I was myself encircled. I was in an agony of spirit when I
+knew that the thing was beginning to advance, but my very will to aid
+was at the time environed."
+
+His voice descended.
+
+He sat motionless, as though the whole bulk of him were devitalized, and
+maintained its outline only by the inclosing frame of the chair.
+
+"It began, Excellency, on an August night. There is a chill in these
+mountains at sunset. I had put wood into the fireplace, and lighted it,
+and was about the house. The Master, as I have said, had worked out
+his formulae. He was at leisure. I could not see him, for the door was
+closed, but the odor of his cigar escaped from the room. It was very
+silent. I was placing the Master's bed-candle on the table in the
+hall, when I heard his voice.... You have read it, Excellency, as the
+scriveners wrote it down before the judge."
+
+He paused.
+
+"It was an exclamation of surprise, of astonishment. Then I heard
+the Master get up softly and go over to the fireplace... Presently he
+returned. He got a new cigar, Excellency, clipped it and lighted it. I
+could hear the blade of the knife on the fiber of the tobacco, and of
+course, clearly the rasp of the match. A moment later I knew that he was
+in the chair again. The odor of ignited tobacco returned. It was some
+time before there was another sound in the room; then suddenly I
+heard the Master swear. His voice was sharp and astonished. This time,
+Excellency, he got up swiftly and crossed the room to the fireplace... I
+could hear him distinctly. There was the sound of one tapping on metal,
+thumping it, as with the fingers."
+
+He stopped again, for a brief moment, as in reflection.
+
+"It was then that the Master unlocked the door and asked for the
+liquor." He indicated the court record in my pocket. "I brought it, a
+goblet of brandy, with some carbonated water. He drank it all without
+putting down the glass.... His face was strange, Excellency.... Then he
+looked at me.
+
+"'Put a log on the fire,' he said.
+
+"I went in and added wood to the fire and came out.
+
+"The Master remained in the doorway; he reentered when I came out, and
+closed the door behind him.... There was a long silence after that; them
+I heard the voice, permitted to the devocation thin, metallic, offering
+the barter to the Master. It began and ceased because the Master was
+on his feet and before the fireplace. I heard him swear again, and
+presently return to his place by the table."
+
+The big Oriental lifted his face and looked out at the sweep of country
+before the window.
+
+"The thing went on, Excellency, the voice offering its lure, and
+presenting it in brief flashes of materialization, and the Master
+endeavoring to seize and detain the visitations, which ceased instantly
+at his approach to the hearth."
+
+The man paused.
+
+"I knew the Master contended in vain against the thing; if he would
+acquire possession of what it offered, he must destroy what the creative
+forces of the spirit had released to him."
+
+Again he paused.
+
+"Toward morning he went out of the house. I could hear him walking on
+the gravel before the door. He would walk the full length of the house
+and return. The night was clear; there was a chill in it, and every
+sound was audible.
+
+"That was all, Excellency. The Master returned a little later and
+ascended to his bedroom as usual."
+
+Then he added:
+
+"It was when I went in to put wood on the fire that I saw the footprint
+on the hearth."
+
+There was a force, compelling and vivid, in these meager details, the
+severe suppression of things, big and tragic. No elaboration could have
+equaled, in effect, the virtue of this restraint.
+
+The man was going on, directly, with the story.
+
+"The following night, Excellency, the thing happened. The Master had
+passed the day in the open. He dined with a good appetite, like a man in
+health. And there was a change in his demeanor. He had the aspect of men
+who are determined to have a thing out at any hazard.
+
+"After his dinner the Master went into the drawing-room and closed the
+door behind him. He had not entered the room on this day. It had stood
+locked and close-shuttered!"
+
+The big Oriental paused and made a gesture outward with his fingers, as
+of one dismissing an absurdity.
+
+"No living human being could have been concealed in that room. There
+is only the bare floor, the Master's table and the fireplace. The great
+wood shutters were bolted in, as they had stood since the Master took
+the room for a workshop and removed the furniture. The door was always
+locked with that special thief-proof lock that the American smiths had
+made for it. No one could have entered."
+
+It was the report of the experts at the trial. They showed by the casing
+of rust on the bolts that the shutters had not been moved; the walls,
+ceiling and floor were undisturbed; the throat of the chimney was coated
+evenly with old soot. Only the door was possible as an entry, and this
+was always locked except when Rodman was himself in the room. And at
+such times the big Oriental never left his post in the hall before it.
+That seemed a condition of his mysterious overcare of Rodman.
+
+Everybody thought the trial court went to an excessive care. It
+scrutinized in minute detail every avenue that could possibly lead to
+a solution of the mystery. The whole country and every resident was
+inquisitioned. The conclusion was inevitable. There was no human
+creature on that forest crest of the Berkshires but Rodman and his
+servant.
+
+But one can see why the trial judge kept at the thing; he was seeking an
+explanation consistent with the common experience of mankind. And when
+he could not find it, he did the only thing he could do. He was wrong,
+as we now know. But he had a hold in the dark on the truth--not the
+whole truth by any means; he never had a glimmer of that. He never had
+the faintest conception of the big, amazing truth. But as I have said,
+he had his fingers on one essential fact.
+
+The man was going on with a slow, precise articulation as though he
+would thereby make a difficult matter clear.
+
+"The night had fallen swiftly. It was incredibly silent. There was no
+sound in the Master's room, and no light except the flicker of the logs
+smoldering in the fireplace. The thin line of it appeared faintly along
+the sill of the door."
+
+He paused.
+
+"The fireplace, Excellency, is at the end of the great room, directly
+opposite this door into the hall, before which I always sat when the
+Master was within. The fireplace is of black marble with an immense
+black-marble hearth. And the gift which I had brought the Master stands
+on one side of the fire, on this marble hearth, as though it were a
+single andiron."
+
+The man turned back into the heart of his story.
+
+"I knew by the vague sense of pressure that the devocations of the
+thing were again on the way. And I began to suffer in the spirit for the
+Master's safety. Interference, both by act and by the will, were denied
+me. But there is an anxiety of spirit, Excellency, that the uncertainty
+of an issue makes intolerable."
+
+The man paused.
+
+"The pressure continued--and the silence. It was nearly midnight. I
+could not distinguish any act or motion of the Master, and in fear
+I crept over to the door and looked in through the crevice along the
+threshold.
+
+"The Master sat by his table; he was straining forward, his hands
+gripping the arms of his chair. His eyes and every tense instinct of the
+man were concentrated on the fireplace. The red light of the embers was
+in the room. I could see him clearly, and the table beyond him with the
+calculations; but the fireplace seemed strangely out of perspective--it
+extended above me.
+
+"My gift to the Master, not more than four handbreaths in length,
+including the base, stood now like an immense bronze on an extended
+marble slab beside a gigantic fireplace. This effect of extension put
+the top of the fireplace and the enlarged andiron, above its pedestal,
+out of my line of vision. Everything else in the chamber, holding its
+normal dimensions, was visible to me.
+
+"The Master's face was a little lifted. He was looking at the elevated
+portions of the andiron which were invisible to me. He did not move. The
+steady light threw half of his face into shadow. But in the other half
+every feature stood out sharply as in a delicate etching. It had that
+refined sharpness and distinction which intense moments of stress stamp
+on the human face. He did not move, and there was no sound.
+
+"I have said, Excellency, that my angle of vision along the crevice of
+the doorsill was sharply cut midway of this now enlarged fireplace. From
+the direction and lift of the Master's face, he was watching something
+above this line and directly over the pedestal of the andiron. I
+watched, also, flattening my face against the sill, for the thing to
+appear.
+
+"And it did appear.
+
+"A naked foot became slowly visible, as though some one were descending
+with extreme care from the elevation of the andiron to the great marble
+hearth, under this strange enlargement, now some distance below."
+
+The big Oriental paused, and looked down at me.
+
+"I knew then, Excellency, that the Master was lost! The creative
+energies of the Spirit suffer no division of worship; those of the
+body must be wholly denied. I had warned the Master. And in travail,
+Excellency, I turned over with my face to the floor.
+
+"But there is always hope, hope over the certainties of experience, over
+the certainties of knowledge. Perhaps the Master, even now, sustained in
+the spirit, would put away the devocation.... No, Excellency, I was not
+misled. I knew the Master was beyond hope! But the will to hope moved
+me, and I turned back to the crevice at the doorsill."
+
+He paused.
+
+"There was now a delicate odor, everywhere, faintly, like the blossom
+of the little bitter apple here in your country. The red embers in the
+fireplace gave out a steady light; and in the glow of it, on the marble
+hearth, stood the one who had descended from the elevation of the
+andiron."
+
+Again the man hesitated, as for an accurate method of expression.
+
+"In the flesh, Excellency, there was color that would not appear in
+the image. The hair was yellow, and the eyes were blue; and against the
+black marble of the fireplace the body was conspicuously white. But in
+every other aspect of her, Excellency, the woman was on the hearth
+in the flesh as she is in the clutch of the savage male figure in the
+image.
+
+"There is no dress or ornament, as you will recall, Excellency. Not even
+an ear-jewel or an anklet, as though the graver of the image felt
+that the inherent beauty of his figure could take nothing from these
+ostentations. The woman's heavy yellow hair was wound around her head,
+as in the image. She shivered a little, faintly, like a naked child in
+an unaccustomed draught of air, although she stood on the warm marble
+hearth and within the red glow of the fire.
+
+"The voice from the male figure of the image, which I had brought the
+Master, and which stood as the andiron, now so immensely enlarged, was
+beginning again to speak. The thin metallic sounds seemed to splinter
+against the dense silence, as it went forward in the ritual prescribed.
+
+"But the Master had already decided; he stood now on the great marble
+hearth with his papers crushed together. And as I looked on, through the
+crevice under the doorsill, he put out his free hand and with his
+finger touched the woman gently. The flesh under his finger yielded, and
+stooping over, he put the formulas into the fire."
+
+Like one who has come to the end of his story, the huge Oriental
+stopped. He remained for some moments silent. Then he continued in an
+even, monotonous voice:
+
+"I got up from the floor then, and purified myself with water. And after
+that I went into an upper chamber, opened the window to the east, and
+sat down to write my report to the brotherhood. For the thing which I
+had been sent to do was finished."
+
+He put his hand somewhere into the loose folds of his Oriental garment
+and brought out a roll of thin vellum like onion-skin, painted in
+Chinese characters. It was of immense length, but on account of the
+thinness of the vellum, the roll wound on a tiny cylinder of wood was
+not above two inches in thickness.
+
+"Excellency," he said, "I have carefully concealed this report through
+the misfortunes that have attended me. It is not certain that I shall
+be able to deliver it. Will you give it for me to the jewel merchant
+Vanderdick, in Amsterdam? He will send it to Mahadal in Bombay, and it
+will go north with the caravans."
+
+His voice changed into a note of solicitation.
+
+"You will not fail me, Excellency--already for my bias to the Master I
+am reduced in merit."
+
+I put the scroll into my pocket and went out, for a motorcar had come
+into the park, and I knew that Marquis had arrived.
+
+I met Sir Henry and the superintendent in the long corridor; they had
+been looking in at my interview through the elevated grating.
+
+"Marquis," I cried, "the judge was right to cut short the criminal trial
+and issue a lunacy warrant. This creature is the maddest lunatic in this
+whole asylum. The human mind is capable of any absurdity."
+
+Sir Henry looked at me with a queer ironical smile.
+
+"The judge was wrong," he said. "The creature, as you call him, is as
+sane as any of us."
+
+"Then you believe this amazing story?" I said.
+
+"I believe Rodman was found at daylight dead on the hearth, with
+practically every bone in his body crushed," he replied.
+
+"Certainly," I said. "We all know that is true. But why was he killed?"
+
+Again Sir Henry regarded me with his ironical smile.
+
+"Perhaps," he drawled, "there is some explanation in the report in your
+pocket, to the Monastic Head. It's only a theory, you know."
+
+He smiled, showing his white, even teeth.
+
+We went into the superintendent's room, and sat down by a smoldering
+fire of coals in the gate. I handed Marquis the roll of vellum. It was
+in one of the Shan dialects. He read it aloud. With the addition of
+certain formal expressions, it contained precisely the Oriental's
+testimony before the court, and no more.
+
+"Ah!" he said in his curiously inflected Oxford voice.
+
+And he held the scroll out to the heat of the fire. The vellum baked
+slowly, and as it baked, the black Chinese characters faded out and
+faint blue ones began to appear.
+
+Marquis read the secret message in his emotionless drawl:
+
+"'The American is destroyed, and his accursed work is destroyed with
+him. Send the news to Bangkok and west to Burma. The treasures of India
+are saved."'
+
+I cried out in astonishment.
+
+"An assassin! The creature was an assassin! He killed Rodman simply by
+crushing him in his arms!"
+
+Sir Henry's drawl lengthened.
+
+"It's Lal Gupta," he said, "the cleverest Oriental in the whole of Asia.
+The jewel-traders sent him to watch Rodman, and to kill him if he was
+ever able to get his formulae worked out. They must have paid him an
+incredible sum."
+
+"And that is why the creature attached himself to Rodman!" I said.
+
+"Surely," replied Sir Henry. "He brought that bronze Romulus carrying
+off the Sabine woman and staged the supernatural to work out his plan
+and to save his life. I knew the bronze as soon as I got my eye on
+it--old Franz Josef gave it as a present to Mahadal in Bombay for
+matching up some rubies."
+
+I swore bitterly.
+
+"And we took him for a lunatic!"
+
+"Ah, yes!" replied Sir Henry. "What was it you said as I came in? 'The
+human mind is capable of any absurdity!'"
+
+
+
+
+II. The Reward
+
+
+I was before one of those difficult positions unavoidable to a visitor
+in a foreign country.
+
+I had to meet the obligations of professional courtesy. Captain Walker
+had asked me to go over the manuscript of his memoirs; and now he had
+called at the house in which I was a guest, for my opinion. We had long
+been friends; associated in innumerable cases, and I wished to suggest
+the difficulty rather than to express it. It was the twilight of an
+early Washington winter. The lights in the great library, softened with
+delicate shades, had been turned on. Outside, Sheridan Circle was almost
+a thing of beauty in its vague outlines; even the squat, ridiculous
+bronze horse had a certain dignity in the blue shadow.
+
+If one had been speculating on the man, from his physical aspect one
+would have taken Walker for an engineer of some sort, rather than the
+head of the United States Secret Service. His lean face and his angular
+manner gaffe that impression. Even now, motionless in the big chair
+beyond the table, he seemed--how shall I say it?--mechanical.
+
+And that was the very defect in his memoir. He had cut the great cases
+into a dry recital. There was no longer in them any pressure of a human
+impulse. The glow of inspired detail had been dissected out. Everything
+startling and wonderful had been devitalized.
+
+The memoir was a report.
+
+The bulky typewritten manuscript lay on the table beside the electric
+lamp, and I stood about uncertain how to tell him.
+
+"Walker," I said, "did nothing wonderful ever happen to you in the
+adventure of these cases?"
+
+"What precisely do you mean, Sir Henry?" he replied.
+
+The practical nature of the man tempted me to extravagance.
+
+"Well," I said, "for example, were you never kissed in a lonely street
+by a mysterious woman and the flash of your dark lantern reveal a face
+of startling beauty?"
+
+"No," he said, as though he were answering a sensible question, "that
+never happened to me."
+
+"Then," I continued, "perhaps you have found a prince of the church,
+pale as alabaster, sitting in his red robe, who put together the
+indicatory evidence of the crime that baffled you with such uncanny
+acumen that you stood aghast at his perspicacity?"
+
+"No," he said; and then his face lighted. "But I'll tell you what I did
+find. I found a drunken hobo at Atlantic City who was the best detective
+I ever saw."
+
+I sat down and tapped the manuscript with my fingers.
+
+"It's not here," I said. "Why did you leave it out?"
+
+He took a big gold watch out of his pocket and turned it about in his
+hand. The case was covered with an inscription.
+
+"Well, Sir Henry," he said, "the boys in the department think a good
+deal of me. I shouldn't like them to know how a dirty tramp faked me at
+Atlantic City. I don't mind telling you, but I couldn't print it in a
+memoir."
+
+He went directly ahead with the story and I was careful not to interrupt
+him:
+
+"I was sitting in a rolling chair out there on the Boardwalk before the
+Traymore. I was nearly all in, and I had taken a run to Atlantic for a
+day or two of the sea air. The fact is the whole department was down and
+out. You may remember what we were up against; it finally got into the
+newspapers.
+
+"The government plates of the Third Liberty Bond issue had disappeared.
+We knew how they had gotten out, and we thought we knew the man at the
+head of the thing. It was a Mulehaus job, as we figured it.
+
+"It was too big a thing for a little crook. With the government plates
+they could print Liberty Bonds just as the Treasury would. And they
+could sow the world with them."
+
+He paused and moved his gold-rimmed spectacles a little closer in on his
+nose.
+
+"You see these war bonds are scattered all over the country. They are
+held by everybody. It's not what it used to be, a banker's business that
+we could round up. Nobody could round up the holders of these bonds.
+
+"A big crook like Mulehaus could slip a hundred million of them into the
+country and never raise a ripple."
+
+He paused and drew his fingers across his bony protruding chin.
+
+"I'll say this for Mulehaus: He's the hardest man to identify in the
+whole kingdom of crooks. Scotland Yard, the Service de la Surete,
+everybody, says that. I don't mean dime-novel disguises--false whiskers
+and a limp. I mean the ability to be the character he pretends--the
+thing that used to make Joe Jefferson, Rip Van Winkle--and not an actor
+made up to look like him. That's the reason nobody could keep track of
+Mulehaus, especially in South American cities. He was a French banker in
+the Egypt business and a Swiss banker in the Argentine."
+
+He turned back from the digression:
+
+"And it was a clean job. They had got away with the plates. We didn't
+have a clew. We thought, naturally, that they'd make for Mexico or some
+South American country to start their printing press. And we had the
+ports and border netted up. Nothing could have gone out across the
+border or, through any port. All the customs officers were, working with
+us, and every agent of the Department of Justice."
+
+He looked at me steadily across the table.
+
+"You see the Government had to get those plates back before the crook
+started to print, or else take up every bond of that issue over the
+whole country. It was a hell of a thing!
+
+"Of course we had gone right after the record of all the big crooks
+to see whose line this sort of job was. And the thing narrowed down to
+Mulehaus or old Vronsky. We soon found out it wasn't Vronsky. He was in
+Joliet. It was Mulehaus. But we couldn't find him.
+
+"We didn't even know that Mulehaus was in America. He's a big crook with
+a genius for selecting men. He might be directing the job from Rio or
+a Mexican port. But we were sure it was a Mulehaus' job. He sold the
+French securities in Egypt in '90; and he's the man who put the bogus
+Argentine bonds on our market--you'll find the case in the 115th Federal
+Reporter.
+
+"Well," he went on, "I was sitting out there in the rolling chair,
+looking at the sun on the sea and thinking about the thing, when
+I noticed this hobo that I've been talking about. He was my chair
+attendant, but I hadn't looked at him before. He had moved round from
+behind me and was now leaning against the galvanized pipe railing.
+
+"He was a big human creature, a little stooped, unshaved and dirty; his
+mouth was slack and loose, and he had a big mobile nose that seemed to
+move about like a piece of soft rubber. He had hardly any clothing; a
+cap that must have been fished out of an ash barrel, no shirt whatever,
+merely an old ragged coat buttoned round him, a pair of canvas breeches
+and carpet slippers tied on to his feet with burlap, and wrapped round
+his ankles to conceal the fact that he wore no socks.
+
+"As I looked at him he darted out, picked up the stump of a cigarette
+that some one had thrown down, and came back to the railing to smoke it,
+his loose mouth and his big soft nose moving like kneaded putty.
+
+"Altogether this tramp was the worst human derelict I ever saw. And it
+occurred to me that this was the one place in the whole of America where
+any sort of a creature could get a kind of employment and no questions
+asked.
+
+"Anything that could move and push a chair could get fifteen cents an
+hour from McDuyal. Wise man, poor man, beggar man, thief, it was all one
+to McDuyal. And the creatures could sleep in the shed behind the rolling
+chairs.
+
+"I suppose an impulse to offer the man a garment of some sort moved me
+to address him.
+
+"'You're nearly naked,' I said.
+
+"He crossed one leg over the other with the toe of the carpet slipper
+touching the walk, in the manner of a burlesque actor, took the
+cigarette out of his mouth with a little flourish, and replied to me:
+
+"'Sure, Governor, I ain't dolled up like John Drew.'
+
+"There was a sort of cocky unconcern about the creature that gave his
+miserable state a kind of beggarly distinction. He was in among the very
+dregs of life, and he was not depressed about it.
+
+"'But if I had a sawbuck," he continued, "I could bulge your eye ....
+Couldn't point the way to one?'
+
+"He arrested my answer with the little flourish of his fingers holding
+the stump of the cigarette.
+
+"'Not work, Governor,' and he made a little duck of his head, 'and not
+murder.... Go as far as you please between 'em.'
+
+"The fantastic manner of the derelict was infectious.
+
+"'O. K.' I said. 'Go out and find me a man who is a deserter from the
+German Army, was a tanner in Bale and began life as a sailor, and I'll
+double your money--I'll give you a twenty-dollar bill.'
+
+"The creature whistled softly in two short staccato notes.
+
+"'Some little order,' he said. And taking a toothpick out of his pocket
+he stuck it into the stump of the cigarette which had become too short
+to hold between his fingers.
+
+"At this moment a boy from the post office came to me with the daily
+report from Washington, and I got out of the chair, tipped the creature,
+and went into the hotel, stopping to pay McDuyal as I passed.
+
+"There was nothing new from the department except that our organization
+over the country was in close touch. We had offered five thousand
+dollars reward for the recovery of the plates, and the Post Office
+Department was now posting the notice all over America in every office.
+The Secretary thought we had better let the public in on it and not keep
+it an underground offer to the service.
+
+"I had forgotten the hobo, when about five o'clock he passed me a
+little below the Steel Pier. He was in a big stride and he had something
+clutched in his hand.
+
+"He called to me as he hurried along: 'I got him, Governor.... See you
+later!'
+
+"'See me now,' I said. 'What's the hurry?'
+
+"He flashed his hand open, holding a silver dollar with his thumb
+against the palm.
+
+"'Can't stop now, I'm going to get drunk. See you later.'
+
+"I smiled at this disingenuous creature. He was saving me for the dry
+hour. He could point out Mulehaus in any passing chair, and I would give
+some coin to be rid of his pretension."
+
+Walker paused. Then he went on:
+
+"I was right. The hobo was waiting for me when I came out of the hotel
+the following morning.
+
+"'Howdy, Governor,' he said; 'I located your man.'
+
+"I was interested to see how he would frame up his case.
+
+"'How did you find him?' I said.
+
+"He grinned, moving his lip and his loose nose.
+
+"'Some luck, Governor, and some sleuthin'. It was like this: I thought
+you was stringin' me. But I said to myself I'll keep out an eye; maybe
+it's on the level--any damn thing can happen.'
+
+"He put up his hand as though to hook his thumb into the armhole of his
+vest, remembered that he had only a coat buttoned round him and dropped
+it.
+
+"'And believe me or not, Governor, it's the God's truth. About four
+o'clock up toward the Inlet I passed a big, well-dressed, banker-looking
+gent walking stiff from the hip and throwing out his leg. "Come eleven!"
+I said to myself. "It's the goosestep!" I had an empty roller, and I
+took a turn over to him.'
+
+"'"Chair, Admiral?" I said.
+
+"'He looked at me sort of queer.
+
+"'"What makes you think I'm an admiral, my man?" he answers.
+
+"Well," I says, lounging over on one foot reflective like, "nobody could
+be a-viewin' the sea with that lovin', ownership look unless he'd bossed
+her a bit.... If I'm right, Admiral, you takes the chair."
+
+"'He laughed, but he got in. "I'm not an admiral," he said, "but it is
+true that I've followed the sea."
+
+"The hobo paused, and put up his first and second fingers spread like a
+V.
+
+"'Two points, Governor--the gent had been a sailor and a soldier; now
+how about the tanner business?
+
+"He scratched his head, moving his ridiculous cap.
+
+"'That sort of puzzled me, and I pussyfooted along toward the Inlet
+thinkin' about it. If a man was a tanner, and especially a foreign,
+hand-workin' tanner, what would his markin's be?
+
+"'I tried to remember everybody that I'd ever seen handlin' a hide, and
+all at once I recollected that the first thing a dago shoemaker done
+when he picked up a piece of leather was to smooth it out with his
+thumbs. An' I said to myself, now that'll be what a tanner does, only he
+does it more.... he's always doin' it. Then I asks myself what would be
+the markin's?'
+
+"The hobo paused, his mouth open, his head twisted to one side. Then he
+jerked up as under a released spring.
+
+"'And right away, Governor, I got the answer to it flat thumbs!'
+
+"The hobo stepped back with an air of victory and flashed his hand up.
+
+"'And he had 'em! I asked him what time it was so I could keep the hour
+straight for McDuyal, I told him, but the real reason was so I could see
+his hands.'"
+
+Walker crossed one leg over the other.
+
+"It was clever," he said, "and I hesitated to shatter it. But the
+question had to come.
+
+"'Where is your man?' I said.
+
+"The hobo executed a little deprecatory step, with his fingers picking
+at his coat pockets.
+
+"'That's the trouble, Governor,' he answered; 'I intended to sleuth him
+for you, but he gave me a dollar and I got drunk... you saw me. That man
+had got out at McDuyal's place not five minutes before. I was flashin'
+to the booze can when you tried to stop me.... Nothin' doin' when I get
+the price.'"
+
+Walker paused.
+
+"It was a good fairy story and worth something. I offered him half a
+dollar. Then I got a surprise.
+
+"The creature looked eagerly at the coin in my fingers, and he moved
+toward it. He was crazy for the liquor it would buy. But he set his
+teeth and pulled up.
+
+"'No, Governor,' he said, 'I'm in it for the sawbuck. Where'll I find
+you about noon?'
+
+"I promised to be on the Boardwalk before Heinz's Pier at two o'clock,
+and he turned to shuffle away. I called an inquiry after him... You see
+there were two things in his story: How did he get a dollar tip, and
+how did he happen to make his imaginary man banker-looking? Mulehaus had
+been banker-looking in both the Egypt and the Argentine affairs. I left
+the latter point suspended, as we say. But I asked about the dollar. He
+came back at once.
+
+"'I forgot about that, Governor,' he said. 'It was like this: The
+admiral kept looking out at the sea where an old freighter was going
+South. You know, the fruit line from New York. One of them goes by
+every day or two. And I kept pushing him along. Finally we got up to the
+Inlet, and I was about to turn when he stopped me. You know the neck of
+ground out beyond where the street cars loop; there's an old board fence
+by the road, then sand to the sea, and about halfway between the fence
+and the water there's a shed with some junk in it. You've seen it. They
+made the old America out there and the shed was a tool house.
+
+"'When I stopped the admiral says: "Cut across to the hole in that old
+board fence and see if an automobile has been there, and I'll give you a
+dollar." An' I done it, an' I got it.'
+
+"Then he shuffled off.
+
+"'Be on the spot, Governor, an' I'll lead him to you.'"
+
+Walker leaned over, rested his elbows on the arms of his chair, and
+linked his fingers together.
+
+"That gave me a new flash on the creature. He was a slicker article than
+I imagined. I was not to get off with a tip. He was taking some pains to
+touch me for a greenback. I thought I saw his line. It would not account
+for his hitting the description of Mulehaus in the make-up of his
+straw-man, but it would furnish the data for the dollar story. I had
+drawn the latter a little before he was ready. It belonged in what he
+planned to give me at two o'clock. But I thought I saw what the creature
+was about. And I was right."
+
+Walker put out his hand and moved the pages of his memoir on the table.
+Then he went on:
+
+"I was smoking a cigar on a bench at the entrance to Heinz's Pier when
+the hobo shuffled up. He came down one of the streets from Pacific
+Avenue, and the direction confirmed me in my theory. It also confirmed
+me in the opinion that I was all kinds of a fool to let this dirty hobo
+get a further chance at me.
+
+"I was not in a very good humor. Everything I had set going after
+Mulehaus was marking time. The only report was progress in linking
+things up; not only along the Canadian and Mexican borders and the
+customhouses, but we had also done a further unusual thing, we had
+an agent on every ship going out of America to follow through to the
+foreign port and look out for anything picked up on the way.
+
+"It was a plan I had set at immediately the robbery was discovered. It
+would cut out the trick of reshipping at sea from some fishing craft or
+small boat. The reports were encouraging enough in that respect. We had
+the whole country as tight as a drum. But it was slender comfort when
+the Treasury was raising the devil for the plates and we hadn't a clew
+to them."
+
+Walker stopped a moment. Then he went on:
+
+"I felt like kicking the hobo when he got to me, he was so obviously the
+extreme of all worthless creatures, with that apologetic, confidential
+manner which seems to be an abominable attendant on human degeneracy.
+One may put up with it for a little while, but it presently becomes
+intolerable.
+
+"'Governor,' he began, when he'd shuffled up, 'you won't git mad if I
+say a little somethin'?
+
+"'Go on and say it,' I said.
+
+"The expression on his dirty unshaved face became, if possible, more
+foolish.
+
+"'Well, then, Governor, askin' your pardon, you ain't Mr. Henry P.
+Johnson, from Erie; you're the Chief of the United States Secret
+Service, from Washington.'"
+
+Walker moved in his chair.
+
+"That made me ugly," he went on, "the assurance of the creature and my
+unspeakable carelessness in permitting the official letters brought
+to me on the day before by the post-office messenger to be seen. In my
+relaxation I had forgotten the eye of the chair attendant. I took the
+cigar out of my teeth and looked at him.
+
+"'And I'll say a little something myself!' I could hardly keep my foot
+clear of him. 'When you got sober this morning and remembered who I was,
+you took a turn up round the post office to make sure of it, and while
+you were in there you saw the notice of the reward for the stolen bond
+plates. That gave you the notion with which you pieced out your fairy
+story about how you got the dollar tip. Having discovered my identity
+through a piece of damned carelessness on my part, and having seen the
+postal notice of the reward, you undertook to enlarge your little game.
+That's the reason you wouldn't take fifty cents. It was your notion in
+the beginning to make a touch for a tip. And it would have worked. But
+now you can't get a damned cent out of me.' Then I threw a little brush
+into him: 'I'd have stood a touch for your finding the fake tanner,
+because there isn't any such person.'
+
+"I intended to put the hobo out of business," Walker went on, "but the
+effect of my words on him were even more startling than I anticipated.
+His jaw dropped and he looked at me in astonishment.
+
+"'No such person!' he repeated. 'Why, Governor, before God, I found a
+man like that, an' he was a banker--one of the big ones, sure as there's
+a hell!'"
+
+Walker put out his hands in a puzzled gesture.
+
+"There it was again, the description of Mulehaus! And it puzzled me.
+Every motion of this hobo's mind in every direction about this affair
+was perfectly clear to me. I saw his intention in every turn of it and
+just where he got the material for the details of his story. But
+this absolutely distinguishing description of Mulehaus was beyond me.
+Everybody, of course, knew that we were looking for the lost plates, for
+there was the reward offered by the Treasury; but no human soul outside
+of the trusted agents of the department knew that we were looking for
+Mulehaus."
+
+Walker did not move, but he stopped in his recital for a moment.
+
+"The tramp shuffled up a step closer to the bench where I sat. The
+anxiety in his big slack face was sincere beyond question.
+
+"'I can't find the banker man, Governor; he's skipped the coop. But I
+believe I can find what he's hid.'
+
+"'Well,' I said, 'go and find it.'
+
+"The hobo jerked out his limp hands in a sort of hopeless gesture.
+
+"'Now, Governor,' he whimpered, 'what good would it do me to find them
+plates?'
+
+"'You'd get five thousand dollars,' I said.
+
+"'I'd git kicked into the discard by the first cop that got to me,' he
+answered, 'that's what I'd git.'
+
+"The creature's dirty, unshaved jowls began to shake, and his voice
+became wholly a whimper.
+
+"'I've got a line on this thing, Governor, sure as there's a hell. That
+banker man was viewin' the layout. I've thought it all over, an' this is
+the way it would be. They're afraid of the border an' they're afraid
+of the customhouses, so they runs the loot down here in an automobile,
+hides it up about the Inlet, and plans to go out with it to one of them
+fruit steamers passing on the way to Tampico. They'd have them plates
+bundled up in a sailor's chest most like.
+
+"'Now, Governor, you'd say why ain't they already done it? An' I'd
+answer, the main guy--this banker man--didn't know the automobile had
+got here until he sent me to look, and there ain't been no ship along
+since then.... I've been special careful to find that out.' And then the
+creature began to whine. 'Have a heart, Governor, come along with me.
+Gimme a show!'
+
+"It was not the creature's plea that moved me, nor his pretended
+deductions; I'm a bit old to be soft. It was the 'banker man' sticking
+like a bur in the hobo's talk. I wanted to keep him in sight until I
+understood where he got it. No doubt that seems a slight reason for
+going out to the Inlet with the creature; but you must remember that
+slight things are often big signboards in our business."
+
+He continued, his voice precise and even
+
+"We went directly from the end of the Boardwalk to the old shed; it was
+open, an unfastened door on a pair of leather hinges. The shed is small,
+about twenty feet by eleven, with a hard dirt floor packed down by the
+workmen who had used it; a combination of clay and sand like the Jersey
+roads put in to make a floor. All round it, from the sea to the board
+fence, was soft sand. There were some pieces of old junk lying about in
+the shed; but nothing of value or it would have been nailed up.
+
+"The hobo led right off with his deductions. There, was the track of a
+man, clearly outlined in the soft sand, leading from the board fence to
+the shed and returning, and no other track anywhere about.
+
+"'Now, Governor,' he began, when he had taken a look at the tracks, 'the
+man that made them tracks carried something into this shed, and he left
+it here, and it was something heavy.'
+
+"I was fairly certain that the hobo had salted the place for me, made
+the tracks himself; but I played out a line to him.
+
+"'How do you know that?' I said.
+
+"'Well, Governor,' he answered, 'take a look at them two lines of
+tracks. In the one comin' to the shed the man was walkin' with his feet
+apart and in the one goin' back he was walkin' with his feet in front of
+one another; that's because he was carryin' somethin' heavy when he come
+an' nothin' when he left.'
+
+"It was an observation on footprints," he went on, "that had never
+occurred to me. The hobo saw my awakened interest, and he added:
+
+"'Did you never notice a man carryin' a heavy load? He kind of totters,
+walkin' with his feet apart to keep his balance. That makes his foot
+tracks side by side like, instead of one before the other as he makes
+them when he's goin' light."'
+
+Walker interrupted his narrative with a comment:
+
+"It's the truth. I've verified it a thousand times since that hobo put
+me onto it. A line running through the center of the heel prints of a
+man carrying a heavy burden will be a zigzag, while one through the heel
+prints of the same man without the burden will be almost straight.
+
+"The tramp went right on with his deductions:
+
+"'If it come in and didn't go out, it's here.'
+
+"And he began to go over the inside of the shed. He searched it like a
+man searching a box for a jewel. He moved the pieces of old castings and
+he literally fingered the shed from end to end. He would have found a
+bird's egg.
+
+"Finally he stopped and stood with his hand spread out over his mouth.
+And I selected this critical moment to touch the powder off under his
+game.
+
+"'Suppose,' I said, 'that this man with the heavy load wished to mislead
+us; suppose that instead of bringing something here he took one of these
+old castings away?'
+
+"The hobo looked at me without changing his position.
+
+"'How could he, Governor; he was pointin' this way with the load?'
+
+"'By walking backward,' I said. For it occurred to me that perhaps the
+creature had manufactured this evidence for the occasion, and I wished
+to test the theory."
+
+Walker went on in his slow, even voice:
+
+"The test produced more action than I expected.
+
+"The hobo dived out through the door. I followed to see him disappear.
+But it was not in flight; he was squatting down over the footprints.
+And a moment later he rocked back on his haunches with a little exultant
+yelp.
+
+"'Dope's wrong, Governor,' he said; 'he was sure comin' this way.' Then
+he explained: 'If a man's walkin' forward in sand or mud or snow the toe
+of his shoe flirts out a little of it, an' if he's walkin' backward his
+heel flirts it out.'
+
+"At this point I began to have some respect for the creature's ability.
+He got up and came back into the shed. And there he stood, in his old
+position, with his fingers over his mouth, looking round at the empty
+shed, in which, as I have said, one could not have concealed a bird's
+egg.
+
+"I watched him without offering any suggestion, for my interest in the
+thing had awakened and I was curious to see what he would do. He stood
+perfectly motionless for about a minute; and then suddenly he snapped
+his fingers and the light came into his face.
+
+"'I got it, Governor!' Then he came over to where I stood. 'Gimme a
+quarter to git a bucket.'
+
+"I gave him the coin, for I was now profoundly puzzled, and he went out.
+He was gone perhaps twenty minutes, and when he came in he had a bucket
+of water. But he had evidently been thinking on the way, for he set the
+bucket down carefully, wiped his hands on his canvas breeches, and began
+to speak, with a little apologetic whimper in his voice.
+
+"'Now look here, Governor,' he said, 'I'm a-goin' to talk turkey; do I
+git the five thousand if I find this stuff?'
+
+"'Surely,' I answered him.
+
+"'An' there'll be no monkeyin', Governor; you'll take me down to a bank
+yourself an' put the money in my hand?'
+
+"'I promise you that,' I assured him.
+
+"But he was not entirely quiet in his mind about it. He shifted uneasily
+from one foot to the other, and his soft rubber nose worked.
+
+"'Now, Governor,' he said, 'I'm leery about jokers--I gotta be. I don't
+want any string to this money. If I git it I want to go and blow it
+in. I don't want you to hand me a roll an' then start any reformin'
+stunt--a-holdin' of it in trust an' a probation officer a-pussyfootin'
+me, or any funny business. I want the wad an' a clear road to the bright
+lights, with no word passed along to pinch me. Do I git it?'
+
+"'It's a trade!' I said.
+
+"'O. K.,' he answered, and he took up the bucket. He began at the door
+and poured the water carefully on the hard tramped earth. When the
+bucket was empty he brought another and another. Finally about midway of
+the floor space he stopped.
+
+"'Here it is!' he said.
+
+"I was following beside him, but I saw nothing to justify his words.
+
+"'Why do you think the plates are buried here?' I said.
+
+"'Look at the air bubbles comin' up, Governor,' he answered."
+
+Walker stopped, then he added:
+
+"It's a thing which I did not know until that moment, but it's the
+truth. If hard-packed earth is dug up and repacked air gets into it, and
+if one pours water on the place air bubbles will come up."
+
+He did not go on, and I flung at him the big query in his story.
+
+"And you found the plates there?"
+
+"Yes, Sir Henry," he replied, "in the false bottom of an old steamer
+trunk."
+
+"And the hobo got the money?"
+
+"Certainly," he answered. "I put it into his hand, and let him go with
+it, as I promised."
+
+Again he was silent, and I turned toward him in astonishment.
+
+"Then," I said, "why did you begin this story by saying the hobo faked
+you? I don't see the fake; he found the plates and he was entitled to
+the reward."
+
+Walker put his hand into his pocket, took out a leather case, selected
+a paper from among its contents and handed it to me. "I didn't see the
+fake either," he said, "until I got this letter."
+
+I unfolded the letter carefully. It was neatly written in a hand like
+copper plate and dated Buenos Aires.
+
+DEAR COLONEL WALKER: When I discovered that you were planting an agent
+on every ship I had to abandon the plates and try for the reward. Thank
+you for the five thousand; it covered expenses.
+
+Very sincerely yours,
+
+D. Mulehaus.
+
+
+
+
+III. The Lost Lady
+
+
+It was a remark of old Major Carrington that incited this adventure.
+
+"It is some distance through the wood--is she quite safe?"
+
+It was a mere reflection as he went out. It was very late. I do not know
+how the dinner, or rather the after-hours of it, had lengthened. It must
+have been the incomparable charm of the woman. She had come, this night,
+luminously, it seemed to us, through the haze that had been on her--the
+smoke haze of a strange, blighting fortune. The three of us had been
+carried along in it with no sense of time; my sister, the ancient Major
+Carrington and I.
+
+He turned back in the road, his decayed voice whipped by the stimulus of
+her into a higher note.
+
+"Suppose the village coachman should think her as lovely as we
+do--what!"
+
+He laughed and turned heavily up the road a hundred yards or so to his
+cottage set in the pine wood. I stood in the road watching the wheels
+of the absurd village vehicle, the yellow cut-under, disappear. The old
+Major called back to me; his voice seemed detached, eerie with the thin
+laugh in it.
+
+"I thought him a particularly villainous-looking creature!"
+
+It was an absurd remark. The man was one of the natives of the island,
+and besides, the innkeeper was a person of sound sense; he would know
+precisely about his driver.
+
+I should not have gone on this adventure but for a further incident.
+
+When I entered the house my sister was going up the stair, the butler
+was beyond in the drawing-room, and there was no other servant visible.
+She was on the first step and the elevation gave precisely the height
+that my sister ought to have received in the accident of birth. She
+would have been wonderful with those four inches added--lacking beauty,
+she had every other grace!
+
+She spoke to me as I approached.
+
+"Winthrop," she said, "what was in the package that Madame Barras
+carried away with her tonight?"
+
+The query very greatly surprised me. I thought Madame Barras had carried
+this package away with her several evenings before when I had put her
+English bank-notes in my box at the local bank. My sister added the
+explanation which I should have been embarrassed to seek, at the moment.
+
+"She asked me to put it somewhere, on Tuesday afternoon.... It was
+forgotten, I suppose.... I laid it in a drawer of the library table....
+What did it contain?"
+
+I managed an evasive reply, for the discovery opened possibilities that
+disturbed me.
+
+"Some certificates, I believe," I said.
+
+My sister made a little pretended gesture of dismay.
+
+"I should have been more careful; such things are of value."
+
+Of value indeed! The certificates in Madame Barras' package, that had
+lain about on the library table, were gold certificates of the United
+States Treasury--ninety odd of them, each of a value of one thousand
+dollars! My sister went:
+
+"How oddly life has tossed her about.... She must have been a mere
+infant at Miss Page's. The attachment of incoming tots to the older
+girls was a custom.... I do not recall her.... There was always a string
+of mites with shiny pigtails and big-eyed wistful faces. The older
+girls never thought very much about them. One has a swarm-memory,
+but individuals escape one. The older girl, in these schools, fancied
+herself immensely. The little satellite that attached itself, with its
+adoration, had no identity. It had a nickname, I think, or a number....
+I have forgotten. We minimized these midges out of everything that could
+distinguish them.... Fancy one of these turning up in Madame Barras and
+coming to me on the memory of it."
+
+"It was extremely lucky for her," I said. "Imagine arriving from the
+interior of Brazil on the invitation of Mrs. Jordan to find that lady
+dead and buried; with no friend, until, by chance, one happened on your
+name in the social register, and ventured on a school attachment of
+which there might remain, perhaps a memory only on the infant's side."
+
+My sister went on up the stair.
+
+"I am glad we happened to be here, and, especially, Winthrop, if you
+have been able to assist her.... She is charming."
+
+Charming was the word descriptive of my sister, for it is a thing of
+manner from a nature elevated and noble, but it was not the word for
+Madame Barras. The woman was a lure. I mean the term in its large and
+catholic sense. I mean the bait of a great cosmic impulse--the most
+subtle and the most persistent of which one has any sense.
+
+The cunning intelligences of that impulse had decked her out with
+every attractiveness as though they had taken thought to confound all
+masculine resistance; to sweep into their service those refractory units
+that withheld themselves from the common purpose. She was lovely, as the
+aged Major Carrington had uttered it--great violet eyes in a delicate
+skin sown with gold flecks, a skin so delicate that one felt that a kiss
+would tear it!
+
+I do not know from what source I have that expression but it attaches
+itself, out of my memory of descriptive phrases, to Madame Barras. And
+it extends itself as wholly descriptive of her. You will say that the
+long and short of this is that I was in love with Madame Barras, but I
+point you a witness in Major Carrington.
+
+He had the same impressions, and he had but one passion in his life, a
+distant worship of my sister that burned steadily even here at the
+end of life. During the few evenings that Madame Barras had been in
+to dinner with us, he sat in his chair beyond my sister in the
+drawing-room, perfect in his early-Victorian manner, while Madame Barras
+and I walked on the great terrace, or sat outside.
+
+One had a magnificent sweep of the world, at night, from that terrace.
+It looked out over the forest of pines to the open sea.
+
+Madame Barras confessed to the pull of this vista. She asked me at what
+direction the Atlantic entered, and when she knew, she kept it always in
+her sight.
+
+It had a persisting fascination for her. At all times and in nearly any
+position, she was somehow sensible of this vista; she knew the lights
+almost immediately, and the common small craft blinking about. To-night
+she had sat for a long time in nearly utter silence here. There was a
+faint light on the open sea as she got up to take her leave of us; what
+would it be she wondered.
+
+I replied that it was some small craft coming in.
+
+"A fishing-boat?"
+
+"Hardly that," I said, "from its lights and position it will be some
+swifter power-boat and, I should say, not precisely certain about the
+channel."
+
+I have been drawn here into reminiscence that did not, at the time,
+detain me in the hall. What my sister had discovered to me, following
+Major Carrington's remark, left me distinctly uneasy. It was very nearly
+two miles to the village, the road was wholly forest and there would be
+no house on the way; for my father, with an utter disregard for cost,
+had sought the seclusion of a large acreage when he had built this
+absurdly elaborate villa on Mount Desert Island.
+
+Besides I was in no mood for sleep.
+
+And, over all probability, there might be some not entirely imaginary
+danger to Madame Barras. Not precisely the danger presented in Major
+Carrington's pleasantry, but the always possible danger to one who is
+carrying a sum of money about. It would be considered, in the world of
+criminal activities, a very large sum of money; and it had been lying
+here, as of no value, in a drawer of the library table since the day
+on which the gold certificates had arrived on my check from the Boston
+bank.
+
+Madame Barras had not taken the currency away as I imagined. It was
+extremely careless of her, but was it not an act in character?
+
+What would such a woman know of practical concern?
+
+I spoke to the butler. He should not wait up, I would let myself in; and
+I went out.
+
+I remember that I got a cap and a stick out of the rack; there was no
+element of selection in the cap, but there was a decided subconscious
+direction about the selection of the stick. It was a heavy blackthorn,
+with an iron ferrule and a silver weight set in the head; picked up--by
+my father at some Irish fair--a weapon in fact.
+
+It was not dark. It was one of those clear hard nights that are not
+uncommon on this island in midsummer; with a full moon, the road
+was visible even in the wood. I swung along it with no particular
+precaution; I was not expecting anything to happen, and in fact, nothing
+did happen on the way into the village.
+
+But in this attitude of confidence I failed to discover an event of this
+night that might have given the whole adventure a different ending.
+
+There is a point near the village where a road enters our private one;
+skirts the border of the mountain, and, making a great turn, enters the
+village from the south. At this division of the road I heard distinctly
+a sound in the wood.
+
+It was not a sound to incite inquiry. It was the sound of some
+considerable animal moving in the leaves, a few steps beyond the road.
+It did not impress me at the time; estrays were constantly at large in
+our forests in summer, and not infrequently a roaming buck from the
+near preserves. There was also here in addition to the other roads,
+an abandoned winter wood-road that ran westward across the island to
+a small farming settlement. Doubtless I took a slighter notice of the
+sound because estrays from the farmers' fields usually trespassed on us
+from this road.
+
+At any rate I went on. I fear that I was very much engrossed with the
+memory of Madame Barras. Not wholly with the feminine lure of her,
+although as I have written she was the perfection of that lure. One
+passed women, at all milestones, on the way to age, and kept before
+them one's sound estimates of life, but before this woman one lost one's
+head, as though Nature, evaded heretofore, would not be denied. But the
+weird fortune that had attended her was in my mind.
+
+Married to Senor Barras out of the door of a convent, carried to Rio
+de Janeiro to an unbearable life, escaping with a remnant of her
+inheritance in English bank-notes, she arrives here to visit the one,
+old, persisting friend, Mrs. Jordan, and finds her dead! And what seemed
+strange, incredible beyond belief, was that this creature Barras had
+thought only of her fortune which he had depleted in two years to the
+something less than twenty thousand pounds which I had exchanged for her
+into our money; a mere fragment of her great inheritance.
+
+I had listened to the story entranced with the alluring teller of it;
+wondering as I now wondered, on the road to the village, how anything
+pretending to be man could think of money when she was before his eye.
+
+What could he buy with money that equaled her! And yet this curious
+jackal had seen in her only the key to a strong-box. There was behind
+it, in explanation, shadowed out, the glamor of an empire that Senor
+Barras would set up with the millions in his country of revolutions, and
+the enthusiasms of a foolish mother.
+
+And yet the jackal and this wreckage had not touched her. There was no
+stain, no crumpled leaf. She was a fresh wonder, even after this, out of
+a chrysalis. It was this amazing newness, this virginity of blossom from
+which one could not escape.
+
+The word in my reflection brought me up. How had she escaped from
+Barras?
+
+I had more than once in my reflections pivoted on the word.
+
+The great hotel was very nearly deserted when I entered.
+
+There was the glow of a cigar where some one smoked, at the end of the
+long porch. Within, there was only a sleepy clerk.
+
+Madame Barras had not arrived... he was quite sure; she had gone out to
+dinner somewhere and had not come in!
+
+I was profoundly concerned. But I took a moment to reflect before
+deciding what to do.
+
+I stepped outside and there, coming up from the shadow of the porch, I
+met Sir Henry Marquis.
+
+It was chance at its extreme of favor. If I had been given the
+selection, in all the world, I should have asked for Sir Henry Marquis
+at that decisive moment.
+
+The relief I felt made my words extravagant.
+
+"Marquis!" I cried. "You here!"
+
+"Ah, Winthrop," he said, in his drawling Oxford voice, "what have you
+done with Madame Barras; I was waiting for her?"
+
+I told him, in a word, how she had set out from my house--my
+concern--the walk down here and this result. I did not ask him at the
+moment how he happened to be here, or with a knowledge of our guest.
+I thought that Marquis was in Canada. But one does not, with success,
+inquire of a C.I.D. official even in his own country. One met him in the
+most unexpected places, unconcerned, and one would have said at leisure.
+
+But he was concerned to-night. What I told brought him up. He stood for
+a moment silent. Then he said, softly, in order drat the clerk behind us
+might not overhear.
+
+"Don't speak of it. I will get a light and go with you!"
+
+He returned in a moment and we went out. He asked me about the road, was
+there only one way down; and I told him precisely. There was only the
+one road into the village and no way to miss it unless one turned into
+the public road at the point where it entered our private one along the
+mountain.
+
+He pitched at once upon this point and we hurried back.
+
+We had hardly a further word on the way. I was decidedly uneasy about
+Madame Barras by now, and Marquis' concern was hardly less evident. He
+raced along in his immense stride, and I had all I could manage to keep
+up.
+
+It may seem strange that I should have brought such a man as Sir Henry
+Marquis into the search of this adventure with so little explanation
+of my guest or the affair. But, one must remember, Marquis was an old
+acquaintance frequently seen about in the world. To thus, on the spot
+so to speak, draft into my service the first gentleman I found, was
+precisely what any one would have done. It was probable, after all, that
+there had been some reason why the cut-under had taken the other road,
+and Madame Barras was quite all right.
+
+It was better to make sure before one raised the village--and Marquis,
+markedly, was beyond any aid the village could have furnished. This
+course was strikingly justified by every after-event.
+
+I have said that the night was not dark. The sky was hard with stars,
+like a mosaic. This white moonlight entered through the tree-tops and
+in a measure illumined the road. We were easily able to see, when we
+reached the point, that the cut-under had turned out into the road
+circling the mountain to the west of the village. The track was so
+clearly visible in the light, that I must have observed it had I been
+thinking of the road instead of the one who had set out upon it.
+
+I was going on quickly, when Marquis stopped. He was stooping over the
+track of the vehicle. He did not come on and I went back.
+
+"What is it?" I said.
+
+He answered, still stooping above the track.
+
+"The cut-under stopped here."
+
+"How do you know that?" I asked, for it seemed hardly possible to
+determine where a wheeled vehicle had stopped.
+
+"It's quite clear," he replied. "The horse has moved about without going
+on."
+
+I now saw it. The hoof-marks of the horse had displaced the dust where
+it had several times changed position.
+
+"And that's not all," Marquis continued. "Something has happened to the
+cut-under here!"
+
+I was now closely beside him.
+
+"It was broken down, perhaps, or some accident to the harness?"
+
+"No," he replied. "The wheel tracks are here broadened, as though they
+had skidded on a turn. This would mean little if the cut-under had been
+moving at the time. But it was not moving; the horse was standing. The
+cut-under had stopped."
+
+He went on as though in a reflection to himself.
+
+"The vehicle must have been violently thrown about here, by something."
+
+I had a sudden inspiration.
+
+"I see it!" I cried. "The horse took fright, stopped, and then bolted;
+there has been a run-away. That accounts for the turn out. Let's hurry!"
+
+But Marquis detained me with a firm hand on my arm.
+
+"No," he said, "the horse was not running when it turned out and it did
+not stop here in fright. The horse was entirely quiet here. The hoof
+marks would show any alarm in the animal, and, moreover, if it had
+stopped in fright there would have been an inevitable recoil which would
+have thrown the wheels of the vehicle backward out of their track. No
+moving animal, man included, stopped by fright fails to register
+this recoil. We always look for it in evidences of violent assault.
+Footprints invariably show it, and one learns thereby, unerringly, the
+direction of the attack."
+
+He rose, his hand still extended and upon my arm.
+
+"There is only one possible explanation," he added. "Something happened
+in the cut-under to throw it violently about in the road, and it
+happened with the horse undisturbed and the vehicle standing still. The
+wheel tracks are widened only at one point, showing a transverse but no
+lateral movement of the vehicle."
+
+"A struggle?" I cried. "Major Carrington was right, Madame Barras has
+been attacked by the driver!"
+
+Marquis' hand held me firmly in the excitement of that realization.
+He was entirely composed. There was even a drawl in his voice as he
+answered me.
+
+"Major Carrington, whoever he may be," he said, "is wrong; if we exclude
+a third party, it was Madame Barras who attacked the driver."
+
+His fingers tightened under my obvious protest.
+
+"It is quite certain," he continued. "Taking the position of the
+standing horse, it will be the front wheels of the cut-under that have
+made, this widened track; the wheels under the driver's seat, and not
+the wheels under the guest seat, in the rear of the vehicle. There has
+been a violent struggle in this cut-under, but it was a struggle that
+took place wholly in the front of the vehicle."
+
+He went on in his maddeningly imperturbable calm.
+
+"No one attacked our guest, but some one, here at this precise point,
+did attack the driver of this vehicle."
+
+"For God's sake," I cried, "let's hurry!"
+
+He stepped back slowly to the edge of the road and the drawl in his
+voice lengthened.
+
+"We do hurry," he said. "We hurry to the value of knowing that there was
+no accident here to the harness, no fright to the horse, no attack on
+the lady, and no change in the direction which the vehicle afterwards
+took. Suppose we had gone on, in a different form of hurry, ignorant of
+these facts?"
+
+At this point I distinctly heard again the sound of a heavy animal in
+the wood. Marquis also heard it and he plunged into the thick bushes.
+Almost immediately we were at the spot, and before us some heavy object
+turned in the leaves.
+
+Marquis whipped an electric-flash out of his pocket. The body of a man,
+tied at the hands and heels behind with a hitching-strap, and with a
+linen carriage lap-cloth wound around his head and knotted, lay there
+endeavoring to ease the rigor of his position by some movement.
+
+We should now know, in a moment, what desperate thing had happened!
+
+I cut the strap, while Marquis got the lap-cloth unwound from about the
+man's head. It was the driver of the cut-under. But we got no gain from
+his discovery. As soon as his face was clear, he tore out of our grasp
+and began to run.
+
+He took the old road to the westward of the island, where perhaps he
+lived. We were wholly unable to stop him, and we got no reply to our
+shouted queries except his wild cry for help. He considered us his
+assailants from whom, by chance, he had escaped. It was folly to think
+of coming up with the man. He was set desperately for the westward of
+the island, and he would never stop until he reached it.
+
+We turned back into the road:
+
+Marquis' method now changed. He turned swiftly into the road along the
+mountain which the cut-under had taken after its capture.
+
+I was at the extreme of a deadly anxiety about Madame Barras.
+
+It seemed to me, now, certain that some gang of criminals having
+knowledge of the packet of money had waylaid the cut-under. Proud of my
+conclusion, I put the inquiry to Sir Henry as we hurried along. If we
+weren't too late!
+
+He stopped suddenly like a man brought up at the point of a bayonet.
+
+"My word!" He jerked the expression out through his tightened jaws. "Has
+she got ninety thousand dollars of your money!" And he set out again in
+his long stride. I explained briefly as I endeavored to keep his pace.
+It was her own money, not mine, but she did in fact have that large sum
+with her in the cut-under on this night. I gave him the story of the
+matter, briefly, for I had no breath to spare over it. And I asked him
+what he thought. Had a gang of thieves attacked the cut-under?
+
+But he only repeated his expression.
+
+"My word!... You got her ninety thousand dollars and let her drive
+away with no eye on her!.... Such trust in the honesty of our fellow
+creatures!... My word!"
+
+I had to admit the deplorable negligence, but I had not thought of any
+peril, and I did not know that she carried the money with her until the
+conversation with my sister. There was some excuse for me. I could not
+remember a robbery on this island.
+
+Marquis snapped his jaws.
+
+"You'll remember this one!" he said.
+
+It was a ridiculous remark. How could one ever forget if this
+incomparable creature were robbed and perhaps murdered. But were there
+not some extenuating circumstances in my favor. I presented them as we
+advanced; my sister and I lived in a rather protected atmosphere apart
+from all criminal activities, we could not foresee such a result. I had
+no knowledge of criminal methods.
+
+"I can well believe it," was the only reply Marquis returned to me.
+
+In addition to my extreme anxiety about Madame Barras I began now to
+realize a profound sense of responsibility; every one, it seemed, saw
+what I ought to have done, except myself. How had I managed to overlook
+it? It was clear to other men. Major Carrington had pointed it out to me
+as I was turning away; and now here Sir Henry Marquis was expressing in
+no uncertain words how negligent a creature he considered me--to permit
+my guest, a woman, to go alone, at night, with this large sum of money.
+
+It was not a pleasant retrospect. Other men--the world--would scarcely
+hold me to a lesser negligence than Sir Henry Marquis!
+
+I could not forbear, even in our haste, to seek some consolation.
+
+"Do you think Madame Barras has been hurt?"
+
+"Hurt!" he repeated. "How should Madame Barras be hurt?"
+
+"In the robbery," I said.
+
+"Robbery!" and he repeated that word. "There has been no robbery!"
+
+I replied in some astonishment.
+
+"Really, Sir Henry! You but now assured me that I would remember this
+night's robbery."
+
+The drawl got back into his voice.
+
+"Ah, yes," he said, "quite so. You will remember it."
+
+The man was clearly, it seemed to me, so engrossed with the mystery
+that it was idle to interrogate him. And he was walking with a devil's
+stride.
+
+Still the pointed query of the affair pressed me, and I made another
+effort.
+
+"Why did these assailants take Madame Barras on with them?"
+
+Marquis regarded me, I thought, with wonder.
+
+"The devil, man!" he said. "They couldn't leave her behind."
+
+"The danger would be too great to them?"
+
+"No," he said, "the danger would be too great to her."
+
+At this moment an object before us in the road diverted our attention.
+It was the cut-under and the horse. They were standing by the roadside
+where it makes a great turn to enter the village from the south. There
+is a wide border to the road at this point, clear of underbrush, where
+the forest edges it, and there are here, at the whim of some one, or by
+chance, two great flat stones, one lying upon the other, but not fitting
+by a hand's thickness by reason of the uneven surfaces.
+
+What had now happened was evident. The assailants of the cut-under
+had abandoned it here before entering the village. They could not, of
+course, go on with this incriminating vehicle.
+
+The sight of the cut-under here had on Marquis the usual effect of any
+important evidential sign. He at once ceased to hurry. He pulled up;
+looked over the cut-under and the horse, and began to saunter about.
+
+This careless manner was difficult for me at such a time. But for
+his assurance that Madame Barras, was uninjured it would have been
+impossible. I had a blind confidence in the man although his expressions
+were so absurdly in conflict.
+
+I started to go on toward the village, but as he did not follow I turned
+back. Marquis was sitting on the flat stones with a cigarette in his
+fingers:
+
+"Good heavens, man," I cried, "you're not stopping to smoke a
+cigarette?"
+
+"Not this cigarette, at any rate," he replied. "Madame Barras has
+already smoked it.... I can, perhaps, find you the burnt match."
+
+He got the electric-flash out of his pocket, and stooped over.
+Immediately he made an exclamation of surprise.
+
+I leaned down beside him.
+
+There was a little heap of charred paper on the brown bed of
+pine-needles. Marquis was about to take up this charred paper when his
+eye caught something thrust in between the two stones. It was a handful
+of torn bits of paper.
+
+Marquis got them out and laid them on the top of the flat stones under
+his light.
+
+"Ah," he said, "Madame Barras, while she smoked, got rid of some money."
+
+"The package of gold certificates!" I cried. "She has burned them?"
+
+"No," he replied, "Madame Barras has favored your Treasury in her
+destructive process. These are five-pound notes, of the Bank of
+England."
+
+I was astonished and I expressed it.
+
+"But why should Madame Barras destroy notes of the Bank of England?"
+
+"I imagine," he answered, "that they were some which she had, by chance,
+failed to give you for exchange."
+
+"But why should she destroy them?" I went on.
+
+"I conclude," he drawled, "that she was not wholly certain that she
+would escape."
+
+"Escape!" I cried. "You have been assuring me all along that Madame
+Barras is making no effort to escape."
+
+"Oh, no," he replied, "she is making every effort."
+
+I was annoyed and puzzled.
+
+"What is it," I said, "precisely, that Madame Barras did here; can you
+tell me in plain words?"
+
+"Surely," he replied, "she sat here while something was decided, and
+while she sat here she smoked the cigarette, and while she smoked the
+cigarette, she destroyed the money. But," he added, "before she had
+quite finished, a decision was made and she hastily thrust the remaining
+bits of the torn notes into the crevice between these stones."
+
+"What decision?" I said.
+
+Marquis gathered up the bits of torn paper and put them into his pocket
+with the switched-off flash.
+
+"I wish I knew that," he said.
+
+"Knew what?"
+
+"Which path they have taken," he replied; "there seem to be two
+branching from this point, but they pass over a bed of pine-needles and
+that retains no impression.... Where do these paths lead?"
+
+I did not know that any paths came into the road at this point. But the
+island is veined over with old paths. The lead of paths here, however,
+was fairly evident.
+
+"They must come out somewhere on the sea," I said.
+
+"Right," he cried. "Take either, and let's be off... Madame's cigarette
+was not quite cold when I picked it up."
+
+I was right about the direction of the paths but, as it happened, the
+one Marquis took was nearly double the distance of the other to the sea;
+and I have wondered always, if it was chance that selected the one taken
+by the assailants of the cut-under as it was chance that selected the
+one taken by us.
+
+Marquis was instantly gone, and I hurried along the path, running
+nearly due east. There was light enough entering from the brilliant moon
+through the tree-tops to make out the abandoned trail.
+
+And as I hurried, Marquis' contradicting expressions seemed to adjust
+themselves into a sort of order, and all at once I understood what had
+happened. The Brazilian adventurer had not taken the loss of his wife
+and the fortune in English pounds sterling, lying down. He had followed
+to recover them.
+
+I now saw clearly the reason for everything that had happened: the
+attack on the driver, and my guest's concern to get rid of the English
+money which she discovered remaining in her possession; this man would
+have no knowledge of her gold certificates but he would be searching
+for his English pounds. And if she came clear of any trace of these
+five-pound notes, she might disclaim all knowledge of them and perhaps
+send him elsewhere on his search, since it was always the money and not
+the woman that he sought.
+
+This explanation was hardly realized before it was confirmed.
+
+I came out abruptly onto a slope of bracken, and before me at a few
+paces on the path were Madame Barras and two men; one at some distance
+in advance of her, disappearing at the moment behind a spur of the
+slope that hid us from the sea, and I got no conception of him; but the
+creature at her heels was a huge foreign beast of a man, in the dress of
+a common sailor.
+
+What happened was over in a moment.
+
+I was nearly on the man when I turned out of the wood, and with a shout
+to Madame Barras I struck at him with the heavy walking-stick. But the
+creature was not to be taken unaware; he darted to one side, wrenched
+the stick out of my hand, and dashed its heavy-weighted head into
+my face. I went down in the bracken, but I carried with me into
+unconsciousness a vision of Madame Barras that no shadow of the
+lengthening years can blur.
+
+She had swung round sharply at the attack behind her, and she stood
+bare-haired and bare-shouldered, knee-deep in the golden bracken, with
+the glory of the moon on her; her arms hanging, her lips parted, her
+great eyes wide with terror--as lovely in her desperate extremity as a
+dream, as, a painted picture. I don't know how long I was down there,
+but when I finally got up, and, following along the path behind the spur
+of rock, came out onto the open sea, I found Sir Henry Marquis. He was
+standing with his hands in the pockets of his loose tweed coat, and he
+was cursing softly:
+
+"The ferry and the mainland are patroled... I didn't think of their
+having an ocean-going yacht...."
+
+A gleam of light was disappearing into the open sea.
+
+He put his hand into his pocket and took out the scraps of torn paper.
+
+"These notes," he said, "like the ones which you hold in your
+bank-vault, were never issued by the Bank of England."
+
+I stammered some incoherent sentence; and the great chief of the
+Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard turned toward me.
+
+"Do you know who that woman is?"
+
+"Surely," I cried, "she went to school with my sister at Miss Page's;
+she came to visit Mrs. Jordan...."
+
+He looked at me steadily.
+
+"She got the data about your sister out of the Back Bay biographies and
+she used the accident of Mrs. Jordan's death to get in with it... the
+rest was all fiction."
+
+"Madame Barras?" I stuttered. "You mean Madame Barras?"
+
+"Madame the Devil," he said. "That's Sunny Suzanne. Used to be in the
+Hungarian Follies until the Soviet government of Austria picked her up
+to place the imitation English money that its presses were striking off
+in Vienna."
+
+
+
+
+IV. The Cambered Foot
+
+
+I shall not pretend that I knew the man in America or that he was a
+friend of my family or that some one had written to me about him. The
+plain truth is that I never laid eyes on him until Sir Henry Marquis
+pointed him out to me the day after I went down from here to London. It
+was in Piccadilly Circus.
+
+"There's your American," said Sir Henry.
+
+The girl paused for a few moments. There was profound silence.
+
+"And that isn't all of it. Nobody presented him to me. I deliberately
+picked him up!"
+
+Three persons were in the drawing-room. An old woman with high
+cheekbones, a bowed nose and a firm, thin-lipped mouth was the central
+figure. She sat very straight in her chair, her head up and her hands in
+her lap. An aged man, in the khaki uniform of a major of yeomanry, stood
+at a window looking out, his hands behind his back, his chin lifted as
+though he were endeavoring to see something far away over the English
+country--something beyond the little groups of Highland cattle and the
+great oak trees.
+
+Beside the old woman, on a dark wood frame, there was a fire screen made
+of the pennant of a Highland regiment. Beyond her was a table with
+a glass top. Under this cover, in a sort of drawer lined with purple
+velvet, there were medals, trophies and decorations visible below
+the sheet of glass. And on the table, in a heavy metal frame, was
+the portrait of a young man in the uniform of a captain of Highland
+infantry.
+
+The girl who had been speaking sat in a big armchair by this table.
+One knew instantly that she was an American. The liberty of manner,
+the independence of expression, could not be mistaken in a country of
+established forms. She had abundant brown hair skillfully arranged under
+a smart French hat. Her eyes were blue; not the blue of any painted
+color; it was the blue of remote spaces in the tropic sky.
+
+The old woman spoke without looking at the girl.
+
+"Then," she said, "it's all quite as"--she hesitated for a
+word--"extraordinary as we have been led to believe."
+
+There was the slow accent of Southern blood in the girl's voice as she
+went on.
+
+"Lady Mary," she said, "it's all far more extraordinary than you have
+been led to believe--than any one could ever have led you to believe. I
+deliberately picked the man up. I waited for him outside the Savoy, and
+pretended to be uncertain about an address. He volunteered to take me in
+his motor and I went with him. I told him I was alone in London, at the
+Ritz. It was Blackwell's bank I pretended to be looking for. Then we had
+tea."
+
+The girl paused.
+
+Presently she continued: "That's how it began: You're mistaken to
+imagine that Sir Henry Marquis presented me to this American. It was the
+other way about; I presented Sir Henry. I had the run of the Ritz," she
+went on. "We all do if we scatter money. Sir Henry came in to tea the
+next afternoon. That's how he met Mr. Meadows. And that's the only place
+he ever did meet him. Mr. Meadows came every day, and Sir Henry formed
+the habit of dropping in. We got to be a very friendly party."
+
+The motionless old woman, a figure in plaster until now, kneaded her
+fingers as under some moving pressure. "At this time," she said, "you
+were engaged to Tony and expected to be his wife!"
+
+The girl's voice did not change. It was slow and even. "Yes," she said.
+
+"Tony, of course, knew nothing about this?"
+
+"He knows nothing whatever about it unless you have written him."
+
+Again the old woman moved slightly. "I have waited," she said, "for the
+benefit of your explanation. It seems as--as bad as I feared."
+
+"Lady Mary," said the girl in her slow voice, "it's worse than you
+feared. I don't undertake to smooth it over. Everything that you have
+heard is quite true. I did go out with the man in his motor, in the
+evening. Sometimes it was quite dark before we returned. Mr. Meadows
+preferred to drive at night because he was not accustomed to the English
+rule of taking the left on the road, when one always takes the right in
+America. He was afraid he couldn't remember the rule, so it was safer at
+night and there was less traffic.
+
+"I shall not try to make the thing appear better than it was. We
+sometimes took long runs. Mr. Meadows liked the high roads along the
+east coast, where one got a view of the sea and the cold salt air. We
+ran prodigious distances. He had the finest motor in England, the very
+latest American model. I didn't think so much about night coming on, the
+lights on the car were so wonderful. Mr. Meadows was an amazing driver.
+We made express-train time. The roads were usually clear at night and
+the motor was a perfect wonder. The only trouble we ever had was with
+the lights. Sometimes one, of them would go out. I think it was bad
+wiring. But there was always the sweep of the sea under the stars to
+look at while Mr. Meadows got the thing adjusted."
+
+This long, detailed, shameless speech affected the aged soldier at the
+window. It seemed to him immodest bravado. And he suffered in his heart,
+as a man old and full of memories can suffer for the damaged honor of a
+son he loves.
+
+Continuing, the girl said: "Of course it isn't true that we spent
+the nights touring the east coast of England in a racer. It was
+dark sometimes when we got in--occasionally after trouble with the
+lights--quite dark. We did go thundering distances."
+
+"With this person, alone?" The old woman spoke slowly, like one
+delicately probing at a wound.
+
+"Yes," the girl admitted. "You see, the car was a roadster; only two
+could go; and, besides, there was no one else. Mr. Meadows said he was
+alone in London, and of course I was alone. When Sir Henry asked me to
+go down from here I went straight off to the Ritz."
+
+The old woman made a slight, shivering gesture. "You should have gone to
+my sister in Grosvenor Square. Monte would have put you up--and looked
+after you."
+
+"The Ritz put me up very well," the girl continued. "And I am accustomed
+to looking after myself. Sir Henry thought it was quite all right."
+
+The old woman spoke suddenly with energy and directness. "I don't
+understand Henry in the least," she said. "I was quite willing for you
+to go to London when he asked me for permission. But I thought he would
+take you to Monte's, and certainly I had the right to believe that he
+would not have lent himself to--to this escapade."
+
+"He seemed to be very nice about it," the girl went on. "He came in to
+tea with us--Mr. Meadows and me--almost every evening. And he always
+had something amusing to relate, some blunder of Scotland Yard or some
+ripping mystery. I think he found it immense fun to be Chief of the
+Criminal Investigation Department. I loved the talk: Mr. Meadows was
+always interested and Sir Henry likes people to be interested."
+
+The old woman continued to regard the girl as one hesitatingly touches
+an exquisite creature frightfully mangled.
+
+"This person--was he a gentleman?" she inquired. The girl answered
+immediately. "I thought about that a good deal," she said. "He had
+perfect manners, quite Continental manners; but, as you say over here,
+Americans are so imitative one never can tell. He was not young--near
+fifty, I would say; very well dressed. He was from St. Paul; a London
+agent for some flouring mills in the Northwest. I don't know precisely.
+He explained it all to Sir Henry. I think he would have been glad of
+a little influence--some way to meet the purchasing agents for the
+government. He seemed to have the American notion that he could come to
+London and go ahead without knowing anybody. Anyway, he was immensely
+interesting--and he had a ripping motor."
+
+The old man at the window did not move. He remained looking out over the
+English country with his big, veined hands clasped behind his back. He
+had left this interview to Lady Mary, as he had left most of the crucial
+affairs of life to her dominant nature. But the thing touched him far
+deeper than it touched the aged dowager. He had a man's faith in the
+fidelity of a loved woman.
+
+He knew how his son, somewhere in France, trusted this girl, believed
+in her, as long ago in a like youth he had believed in another. He knew
+also how the charm of the girl was in the young soldier's blood, and
+how potent were these inscrutable mysteries. Every man who loved a
+woman wished to believe that she came to him out of the garden of a
+convent--out of a roc's egg, like the princess in the Arabian story.
+
+All these things he had experienced in himself, in a shattered romance,
+in a disillusioned youth, when he was young like the lad somewhere in
+France. Lady Mary would see only broken conventions; but he saw immortal
+things, infinitely beyond conventions, awfully broken. He did not move.
+He remained like a painted picture.
+
+The girl went on in her soft, slow voice. "You would have disliked Mr.
+Meadows, Lady Mary," she said. "You would dislike any American who came
+without letters and could not be precisely placed." The girl's voice
+grew suddenly firmer. "I don't mean to make it appear better," she said.
+"The worst would be nearer the truth. He was just an unknown American
+bagman, with a motor car, and a lot of time on his hands--and I picked
+him up. But Sir Henry Marquis took a fancy to him."
+
+"I cannot understand Henry," the old woman repeated. "It's
+extraordinary."
+
+"It doesn't seem extraordinary to me," said the girl. "Mr. Meadows was
+immensely clever, and Sir Henry was like a man with a new toy. The Home
+Secretary had just put him in as Chief of the Criminal Investigation
+Department. He was full of a lot of new ideas--dactyloscopic bureaus,
+photographie mitrique, and scientific methods of crime detection. He
+talked about it all the time. I didn't understand half the talk. But
+Mr. Meadows was very clever. Sir Henry said he was a charming person.
+Anybody who could discuss the whorls of the Galton finger-print tests
+was just then a charming person to Sir Henry."
+
+The girl paused a moment, then she went on
+
+"I suppose things had gone so for about a fortnight when your sister,
+Lady Monteith, wrote that she had seen Sir Henry with us--Mr. Meadows
+and me--in the motor. I have to shatter a pleasant fancy about that
+chaperonage! That was the only time Sir Henry was ever with us.
+
+"It came about like this: It was Thursday morning about nine o'clock,
+I think, when Sir Henry, popped in at the Ritz. He was full of some
+amazing mystery that had turned up at Benton Court, a country house
+belonging to the Duke of Dorset, up the Thames beyond Richmond. He
+wanted to go there at once. He was fuming because an under secretary had
+his motor, and he couldn't catch up with him.
+
+"I told him he could have 'our' motor. He laughed. And I telephoned Mr.
+Meadows to come over and take him up. Sir Henry asked me to go along.
+So that's how Lady Monteith happened to see the three of us crowded into
+the seat of the big roadster."
+
+The girl went on in her deliberate, even voice
+
+"Sir Henry was boiling full of the mystery. He got us all excited by the
+time we arrived at Benton Court. I think Mr. Meadows was as keen about
+the thing as Sir Henry. They were both immensely worked up. It was an
+amazing thing!"
+
+"You see, Benton Court is a little house of the Georgian period. It
+has been closed up for ages, and now, all at once, the most mysterious
+things began to happen in it.
+
+"A local inspector, a very reliable man named Millson, passing that way
+on his bicycle, saw a man lying on the doorstep. He also saw some one
+running away. It was early in the morning, just before daybreak.
+
+"Millson saw only the man's back, but he could distinguish the color
+of his clothes. He was wearing a blue coat and reddish-brown trousers.
+Millson said he could hardly make out the blue coat in the darkness, but
+he could distinctly see the reddish brown color of the man's trousers.
+He was very positive about this. Mr. Meadows and Sir Henry pressed him
+pretty hard, but he was firm about it. He could make out that the
+coat was blue, and he could see very distinctly that the trousers were
+reddish-brown.
+
+"But the extraordinary thing came a little later. Millson hurried to a
+telephone to get Scotland Yard, then he returned to Benton Court; but
+when he got back the dead man had disappeared.
+
+"He insists that he was not away beyond five minutes, but within that
+time the dead man had vanished. Millson could find no trace of him.
+That's the mystery that sent us tearing up there with Mr. Meadows and
+Sir Henry transformed into eager sleuths.
+
+"We found the approaches to the house under a patrol from Scotland Yard.
+But nobody had gone in. The inspector was waiting for Sir Henry."
+
+The old man stood like an image, and the aged woman sat in her chair
+like a figure in basalt.
+
+But the girl ran on with a sort of eager unconcern: "Sir Henry and Mr.
+Meadows took the whole thing in charge. The door had been broken open.
+They examined the marks about the fractures very carefully; then they
+went inside. There were some naked footprints. They were small, as of a
+little, cramped foot, and they seemed to be tracked in blood on the hard
+oak floor. There was a wax candle partly burned on the table. And that's
+all there was.
+
+"There were some tracks in the dust of the floor, but they were not very
+clearly outlined, and Sir Henry thought nothing could be made of them.
+
+"It was awfully exciting. I went about behind the two men. Sir Henry
+talked all the time. Mr. Meadows was quite as much interested, but he
+didn't say anything. He seemed to say less as the thing went on.
+
+"They went over everything--the ground outside and every inch of the
+house. Then they put everybody out and sat down by a table in the room
+where the footprints were.
+
+"Sir Henry had been awfully careful. He had a big lens with which to
+examine the marks of the bloody footprints. He was like a man on the
+trail of a buried treasure. He shouted over everything, thrust his glass
+into Mr. Meadows' hand and bade him verify what he had seen. His ardor
+was infectious. I caught it myself.
+
+"Mr. Meadows, in his quiet manner, was just as much concerned in
+unraveling the thing as Sir Henry. I never had so wild a time in all
+my life. Finally, when Sir Henry put everybody else out and closed the
+door, and the three of us sat down at the table to try to untangle the
+thing, I very nearly screamed with excitement. Mr. Meadows sat with
+his arms folded, not saying a word; but Sir Henry went ahead with his
+explanation."
+
+The girl looked like a vivid portrait, the soft colors of her gown and
+all the cool, vivid extravagancies of youth distinguished in her. Her
+words indicated fervor and excited energy; but they were not evidenced
+in her face or manner. She was cool and lovely. One would have thought
+that she recounted the inanities of a curate's tea party.
+
+The aged man, in the khaki uniform of a major of yeomanry, remained in
+his position at the window. The old woman sat with her implacable face,
+unchanging like a thing insensible and inorganic.
+
+This unsympathetic aspect about the girl did not seem to disturb her.
+She went on:
+
+"The thing was thrilling. It was better than any theater--the three of
+us at the old mahogany table in the room, and the Scotland Yard patrol
+outside.
+
+"Sir Henry was bubbling over with his theory. 'I read this riddle like a
+printed page,' he said. 'It will be the work of a little band of expert
+cracksmen that the Continent has kindly sent us. We have had some
+samples of their work in Brompton Road. They are professional crooks
+of a high order--very clever at breaking in a door, and, like all the
+criminal groups that we get without an invitation from over the Channel,
+these crooks have absolutely no regard for human life.'
+
+"That's the way Sir Henry led off with his explanation. Of course he had
+all that Scotland Yard knew about criminal groups to start him right.
+It was a good deal to have the identity of the criminal agents selected
+out; but I didn't see how he was going to manage to explain the mystery
+from the evidence. I was wild to hear him. Mr. Meadows was quite as
+interested, I thought, although he didn't say a word.
+
+"Sir Henry nodded, as though he took the American's confirmation as a
+thing that followed. 'We are at the scene,' he said, 'of one of the most
+treacherous acts of all criminal drama. I mean the "doing in," as our
+criminals call it, of the unprofessional accomplice. It's a regulation
+piece of business with the hard-and-fast criminal organizations of the
+Continent, like the Nervi of Marseilles, or the Lecca of Paris.
+
+"'They take in a house servant, a shopkeeper's watchman, or a bank guard
+to help them in some big haul. Then they lure him into some abandoned
+house, under a pretense of dividing up the booty, and there put him out
+of the way. That's what's happened here. It's a common plan with these
+criminal groups, and clever of them. The picked-up accomplice would be
+sure to let the thing out. For safety the professionals must "do him
+in" at once, straight away after the big job, as a part of what the
+barrister chaps call the res gestae.'
+
+"Sir Henry went on nodding at us and drumming the palm of his hand on
+the edge of the table.
+
+"'This thing happens all the time,' he said, 'all about, where
+professional criminals are at work. It accounts for a lot of mysteries
+that the police cannot make head or tail of, like this one, for example.
+Without our knowledge of this sinister custom, one could not begin or
+end with an affair like this.
+
+"'But it's simple when one has the cue--it's immensely simple. We
+know exactly what happened and the sort of crooks that were about the
+business. The barefoot prints show the Continental group. That's the
+trick of Southern Europe to go in barefoot behind a man to kill him.'
+
+"Sir Henry jarred the whole table with his big hand. The surface of the
+table was covered with powdered chalk that the baronet had dusted over
+it in the hope of developing criminal finger prints. Now under
+the drumming of his palm the particles of white dust whirled like
+microscopic elfin dancers.
+
+"'The thing's clear as daylight,' he went on: 'One of the professional
+group brought the accomplice down here to divide the booty. He broke the
+door in. They sat down here at this table with the lighted candle as you
+see it. And while the stuff was being sorted out, another of the band
+slipped in behind the man and killed him.
+
+"'They started to carry the body out. Millson chanced by. They got in a
+funk and rushed the thing. Of course they had a motor down the road,
+and equally of course it was no trick to whisk the body out of the
+neighborhood.'
+
+"Sir Henry got half up on his feet with his energy in the solution of
+the thing. He thrust his spread-out fingers down on the table like a
+man, by that gesture, pressing in an inevitable, conclusive summing up."
+
+The girl paused. "It was splendid, I thought. I applauded like an
+entranced pit!
+
+"But Mr. Meadows didn't say a word. He took up the big glass we had used
+about the inspection of the place, and passed it over the prints Sir
+Henry was unconsciously making in the dust on the polished surface of
+the table. Then he put the glass down and looked the excited baronet
+calmly in the face.
+
+"'There,' cried Sir Henry, 'the thing's no mystery.'
+
+"For the first time Mr. Meadows opened his mouth. 'It's the profoundest
+mystery I ever heard of,' he said.
+
+"Sir Henry was astonished. He sat down and looked across the table at
+the man. He wasn't able to speak for a moment, then he got it out: 'Why
+exactly do you say that?'
+
+"Mr. Meadows put his elbows on the table. He twiddled the big reading
+glass in his fingers. His face got firm and decided.
+
+"'To begin with,' he said, 'the door to this house was never broken by
+a professional cracksman. It's the work of a bungling amateur. A
+professional never undertakes to break a door at the lock. Naturally
+that's the firmest place about a door. The implement he intends to use
+as a lever on the door he puts in at the top or bottom. By that means
+he has half of the door as a lever against the resistance of the lock.
+Besides, a professional of any criminal group is a skilled workman. He
+doesn't waste effort. He doesn't fracture a door around the lock. This
+door's all mangled, splintered and broken around the lock.'"
+
+"He stopped and looked about the room, and out through the window at the
+Scotland Yard patrol. The features of his face were contracted with
+the problem. One could imagine one saw the man's mind laboring at the
+mystery. 'And that's not all,' he said. 'Your man Millson is not telling
+the truth. He didn't see a dead body lying on the steps of this house;
+and he didn't see a man running away.'
+
+"Sir Henry broke in at that. 'Impossible,' he said; 'Millson's a
+first-class inspector, absolutely reliable. Why do you say that he
+didn't see the dead man on the steps or the assassin running away?'
+
+"Mr. Meadows answered in the same even voice. 'Because there was never
+any dead man here,' he said, 'for anybody to see. And because Millson's
+'description of the man he saw is scientifically an impossible feat of
+vision.'
+
+"Impossible?' cried Sir Henry.
+
+"'Quite impossible,' Mr. Meadows insisted. 'Millson tells us that the
+man he saw running away in the night wore a blue coat and reddish-brown
+trousers. He says he was barely able to distinguish the blue coat, but
+that he could see the reddish-brown trousers very clearly. Now, as a
+matter of fact, it has been very accurately determined that red is the
+hardest color to distinguish at night, and blue the very easiest. A
+blue coat would be clearly visible long after reddish-brown trousers had
+become indistinguishable in the darkness.'
+
+"Sir Henry's under jaw sagged a little. 'Why, yes,' he said, 'that's
+true; that's precisely true. Gross, at the University of Gratz,
+determined that by experiment in 1912. I never thought about it!'
+
+"'There are some other things here that you have not, perhaps, precisely
+thought about,' Mr. Meadows went on.
+
+"'For example, the things that happened in this room did not happen in
+the night. They happened in the day.'
+
+"He pointed to the half-burned wax candle on the table. 'There's a
+headless joiner's nail driven into the table,' he said, 'and this candle
+is set down over the nail. That means that the person who placed it
+there wished it to remain there--to remain there firmly. He didn't put
+it down there for the brief requirements of a passing tragedy, he put it
+there to remain; that's one thing.
+
+"'Another thing is that this candle thus firmly fastened on the table
+was never alight there. If it had ever been burning in its position on
+the table, some of the drops of melted wax would have fallen about it.
+
+"'You will observe that, while the candle is firmly fixed, it does not
+set straight; it is inclined at least ten degrees out of perpendicular.
+In that position it couldn't have burned for a moment without dripping
+melted wax on the table. And there's none on the table; there has never
+been any on it. Your glass shows not the slightest evidence of a wax
+stain.' He added: 'Therefore the candle is a blind; false evidence to
+give us the impression of a night affair.'
+
+"Sir Henry's jaw sagged; now his mouth gaped. 'True,' he said. 'True,
+true.' He seemed to get some relief to his damaged deductions out of the
+repeated word.
+
+"The irony in Mr. Meadows' voice increased a little. 'Nor is that all,'
+he said. 'The smear on the floor, and the stains in which the naked
+foot tracked, are not human blood. They're not any sort of blood. It
+was clearly evident when you had your lens over them. They show no
+coagulated fiber. They show only the evidences of dye--weak dye--watered
+red ink, I'd say.'
+
+"I thought Sir Henry was going to crumple up in his chair. He seemed to
+get loose and baggy in some extraordinary fashion, and his gaping jaw
+worked. 'But the footprints,' he said, 'the naked footprints?' His voice
+was a sort of stutter-the sort of shaken stutter of a man who has come
+a' tumbling cropper.
+
+"The American actually laughed: he laughed as we sometimes laugh at a
+mental defective.
+
+"'They're not footprints!' he said. 'Nobody ever had a foot cambered
+like that, or with a heel like it, or with toes like it. Somebody made
+those prints with his hand--the edge of his palm for the heel and the
+balls of his fingers for the toes. The wide, unstained distances
+between these heelprints and the prints of the ball of the toes show the
+impossible arch.'
+
+"Sir Henry was like a man gone to pieces. 'But who--who made them?' he
+faltered.
+
+"The American leaned forward and put the big glass over the prints that
+Sir Henry had made with his fingers in the white dust on the mahogany
+table. 'I think you know the answer to your question,' he said. 'The
+whorls of these prints are identical with those of the toe tracks.'
+
+"Then he laid the glass carefully down, sat back in his chair, folded
+his arms and looked at Sir Henry.
+
+"'Now,' he said, 'will you kindly tell me why you have gone to the
+trouble of manufacturing all these false evidences of a crime?"'
+
+The girl paused. There was intense silence in the drawing-room. The aged
+man at the window had turned and was looking at her. The face of the old
+woman seemed vague and uncertain.
+
+The girl smiled.
+
+"Then," she said, "the real, amazing miracle happened. Sir Henry got on
+his feet, his big body tense, his face like iron, his voice ringing.
+
+"'I went to that trouble,' he said, 'because I wished to demonstrate--I
+wished to demonstrate beyond the possibility of any error--that Mr.
+Arthur Meadows, the pretended American from St. Paul, was in fact the
+celebrated criminologist, Karl Holweg Leibnich, of Bonn, giving us the
+favor of his learned presence while he signaled the German submarines
+off the east coast roads with his high-powered motor lights.'"
+
+Now there was utter silence in the drawing-room but for the low of the
+Highland cattle and the singing of the birds outside.
+
+For the first time there came a little tremor in the girl's voice.
+
+"When Sir Henry doubted this American and asked me to go down and make
+sure before he set a trap for him, I thought--I thought, if Tony could
+risk his life for England, I could do that much."
+
+At this moment a maid appeared in the doorway, the trim, immaculate,
+typical English maid. "Tea is served, my lady," she said.
+
+The tall, fine old man crossed the room and offered his arm to the girl
+with the exquisite, gracious manner with which once upon a time he had
+offered it to a girlish queen at Windsor.
+
+The ancient woman rose as if she would go out before them. Then
+suddenly, at the door, she stepped aside for the girl to pass, making
+the long, stooping, backward curtsy of the passed Victorian era.
+
+"After you, my dear," she said, "always!"
+
+
+
+
+V. The Man in the Green Hat
+
+
+"Alas, monsieur, in spite of our fine courtesies, the conception of
+justice by one race must always seem outlandish to another!"
+
+It was on the terrace of Sir Henry Marquis' villa at Cannes. The
+members of the little party were in conversation over their tobacco--the
+Englishman, with his brier-root pipe; the American Justice, with a
+Havana cigar; and the aged Italian, with his cigarette. The last was
+speaking.
+
+He was a very old man, but he gave one the impression of incredible,
+preposterous age. He was bald; he had neither eyebrows nor eyelashes. A
+wiry mustache, yellow with nicotine, alone remained. Great wrinkles lay
+below the eyes and along the jaw, under a skin stretched like parchment
+over the bony protuberances of the face.
+
+These things established the aspect of old age; but it was the man's
+expression and manner that gave one the sense of incalculable antiquity.
+The eyes seemed to look out from a window, where the man behind them had
+sat watching the human race from the beginning. And his manners had
+the completion of one whose experience of life is comprehensive and
+finished.
+
+"It seems strange to you, monsieur"--he was addressing, in French, the
+American Justice--"that we should put our prisoners into an iron cage,
+as beasts are exhibited in a circus. You are shocked at that. It strikes
+you as the crudity of a race not quite civilized.
+
+"You inquire about it with perfect courtesy; but, monsieur, you inquire
+as one inquires about a custom that his sense of justice rejects."
+
+He paused.
+
+"Your pardon, monsieur; but there are some conceptions of justice in the
+law of your admirable country that seem equally strange to me."
+
+The men about the Count on the exquisite terrace, looking down over
+Cannes into the arc of the sea, felt that the great age of this man gave
+him a right of frankness, a privilege of direct expression, they
+could not resent. Somehow, at the extremity of life, he seemed beyond
+pretenses; and he had the right to omit the digressions by which younger
+men are accustomed to approach the truth.
+
+"What is this strange thing in our law, Count?" said the American.
+
+The old man made a vague gesture, as one who puts away an inquiry until
+the answer appears.
+
+"Many years ago," he continued, "I read a story about the red Indians by
+your author, Cooper. It was named 'The Oak Openings,' and was included,
+I think, in a volume entitled Stories of the Prairie. I believe I have
+the names quite right, since the author impressed me as an inferior
+comer with an abundance of gold about him. In the story Corporal Flint
+was captured by the Indians under the leadership of Bough of Oak, a
+cruel and bloodthirsty savage.
+
+"This hideous beast determined to put his prisoner to the torture of the
+saplings, a barbarity rivaling the crucifixion of the Romans. Two small
+trees standing near each other were selected, the tops lopped off and
+the branches removed; they were bent and the tops were lashed together.
+One of the victim's wrists was bound to the top of each of the young
+trees; then the saplings were released and the victim, his arms wrenched
+and dislocated, hung suspended in excruciating agony, like a man nailed
+to a cross.
+
+"It was fearful torture. The strain on the limbs was hideous, yet the
+victim might live for days. Nothing short of crucifixion--that beauty of
+the Roman law--ever equaled it."
+
+He paused and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.
+
+"Corporal Flint, who seemed to have a knowledge of the Indian character,
+had endeavored so to anger the Indians by taunt and invective that some
+brave would put an arrow into his heart, or dash his brains out with a
+stone ax.
+
+"In this he failed. Bough of Oak controlled his braves and Corporal
+Flint was lashed to the saplings. But, as the trees sprang apart,
+wrenching the man's arms out of their sockets, a friendly Indian,
+Pigeonwing, concealed in a neighboring thicket, unable to rescue his
+friend and wishing to save him from the long hours of awful torture,
+shot Corporal Flint through the forehead.
+
+"Now," continued the Count, "if there was no question about these facts,
+and Bough of Oak stood for trial before any civilized tribunal on this
+earth, do you think the laws of any country would acquit him of the
+murder of Corporal Flint?"
+
+The whole company laughed.
+
+"I am entirely serious," continued the Count. "What do you think? There
+are three great nations represented here."
+
+"The exigencies of war," said Sir Henry Marquis, "might differentiate a
+barbarity from a crime."
+
+"But let us assume," replied the Count, "that no state of war existed;
+that it was a time of peace; that Corporal Flint was innocent of wrong;
+and that Bough of Oak was acting entirely from a depraved instinct bent
+on murder. In other words, suppose this thing had occurred yesterday in
+one of the Middle States of the American Republic?"
+
+The American felt that this question was directed primarily to himself.
+He put down his cigar and indicated the Englishman by a gesture.
+
+"Your great jurist, Sir James Stephen," he began, "constantly reminds
+us that the criminal law is a machine so rough and dangerous that we can
+use it only with every safety device attached.
+
+"And so, Count," he continued, to the Italian, "the administration of
+the criminal law in our country may seem to you subject to delays and
+indirections that are not justified. These abuses could be generally
+corrected by an intelligent presiding judge; but, in part, they are
+incidental to a fair and full investigation of the charge against the
+prisoner. I think, however, that our conception of justice does not
+differ from that of other nations."
+
+The old Count shrugged his shoulders at the digression.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said. "I do not refer to the mere administration
+of the criminal law in your country; though, monsieur, we have been
+interested in observing its peculiarities in such notable examples as
+the Thaw trials in New York, and the Anarchist cases in Chicago some
+years ago. I believe the judge in the latter trial gave about one
+hundred instructions on the subject of reasonable doubt--quite
+intelligible, I dare say, to an American jury; but, I must confess,
+somewhat beyond me in their metaphysical refinements.
+
+"I should understand reasonable doubt if I were uninstructed, but I do
+not think I could explain it. I should be, concerning it, somewhat as
+Saint Augustine was with a certain doctrine of the Church when he said:
+'I do not know if you ask me; but if you do not ask me I know very
+well.'"
+
+He paused and blew a tiny ring or smoke out over the terrace toward the
+sea.
+
+"There was a certain poetic justice finally in that case," he added.
+
+"The prisoners were properly convicted of the Haymarket murders," said
+the American Justice.
+
+"Ah, no doubt," returned the Count; "but I was not thinking of that.
+Following a custom of your courts, I believe, the judge at the end
+of the trial put the formal inquiry as to whether the prisoners had
+anything to say. Whereupon they rose and addressed him for six days!"
+
+He bowed.
+
+"After that, monsieur, I am glad to add, they were all very properly
+hanged.
+
+"But, monsieur, permit me to return to my question: Do you think any
+intelligent tribunal on this earth would acquit Bough of Oak of the
+murder of Corporal Flint under the conditions I have indicated?"
+
+"No," said the American. "It would be a cold-blooded murder; and in the
+end the creature would be executed."
+
+The old Count turned suddenly in his chair.
+
+"Yes," he said, "in a Continental court, it is certain; but in America,
+monsieur, under your admirable law, founded on the common law of
+England?"
+
+"I am sure we should hang him," replied the American.
+
+"Monsieur," cried the old Count, "you have me profoundly puzzled."
+
+It seemed to the little group on the terrace that they, and not the
+Count, were indicated by that remark. He had stated a case about
+which there could be no two opinions under any civilized conception of
+justice. Sir Henry Marquis had pointed out the only element--a state of
+war--which could distinguish the case from plain premeditated murder in
+its highest degree. They looked to him for an explanation; but it did
+not immediately arrive.
+
+The Count noticed it and offered a word of apology.
+
+"Presently--presently," he said. "We have these two words in
+Italian--sparate! and aspetate! Monsieur."
+
+He turned to the American:
+
+"You do not know our language, I believe. Suppose I should suddenly call
+out one of these words and afterward it should prove that a life hung
+on your being able to say which word it was I uttered. Do you think,
+monsieur, you could be certain?
+
+"No, monsieur; and so courts are wise to require a full explanation
+of every extraordinary fact. George Goykovich, an Austrian, having no
+knowledge of the Italian language, swore in the court of an American
+state that he heard a prisoner use the Italian word sparate! and that he
+could not be mistaken.
+
+"I would not believe him, monsieur, on that statement; but he explained
+that he was a coal miner, that the mines were worked by Italians, and
+that this word was called out when the coal was about to be shot down
+with powder.
+
+"Ah, monsieur, the explanation is complete. George Goykovich must know
+this word; it was a danger signal. I would believe now his extraordinary
+statement."
+
+The Count stopped a moment and lighted another cigarette.
+
+"Pardon me if I seem to proceed obliquely. The incident is related to
+the case I approach; and it makes clear, monsieur, why the courts of
+France, for example, permit every variety of explanation in a
+criminal trial, while your country and the great English nation limit
+explanations.
+
+"You do not permit hearsay evidence to save a man's life; with a fine
+distinction you permit it to save only his character!"
+
+"The rule," replied the American justice, "everywhere among
+English-speaking people is that the best evidence of which the subject
+is capable shall be produced. We permit a witness to testify only
+to what he actually knows. That is the rule. It is true there are
+exceptions to it. In some instances he may testify as to what he has
+heard."
+
+"Ah, yes," replied the Count; "you will not permit such evidence to
+take away a man's horse, but you will permit it to take away a
+woman's reputation! I shall never be able to understand these delicate
+refinements of the English law!"
+
+"But, Count," suggested Sir Henry Marquis, "reputation is precisely that
+what the neighborhood says about one."
+
+"Pardon, monsieur," returned the Count. "I do not criticize your
+customs. They are doubtless excellent in every variety of way. I deplore
+only my inability to comprehend them. For example, monsieur, why should
+you hold a citizen responsible in all other cases only for what he does,
+but in the case of his own character turn about and try him for what
+people say he does?
+
+"Thus, monsieur, as I understand it, the men of an English village
+could not take away my pig by merely proving that everybody said it was
+stolen; but they could brand me as a liar by merely proving what the
+villagers said! It seems incredible that men should put such value on a
+pig."
+
+Sir Henry Marquis laughed.
+
+"It is not entirely a question of values, Count."
+
+"I beg you to pardon me, monsieur," the Italian went on. "Doubtless, on
+this subject I do nothing more than reveal an intelligence lamentably
+inefficient; but I had the idea that English people were accustomed to
+regard property of greater importance than life."
+
+"I have never heard," replied the Englishman, smiling, "that our courts
+gave more attention to pigs than to murder."
+
+"Why, yes, monsieur," said the Count--"that is precisely what they have
+been accustomed to do. It is only, I believe, within recent years that
+one convicted of murder in England could take an appeal to a higher
+court; though a controversy over pigs--or, at any rate, the pasture on
+which they gathered acorns--could always be carried up."
+
+The great age of the Count--he seemed to be the representative in the
+world of some vanished empire--gave his irony a certain indirection.
+Everybody laughed. And he added: "Even your word 'murder,' I believe,
+was originally the name of a fine imposed by the Danes on a village
+unless it could be proved that the person found dead was an Englishman!
+
+"I wonder when, precisely, the world began to regard it as a crime to
+kill an Englishman?"
+
+The parchment on the bones of his face wrinkled into a sort of smile.
+His greatest friend on the Riviera was this pipe-smoking Briton.
+
+Then suddenly, with a nimble gesture that one would not believe possible
+in the aged, he stripped back his sleeve and exhibited a long, curiously
+twisted scar, as though a bullet had plowed along the arm.
+
+"Alas, monsieur," he said, "I myself live in the most primitive
+condition of society! I pay a tribute for life.... Ah! no, monsieur;
+it is not to the Camorra that I pay. It is quite unromantic. I think my
+secretary carries it in his books as a pension to an indigent relative."
+
+He turned to the American
+
+"Believe me, monsieur, my estates in Salerno are not what they were; the
+olive trees are old and all drains on my income are a burden--even this
+gratuity. I thought I should be rid of it; but, alas, the extraordinary
+conception of justice in your country!"
+
+He broke the cigarette in his fingers, and flung the pieces over the
+terrace.
+
+"In the great range of mountains," he began, "slashing across the
+American states and beautifully named the Alleghanies, there is a vast
+measure of coal beds. It is thither that the emigrants from Southern
+Europe journey. They mine out the coal, sometimes descending into the
+earth through pits, or what in your language are called shafts, and
+sometimes following the stratum of the coal bed into the hill.
+
+"This underworld, monsieur--this, sunless world, built underneath the
+mountains, is a section of Europe slipped under the American Republic.
+The language spoken there is not English. The men laboring in those
+buried communities cry out sparate when they are about to shoot down the
+coal with powder. It is Italy under there. There is a river called the
+Monongahela in those mountains. It is an Indian name."
+
+He paused.
+
+"And so, monsieur, what happened along it doubtless reminded me of
+Cooper's story--Bough of Oak and the case of Corporal Flint."
+
+He took another cigarette out of a box on the table, but he did not
+light it.
+
+"In one of the little mining villages along this river with the
+enchanting name there was a man physically like the people of the Iliad;
+and with that, monsieur, he had a certain cast of mind not unHellenic.
+He was tall, weighed two hundred and forty pounds, lean as a gladiator,
+and in the vigor of golden youth.
+
+"There were no wars to journey after and no adventures; but there was
+danger and adventure here. This land was full of cockle, winnowed out
+of Italy, Austria and the whole south of Europe. It took courage and the
+iron hand of the state to keep the peace. Here was a life of danger;
+and this Ionian--big, powerful, muscled like the heroes of the Circus
+Maximus--entered this perilous service.
+
+"Monsieur, I have said his mind was Hellenic, like his big, wonderful
+body. Mark you how of heroic antiquity it was! It was his boast, among
+the perils that constantly beset him, that no criminal should ever take
+his life; that, if ever he should receive a mortal wound from the hand
+of the assassins about him, he would not wait to die in agony by it. He
+himself would sever the damaged thread of life and go out like a man!
+
+"Observe, monsieur, how like the great heroes of legend--like the
+wounded Saul when he ordered his armor-bearer to kill him; like Brutus
+when he fell on his sword!"
+
+He looked intently at the American.
+
+"Doubtless, monsieur," he went on, "those near this man along the
+Monongahela did not appreciate his attitude of grandeur; but to us, in
+the distance, it seemed great and noble."
+
+He looked out over the Mediterranean, where the great adventurers who
+cherished these lofty pagan ideals once beat along in the morning of the
+world.
+
+"On an afternoon of summer," he continued like one who begins a saga,
+"this man, alone and fearless, followed a violator of the law and
+arrested him in a house of the village. As he led the man away he
+noticed that an Italian followed. He was a little degenerate, wearing a
+green hat, and bearing now one name and now another. They traversed the
+village toward the municipal prison; and this creature, featured like a
+Parisian Apache, skulked behind.
+
+"As they went along, two Austrians seated on the porch of a house heard
+the little man speak to the prisoner. He used the word sparate. They did
+not know what he meant, for he spoke in Italian; but they recognized
+the word, for it was the word used in the mines before the coal was shot
+down. The prisoner made his reply in Italian, which the Austrians did
+not understand.
+
+"It seemed that this man who had made the arrest did not know Italian,
+for he stopped and asked the one behind him whether the prisoner was his
+brother. The man replied in the negative."
+
+The Count paused, as though for an explanation. "What the Apache said
+was: 'Shall I shoot him here or wait until we reach the ravine?' And the
+prisoner replied: 'Wait until we come to the ravine.'
+
+"They went on. Presently they reached a sort of hollow, where the reeds
+grew along the road densely and to the height of a man's head. Here the
+Italian Apache, the degenerate with the green hat, following some three
+steps behind, suddenly drew a revolver from his pocket and shot the man
+twice in the back. It was a weapon carrying a lead bullet as large as
+the tip of one's little finger. The officer fell. The Apache and the
+prisoner fled.
+
+"The wounded man got up. He spread out his arms; and he shouted, with a
+great voice, like the heroes of the Iliad. The two wounds were mortal;
+they were hideous, ghastly wounds, ripping up the vital organs in the
+man's body and severing the great arteries. The splendid pagan knew he
+had received his death wounds; and, true to his atavistic ideal, the
+ideal of the Greek, the Hebrew and the Roman, the ideal of the great
+pagan world to which he in spirit belonged, and of which the poets sing,
+he put his own weapon to his head and blew his brains out."
+
+The old Count, his chin up, his withered, yellow face vitalized, lifted
+his hands like one before something elevated and noble. After some
+moments had passed he continued:
+
+"On the following day the assassin was captured in a neighboring
+village. Feeling ran so high that it was with difficulty that the
+officers of the law saved him from being lynched. He was taken about
+from one prison to another. Finally he was put on trial for murder.
+
+"There was never a clearer case before any tribunal in this world.
+
+"Many witnesses identified the assassin--not merely English-speaking
+men, who might have been mistaken or prejudiced, but Austrians, Poles,
+Italians--the men of the mines who knew him; who had heard him cry out
+the fatal Italian word; who saw him following in the road behind his
+victim on that Sunday afternoon of summer; who knew his many names and
+every feature of his cruel, degenerate face. There was no doubt anywhere
+in the trial. Learned surgeons showed that the two wounds in the dead
+man's back from the big-calibered weapon were deadly, fatal wounds that
+no man could have survived.
+
+"There was nothing incomplete in that trial.
+
+"Everything was so certain that the assassin did not even undertake to
+contradict; not one statement, not one word of the evidence against him
+did he deny. It was a plain case of willful, deliberate and premeditated
+murder. The judge presiding at the trial instructed the jury that a man
+is presumed to intend that which he does; that whoever kills a human
+being with malice aforethought is guilty of murder; that murder which is
+perpetrated by any kind of willful, deliberate and premeditated killing
+is murder in the first degree. The jury found the assassin guilty and
+the judge sentenced him to be hanged."
+
+The Count paused and looked at his companions about him on the terrace.
+
+"Messieurs," he said, "do you think that conviction was just?"
+
+There was a common assent. Some one said: "It was a cruel murder if ever
+there was one." And another: "It was wholly just; the creature deserved
+to hang."
+
+The old Count bowed, putting out his hands.
+
+"And so I hoped he would."
+
+"What happened?" said the American.
+
+The Count regarded him with a queer, ironical smile.
+
+"Unlike the great British people, monsieur," he replied, "your courts
+have never given the pig, or the pasture on which he gathers his acorns,
+a consideration above the human family. The case was taken to your Court
+of Appeals of that province."
+
+He stopped and lighted his cigarette deliberately, with a match
+scratched slowly on the table.
+
+"Monsieur," he said, "I do not criticize your elevated court. It is
+composed of learned men--wise and patriotic, I have no doubt. They
+cannot make the laws, monsieur; they cannot coin a conception of justice
+for your people. They must enforce the precise rules of law that the
+conception of justice in your country has established.
+
+"Nevertheless, monsieur"--and his thin yellow lips curled--"for the sake
+of my depleted revenues I could have wished that the decision of this
+court had been other than it was."
+
+"And what did it decide?" asked the American.
+
+"It decided, monsieur," replied the Count, "that my estates in Salerno
+must continue to be charged with the gratuity to the indigent relative.
+
+"That is to say, monsieur, it decided, because the great pagan did not
+wait to die in agony, did not wait for the mortal wounds inflicted by
+the would-be assassin to kill him, that interesting person--the man in
+the green hat--was not guilty of murder in the first degree and could
+not be hanged!"
+
+
+Note--See State versus Angelina; 80 Southeastern Reporter, 141: "The
+intervening responsible agent who wrongfully accelerates death is guilty
+of the murder, and not the one who inflicted the first injury, though in
+itself mortal."
+
+
+
+
+VI. The Wrong Sign
+
+
+It was an ancient diary in a faded leather cover. The writing was fine
+and delicate, and the ink yellow with age. Sir Henry Marquis turned the
+pages slowly and with care for the paper was fragile.
+
+We had dined early at the Ritz and come in later to his great home in
+St. James's Square.
+
+He wished to show me this old diary that had come to him from a branch
+of his mother's family in Virginia--a branch that had gone out with a
+King's grant when Virginia was a crown colony. The collateral ancestor,
+Pendleton, had been a justice of the peace in Virginia, and a spinster
+daughter had written down some of the strange cases with which her
+father had been concerned.
+
+Sir Henry Marquis believed that these cases in their tragic details, and
+their inspirational, deductive handling, equaled any of our modern time.
+The great library overlooking St. James's Square, was curtained off from
+London. Sir Henry read by the fire; and I listened, returned, as by some
+recession of time to the Virginia of a vanished decade. The narrative of
+the diary follows:
+
+
+My father used to say that the Justice of God was sometimes swift and
+terrible. He said we thought of it usually as remote and deliberate, a
+sort of calm adjustment in some supernatural Court of Equity. But this
+idea was far from the truth. He had seen the justice of God move on
+the heels of a man with appalling swiftness; with a crushing force and
+directness that simply staggered the human mind. I know the case he
+thought about.
+
+Two men sat over a table when my father entered. One of them got up. He
+was a strange human creature, when you stood and looked calmly at him.
+You thought the Artificer had designed him for a priest of the church.
+He had the massive features and the fringe of hair around his bald
+head like a tonsure. At first, to your eye, it was the vestments of the
+church, he lacked; then you saw that the lack was something fundamental;
+something organic in the nature of the man. And as he held and
+stimulated your attention you got a fearful idea, that the purpose for
+which this human creature was shaped had been somehow artfully reversed!
+
+He was big boned and tall when he stood up.
+
+"Pendleton," he said, "I would have come to you, but for my guest."
+
+And he indicated the elegant young man at the table.
+
+"But I did not send you word to ride a dozen miles through the hills on
+any trivial business, or out of courtesy to me. It is a matter of some
+import, so I will pay ten eagles."
+
+My father looked steadily at the man.
+
+"I am not for hire," he said.
+
+My father was a justice of the peace in Virginia, under the English
+system, by the theory of which the most substantial men in a county
+undertook to keep the peace for the welfare of the State. Like
+Washington in the service of the Colonial army, he took no pay.
+
+The big man laughed.
+
+"We are most of us for purchase, and all of us for hire," he said. "I
+will make it twenty!"
+
+The young man at the table now interrupted. He was elegant in the
+costume of the time, in imported linen and cloth from an English loom.
+His hair was thick and black; his eyebrows straight, his body and his
+face rich in the blood and the vitalities of youth. But sensuality was
+on him like a shadow. The man was given over to a life of pleasure.
+
+"Mr. Pendleton," he said, with a patronizing pedantic air, "the
+commonwealth is interested to see that litigation does not arise; and to
+that end, I hope you will not refuse us the benefit of your experience.
+We are about to draw up a deed of sale running into a considerable sum,
+and we would have it court proof."
+
+He made a graceful gesture with his jeweled hand.
+
+"I would be secure in my purchase, and Zindorf in his eagles, and you,
+Sir, in the knowledge that the State will not be vexed by any suit
+between us. Every contract, I believe, upon some theory of the law, is
+a triangular affair with the State a party. Let us say then, that you
+represent Virginia!"
+
+"In the service of the commonwealth," replied my father coldly, "I am
+always to be commanded."
+
+The man flicked a bit of dust from his immaculate coat sleeve.
+
+"It will be a conference of high powers. I shall represent Eros; Mr.
+Pendleton, Virginia; and Zindorf" and he laughed--"his Imperial Master!"
+
+And to the eye the three men fitted to their legend. The Hellenic God
+of pleasure in his sacred groves might have chosen for his disciple one
+from Athens with a face and figure like this youth. My father bore
+the severities of the law upon him. And I have written how strange a
+creature the third party to this conference was.
+
+He now answered with an oath.
+
+"You have a very pretty wit, Mr. Lucian Morrow," he said. "I add to my
+price a dozen eagles for it."
+
+The young man shrugged his shoulders in his English coat.
+
+"Smart money, eh, Zindorf... Well, it does not make me smart. It only
+makes me remember that Count Augsburg educated you in Bavaria for the
+Church and you fled away from it to be a slave trader in Virginia."
+
+He got on his feet, and my father saw that the man was in liquor. He
+was not drunken, but the effect was on him with its daring and its
+indiscretions.
+
+It was an April morning, bright with sun. The world was white with apple
+blossoms, the soft air entered through the great open windows. And my
+father thought that the liquor in the man had come with him out of a
+night of bargaining or revel.
+
+Morrow put his hands on the table and looked at Zindorf; then, suddenly,
+the laughter in his face gave way to the comprehension of a swift,
+striking idea.
+
+"Why, man," he cried, "it's the devil's truth! Everything about you is a
+negation! You ought to be a priest by all the lines and features of you;
+but you're not... Scorch me, but you're not!"
+
+His voice went up on the final word as though to convey some impressive,
+sinister discovery.
+
+It was true in every aspect of the man. The very clothes he wore,
+somber, wool-threaded homespun, crudely patched, reminded one of the
+coarse fabrics that monks affect for their abasement. But one saw, when
+one remembered the characteristic of the man, that they represented here
+only an extremity of avarice.
+
+Zindorf looked coldly at his guest.
+
+"Mr. Lucian Morrow," he said, "you will go on, and my price will go on!"
+
+But the young blood, on his feet, was not brought up by the monetary
+threat. He looked about the room, at the ceiling, the thick walls. And,
+like a man who by a sudden recollection confounds his adversary with an
+overlooked illustrative fact, he suddenly cried out:
+
+"By the soul of Satan, you're housed to suit! Send me to the pit! It's
+the very place for you! Eh! Zindorf, do you know who built the house you
+live in?"
+
+"I do not, Mr. Lucian Morrow," said the man. "Who built it?"
+
+One could see that he wished to divert the discourses of his guest. He
+failed.
+
+"God built it!" cried Morrow.
+
+He put out his hands as though to include the hose.
+
+"Pendleton," he said, "you will remember. The people built these walls
+for a church. It burned, but the stone walls could not burn; they
+remained overgrown with creeper. Then, finally, old Wellington Monroe
+built a house into the walls for the young wife he was about to marry,
+but he went to the coffin instead of the bride-bed, and the house
+stood empty. It fell into the courts with the whole of Monroe's tangled
+business and finally Zindorf gets it at a sheriff's sale."
+
+The big man now confronted the young blood with decision.
+
+"Mr. Lucian Morrow," he said, "if you are finished with your fool talk,
+I will bid you good morning. I have decided not to sell the girl."
+
+The face of Morrow changed. His voice wheedled in an anxious note.
+
+"Not sell her, Zindorf!" he echoed. "Why man, you have promised her to
+me all along. You always said I should have her in spite of your cursed
+partner Ordez. You said you'd get her some day and sell her to me.
+Now, curse it, Zindorf, I want her... I've got the money: ten thousand
+dollars. It's a big lot of money. But I've got it. I've got it in gold."
+
+He went on:
+
+"Besides, Zindorf, you can have the money, it'll mean more to you. But
+it's the girl I want."
+
+He stood up and in his anxiety the effect of the liquor faded out.
+
+"I've waited on your promise, Zindorf. You said that some day, when
+Ordez was hard-pressed he would sell her for money, even if she was
+his natural daughter. You were right; you knew Ordez. You have got an
+assignment of all the slaves in possession, in the partnership, and
+Ordez has cleared out of the country. I know what you paid for his
+half-interest in this business, it's set out in the assignment. It was
+three thousand dollars.
+
+"Think of it, man, three thousand dollars to Ordez for a wholesale,
+omnibus assignment of everything. An elastic legal note of an assignment
+that you can stretch to include this girl along with the half-dozen
+other slaves that you have on hand here; and I offer you ten thousand
+dollars for the girl alone!"
+
+One could see how the repetition of the sum in gold affected Zindorf.
+
+He had the love of money in that dominating control that the Apostle
+spoke of. But the elegant young man was moved by a lure no less potent.
+And his anxiety, for the time, suppressed the evidences of liquor.
+
+"I'll take the risk on the title, Zindorf. You and Ordez were partners
+in this traffic. Ordez gives you a general assignment of all slaves on
+hand for three thousand dollars and lights out of the country. He leaves
+his daughter here among the others. And this general assignment can be
+construed to include her. Her mother was a slave and that brings her
+within the law. We know precisely who her mother was, and all about it.
+You looked it up and my lawyer, Mr. Cable, looked it up. Her mother
+was the octoroon woman, Suzanne, owned by old Judge Marquette in New
+Orleans.
+
+"There may have been some sort of church marriage, but there's no legal
+record, Cable says.
+
+"The woman belonged to Marquette, and under the law the girl is a slave.
+You got a paper title out of Marquette's executors, privily, years
+ago. Now you have this indefinite assignment by Ordez. He's gone to the
+Spanish Islands, or the devil, or both. And if Mr. Pendleton can draw
+a deed of sale that will stand in the courts between us, I'll take the
+risk on the validity of my title."
+
+He paused.
+
+"The law's sound on slaves, Judge Madison has a dozen himself, not all
+black either; not three-eighths black!" and he laughed.
+
+Then he turned to my father.
+
+"Mr. Pendleton," he said, "I persuaded Zindorf to send for you to draw
+up this deed of sale. I have no confidence in the little practicing
+tricksters at the county seat. They take a fee and, with premeditation,
+write a word or phrase into the contract that leaves it open for a suit
+at law."
+
+He made a courteous bow, accompanied by a dancing master's gesture.
+
+"I do not offend you with the offer of a fee, but I present my gratitude
+for the conspicuous courtesy, and I indicate the service to the
+commonwealth of legal papers in form and court proof. May I hope, Sir,
+that you will not deny us the benefit of your highly distinguished
+service."
+
+My father very slowly looked about him in calm reflection.
+
+He had ridden ten miles through the hills on this April morning, at
+Zindorf's message sent the night before. The clay of the roads was still
+damp and plastic from the recent rain. There were flecks of mud on him
+and the splashing of the streams.
+
+He was a big, dominating man, in the hardened strength and experience
+of middle life. He had come, as he believed, upon some service of the
+state. And here was a thing for the little dexterities of a lawyer's
+clerk. Everybody in Virginia, who knew my father, can realize how he was
+apt to meet the vague message of Zindorf that got him in this house, and
+the patronizing courtesies of Mr. Lucian Morrow.
+
+He was direct and virile, and while he feared God, like the great
+figures in the Pentateuch, as though he were a judge of Israel enforcing
+his decrees with the weapon of iron, I cannot write here, that at
+any period of his life, or for any concern or reason, he very greatly
+regarded man.
+
+He went over to the window and looked out at the hills and the road that
+he had traveled.
+
+The mid-morning sun was on the fields and groves like a benediction. The
+soft vitalizing air entered and took up the stench of liquor, the ash of
+tobacco and the imported perfumes affected by Mr. Lucian Morrow.
+
+The windows in the room were long, gothic like a church, and turning
+on a pivot. They ran into the ceiling that Monroe had built across the
+gutted walls. The house stood on the crown of a hill, in a cluster of
+oak trees. Below was the abandoned graveyard, the fence about it rotted
+down; the stone slabs overgrown with moss. The four roads running into
+the hills joined and crossed below this oak grove that the early people
+had selected for a house of God.
+
+My father looked out on these roads and far back on the one that he had
+traveled.
+
+There was no sound in the world, except the faint tolling of a bell in
+a distant wood on the road. It was far off on the way to my father's
+house, and the vague sound was to be heard only when a breath of wind
+carried from that way.
+
+My father gathered his big chin, flat like a plowshare, into the trough
+of his bronze hand. He stood for some moments in reflection, then he
+turned to Mr. Lucian Morrow.
+
+"I think you are right," he said. "I think this is a triangular affair
+with the state a party. I am in the service of the state. Will you
+kindly put the table by this window."
+
+They thought he wished the air, and would thus escape the closeness of
+the room. And while my father stood aside, Zindorf and his guest carried
+the flat writing table to the window and placed a chair.
+
+My father sat down behind the table by the great open window, and looked
+at Zindorf.
+
+The man moved and acted like a monk. He had the figure and the tonsured
+head. His coarse, patched clothes cut like the homely garments of the
+simple people of the day, were not wholly out of keeping to the part.
+The idea was visualized about him; the simplicity and the poverty of the
+great monastic orders in their vast, noble humility. All striking and
+real until one saw his face!
+
+My father used to say that the great orders of God were correct in this
+humility; for in its vast, comprehensive action, the justice of God
+moved in a great plain, where every indicatory event was precisely
+equal; a straw was a weaver's beam.
+
+God hailed men to ruin in his court, not with spectacular devices, but
+by means of some homely, common thing, as though to abase and overcome
+our pride.
+
+My father moved the sheets of foolscap, and tested the point of the
+quill pen like one who considers with deliberation. He dipped the point
+into the inkpot and slowly wrote a dozen formal words.
+
+Then he stopped and put down the pen.
+
+"The contests of the courts," he said, "are usually on the question of
+identity. I ought to see this slave for a correct description."
+
+The two men seemed for a moment uncertain what to do.
+
+Then Zindorf addressed my father.
+
+"Pendleton," he said, "the fortunes of life change, and the ideas suited
+to one status are ridiculous in another. Ordez was a fool. He made
+believe to this girl a future that he never intended, and she is under
+the glamor of these fancies."
+
+He stood in the posture of a monk, and he spoke each word with a clear
+enunciation.
+
+"It is a very delicate affair, to bring this girl out of the
+extravagances with which Ordez filled her idle head, and not be brutal
+in it. We must conduct the thing with tact, and we will ask you,
+Pendleton, to observe the courtesies of our pretension."
+
+When he had finished, he flung a door open and went down a stairway. For
+a time my father heard his footsteps, echoing, like those of a priest
+in the under chambers of a chapel. Then he ascended, and my father was
+astonished.
+
+He came with a young girl on his arm, as in the ceremony of marriage
+sometimes the priest emerges with the bride. The girl was young and of a
+Spanish beauty. She was all in white with blossoms in her hair. And
+she was radiant, my father said, as in the glory of some happy
+contemplation. There was no slave like this on the block in Virginia.
+Young girls like this, my father had seen in Havana in the houses of
+Spanish Grandees.
+
+"This is Mr. Pendleton, our neighbor," Zindorf said. "He comes to offer
+you his felicitations."
+
+The girl made a little formal curtsy.
+
+"When my father returns," she said in a queer, liquid accent, "he will
+thank you, Meester Pendleton; just now he is on a journey."
+
+And she gave her hand to Lucian Morrow to kiss, like a lady of the time.
+Then Zindorf, mincing his big step, led her out.
+
+And my father stood behind the table in the enclosure of the window,
+with his arms folded, and his chin lifted above his great black stock.
+I know how my father looked, for I have seen him stand like that before
+moving factors in great events, when he intended, at a certain cue, to
+enter.
+
+He said that it was at this point that Mr. Lucian Morrow's early comment
+on Zindorf seemed, all at once, to discover the nature of this whole
+affair. He said that suddenly, with a range of vision like the great
+figures in the Pentateuch, he saw how things right and true would work
+out backward into abominations, if, by any chance, the virtue of God in
+events were displaced!
+
+Zindorf returned, and as he stepped through the door, closing it
+behind him, the far-off tolling of the bell, faint, eerie, carried by
+a stronger breath of April air, entered through the window. My father
+extended his arm toward the distant wood.
+
+"Zindorf," he said, "do you mark the sign?" The man listened.
+
+"What sign?" he said.
+
+"The sign of death!" replied my father.
+
+The man made a deprecating gesture with his hands, "I do not believe in
+signs," he said.
+
+My father replied like one corrected by a memory.
+
+"Why, yes," he said, "that is true. I should have remembered that. You
+do not believe in signs, Zindorf, since you abandoned the sign of the
+cross, and set these coarse patches on your knees to remind you not to
+bend them in the sign of submission to the King of Kings."
+
+The intent in the mended clothing was the economy of avarice, but my
+father turned it to his use.
+
+The man's face clouded with anger.
+
+"What I believe," he said, "is neither the concern of you nor another."
+
+He paused with an oath.
+
+"Whatever you may believe, Zindorf," replied my father, "the sound of
+that bell is unquestionably a sign of death." He pointed toward the
+distant wood. "In the edge of the forest yonder is the ancient church
+that the people built to replace the burned one here. It has been long
+abandoned, but in its graveyard lie a few old families. And now and
+then, when an old man dies, they bring him back to put him with his
+fathers. This morning, as I came along, they were digging the grave for
+old Adam Duncan, and the bell tolls for him. So you see," and he looked
+Zindorf in the face, "a belief in signs is justified."
+
+Again the big man made his gesture as of one putting something of no
+importance out of the way.
+
+"Believe what you like," he said, "I am not concerned with signs."
+
+"Why, yes, Zindorf," replied my father, "of all men you are the very
+one most concerned about them. You must be careful not to use the wrong
+ones."
+
+It was a moment of peculiar tension.
+
+The room was flooded with sun. The tiny creatures of the air droned
+outside. Everywhere was peace and the gentle benevolence of peace. But
+within this room, split off from the great chamber of a church, events
+covert and sinister seemed preparing to assemble.
+
+My father, big and dominant, was behind the table, his great shoulders
+blotting out the window.
+
+Mr. Lucian Morrow sat doubled in a chair, and Zindorf stood with the
+closed door behind him.
+
+"You see, Zindorf," he said, "each master has his set of signs. Most of
+us have learned the signs of one master only. But you have learned the
+signs of both. And you must be careful not to bring the signs of your
+first master into the service of your last one."
+
+The big man did not move, he stood with the door closed behind him, and
+studied my father's face like one who feels the presence of a danger
+that he cannot locate.
+
+"What do you mean?" he said.
+
+"I mean," replied my father, "I mean, Zindorf, that each master has a
+certain intent in events, and this intent is indicated by his set of
+signs. Now the great purpose of these two masters, we believe, in all
+the moving of events, is directly opposed. Thus, when we use a sign
+of one of these masters, we express by the symbol of it the hope that
+events will take the direction of his established purpose.
+
+"Don't you see then... don't you see, that we dare not use the signs of
+one in the service of the other?"
+
+"Pendleton," said the man, "I do not understand you."
+
+He spoke slowly and precisely, like one moving with an excess of care.
+
+My father went on, his voice strong and level, his eyes on Zindorf.
+
+"The thing is a great mystery," he said. "It is not clear to any of us
+in its causes or its relations. But old legends and old beliefs, running
+down from the very morning of the world, tell us--warn us, Zindorf--that
+the signs of each of these masters are abhorrent to the other. Neither
+will tolerate the use of his adversary's sign. Moreover, Zindorf, there
+is a double peril in it."
+
+And his voice rose.
+
+"There is the peril that the new master will abandon the blunderer for
+the insult, and there is the peril that the old one will destroy him for
+the sacrilege!"
+
+At this moment the door behind Zindorf opened, and the young girl
+entered. She was excited and her eyes danced.
+
+"Oh!" she said, "people are coming on every road!"
+
+She looked, my father said, like a painted picture, her dark Castilian
+beauty illumined by the pleasure in her interpretation of events. She
+thought the countryside assembled after the manner of my father to
+express its felicitations.
+
+Zindorf crossed in great strides to the window: Mr. Lucian Morrow, sober
+and overwhelmed by the mystery of events about him, got unsteadily on
+his feet, holding with both hands to the oak back of a chair.
+
+My father said that the tragedy of the thing was on him, and he acted
+under the pressure of it.
+
+"My child," he said, "you are to go to the house of your grandfather in
+Havana. If Mr. Lucian Morrow wishes to renew his suit for your hand in
+marriage, he will do it there. Go now and make your preparations for the
+journey."
+
+The girl cried out in pleasure at the words.
+
+"My grandfather is a great person in New Spain. I have always longed to
+see him... father promised... and now I am to go ... when do we set out,
+Meester Pendleton?"
+
+"At once," replied my father, "to-day." Then he crossed the room and
+opened the door for her to go out. He held the latch until the girl was
+down the stairway. Then he closed the door.
+
+The big man, falsely in his aspect, like a monk, looking out at the
+far-off figures on the distant roads, now turned about.
+
+"A clever ruse, Pendleton," he said, "We can send her now, on this
+pretended journey, to Morrow's house, after the sale."
+
+My father went over and sat down at the table. He took a faded silk
+envelope out of his, coat, and laid it down before him. Then he answered
+Zindorf.
+
+"There will be no sale," he said.
+
+Mr. Lucian Morrow interrupted.
+
+"And why no sale, Sir?"
+
+"Because there is no slave to sell," replied my father. "This girl is
+not the daughter of the octoroon woman, Suzanne."
+
+Zindorf's big jaws tightened.
+
+"How did you know that?" he said.
+
+My father answered with deliberation.
+
+"I would have known it," he said, "from the wording of the paper you
+exhibit from Marquette's executors. It is merely a release of any claim
+or color of title; the sort of legal paper one executes when one gives
+up a right or claim that one has no faith in. Marquette's executors were
+the ablest lawyers in New Orleans. They were not the men to sign away
+valuable property in a conveyance like that; that they did sign such a
+paper is conclusive evidence to me that they had nothing--and knew they
+had nothing--to release by it." He paused.
+
+"I know it also," he said, "because I have before me here the girl's
+certificate of birth and Ordez's certificate of marriage."
+
+He opened the silk envelope and took out some faded papers. He unfolded
+them and spread them out under his hand.
+
+"I think Ordez feared for his child," he said, "and stored these papers
+against the day of danger to her, because they are copies taken from the
+records in Havana."
+
+He looked up at the astonished Morrow.
+
+"Ordez married the daughter of Pedro de Hernando. I find, by a note
+to these papers, that she is dead. I conclude that this great Spanish
+family objected to the adventurer, and he fled with his infant daughter
+to New Orleans." he paused.
+
+"The intrigue with the octoroon woman, Suzanne, came after that."
+
+Then he added:
+
+"You must renew your negotiations, Sir, in, a somewhat different manner
+before a Spanish Grandee in Havana!"
+
+Mr. Lucian Morrow did not reply. He stood in a sort of wonder. But
+Zindorf, his face like iron, addressed my father:
+
+"Where did you get these papers, Pendleton?" he said.
+
+"I got them from Ordez," replied my father.
+
+"When did you see Ordez?"
+
+"I saw him to-day," replied my father.
+
+Zindorf did not move, but his big jaw worked and a faint spray of
+moisture came out on his face. Then, finally, with no change or quaver
+in his voice, he put his query.
+
+"Where is Ordez?"
+
+"Where?" echoed my father, and he rose. "Why, Zindorf, he is on his
+way here." And he extended his arm toward the open window. The big man
+lifted his head and looked out at the men and horses now clearly visible
+on the distant road.
+
+"Who are these people," he said, "and why do they come?" He spoke as
+though he addressed some present but invisible authority.
+
+My father answered him
+
+"They are the people of Virginia," he said, "and they come, Zindorf, in
+the purpose of events that you have turned terribly backward!"
+
+The man was in some desperate perplexity, but he had steel nerves and
+the devil's courage.
+
+He looked my father calmly in the face.
+
+"What does all this mean?" he said.
+
+"It means, Zindorf," cried my father, "it means that the very things,
+the very particular things, that you ought to have used for the glory of
+God, God has used for your damnation!"
+
+And again, in the clear April air, there entered through the open window
+the faint tolling of a bell.
+
+"Listen, Zindorf! I will tell you. In the old abandoned church yonder,
+when they came to toll the bell for Duncan, the rope fell to pieces; I
+came along then, and Jacob Lance climbed into the steeple to toll the
+bell by hand. At the first crash of sound a wolf ran out of a thicket
+in the ravine below him, and fled away toward the mountains. Lance, from
+his elevated point, could see the wolf's muzzle was bloody. That would
+mean, that a lost horse had been killed or an estray steer. He called
+down and we went in to see what thing this scavenger had got hold of."
+
+He paused.
+
+"In the cut of an abandoned road we found the body of Ordez riddled with
+buckshot, and his pockets rifled. But sewed up in his coat was the silk
+envelope with these papers. I took possession of them as a Justice of
+the Peace, ordered the body sent on here, and the people to assemble."
+
+He extended his arm toward the faint, quivering, distant sound.
+
+"Listen, Zindorf," he cried; "the bell began to toll for Duncan, but
+it tolls now for the murderer of Ordez. It tolls to raise the country
+against the assassin!"
+
+The false monk had the courage of his master. He stood out and faced my
+father.
+
+"But can you find him, Pendleton," he said. And his harsh voice was
+firm. "You find Ordez dead; well, some assassin shot him and carried his
+body into the cut of the abandoned road. But who was that assassin? Is
+Virginia scant of murderers? Do you know the right one?"
+
+My father answered in his great dominating voice
+
+"God knows him, Zindorf, and I know him!... The man who murdered Ordez
+made a fatal blunder... He used a sign of God in the service of the
+devil and he is ruined!"
+
+The big man stepped slowly backward into the room, while my father's
+voice, filling the big empty spaces of the house, followed after him.
+
+"You are lost, Zindorf! Satan is insulted, and God is outraged! You are
+lost!"
+
+There was a moment's silence; from outside came the sound of men and
+horses. The notes of the girl, light, happy, ascended from the lower
+chamber, as she sang about her preparations for the journey. Zindorf
+continued to step awfully backward. And Lucian Morrow, shaken and sober,
+cried out in the extremity of fear:
+
+"In God's name, Pendleton, what do you mean; Zindorf, using a sign of
+God in the service of the devil."
+
+And my father answered him:
+
+"The corpse of Ordez lay in the bare cut of the abandoned road, and
+beside it, bedded in the damp clay where he had knelt down to rifle the
+pockets of the murdered body, were the patch prints of Zindorf's knees!"
+
+
+
+
+
+VII. The Fortune Teller
+
+
+Sir Henry Marquis continued to read; he made no comment; his voice clear
+and even.
+
+
+It was a big sunny room. The long windows looked out on a formal garden,
+great beech trees and the bow of the river. Within it was a sort of
+library. There were bookcases built into the wall, to the height of a
+man's head, and at intervals between them, rising from the floor to the
+cornice of the shelves, were rows of mahogany drawers with glass knobs.
+There was also a flat writing table.
+
+It was the room of a traveler, a man of letters, a dreamer. On the
+table were an inkpot of carved jade, a paperknife of ivory with gold
+butterflies set in; three bronze storks, with their backs together, held
+an exquisite Japanese crystal.
+
+The room was in disorder--the drawers pulled out and the contents
+ransacked.
+
+My father stood leaning against the casement of the window, looking out.
+The lawyer, Mr. Lewis, sat in a chair beside the table, his eyes on the
+violated room.
+
+"Pendleton," he said, "I don't like this English man Gosford."
+
+The words seemed to arouse my father out of the depths of some
+reflection, and he turned to the lawyer, Mr. Lewis.
+
+"Gosford!" he echoed.
+
+"He is behind this business, Pendleton," the lawyer, Mr. Lewis, went on.
+"Mark my word! He comes here when Marshall is dying; he forces his way
+to the man's bed; he puts the servants out; he locks the door. Now,
+what business had this Englishman with Marshall on his deathbed? What
+business of a secrecy so close that Marshall's son is barred out by a
+locked door?"
+
+He paused and twisted the seal ring on his finger.
+
+"When you and I came to visit the sick man, Gosford was always here, as
+though he kept a watch upon us, and when we left, he went always to this
+room to write his letters, as he said.
+
+"And more than this, Pendleton; Marshall is hardly in his grave before
+Gosford writes me to inquire by what legal process the dead man's papers
+may be examined for a will. And it is Gosford who sends a negro riding,
+as if the devil were on the crupper, to summon me in the name of the
+Commonwealth of Virginia,--to appear and examine into the circumstances
+of this burglary.
+
+"I mistrust the man. He used to hang about Marshall in his life, upon
+some enterprise of secrecy; and now he takes possession and leadership
+in his affairs, and sets the man's son aside. In what right, Pendleton,
+does this adventurous Englishman feel himself secure?"
+
+My father did not reply to Lewis's discourse. His comment was in another
+quarter.
+
+"Here is young Marshall and Gaeki," he said.
+
+The lawyer rose and came over to the window.
+
+Two persons were advancing from the direction of the stables--a tall,
+delicate boy, and a strange old man. The old man walked with a quick,
+jerky, stride. It was the old country doctor Gaeki. And, unlike any
+other man of his profession, he would work as long and as carefully on
+the body of a horse as he would on the body of a man, snapping out his
+quaint oaths, and in a stress of effort, as though he struggled with
+some invisible creature for its prey. The negroes used to say that the
+devil was afraid of Gaeki, and he might have been, if to disable a man
+or his horse were the devil's will. But I think, rather, the negroes
+imagined the devil to fear what they feared themselves.
+
+"Now, what could bring Gaeki here?" said Lewes.
+
+"It was the horse that Gosford overheated in his race to you," replied
+my father. "I saw him stop in the road where the negro boy was leading
+the horse about, and then call young Marshall."
+
+"It was no fault of young Marshall, Pendleton," said the lawyer. "But,
+also, he is no match for Gosford. He is a dilettante. He paints little
+pictures after the fashion he learned in Paris, and he has no force or
+vigor in him. His father was a dreamer, a wanderer, one who loved the
+world and its frivolities, and the son takes that temperament, softened
+by his mother. He ought to have a guardian."
+
+"He has one," replied my father.
+
+"A guardian!" repeated Lewis. "What court has appointed a guardian for
+young Marshall?"
+
+"A court," replied my father, "that does not sit under the authority of
+Virginia. The helpless, Lewis, in their youth and inexperience, are not
+wholly given over to the spoiler."
+
+The boy they talked about was very young--under twenty, one would say.
+He was blue-eyed and fair-haired, with thin, delicate features, which
+showed good blood long inbred to the loss of vigor. He had the fine,
+open, generous face of one who takes the world as in a fairy story. But
+now there was care and anxiety in it, and a furtive shadow, as though
+the lad's dream of life had got some rude awakening.
+
+At this moment the door behind my father and Lewis was thrown violently
+open, and a man entered. He was a person with the manner of a barrister,
+precise and dapper; he had a long, pink face, pale eyes, and a
+close-cropped beard that brought out the hard lines of his mouth. He
+bustled to the table, put down a sort of portfolio that held an inkpot,
+a writing-pad and pens, and drew up a chair like one about to take the
+minutes of a meeting. And all the while he apologized for his delay.
+He had important letters to get off in the post, and to make sure, had
+carried them to the tavern himself.
+
+"And now, sirs, let us get about this business," he finished, like one
+who calls his assistants to a labor:
+
+My father turned about and looked at the man.
+
+"Is your name Gosford?" he said in his cold, level voice.
+
+"It is, sir," replied the Englishman, "--Anthony Gosford."
+
+"Well, Mr. Anthony Gosford," replied my father, "kindly close the door
+that you have opened."
+
+Lewis plucked out his snuffbox and trumpeted in his many-colored
+handkerchief to hide his laughter.
+
+The Englishman, thrown off his patronizing manner, hesitated, closed the
+door as he was bidden--and could not regain his fine air.
+
+"Now, Mr. Gosford," my father went on, "why was this room violated as we
+see it?"
+
+"It was searched for Peyton Marshall's will, sir," replied the man.
+
+"How did you know that Marshall had a will?" said my father.
+
+"I saw him write it," returned the Englishman, "here in this very room,
+on the eighteenth day of October, 1854."
+
+"That was two years ago," said my father. "Was the will here at
+Marshall's death?"
+
+"It was. He told me on his deathbed."
+
+"And it is gone now?"
+
+"It is," replied the Englishman.
+
+"And now, Mr. Gosford," said my father, "how do you know this will is
+gone unless you also know precisely where it was?"
+
+"I do know precisely where it was, sir," returned the man. "It was
+in the row of drawers on the right of the window where you stand--the
+second drawer from the top. Mr. Marshall put it there when he wrote it,
+and he told me on his deathbed that it remained there. You can see, sir,
+that the drawer has been rifled."
+
+My father looked casually at the row of mahogany drawers rising along
+the end of the bookcase. The second one and the one above were open; the
+others below were closed.
+
+"Mr. Gosford," he said, "you would have some interest in this will, to
+know about it so precisely."
+
+"And so I have," replied the man, "it left me a sum of money."
+
+"A large sum?"
+
+"A very large sum, sir."
+
+"Mr. Anthony Gosford," said my father, "for what purpose did Peyton
+Marshall bequeath you a large sum of money? You are no kin; nor was he
+in your debt."
+
+The Englishman sat down and put his fingers together with a judicial
+air.
+
+"Sir," he began, "I am not advised that the purpose of a bequest is
+relevant, when the bequest is direct and unencumbered by the testator
+with any indicatory words of trust or uses. This will bequeathes me a
+sum of money. I am not required by any provision of the law to show the
+reasons moving the testator. Doubtless, Mr. Peyton Marshall had reasons
+which he deemed excellent for this course, but they are, sir, entombed
+in the grave with him."
+
+My father looked steadily at the man, but he did not seem to consider
+his explanation, nor to go any further on that line.
+
+"Is there another who would know about this will?" he said.
+
+"This effeminate son would know," replied Gosford, a sneer in the
+epithet, "but no other. Marshall wrote the testament in his own hand,
+without witnesses, as he had the legal right to do under the laws of
+Virginia. The lawyer," he added, "Mr. Lewis, will confirm me in the
+legality of that."
+
+"It is the law," said Lewis. "One may draw up a holograph will if he
+likes, in his own hand, and it is valid without a witness in this State,
+although the law does not so run in every commonwealth."
+
+"And now, sir," continued the Englishman, turning to my father, "we will
+inquire into the theft of this testament."
+
+But my father did not appear to notice Mr. Gosford. He seemed perplexed
+and in some concern.
+
+"Lewis," he said, "what is your definition of a crime?"
+
+"It is a violation of the law," replied the lawyer.
+
+"I do not accept your definition," said my father. "It is, rather, I
+think, a violation of justice--a violation of something behind the law
+that makes an act a crime. I think," he went on, "that God must take a
+broader view than Mr. Blackstone and Lord Coke. I have seen a murder
+in the law that was, in fact, only a kind of awful accident, and I have
+seen your catalogue of crimes gone about by feeble men with no intent
+except an adjustment of their rights. Their crimes, Lewis, were merely
+errors of their impractical judgment."
+
+Then he seemed to remember that the Englishman was present.
+
+"And now, Mr. Gosford," he said, "will you kindly ask young Marshall to
+come in here?"
+
+The man would have refused, with some rejoinder, but my father was
+looking at him, and he could not find the courage to resist my father's
+will. He got up and went out, and presently returned followed by the lad
+and Gaeki. The old country doctor sat down by the door, his leather
+case of bottles by the chair, his cloak still fastened under his chin.
+Gosford went back to the table and sat down with his writing materials
+to keep notes. The boy stood.
+
+My father looked a long time at the lad. His face was grave, but when he
+spoke, his voice was gentle.
+
+"My boy," he said, "I have had a good deal of experience in the
+examination of the devil's work." He paused and indicated the violated
+room. "It is often excellently done. His disciples are extremely clever.
+One's ingenuity is often taxed to trace out the evil design in it, and
+to stamp it as a false piece set into the natural sequence of events."
+
+He paused again, and his big shoulders blotted out the window.
+
+"Every natural event," he continued, "is intimately connected with
+innumerable events that precede and follow. It has so many serrated
+points of contact with other events that the human mind is not able to
+fit a false event so that no trace of the joinder will appear. The most
+skilled workmen in the devil's shop are only able to give their false
+piece a blurred joinder."
+
+He stopped and turned to the row of mahogany drawers beside him.
+
+"Now, my boy," he said, "can you tell me why the one who ransacked this
+room, in opening and tumbling the contents of all the drawers, about,
+did not open the two at the bottom of the row where I stand?"
+
+"Because there was nothing in them of value, sir," replied the lad.
+
+"What is in them?" said my father.
+
+"Only old letters, sir, written to my father, when I was in
+Paris--nothing else."
+
+"And who would know that?" said my father.
+
+The boy went suddenly white.
+
+"Precisely!" said my father. "You alone knew it, and when you
+undertook to give this library the appearance of a pillaged room, you
+unconsciously endowed your imaginary robber with the thing you knew
+yourself. Why search for loot in drawers that contained only old
+letters? So your imaginary robber reasoned, knowing what you knew. But a
+real robber, having no such knowledge, would have ransacked them lest he
+miss the things of value that he searched for."
+
+He paused, his eyes on the lad, his voice deep and gentle.
+
+"Where is the will?" he said.
+
+The white in the boy's face changed to scarlet. He looked a moment
+about him in a sort of terror; then he lifted his head and put back his
+shoulders. He crossed the room to a bookcase, took down a volume, opened
+it and brought out a sheet of folded foolscap. He stood up and faced my
+father and the men about the room.
+
+"This man," he said, indicating Gosford, "has no right to take all my
+father had. He persuaded my father and was trusted by him. But I did not
+trust him. My father saw this plan in a light that I did not see it,
+but I did not oppose him. If he wished to use his fortune to help our
+country in the thing which he thought he foresaw, I was willing for him
+to do it.
+
+"But," he cried, "somebody deceived me, and I will not believe that it
+was my father. He told me all about this thing. I had not the health
+to fight for our country, when the time came, he said, and as he had
+no other son, our fortune must go to that purpose in our stead. But my
+father was just. He said that a portion would be set aside for me, and
+the remainder turned over to Mr. Gosford. But this will gives all to Mr.
+Gosford and leaves me nothing!"
+
+Then he came forward and put the paper in my father's hand. There was
+silence except for the sharp voice of Mr. Gosford.
+
+"I think there will be a criminal proceeding here!"
+
+My father handed the paper to Lewis, who unfolded it and read it aloud.
+It directed the estate of Peyton Marshall to be sold, the sum of fifty
+thousand dollars paid to Anthony Gosford and the remainder to the son.
+
+"But there will be no remainder," cried young Marshall. "My father's
+estate is worth precisely that sum. He valued it very carefully, item by
+item, and that is exactly the amount it came to."
+
+"Nevertheless," said Lewis, "the will reads that way. It is in legal
+form, written in Marshall's hand, and signed with his signature, and
+sealed. Will you examine it, gentlemen? There can be no question of the
+writing or the signature."
+
+My father took the paper and read it slowly, and old Gaeki nosed it over
+my father's arm, his eyes searching the structure of each word, while
+Mr. Gosford sat back comfortably in his chair like one elevated to a
+victory.
+
+"It is in Marshall's hand and signature," said my father, and old Gaeki,
+nodded, wrinkling his face under his shaggy eyebrows. He went away still
+wagging his grizzled head, wrote a memorandum on an envelope from his
+pocket, and sat down in, his chair.
+
+My father turned now to young Marshall.
+
+"My boy," he said, "why do you say that some one has deceived you?"
+
+"Because, sir," replied the lad, "my father was to leave me twenty
+thousand dollars. That was his plan. Thirty thousand dollars should be
+set aside for Mr. Gosford, and the remainder turned over to me."
+
+"That would be thirty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, instead of
+fifty," said my father.
+
+"Yes, sir," replied the boy; "that is the way my father said he would
+write his will. But it was not written that way. It is fifty thousand
+dollars to Mr. Gosford, and the remainder to me. If it were thirty
+thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, as my father, said his will would be,
+that would have left me twenty thousand dollars from the estate; but
+giving Mr. Gosford fifty thousand dollars leaves me nothing."
+
+"And so you adventured on a little larceny," sneered the Englishman.
+
+The boy stood very straight and white.
+
+"I do not understand this thing," he said, "but I do not believe that my
+father would deceive me. He never did deceive me in his life. I may have
+been a disappointment to him, but my father was a gentle man." His voice
+went up strong and clear. "And I refuse to believe that he would tell me
+one thing and do another!"
+
+One could not fail to be impressed, or to believe that the boy spoke the
+truth.
+
+"We are sorry," said Lewis, "but the will is valid and we cannot go
+behind it."
+
+My father walked about the room, his face in reflection. Gosford sat at
+his ease, transcribing a note on his portfolio. Old Gaeki had gone back
+to his chair and to his little case of bottles; he got them up on his
+knees, as though he would be diverted by fingering the tools of his
+profession. Lewis was in plain distress, for he held the law and its
+disposition to be inviolable; the boy stood with a find defiance,
+ennobled by the trust in his father's honor. One could not take his
+stratagem for a criminal act; he was only a child, for all his twenty
+years of life. And yet Lewis saw the elements of crime, and he knew that
+Gosford was writing down the evidence.
+
+It was my father who broke the silence.
+
+"Gosford," he said, "what scheme were you and Marshall about?"
+
+"You may wonder, sir," replied the Englishman, continuing to write at
+his notes; "I shall not tell you."
+
+"But I will tell you," said the boy. "My father thought that the states
+in this republic could not hold together very much longer. He believed
+that the country would divide, and the South set up a separate
+government. He hoped this might come about without a war. He was in
+horror of a war. He had traveled; he had seen nations and read their
+history, and he knew what civil wars were. I have heard him say that men
+did not realize what they were talking when they urged war."
+
+He paused and looked at Gosford.
+
+"My father was convinced that the South would finally set up an
+independent government, but he hoped a war might not follow. He believed
+that if this new government were immediately recognized by Great
+Britain, the North would accept the inevitable and there would be
+no bloodshed. My father went to England with this scheme. He met Mr.
+Gosford somewhere--on the ship, I think. And Mr. Gosford succeeded in
+convincing my father that if he had a sum of money he could win over
+certain powerful persons in the English Government, and so pave the way
+to an immediate recognition of the Southern Republic by Great Britain.
+He followed my father home and hung about him, and so finally got
+his will. My father was careful; he wrote nothing; Mr. Gosford wrote
+nothing; there is no evidence of this plan; but my father told me, and
+it is true."
+
+My father stopped by the table and lifted his great shoulders.
+
+"And so," he said, "Peyton Marshall imagined a plan like that, and left
+its execution to a Mr. Gosford!"
+
+The Englishman put down his pen and addressed my father.
+
+"I would advise you, sir, to require a little proof for your
+conclusions. This is a very pretty story, but it is prefaced by an
+admission of no evidence, and it comes as a special pleading for a
+criminal act. Now, sir, if I chose, if the bequest required it, I could
+give a further explanation, with more substance; of moneys borrowed by
+the decedent in his travels and to be returned to me. But the will, sir,
+stands for itself, as Mr. Lewis will assure you."
+
+Young Marshall looked anxiously at the lawyer.
+
+"Is that the law, sir?"
+
+"It is the law of Virginia," said Lewis, "that a will by a competent
+testator, drawn in form, requires no collateral explanation to support
+it."
+
+My father seemed brought up in a cul-de-sac. His face was tense and
+disturbed. He stood by the table; and now, as by accident, he put out
+his hand and took up the Japanese crystal supported by the necks of the
+three bronze storks. He appeared unconscious of the act, for he was
+in deep reflection. Then, as though the weight in his hand drew his
+attention, he glanced at the thing. Something about it struck him, for
+his manner changed. He spread the will out on the table and began to
+move the crystal over it, his face close to the glass. Presently his
+hand stopped, and he stood stooped over, staring into the Oriental
+crystal, like those practicers of black art who predict events from what
+they pretend to see in these spheres of glass.
+
+Mr. Gosford, sitting at his ease, in victory, regarded my father with a
+supercilious, ironical smile.
+
+"Sir," he said, "are you, by chance, a fortuneteller?"
+
+"A misfortune-teller," replied my father, his face still held above the
+crystal. "I see here a misfortune to Mr. Anthony Gosford. I predict,
+from what I see, that he will release this bequest of moneys to Peyton
+Marshall's son."
+
+"Your prediction, sir," said Gosford, in a harder note, "is not likely
+to come true."
+
+"Why, yes," replied my father, "it is certain to come true. I see it
+very clearly. Mr. Gosford will write out a release, under his hand and
+seal, and go quietly out of Virginia, and Peyton Marshall's son will
+take his entire estate."
+
+"Sir," said the Englishman, now provoked into a temper, "do you enjoy
+this foolery?"
+
+"You are not interested in crystal-gazing, Mr. Gosford," replied my
+father in a tranquil voice. "Well, I find it most diverting. Permit me
+to piece out your fortune, or rather your misfortune, Mr. Gosford!
+By chance you fell in with this dreamer Marshall, wormed into his
+confidence, pretended a relation to great men in England; followed and
+persuaded him until, in his ill-health, you got this will. You saw it
+written two years ago. When Marshall fell ill, you hurried here, learned
+from the dying man that the will remained and where it was. You
+made sure by pretending to write letters in this room, bringing your
+portfolio with ink and pen and a pad of paper. Then, at Marshall's
+death, you inquired of Lewis for legal measures to discover the dead
+man's will. And when you find the room ransacked, you run after the
+law."
+
+My father paused.
+
+"That is your past, Mr. Gosford. Now let me tell your future. I see you
+in joy at the recovered will. I see you pleased at your foresight in
+getting a direct bequest, and at the care you urged on Marshall to leave
+no evidence of his plan, lest the authorities discover it. For I see,
+Mr. Gosford, that it was your intention all along to keep this sum of
+money for your own use and pleasure. But alas, Mr. Gosford, it was not
+to be! I see you writing this release; and Mr. Gosford"--my father's
+voice went up full and strong,--"I see you writing it in terror--sweat
+on your face!"
+
+"The Devil take your nonsense!" cried the Englishman.
+
+My father stood up with a twisted, ironical smile.
+
+"If you doubt my skill, Mr. Gosford, as a fortune, or rather a
+misfortune-teller I will ask Mr. Lewis and Herman Gaeki to tell me what
+they see."
+
+The two men crossed the room and stooped over the paper, while my father
+held the crystal. The manner and the bearing of the men changed. They
+grew on the instant tense and fired with interest.
+
+"I see it!" said the old doctor, with a queer foreign expletive.
+
+"And I," cried Lewis, "see something more than Pendleton's vision. I see
+the penitentiary in the distance."
+
+The Englishman sprang up with an oath and leaned across the table. Then
+he saw the thing.
+
+My father's hand held the crystal above the figures of the bequest
+written in the body of the will. The focused lens of glass magnified
+to a great diameter, and under the vast enlargement a thing that would
+escape the eye stood out. The top curl of a figure 3 had been erased,
+and the bar of a 5 added. One could see the broken fibers of the paper
+on the outline of the curl, and the bar of the five lay across the top
+of the three and the top of the o behind it like a black lath tacked
+across two uprights.
+
+The figure 3 had been changed to 5 so cunningly is to deceive the eye,
+but not to deceive the vast magnification of the crystal. The thing
+stood out big and crude like a carpenter's patch.
+
+Gosford's face became expressionless like wood, his body rigid; then he
+stood up and faced the three men across the table.
+
+"Quite so!" he said in his vacuous English voice. "Marshall wrote a 3
+by inadvertence and changed it. He borrowed my penknife to erase the
+figure."
+
+My father and Lewis gaped like men who see a penned-in beast slip out
+through an unimagined passage. There was silence. Then suddenly, in the
+strained stillness of the room, old Doctor Gaeki laughed.
+
+Gosford lifted his long pink face, with its cropped beard bringing out
+the ugly mouth.
+
+"Why do you laugh, my good man?" he said.
+
+"I laugh," replied Gaeki, "because a figure 5 can have so many colors."
+
+And now my father and Lewis were no less astonished than Mr. Gosford.
+
+"Colors!" they said, for the changed figure in the will was black.
+
+"Why, yes," replied the old man, "it is very pretty."
+
+He reached across the table and drew over Mr. Gosford's memorandum
+beside the will.
+
+"You are progressive, sir," he went on; "you write in iron-nutgall ink,
+just made, commercially, in this year of fifty-six by Mr. Stephens. But
+we write here as Marshall wrote in 'fifty-four, with logwood."
+
+He turned and fumbled in his little case of bottles.
+
+"I carry a bit of acid for my people's indigestions. It has other uses."
+He whipped out the stopper of his vial and dabbed Gosford's notes and
+Marshall's signature.
+
+"See!" he cried. "Your writing is blue, Mr. Gosford, and Marshall's
+red!"
+
+With an oath the trapped man struck at Gaeki's hand. The vial fell and
+cracked on the table. The hydrochloric acid spread out over Marshall's
+will. And under the chemical reagent the figure in the bequest of fifty
+thousand dollars changed beautifully; the bar of the 5 turned blue, and
+the remainder of it a deep purple-red like the body of the will.
+
+"Gaeki," cried my father, "you have trapped a rogue!"
+
+"And I have lost a measure of good acid," replied the old man. And he
+began to gather up the bits of his broken bottle from the table.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. The Hole in the Mahogany Panel
+
+
+Sir Henry paused a moment, his finger between the pages of the ancient
+diary.
+
+"It is the inspirational quality in these cases," he said, "that
+impresses me. It is very nearly absent in our modern methods of criminal
+investigation. We depend now on a certain formal routine. I rarely find
+a man in the whole of Scotland Yard with a trace of intuitive impulse to
+lead him.... Observe how this old justice in Virginia bridged the gaps
+between his incidents."
+
+He paused.
+
+"We call it the inspirational instinct, in criminal investigation ...
+genius, is the right word."
+
+He looked up at the clock.
+
+"We have an hour, yet, before the opera will be worth hearing; listen to
+this final case."
+
+The narrative of the diary follows:
+
+The girl was walking in the road. Her frock was covered with dust. Her
+arms hung limp. Her face with the great eyes and the exquisite mouth
+was the chalk face of a ghost. She walked with the terrible stiffened
+celerity of a human creature when it is trapped and ruined.
+
+Night was coming on. Behind the girl sat the great old house at the end
+of a long lane of ancient poplars.
+
+This was a strange scene my father came on. He pulled up his big
+red-roan horse at the crossroads, where the long lane entered the
+turnpike, and looked at the stiff, tragic figure. He rode home from
+a sitting of the county justices, alone, at peace, on this midsummer
+night, and God sent this tragic thing to meet him.
+
+He got down and stood under the crossroads signboard beside his horse.
+
+The earth was dry; in dust. The dead grass and the dead leaves made
+a sere, yellow world. It looked like a land of unending summer, but a
+breath of chill came out of the hollows with the sunset.
+
+The girl would have gone on, oblivious. But my father went down into the
+road and took her by the arm. She stopped when she saw who it was, and
+spoke in the dead, uninflected voice of a person in extremity.
+
+"Is the thing a lie?" she said.
+
+"What thing, child?" replied my father.
+
+"The thing he told me!"
+
+"Dillworth?" said my father. "Do you mean Hambleton Dillworth?"
+
+The girl put out her free arm in a stiff, circling gesture. "In all the
+world," she said, "is there any other man who would have told me?"
+
+My father's face hardened as if of metal. "What did he tell you?"
+
+The girl spoke plainly, frankly, in her dead voice, without
+equivocation, with no choice of words to soften what she said:
+
+"He said that my father was not dead; that I was the daughter of a
+thief; that what I believed about my father was all made up to save the
+family name; that the truth was my father robbed him, stole his best
+horse and left the country when I was a baby. He said I was a burden on
+him, a pensioner, a drone; and to go and seek my father."
+
+And suddenly she broke into a flood of tears. Her face pressed against
+my father's shoulder. He took her up in his big arms and got into his
+saddle.
+
+"My child," he said, "let us take Hambleton Dillworth at his word."
+
+And he turned the horse into the lane toward the ancient house. The
+girl in my father's arms made no resistance. There was this dominating
+quality in the man that one trusted to him and followed behind him. She
+lay in his arms, the tears wetting her white face and the long lashes.
+
+The moon came up, a great golden moon, shouldered over the rim of the
+world by the backs of the crooked elves. The horse and the two persons
+made a black, distorted shadow that jerked along as though it were a
+thing evil and persistent. Far off in the thickets of the hills an owl
+cried, eerie and weird like a creature in some bitter sorrow. The lane
+was deep with dust. The horse traveled with no sound, and the distorted
+black shadow followed, now blotted out by the heavy tree tops, and now
+only partly to be seen, but always there.
+
+My father got down at the door and carried the girl up the steps and
+between the plaster pillars into the house. There was a hall paneled
+in white wood and with mahogany doors. He opened one of these doors and
+went in. The room he entered had been splendid in some ancient time.
+It was big; the pieces in it were exquisite; great mirrors and old
+portraits were on the wall.
+
+A man sitting behind a table got up when my father entered. Four tallow
+candles, in ancient silver sticks, were on the table, and some sheets
+with figured accounts.
+
+The man who got up was like some strange old child. He wore a number of
+little capes to hide his humped back, and his body, one thought, under
+his clothes was strapped together. He got on his feet nimbly like a
+spider, and they heard the click of a pistol lock as he whipped the
+weapon out of an open drawer, as though it were a habit thus always to
+keep a weapon at his hand to make him equal in stature with other men.
+Then he saw who it was and the double-barreled pistol slipped out of
+sight. He was startled and apprehensive, but he was not in fear.
+
+He stood motionless behind the table, his head up, his eyes hard, his
+thin mouth closed like a trap and his long, dead black hair hanging on
+each side of his lank face over the huge, malformed ears. The man stood
+thus, unmoving, silent, with his twisted ironical smile, while my father
+put the girl into a chair and stood up behind it.
+
+"Dillworth," said my father, "what do you mean by turning this child out
+of the house?"
+
+The man looked steadily at the two persons before him.
+
+"Pendleton," he said, and he spoke precisely, "I do not recognize
+the right of you, or any other man, to call my acts into account;
+however"--and he made a curious gesture with his extended hands "not at
+your command, but at my pleasure, I will tell you.
+
+"This young woman had some estate from her mother at that lady's death.
+As her guardian I invested it by permission of the court's decree." He
+paused. "When the Maxwell lands were sold before the courthouse I bid
+them in for my ward. The judge confirmed this use of the guardian funds.
+It was done upon advice of counsel and within the letter of the law. Now
+it appears that Maxwell had only a life interest in these lands; Maxwell
+is dead, and one who has purchased the interest of his heirs sues in the
+courts for this estate.
+
+"This new claimant will recover; since one who buys at a judicial sale,
+I find, buys under the doctrine of caveat emptor--that is to say, at his
+peril. He takes his chance upon the title. The court does not insure it.
+If it is defective he loses both the money and the lands. And so," he
+added, "my ward will have no income to support her, and I decline to
+assume that burden."
+
+My father looked the hunchback in the face. "Who is the man bringing
+this suit at law?"
+
+"A Mr. Henderson, I believe," replied Dillworth, "from Maryland."
+
+"Do you know him?" said my father.
+
+"I never heard of him," replied the hunchback.
+
+The girl, huddled in the chair, interrupted. "I have seen letters," she
+said, "come in here with this man's return address at Baltimore written
+on the envelope."
+
+The hunchback made an irrelevant gesture. "The man wrote--to inquire
+if I would buy his title. I declined." Then he turned to my father.
+"Pendleton," he said, "you know about this matter. You know that every
+step I took was legal. And with pains and care how I got an order out
+of chancery to make this purchase, and how careful I was to have this
+guardianship investment confirmed by the court. No affair was ever done
+so exactly within the law."
+
+"Why were you so extremely careful?" said my father.
+
+"Because I wanted the safeguard of the law about me at every step,"
+replied the man.
+
+"But why?"
+
+"You ask me that, Pendleton?"' cried the man. "Is not the wisdom of my
+precautions evident? I took them to prevent this very thing; to protect
+myself when this thing should happen!"
+
+"Then," said my father, "you knew it was going to happen."
+
+The man's eyes slipped about a moment in his head. "I knew it was
+going to happen that I would be charged with all sorts of crimes and
+misdemeanors if there should be any hooks on which to hang them. Because
+a man locks his door is it proof that he knows a robber is on the way?
+Human foresight and the experience of men move prudent persons to a
+reasonable precaution in the conduct of affairs."
+
+"And what is it," said my father, "that moves them to an excessive
+caution?"
+
+The hunchback snapped his fingers with an exasperated gesture. "I will
+not be annoyed by your big, dominating manner!" he cried.
+
+My father was not concerned by this defiance. "Dillworth," he said, "you
+sent this child out to seek her father. Well, she took the right road to
+find him."
+
+The hunchback stepped back quickly, his face changed. He sat down in
+his chair and looked up at my father. There was here suddenly uncovered
+something that he had not looked for. And he talked to gain time.
+
+"I have cast up the accounts in proper form," he said while he studied
+my father, his hand moving the figured sheets. "They are correct and
+settled before two commissioners in chancery. Taking out my commission
+as guardian, the amounts allowed me for the maintenance and education of
+the ward, and no dollar of this personal estate remains."
+
+His long, thin hand with the nimble fingers turned the sheets over on
+the table as though to conclude that phase of the affair.
+
+"The real property," he continued, "will return nothing; the purchase
+money was applied on Maxwell's debts and cannot be followed. This new
+claimant, Henderson, who has bought up the outstanding title, will take
+the land."
+
+"For some trifling sum," said my father.
+
+The hunchback nodded slowly, his eyes in a study of my father's face.
+
+"Doubtless," he said, "it was not known that Maxwell had only a life
+estate in the lands, and the remainder to the heirs was likely purchased
+for some slight amount. The language of the deeds that Henderson
+exhibits in his suit shows a transfer of all claim or title, as though
+he bought a thing which the grantees thought lay with the uncertainties
+of a decree in chancery."
+
+"I have seen the deeds," said my father.
+
+"Then," said the hunchback, "you know they are valid, and transfer the
+title." He paused. "I have no doubt that Mr. Henderson assembled these
+outstanding interests at no great cost, but his conveyances are in form
+and legal."
+
+"Everything connected with this affair," said my father, "is strangely
+legal!"
+
+The hunchback considered my father through his narrow eyelids.
+
+"It is a strange world," he said.
+
+"It is," replied my father. "It is profoundly, inconceivably strange."
+
+There was a moment of silence. The two men regarded each other across
+the half-length of the room. The girl sat in the chair. She had got back
+her courage. The big, forceful presence of my father, like the shadow
+of a great rock, was there behind her. She had the fine courage of her
+blood, and, after the first cruel shock of this affair, she faced the
+tragedies that might lie within it calmly.
+
+Shadows lay along the walls of the great room, along the gilt frames of
+the portraits, the empty fireplace, the rosewood furniture of ancient
+make and the oak floor. Only the hunchback was in the light, behind the
+four candles on the table.
+
+"It was strange," continued my father over the long pause, "that your
+father's will discovered at his death left his lands to you, and no acre
+to your brother David."
+
+"Not strange," replied the hunchback, "when you consider what my brother
+David proved to be. My father knew him. What was hidden from us, what
+the world got no hint of, what the man was in the deep and secret places
+of his heart, my father knew. Was it strange, then, that he should leave
+the lands to me?"
+
+"It was a will drawn by an old man in his senility, and under your
+control."
+
+"Under my care," cried the hunchback. "I will plead guilty, if you like,
+to that. I honored my father. I was beside his bed with loving-kindness,
+while my brother went about the pleasures of his life."
+
+"But the testament," said my father, "was in strange terms. It
+bequeathed the lands to you, with no mention of the personal property,
+as though these lands were all the estate your father had."
+
+"And so they were," replied the hunchback calmly. "The lands had been
+stripped of horse and steer, and every personal item, and every dollar
+in hand or debt owing to my father before his death." The man paused
+and put the tips of his fingers together. "My father had given to my
+brother so much money from these sources, from time to time, that he
+justly left me the lands to make us even."
+
+"Your father was senile and for five years in his bed. It was you,
+Dillworth, who cleaned the estate of everything but land."
+
+"I conducted my father's business," said the hunchback, "for him, since
+he was ill. But I put the moneys from these sales into his hand and he
+gave them to my brother."
+
+"I have never heard that your brother David got a dollar of this money."
+
+The hunchback was undisturbed.
+
+"It was a family matter and not likely to be known."
+
+"I see it," said my father. "It was managed in your legal manner and
+with cunning foresight. You took the lands only in the will, leaving the
+impression to go out that your brother had already received his share
+in the personal estate by advancement. It was shrewdly done. But there
+remained one peril in it: If any personal property should appear under
+the law you would be required to share it equally with your brother
+David."
+
+"Or rather," replied the hunchback calmly, "to state the thing
+correctly, my brother David would be required to share any discovered
+personal property with me." Then he added: "I gave my brother David a
+hundred dollars for his share in the folderol about the premises, and
+took possession of the house and lands."
+
+"And after that," said my father, "what happened?"
+
+The hunchback uttered a queerly inflected expletive, like a bitter
+laugh.
+
+"After that," he answered, "we saw the real man in my brother David, as
+my father, old and dying, had so clearly seen it. After that he turned
+thief and fugitive."
+
+At the words the girl in the chair before my father rose. She stood
+beside him, her lithe figure firm, her chin up, her hair spun darkness.
+The courage, the fine, open, defiant courage of the first women of the
+world, coming with the patriarchs out of Asia, was in her lifted face.
+My father moved as though he would stop the hunchback's cruel speech.
+But she put her fingers firmly on his arm.
+
+"He has gone so far," she said, "let him go on to the end. Let him omit
+no word, let us hear every ugly thing the creature has to say."
+
+Dillworth sat back in his chair at ease, with a supercilious smile. He
+passed the girl and addressed my father.
+
+"You will recall the details of that robbery," he said in his
+complacent, piping voice. "My brother David had married a wife, like the
+guest invited in the Scriptures. A child was born. My brother lived
+with his wife's people in their house. One night he came to me to borrow
+money."
+
+He paused and pointed his long index finger through the doorway and
+across the hall.
+
+"It was in my father's room that I received him. It did not please me to
+put money into his hands. But I admonished him with wise counsel. He
+did not receive my words with a proper brotherly regard. He flared up in
+unmanageable anger. He damned me with reproaches, said I had stolen his
+inheritance, poisoned his father's mind against him and slipped into the
+house and lands. 'Pretentious and perfidious' is what he called me. I
+was firm and gentle. But he grew violent and a thing happened."
+
+The man put up his hand and moved it along in the air above the table.
+
+"There was a secretary beside the hearth in my father's room. It was an
+old piece with drawers below and glass doors above. These doors had not
+been opened for many years, for there was nothing on the shelves behind
+them--one could see that--except some rows of the little wooden boxes
+that indigo used to be sold in at the country stores."
+
+The hunchback paused as though to get the details of his story precisely
+in relation.
+
+"I sat at my father's table in the middle of the room. My brother David
+was a great, tall man, like Saul. In his anger, as he gesticulated by
+the hearth, his elbow crashed through the glass door of this secretary;
+the indigo boxes fell, burst open on the floor, and a hidden store of my
+father's money was revealed. The wooden boxes were full of gold pieces!"
+
+He stopped and passed his fingers over his projecting chin.
+
+"I was in fear, for I was alone in the house. Every negro was at a
+distant frolic. And I was justified in that fear. My brother leaped on
+me, struck me a stunning blow on the chest over the heart, gathered up
+the gold, took my horse and fled. At daybreak the negroes found me on
+the floor, unconscious. Then you came, Pendleton. The negroes had washed
+up the litter from the hearth where the indigo about the coins in the
+boxes had been shaken out."
+
+My father interrupted:
+
+"The negroes said the floor had been scrubbed when they found you."
+
+"They were drunk," continued the hunchback with no concern. "And, does
+one hold a drunken negro to his fact? But you saw for yourself the
+wooden boxes, round, three inches high, with tin lids, and of a diameter
+to hold a stack of golden eagles, and you saw the indigo still sticking
+about the sides of these boxes where the coins had lain."
+
+"I did," replied my father. "I observed it carefully, for I thought the
+gold pieces might turn up sometime, and the blue indigo stain might be
+on them when they first appeared."
+
+Dillworth leaned far back in his chair, his legs tangled under him, his
+eyes on my father, in reflection. Finally he spoke.
+
+"You are far-sighted," he said.
+
+"Or God is," replied my father, and, stepping over to the table, he spun
+a gold piece on the polished surface of the mahogany board.
+
+The hunchback watched the yellow disk turn and flit and wabble on its
+base and flutter down with its tingling reverberations.
+
+"To-day, when I rode into the county seat to a sitting of the justices,"
+continued my father, "the sheriff showed me some gold eagles that your
+man from Maryland, Mr. Henderson, had paid in on court costs. Look,
+Dillworth, there is one of them, and with your thumb nail on the milled
+edge you can scrape off the indigo!"
+
+The hunchback looked at the spinning coin, but he did not touch it. His
+head, with its long, straight hair, swung a moment uncertain between his
+shoulders. Then, swiftly and with a firm grip, he took his resolution.
+
+"The coins appear," he said. "My brother David must be in Baltimore
+behind this suit."
+
+"He is not in Baltimore," said my father.
+
+"Perhaps you know where he is," cried the hunchback, "since you speak
+with such authority."
+
+"I do know where he is," said my father in his deep, level voice.
+
+The hunchback got on his feet slowly beside his chair. And the girl came
+into the protection of my father's arm, her features white like plaster;
+but the fiber in her blood was good and she stood up to face the thing
+that might be coming. After the one long abandonment to tears in my
+father's saddle she had got herself in hand. She had gone, like the
+princes of the blood, through the fire, and the dross of weakness was
+burned out.
+
+The hunchback got on his feet, in position like a duelist, his hard,
+bitter face turned slantwise toward my father.
+
+"Then," he said, "if you know where David is you will take his daughter
+to him, if you please, and rid my house of the burden of her."
+
+"We shall go to him," said my father slowly, "but he shall not return to
+us."
+
+The hunchback's eyes blinked and bated in the candlelight.
+
+"You quote the Scriptures," he said. "Is David in a grave?"
+
+"He is not," replied my father.
+
+The hunchback seemed to advance like a duelist who parries the first
+thrust of his opponent. But my father met him with an even voice.
+
+"Dillworth," he said, "it was strange that no man ever saw your brother
+or the horse after the night he visited you in this house."
+
+"It was dark," replied the man. "He rode from this door through the gap
+in the mountains into Maryland."
+
+"He rode from this door," said my father slowly, "but not through the
+gap in the mountains into Maryland."
+
+The hunchback began to twist his fingers.
+
+"Where did he ride then? A man and a horse could not vanish."
+
+"They did vanish," said my father.
+
+"Now you utter fool talk!" cried Dillworth.
+
+"I speak the living truth," replied my father. "Your brother David and
+your horse disappeared out of sound and hearing--disappeared out of the
+sight and knowledge of men--after he rode away from your door on that
+fatal night."
+
+"Well," said the hunchback, "since my brother David rode away from my
+door--and you know that--I am free of obligation for him."
+
+"It is Cain's speech!" replied my father.
+
+The hunchback put back his long hair with a swift brush of the fingers
+across his forehead.
+
+"Dillworth," cried my father, and his voice filled the empty places of
+the room, "is the mark there?"
+
+The hunchback began to curse. He walked around my father and the girl,
+the hair about his lank jaws, his fingers working, his face evil. In
+his front and menace he was like a weasel that would attack some larger
+creature. And while he made the great turn of his circle my father, with
+his arm about the girl, stepped before the drawer of the table where the
+pistol lay.
+
+"Dillworth," he said calmly, "I know where he is. And the mark you felt
+for just now ought to be there."
+
+"Fool!" cried the hunchback. "If I killed him how could he ride away
+from the door?"
+
+"It was a thing that puzzled me," replied my father, "when I stood in
+this house on the morning of your pretended robbery. I knew what had
+happened. But I thought it wiser to let the evil thing remain a mystery,
+rather than unearth it to foul your family name and connect this child
+in gossip for all her days with a crime."
+
+"With a thief," snarled the man.
+
+"With a greater criminal than a thief," replied My father. "I was not
+certain about this gold on that morning when you showed me the empty
+boxes. They were too few to hold gold enough for such a motive. I
+thought a quarrel and violent hot blood were behind the thing; and for
+that reason I have been silent. But now, when the coins turn up, I see
+that the thing was all ruthless, cold-blooded love of money.
+
+"I know what happened in that room. When your brother David struck the
+old secretary with his elbow, and the dozen indigo boxes fell and burst
+open on the hearth, you thought a great hidden treasure was uncovered.
+You thought swiftly. You had got the land by undue influence on your
+senile father, and you did not have to share that with your brother
+David. But here was a treasure you must share; you saw it in a flash.
+You sat at your father's table in the room. Your brother stood by the
+wall looking at the hearth. And you acted then, on the moment, with the
+quickness of the Evil One. It was cunning in you to select the body over
+the heart as the place to receive the imagined blow--the head or face
+would require some evidential mark to affirm your word. And it was
+cunning to think of the unconscious, for in that part one could get up
+and scrub the hearth and lie down again to play it."
+
+He paused.
+
+"But the other thing you did in that room was not so clever. A picture
+was newly hung on the wall--I saw the white square on the opposite wall
+from which it had been taken. It hung at the height of a man's shoulders
+directly behind the spot where your brother must have stood after he
+struck the secretary, and it hung in this new spot to cover the crash of
+a bullet into the mahogany panel!"
+
+My father stopped and caught up the hunchback's double-barreled pistol
+out of the empty drawer.
+
+The room was now illumined; the moon had got above the tree tops and its
+light slanted in through the long windows. The hunchback saw the thing
+and he paused; his face worked in the fantastic light.
+
+"Yes," continued my father, in his deep, quiet voice, "this is your
+mistake to-night--to let me get your weapon. Your mistake that other
+night was to shoot before you counted the money. It was only a few
+hundred dollars. The dozen wooden boxes would hold no great sum. But the
+thing was done, and you must cover it."
+
+He paused.
+
+"And you did cover it--with fiendish cunning. It would not do for your
+brother to vanish from your house, alone and with no motive. But if
+he disappeared, with the gold to take him and a horse to ride, the
+explanation would have solid feet to go on. I give you credit here for
+the ingenuity of Satan. You managed the thing. You caused your brother
+David and the horse to vanish. I saw, on that morning, the tracks of
+the horse where you led him from the stable to the door, and his tracks
+where you led him, holding the dead man in the saddle, from the door to
+the ancient orchard where the grass grows over the fallen-down chimney
+of your grandsire's house. And there, at your cunning, they wholly
+vanished."
+
+The mad courage in the hunchback got control, and he began to advance on
+my father with no weapon and with no hope to win. His fingers crooked,
+his body in a bow, his wizen, cruel face pallid in the ghostly light.
+
+"Dillworth," cried my father, in a great voice, like one who would
+startle a creature out of mania, "you will write a deed in your
+legal manner granting these lands to your brother's child. And after
+that"--his words were like the blows of a hammer on an anvil--"I will
+give you until daybreak to vanish out of our sight and hearing--through
+the gap in the mountains into Maryland on your horse, as you say your
+brother David went, or into the abandoned cistern in the ancient orchard
+where he lies under the horse that you shot and tumbled in on his
+murdered body!"
+
+The moon was now above the gable of the house. The candles were burned
+down. They guttered around the sheet of foolscap wet with the scrawls
+and splashes of Dillworth's quill. My father stood at a window looking
+out, the girl in a flood of tears, relaxed and helpless, in the
+protection of his arm.
+
+And far down the long turnpike, white like an expanded ribbon, the
+hunchback rode his great horse in a gallop, perched like a monkey,
+his knees doubled, his head bobbing, his loose body rolling in the
+saddle--while the black, distorted shadow that had followed my father
+into this tragic house went on before him like some infernal messenger
+convoying the rider to the Pit.
+
+
+
+
+IX. The End of the Road
+
+
+The man laughed.
+
+It was a faint cynical murmur of a laugh. Its expression hardly
+disturbed the composition of his features.
+
+"I fear, Lady Muriel," he said, "that your profession is ruined. Our
+friend--'over the water'--is no longer concerned about the affairs of
+England."
+
+The woman fingered at her gloves, turning them back about the wrists.
+Her face was anxious and drawn.
+
+"I am rather desperately in need of money," she said.
+
+The cynicism deepened in the man's face.
+
+"Unfortunately," he replied, "a supply of money cannot be influenced by
+the intensity of one's necessity for it."
+
+He was a man indefinite in age. His oily black hair was brushed
+carefully back. His clothes were excellent, with a precise detail.
+Everything about him was conspicuously correct in the English fashion.
+But the man was not English. One could not say from what race he
+came. Among the races of Southern Europe he could hardly have been
+distinguished. There was a chameleon quality strongly dominant in the
+creature.
+
+The woman looked up quickly, as in a strong aversion.
+
+"What shall you do?" she said.
+
+"I?"
+
+The man glanced about the room. There was a certain display within
+the sweep of his vision. Some rugs of great value, vases and bronzes;
+genuine and of extreme age. He made a careless gesture with his hands.
+
+"I shall explore some ruins in Syria, and perhaps the aqueduct which the
+French think carried a water supply to the Carthage of Hanno. It will
+be convenient to be beyond British inquiry for some years to come; and
+after all, I am an antiquarian, like Prosper Merimee."
+
+Lady Muriel continued to finger her gloves. They had been cleaned and
+the cryptic marks of the shopkeeper were visible along the inner side of
+the wrist hem. This was, to the woman, the first subterfuge of decaying
+smartness. When a woman began to send her gloves to the laundry she
+was on her way down. Other evidences were not entirely lacking in the
+woman's dress, but they were not patent to the casual eye. Lady Muriel
+was still, to the observer, of the gay top current in the London world.
+
+The woman followed the man's glance about the room.
+
+"You must be rich, Hecklemeir," she said. "Lend me a hundred pounds."
+
+The man laughed again in his queer chuckle.
+
+"Ah, no, my Lady," he replied, "I do not lend." Then he added.
+
+"If you have anything of value, bring it to me.... not information
+from the ministry, and not war plans; the trade in such commodities is
+ended."
+
+It was the woman's turn to laugh.
+
+"The shopkeepers in Oxford Street have been before you, Baron.. .. I've
+nothing to sell."
+
+Hecklemeir smiled, kneading his pudgy hands.
+
+"It will be hard to borrow," he said. "Money is very dear to the
+Britisher just now--right against his heart.... Still.... perhaps one's
+family could be thumb screwed......An elderly relative with no children
+would be the most favorable, I think. Have you got such a relative
+concealed somewhere in a nook of London? Think about it. If you could
+recall one, he would be like a buried nut."
+
+The man paused; then he added, with the offensive chuckling laugh:
+
+"Go to such an one, Lady Muriel. Who shall turn aside from virtue
+in distress? Perhaps, in the whole of London, I alone have the
+brutality--shall we call it--to resist that spectacle."
+
+The woman rose. Her face was now flushed and angry.
+
+"I do not know of any form of brutality in which you do not excel,
+Hecklemeir," she said. "I have a notion to, go to Scotland Yard with the
+whole story of your secret traffic."
+
+The man continued to smile.
+
+"Alas, my Lady," he replied, "we are coupled together. Scotland Yard
+would hardly separate us.... you could scarcely manage to drown me and,
+keep afloat yourself. Dismiss the notion; it is from the pit."
+
+There was no virtue in her threat as the woman knew. Already her mind
+was on the way that Hecklemeir had ironically suggested--an elderly
+relative, with no children, from whom one might borrow,--she valued
+the ramifications of her family, running out to the remote, withered
+branches of that noble tree. She appraised the individuals and rejected
+them.
+
+Finally her searching paused.
+
+There was her father's brother who had gone in for science--deciding
+against the army and the church--Professor Bramwell Winton, the
+biologist. He lived somewhere toward Covent Garden.
+
+She had not thought of him for years. Occasionally his name appeared in
+some note issued by the museum, or a college at Oxford.
+
+For almost four years she had been relieved of this thought about one's
+family. The one "over the water" for whom Hecklemeir had stolen the
+Scottish toast to designate, had paid lavishly for what she could find
+out.
+
+She had been richly, for these four years, in funds.
+
+The habit was established of dipping her hand into the dish. And now
+to find the dish empty appalled her. She could not believe that it was
+empty. She had come again, and again to this apartment above the shops
+in Regent Street, selected for its safety of ingress; a modiste and a
+hairdresser on either side of a narrow flight of steps.
+
+A carriage could stop here; one could be seen here.
+
+Even on the right, above, at the landing of the flight of steps Nance
+Coleen altered evening gowns with the skill of one altering the plumage
+of the angels. It must have cost the one "over the water" a pretty penny
+to keep this whole establishment running through four years of war.
+
+She spoke finally.
+
+"Have you a directory of London, Hecklemeir?"
+
+The man had been watching her closely.
+
+"If it is Scotland Yard, my Lady," he said, "you will not require a
+direction. I can give you the address. It is on the Embankment,
+near..."
+
+"Don't be a fool, Hecklemeir," she interrupted, and taking the book from
+his hands, she whipped through the pages, got the address she sought,
+and went out onto the narrow landing and down the steps into Regent
+Street:
+
+She took a hansom.
+
+With some concern she examined the contents of her purse. There was a
+guinea, a half crown and some shillings in it--the dust of the bin. And
+her profession, as Hecklemeir had said, was ended.
+
+She leaned over, like a man, resting her arms on the closed doors.
+
+The future looked troublous. Money was the blood current in the life she
+knew. It was the vital element. It must be got.
+
+And thus far she had been lucky.
+
+Even in this necessity Bramwell Winton had emerged, when she could not
+think of any one. He would not have much. These scientific creatures
+never accumulated money, but he would have a hundred pounds. He had no
+wife or children to scatter the shillings of his income.
+
+True these creatures spent a good deal on the absurd rubbish of their
+hobbies. But they got money sometimes, not by thrift but by a sort of
+chance. Had not one of them, Sir Isaac Martin, found the lost mines from
+which the ancient civilization of Syria drew its supply of copper. And
+Hector Bartlett, little more than a mummy in the Museum, had gone one
+fine day into Asia and dug up the gold plates that had roofed a temple
+of the Sun.
+
+He had been shown in the drawing rooms, on his return, and she had
+stopped a moment to look him over--he was a sort of mummy. She was not
+hoping to find Bramwell Winton one of these elect. But he was a hive
+that had not been plundered.
+
+She reflected, sitting bent forward in the hansom, her face determined
+and unchanging. She did not undertake to go forward beyond the hundred
+pounds. Something would turn up. She was lucky... others had gone to
+the tower; gone before the firing squad for lesser activities in
+what Hecklemeir called her profession, but she had floated through...
+carrying what she gleaned to the paymaster. Was it skill, or was she a
+child of Fortune?
+
+And like every gambler, like every adventurer in a life of hazard, she
+determined for the favorite of some immense Fatality.
+
+It was an old house she came to, built in the prehistoric age of London,
+with thick, heavy walls, one of a row, deadly in its monotony. The row
+was only partly tenanted.
+
+She dismissed the hansom and got out.
+
+It was a moment before she found the number. The houses adjoining on
+either side were empty, the windows were shuttered. One might have
+considered the middle house with the two, for its step was unscrubbed,
+and it presented unwashed windows.
+
+It was a heavy, deep-walled structure like a monument. Even the
+street in the vicinity was empty. If the biologist had been seeking an
+undisturbed quarter of London, he had, beyond doubt, found it here.
+
+There was a bridged-over court before the house. Lady Muriel crossed.
+She paused before the door. There had been a bell pull in the wall, but
+the brass handle was broken and only the wire remained.
+
+She was uncertain whether one was supposed to pull this wire, and in
+the hesitation she took hold of the door latch. To her surprise the door
+yielded, and following the impulse of her extended hand, she went in.
+
+The hall was empty. There was no servant to be seen. And immediately the
+domestic arrangement of the biologist were clear to her. They would be
+that of one who had a cleaning woman in on certain days, and so lived
+alone. She was not encouraged by this economy, and yet such a custom in
+a man like Bramwell Winton might be habit.
+
+The scientist, in the popular conception, was not concerned with the
+luxury of life--they were a rum lot.
+
+But the house was not empty. A smart hat and stick were in the rack and
+from what should be a drawing room, above, there descended faintly the
+sound of voices.
+
+It seemed ridiculous to Lady Muriel to go out and struggle with the
+broken bell wire. She would go up, now that she had entered, and
+announce herself, since, in any event, it must come to that.
+
+The heavy oak door closed without a sound, as it had opened. Lady Muriel
+went up the stairway. She had nothing to put down. The only thing she
+carried was a purse, and lest it should appear suggestive--as of one
+coming with his empty wallet in his hand--she tucked the gold mesh into
+the bosom of her jacket.
+
+The door to the drawing room was partly open, and as Lady Muriel
+approached the top of the stair she heard the voices of two men in an
+eager colloquy; a smart English accent from the world that she was so
+desperately endeavoring to remain in, and a voice that paused and
+was unhurried. But they were both eager, as I have written, as though
+commonly impulsed by an unusual concern.
+
+And now that she was near, Lady Muriel realized that the conversation
+was not low or under uttered. The smart voice was, in fact, loud and
+incisive. It was the heavy house that reduced the sounds. In fact, the
+conversation was keyed up. The two men were excited about something.
+
+A sentence arrested the woman's advancing feet.
+
+"My word! Bramwell, if some one should go there and bring the things
+out, he would make a fortune, and would be famous. Nobody ever believed
+these stories."
+
+"There was Le Petit, Sir Godfrey," replied the deliberate voice. "He
+declared over his signature that he had seen them."
+
+"But who believed Le Petit," continued the other. "The world took him
+to be a French imaginist like Chateaubriand... who the devil, Bramwell,
+supposed there was any truth in this old story? But by gad, sir, it's
+true! The water color shows it, and if you turn it over you will see
+that the map on the back of it gives the exact location of the spot.
+It's all exact work, even the fine lines of the map have the bearings
+indicated. The man who made that water color, and the drawing on the
+back of it, had been on the spot.
+
+"Of course, we don't know conclusively who made it. Tony had gone in
+from the West coast after big game, and he found the thing put up as
+a sort of fetish in a devil house. It was one of the tribes near the
+Karamajo range. As I told you, we have only Tony's diary for it. I found
+the thing among his effects after he was killed in Flanders. It's pretty
+certain Tony did not understand the water color. There was only this
+single entry in the diary about how he found it, and a query in pencil.
+
+"My word! if he had understood the water color, he would have beaten
+over every foot of Africa to Lake Leopold. And it would have been the
+biggest find of his time. Gad! what a splash he'd have made! But he
+never had any luck, the beggar... stopped a German bullet in the first
+week out.
+
+"Now, how the devil, Bramwell, do you suppose that water color got into
+a native medicine house?"
+
+The reflective voice replied slowly.
+
+"I've thought about the thing, Sir Godfrey. It must have been the work
+of the Holland explorer, Maartin. He was all about in Africa, and he
+died in there somewhere, at least he never came out... that was ten
+years ago. I've looked him up, and I find that he could do a water
+color--in fact there's a collection of his water colors in, the Dutch
+museum. They're very fine work, like this one; exquisite, I'd say. The
+fellow was born an artist.
+
+"How it got into the hands of a native devil doctor is not difficult
+to imagine. The sleeping sickness may have wiped Maartin out, or the
+natives may have rushed his camp some morning, or he may have been
+mauled by a beast. Any article of a white man is medicine stuff you
+know. When you first showed me the thing I was puzzled. I knew what
+it was because I had read Le Petit's pretension... I can't call it a
+pretension now; the things are there whether he saw them or not.
+
+"I think he did not see them. But it is certain from this water color
+that some one did; and Maartin is the only explorer that could have done
+such a color. As soon as I thought of Maartin I knew the thing could
+have been done by no other."
+
+Lady Muriel had remained motionless on the stair. The door to the
+drawing room, before her, was partly open. She stepped in to the angle
+of the wall and drew the door slowly back until it covered this angle in
+which she stood.
+
+She was rich in such experiences, for her success had depended, not a
+little, on overhearing what was being said. Through the crack of the
+door the whole interior of the room was visible.
+
+Sir Godfrey Halleck, a little dapper man, was sitting across the table
+from Bramwell Winton. His elbows were on the table, and he was looking
+eagerly at the biologist. Bramwell Winton had in his hands the thing
+under discussion.
+
+It seemed to be a piece of cardboard or heavy paper about six inches in
+length by, perhaps, four in width. Lady Muriel could not see what was
+drawn or painted on this paper. But the heart in her bosom quickened.
+She had chanced on the spoor of something worth while.
+
+The little dapper man flung his head up.
+
+"Oh, it's certain, Bramwell; it's beyond any question now. My word!
+If Tony were only alive, or I twenty years younger! It's no great
+undertaking, to go in to the Karamajo Mountains. One could start from
+the West Coast, unship any place and pick up a bunch of natives. The map
+on the back of the water color is accurate. The man who made that knew
+how to travel in an unknown country. He must have had a theodolite and
+the very best equipment. Anybody could follow that map."
+
+There was a battered old dispatch box on the table beside Sir Godfrey's
+arm--one that had seen rough service.
+
+"Of course," he went on, "we don't know when Tony picked up this
+drawing. It was in this box here with his diary, an automatic pistol and
+some quinine. The date of the diary entry is the only clue. That would
+indicate that he was near the Karamajo range at the time, not far from
+the spot."
+
+He snapped his fingers.
+
+"What damned luck!"
+
+He clinched his hands and brought them down on the table.
+
+"I'm nearly seventy, Bramwell, but you're ten years under that. You
+could go in. No one need know the object of your expedition. Hector
+Bartlett didn't tell the whole of England when he went out to Syria for
+the gold plates. A scientist can go anywhere. No one wonders what he is
+about. It wouldn't take three months. And the climate isn't poisonous. I
+think it's mostly high ground. Tony didn't complain about it."
+
+The biologist answered without looking up.
+
+"I haven't got the money, Sir Godfrey."
+
+The dapper little man jerked his head as over a triviality.
+
+"I'll stake you. It wouldn't cost above five hundred pounds."
+
+The biologist sat back in his chair, at the words, and looked over the
+table at his guest.
+
+"That's awfully decent of you, Godfrey," he said, "and I'd go if I saw a
+way to get your money to you if anything happened."
+
+"Damn the money!" cried the other.
+
+The biologist smiled.
+
+"Well," he said, "let me think about it. I could probably fix up some
+sort of insurance. Lloyd's will bet nearly any sane man that he won't
+die for three months. And besides I should wish to look things up a
+little."
+
+Sir Godfrey rose.
+
+"Oh, to be sure," he said, "you want to make certain about the thing. We
+might be wrong. I hadn't an idea what it was until I brought it to you,
+and of course Tony hadn't an idea. Make certain of it by all means."
+
+The biologist extended his long legs under the table. He indicated the
+water color in his hand.
+
+"This thing's certain," he said. "I know what this thing is."
+
+He rapped the water color with the fingers of his free hand.
+
+"This thing was painted on the spot. Maartin was looking at this thing
+when he painted it. You can see the big shadows underneath. No living
+creature could have imagined this or painted it from hearsay. He had to
+see it. And he did see it. I wasn't thinking about this, Godfrey. I was
+thinking the Dutch government might help a bit in the hope of finding
+some trace of Maartin and I should wish to examine any information they
+might have about him."
+
+"Damn the Dutch government!" cried the little man. "And damn Lloyd's. We
+will go it on our own hook."
+
+The biologist smiled.
+
+"Let me think about it, a little," he said.
+
+The dapper man flipped a big watch out of his waistcoat pocket.
+
+"Surely!" he cried, "I must get the next train up. Have you got a place
+to lock the stuff? I had to cut this lid open with a chisel."
+
+He indicated the tin dispatch box.
+
+"Better keep it all. You'll want to run through the diary, I imagine.
+Tony's got down the things explorer chaps are always keen about;
+temperature, water supply, food and all that..... Now, I'm off. See you
+Thursday afternoon at the United Service Club. Better lunch with me."
+
+Then he pushed the dispatch box across the table. The biologist rose and
+turned back the lid of the box. The contents remained as Sir Godfrey's
+dead son had left them; a limp leather diary, an automatic pistol of
+some American make, a few glass tubes of quinine, packed in cotton wool.
+
+He put the water color on the bottom of the box and replaced them.
+
+Then he took the dispatch box over to an old iron safe at the farther
+end of the room, opened it, set the box within, locked the door, and,
+returning, thrust the key under a pile of journals on the corner of the
+table. Then he went out, and down the stairway with his guest to the
+door.
+
+They passed within a finger touch of Lady Muriel.
+
+The woman was quick to act. There would be no borrowing from Bramwell
+Winton. He would now, with this expedition on the way, have no penny for
+another. But here before her, as though arranged by favor of Fatality,
+was something evidently of enormous value that she could cash in to
+Hecklemeir.
+
+There was fame and fortune on the bottom of that dispatch box.
+
+Something that would have been the greatest find of the age to Tony
+Halleck... something that the biologist, clearly from his words and
+manner, valued beyond the gold plates of Sir Hector Bartlett.
+
+It was a thing that Hecklemeir would buy with money... the very thing
+which he would be at this opportune moment interested to purchase. She
+saw it in the very first comprehensive glance.
+
+Her luck was holding Fortune was more than favorable, merely. It
+exercised itself actively, with evident concern, in her behalf.
+
+Lady Muriel went swiftly into the room. She slipped the key from under
+the pile of journals and crossed to the safe sitting against the wall.
+
+It was an old safe of some antediluvian manufacture and the lock was
+worn. The stem of the key was smooth and it slipped in her gloved hands.
+She could not hold it firm enough to turn the lock. Finally with her
+bare fingers and with one hand to aid the other she was able to move the
+lock and so open the safe.
+
+She heard the door to the street close below, and the faint sound of
+Bramwell Winton's footsteps as though he went along the hall into the
+service portion of the house. She was nervous and hurried, but this
+reassured her.
+
+The battered dispatch box sat within on the empty bottom of the a safe.
+
+She lifted the lid; an automatic pistol lay on a limp leather-backed
+journal, stained, discolored and worn. Lady Muriel slipped her hand
+under these articles and lifted out the thing she sought.
+
+Even in the pressing haste of her adventure, the woman could not forbear
+to look at the thing upon which these two men set so great a value. She
+stopped then a moment on her knees beside the safe, the prized article
+in her hands.
+
+A map, evidently drawn with extreme care, was before her. She glanced
+at it hastily and turned the thing quickly over. What she saw amazed and
+puzzled her. Even in this moment of tense emotions she was astonished:
+She saw a pool of water,--not a pool of water in the ordinary sense--but
+a segment of water, as one would take a certain limited area of the
+surface of the sea or a lake or river. It was amber-colored and as
+smooth as glass, and on the surface of this water, as though they
+floated, were what appeared to be three, reddish-purple colored flowers,
+and beneath them on the bottom of the water were huge indistinct
+shadows.
+
+The water was not clear to make out the shadows. But the appearing
+flowers were delicately painted. They stood out conspicuously on the
+glassy surface of the water as though they were raised above it.
+
+Amazement held the woman longer than she thought, over this
+extraordinary thing. Then she thrust it into the bosom of her jacket,
+fastening the button securely over it.
+
+The act kept her head down. When she lifted it Bramwell Winton was
+standing in the door.
+
+In terror her hand caught up the automatic pistol out of the tin box.
+She acted with no clear, no determined intent. It was a gesture of fear
+and of indecision; escape through menace was perhaps the subconscious
+motive; the most primitive, the most common motive of all creatures in
+the corner. It extends downward from the human mind through all life.
+
+To spring up, to drag the veil over her face with her free hand, and to
+thrust the weapon at the figure in the doorway was all simultaneous and
+instinctive acts in the expression of this primordial impulse of escape
+through menace.
+
+Then a thing happened.
+
+There was a sharp report and the figure standing in the doorway swayed
+a moment and fell forward into the room. The unconscious gripping of the
+woman's fingers had fired the pistol.
+
+For a moment Lady Muriel stood unmoving, arrested in every muscle by
+this accident. But her steady wits--skilled in her profession--did not
+wholly desert her. She saw that the man was dead. There was peril in
+that--immense, uncalculated peril, but the prior and immediate peril,
+the peril of discovery in the very accomplishment of theft, was by this
+act averted.
+
+She stooped over, her eyes fixed on the sprawling body and with her free
+hand closed the door of the safe. Then she crossed the room, put the
+pistol down on the floor near the dead man's hand and went out.
+
+She went swiftly down the stairway and paused a moment at the door to
+look out. The street was empty. She hurried away.
+
+She met no one. A cab in the distance was appearing. She hailed it as
+from a cross street and returned to Regent. It was characteristic of the
+woman that her mind dwelt upon the spoil she carried rather than upon
+the act she had done.
+
+She puzzled at the water color. How could these things be flowers?
+
+Bramwell Winton was a biologist; he would not be concerned with flowers.
+And Sir Godfrey Halleck and his son Tony, the big game hunter, were
+not men to bother themselves with blossoms. Sir Godfrey, as she now
+remembered vaguely, had, like his dead son, been a keen sportsman in his
+youth; his country house was full of trophies.
+
+She carried buttoned in the bosom of her jacket something that these men
+valued. But, what was it? Well, at any rate it was something that would
+mean fame and fortune to the one who should bring it out of Africa. That
+one would now be Hecklemeir, and she should have her share of the spoil.
+
+Lady Muriel found the drawing-room of her former employer in some
+confusion; rugs were rolled up, bronzes were being packed. But in the
+disorder of it the proprietor was imperturbable. He merely elevated his
+eyebrows at her reappearance. She went instantly to the point.
+
+"Hecklemeir," she said, "how would you like to have a definite objective
+in your explorations?"
+
+The man looked at her keenly.
+
+"What do you mean precisely?" he replied.
+
+"I mean," she continued, "something that would bring one fame and
+fortune if one found it." And she added, as a bit of lure, "You remember
+the gold plates Hector Bartlett dug up in Syria?"
+
+He came over closer to her; his little eyes narrowed.
+
+"What have you got?" he said.
+
+His facetious manner--that vulgar persons imagine to be
+distinguished--was gone out of him. He was direct and simple.
+
+She replied with no attempt at subterfuge.
+
+"I've got a map of a route to some sort of treasure--I don't know
+what--It's in the Karamajo Mountains in the French Congo; a map to it
+and a water color of the thing."
+
+Hecklemeir did not ask how Lady Muriel came by the thing she claimed;
+his profession always avoided such detail. But he knew that she had gone
+to Bramwell Winton; and what she had must have come from some scientific
+source. The mention of Hector Bartlett was not without its virtue.
+
+Lady Muriel marked the man's changed manner, and pushed her trade.
+
+"I want a check for a hundred pounds and a third of the thing when you
+bring it out."
+
+Hecklemeir stood for a moment with the tips of his fingers pressed
+against his lips; then replied.
+
+"If you have anything like the thing you describe, I'll give you a
+hundred pounds... let me see it."
+
+She took the water color out of the bosom of her jacket and gave it to
+him.
+
+He carried it over to the window and studied it a moment. Then he turned
+with a sneering oath.
+
+"The devil take your treasure," he said, "these things are
+water-elephants. I don't care a farthing if they stand on the bottom of
+every lake in Africa!"
+
+And he flung the water color toward her. Mechanically the stunned woman
+picked it up and smoothed it out in her fingers.
+
+With the key to the picture she saw it clearly, the shadowy bodies of
+the beasts and the tips of their trunks distended on the surface like
+a purple flower. And vaguely, as though it were a memory from a
+distant life, she recalled hearing the French Ambassador and Baron Rudd
+discussing the report of an explorer who pretended to have seen these
+supposed fabulous elephants come out of an African forest and go down
+under the waters of Lake Leopold.
+
+She stood there a moment, breaking the thing into pieces with her bare
+hands. Then she went out. At the door on the landing she very nearly
+stepped against a little cockney.
+
+"My Lidy," he whined, "I was bringing your gloves; you dropped them on
+your way up."
+
+She took them mechanically and began to draw them on... the cryptic
+sign of the cleaner on the wrist hem was now to her indicatory of
+her submerged estate. The little cockney hung about a moment as for a
+gratuity delayed, then he disappeared down the stair before her.
+
+She went slowly down, fitting the gloves to her fingers.
+
+Midway of the flight she paused. The voice of the little cockney, but
+without the accent, speaking to a Bobby standing beside the entrance
+reached her.
+
+"It was Sir Henry Marquis who set the Yard to register all laundry marks
+in London. Great C. I. D. Chief, Sir Henry!"
+
+And Lady Muriel remembered that she had removed these gloves in order to
+turn the slipping key in Bramwell Winton's safe lock.
+
+
+
+
+X.-The Last Adventure
+
+
+The talk had run on treasure.
+
+I could not sleep and my friends had dropped in. I had the big South
+room on the second floor of the Hotel de Paris. It looks down on the
+Casino and the Mediterranean. Perhaps you know it.
+
+Queer friends, you'd say. Every man-jack of them a gambler. But when one
+begins to sit about all night with his eyes open, the devil's a friend.
+
+Barclay was standing before the fire. The others had drifted out. He's
+a big man pitted with the smallpox. He made a gesture, flinging out his
+hand toward the door.
+
+"That bunch thinks there's a curse on treasure, Sir Henry. That's one of
+the oldest notions in the world... it's unlucky."
+
+"But I know where there's a treasure that's not unlucky. At least it was
+not unlucky for poor Charlie Tavor. He did not get it, but there was no
+curse on it that reached to him. It helped poor Charlie finish in style.
+He died like a lord in a big country house, with a formal garden and a
+line of lackeys."
+
+Barclay paused.
+
+"Queer chap, Tavor. He was the best all round explorer in the world. I
+bar nobody. Charlie Tavor could take a nigger and cross the poisonous
+plateau south west of the Libyan desert. I've backed him. I know... but
+he had no business sense, anybody could fool him. He found the stock of
+bar silver on the west face of the Andes that made old Nute Hardman a
+quarter of a million dollars, clear, after the cursed beast had split it
+a half dozen ways with a crooked South American government."
+
+Barclay's teeth set and he jerked up his clinched hand.
+
+"It was a damned steal, Sir Henry. A piece of low down, dirty robbery;
+and it was like taking candy away from a child.... 'Sign here, Mr.
+Tavor,' and Charlie would scrawl on his fist.. .. Some people think
+there's no hell, but what's God Almighty going to do with Old Nute?"
+
+He flung out his hand again.
+
+"Still the thing didn't dent Charlie. He never missed a step. 'Don't
+bother, Barclay, old man,' he'd say, 'I'll find something else,' and
+then he'd go off into this dream he had of coming back when he'd struck
+it, to the old home county in England and laying it over the bunch that
+had called him 'no good.' He never talked much, but I gathered from odds
+and ends that he was the black sheep in a pretty smart flock.
+
+"Then, I'd stake him to a cheap outfit--not much, I've said he could
+push through the Libyan desert with a nigger--and he'd drop out of
+the world. It wasn't charity. I got my money's worth. The clay pots he
+brought me from Yucatan would sell any day for more cash than I ever
+advanced him."
+
+Barclay moved a little before the fire. I was listening in a big chair,
+my feet extended toward the hearth; a smoking jacket had replaced my
+dinner coat.
+
+"It was five years ago, in London," Barclay went on, "that I fitted
+Charlie out for his last adventure. He wanted to land in the gulf of
+Pe-chi-li and go into the great desert of the Shamo in Central Mongolia.
+You'll find the Shamo all dotted out on the maps; but it's faked dope.
+No white man knows anything about the Shamo.
+
+"It's a trick to lay off these great waste areas and call them elevated
+plateaus or sunken plateaus. You can't go by the atlas. Where's Kane's
+Open Polar Sea and Morris K. Jessup's Land? Still, Charlie thought the
+Shamo might be a low plain, and he thought he might find something in
+it. You see the great gold caravans used to cross it, three thousand
+years ago... and as Charlie kept saying, 'What's time in the Shamo?'
+
+"Well, I bought him a kit of stuff, and he took a P. and O. through the
+Suez. I got a long letter from Pekin two months later; and then Charlie
+Tavor dropped out of the world. I went back to America. No word ever
+came from Charlie. I thought he was dead. I suppose a white man's life
+is about the cheapest thing there is northwest of the Yellow River; and
+Charlie never had an escort. A coolie and an old service pistol would
+about foot up his defenses.
+
+"And there's every ghastly disease in Mongolia.... Still some word
+always came from Tavor inside of a year; a tramp around the Horn would
+bring in a dirty note, written God knows where, and carried out to the
+ship by a naked native swimming with the thing in his teeth; or some
+little embassy would send it to me in a big official envelope stamped
+with enough red wax to make a saint's candle.
+
+"But the luck failed this time. A year ran on, then two, then three and
+I passed Charlie up. He'd surely 'gone west!'"
+
+Barclay paused, thrust his hands into the pockets of his dinner jacket
+and looked down at me.
+
+"One night in New York I got a call from the City Hospital. The
+telephone message came in about ten o'clock. I was in Albany; I found
+the message when I got back the following morning and I went ever to the
+hospital.
+
+"The matron said that they had picked up a man on the North River docks
+in an epileptic fit and the only name they could find on him was my New
+York address. They thought he was going to die, he was cold and stiff
+for hours, and they had undertaken to reach me in order to identify him.
+But he did not die. He was up this morning and she would bring him in."
+
+Barclay paused again.
+
+"She brought in Charlie Tavor!... And I nearly screamed when I saw the
+man. He was dressed in one of those cheap hand-me-downs that the Germans
+used to sell in the tropics for a pound, three and six, his eyes looked
+as dead as glass and he was as white as plaster. How the man managed to
+keep on his feet I don't know.
+
+"I didn't stop for any explanation. I got Tavor into a taxi, and over to
+my apartment."
+
+Barclay moved in his position before the fire.
+
+"But on the way over a thing happened that some little god played in
+for a joke. There was a block just where Thirty-third crosses into Fifth
+Avenue, and our taxi pulled up by a limousine."
+
+Barclay suddenly thrust out his big pock-marked face.
+
+"The thing couldn't have happened by itself. Some burlesque angel put
+it over when the Old Man wasn't looking. Spread out on the tapestry
+cushions of that limousine was Nute Hardman!
+
+"There they were side by side. Not six feet apart; Old Nute in a
+sable-lined coat and Charlie in his hand-me-down, at a pound, three and
+six."
+
+The muscles in Barclay's big jaw tightened.
+
+"Maybe there is a joker that runs the world, and maybe the devil runs
+it. Anyhow it's a queer system. Here was Charlie Tavor, straight as a
+string, down and out. And here was Nute Hardman, so crooked that a fly
+couldn't light on him and stand level, with everything that money could
+buy.
+
+"I cast it up while the taxi stood there beside the car. Nute was consul
+in a South American port that you couldn't spell and couldn't find on
+the map. He didn't have two dollars to rub together, until Charlie Tavor
+turned up. There he sat, out of the world, forgotten, growing moss and
+getting ready to rot; and God Almighty, or the devil, or whatever it is,
+steered Charlie Tavor in to him with the bar silver.
+
+"He picked Charlie to the bone and cut for the States. And this damned
+crooked luck went right along with him. He was in a big apartment, now,
+up on Fifth Avenue and four-flushing toward every point of the
+compass. His last stunt was 'patron of science.' He'd gotten into the
+Geographical Society, and he was laying lines for the Royal Society in
+London. He had a Harvard don working over in the Metropolitan library,
+building him a thesis!
+
+"The thing made me ugly. I wanted to have a plain talk with the devil.
+He wasn't playing fair. Old Nute couldn't have been worth the whole run
+of us; I've legged some myself, and I had a right to be heard. The devil
+ought to make old Nute split up with Charlie. True, Charlie belonged in
+the other camp, but I didn't. And if I wanted a little favor I felt that
+the devil ought to come across with it... I put it up to him, or down to
+him, as you'd say, while I sat there in that taxi."
+
+There was a grim energy in Barclay's face. He was no ordinary person.
+
+"I got Tavor up to my apartment, and a goblet of brandy in him. I never
+saw anybody look like Tavor as he sat there propped up in the chair with
+a lot of cushions around him. It was winter and cold. He had no clothes
+to speak of, but he did not seem to notice either the cold outside or
+the heat in the apartment, as though, somehow, he couldn't tell the
+difference.
+
+"And he was the strangest color that any human being ever was in the
+world. I've said that he looked like plaster, and he did look like it,
+but he looked like a plaster man with a thin coat of tan colored paint
+on him."
+
+Barclay paused.
+
+"It's hardly a wonder that no message reached me. The devil couldn't
+have got word out of the hell land he'd been in. Lost is no name for it.
+He'd been all over the Shamo, and the big Sahara's a park to it. He'd
+been North to the Kangai where they used to get the gold that the
+caravans carried across the Shamo, and he'd followed the old trails
+South to the great wall.
+
+"It's all a Satan's country. I don't know why God Almighty wanted to
+make a hell hole like the Shamo!"
+
+He paused, then he went on.
+
+"But it wasn't in the Shamo that Tavor got track of the thing he was
+after. He said that the age he was trying to get back into was much
+more remote than he imagined. It must have been a good many thousands
+of years ago. He couldn't tell; long before anything like dependable
+history at any rate.... There must have been an immense age of great
+oriental splendor in the South of Asia and along the East African coast,
+dying out at about the time our knowledge of human history begins."
+
+Barclay went on, unmoving before the fire.
+
+"I don't know why we imagine that the legends of a little tribe in Syria
+running back to the fifth or sixth century begins the world.... Anyway,
+Tavor got the notion, as I have said, of an age in decay at about the
+time these legends start in; with a trade moving west.
+
+"He nosed it all out! God knows how. Of course it was only a
+theory--only a notion in fact. He hadn't anything to go on that I could
+see. But after two years' drifting about in the Shamo, this is how he
+finally figured it:
+
+"Northern Asia traded gold in the west; the mined product would be
+molded into bricks in lower Mongolia. It was then carried over land
+to the southwest coast of Arabia. There was some great center of world
+commerce low down on the Red Sea about eight hundred miles south of Port
+Said.
+
+"Tavor said that when he began to think about the thing the caravan
+route was pretty clear to him. Arabia seemed to have been connected,
+in that remote age, with Persia at the Strait of Ormus, so there was
+a direct overland route.... That put another notion into Tavor's head;
+these treasure caravans must have crossed the immense Sandy Desert of
+El-Khali. And this notion developed another; if one were seeking the
+wreck of any one of these treasure caravans he would be more likely to
+find it in the El-Khali than in the Shamo."
+
+Barclay moved away from the fire, got a chair and sat down. He was
+across the hearth from me. He looked about the room and at the curtained
+windows that shut out the blue night.
+
+"You can't sleep," he went on, "so I might just as well tell you this.
+A good deal of it is what the lawyers called dicta... obiter dicta; when
+the judge gets to putting in stuff on the side ... but it's a long time
+'til daylight."
+
+He had taken a small chair and he sat straight in it after the manner of
+a big man.
+
+"You see the treasure carried south across the Shamo would be 'gold
+wheat' (dust, we'd call it), packed in green skins... you couldn't find
+that. But the caravans crossing the El-Khali would carry this gold in
+bricks for the great west trade. Now a gold brick is indestructible;
+you can't think of anything that would last forever like a gold brick.
+Nothing would disturb it, water and sun are alike without effect on
+it....
+
+"That was Tavor's notion, and he went right after it. Most of us would
+have slacked out after two years in the hell hole of Central Mongolia.
+But not Charlie Tavor. He got down to Arabia somehow; God knows, I never
+asked him,--and he went right on into the Great Sandy Desert of Roba El
+Khali. The oldest caravan route known runs straight across the desert
+from Muscat to Mecca. It's a thousand miles across--but you can strike
+the line of it nearly four hundred miles west in a hundred miles travel
+by going due South from the coast between fifty and fifty-five degrees.
+
+"You'll find this old caravan route drawn on the map, a dead straight
+line across the thirty-third parallel. But the man that put it on there
+never traveled over it. He doesn't know whether it is a sunken plateau,
+or an elevated plateau, or what the devil it is that this old route runs
+across. And he doesn't know what the earth's like in the great basin of
+the El-Khali; maybe it's sand and maybe it's something else."
+
+Barclay stopped and looked queerly at me.
+
+"The Doctor Cooks have put a lot of stuff over on us. The fact is,
+there's six million square miles of the earth's surface that nobody
+knows anything about."
+
+He got a package of American cigarettes out of his pocket, selected one
+and lighted it with a fragment of the box thrust into the fire.
+
+"That's where Tavor was the last year. When the ambulance picked him up,
+he'd crawled around the Horn in a Siamese tramp."
+
+He paused.
+
+"Great people, the English; no fag-out to them. Look how Scott went on
+in the Antarctic with his feet frozen... It's in the blood; it was in
+Tavor.
+
+"I sat there that winter night in my room in New York while he told me
+all about it.
+
+"It was morning when he finished--the milk wagons were on the
+street,--and then, he added, quite simply, as though it were a matter of
+no importance,
+
+"'But I can't go back, Barclay, old man; my tramping's over. That was no
+fit I had on the dock.'
+
+"He looked at me with his dead eyes in his tan-colored plaster face.
+You've heard of the hemp-chewers and the betel-chewers; well, all that's
+baby-food to a thing they've got in the Shamo. It's a shredded root,
+bitter like cactus, and when you chew it, you don't get tired and you
+don't get hot... you go on and you don't know what the temperature
+is. Then some day, all at once, you go down, cold all over like a dead
+man... that time you don't die, but the next time..."
+
+Barclay snapped his fingers without adding the word.'
+
+"And you can calculate when the second one will strike you. It's a
+hundred and eighty-one days to the hour."
+
+Then he added:
+
+"That was the first one on the dock. Tavor had six months to live."
+
+The big man broke the cigarette in his fingers and threw the pieces into
+the fire. Then he turned abruptly toward me.
+
+"And I know where he wanted to live for those six months. The old dream
+was still with him. He wanted that country house in his native county
+in England, with the formal garden and the lackeys. The finish didn't
+bother him, but he wanted to round out his life with the dream that he
+had carried about with him.
+
+"I put him to bed and went down into Broadway, and walked about all
+night. Tavor couldn't go back and he had to have a bunch of money.
+
+"It was no good. I couldn't see it. I went back Tavor was up and I sat
+him down to a cross examination that would have delighted the soul of a
+Philadelphia lawyer."
+
+Barclay paused.
+
+"It was all at once that I saw it--like you'd snap your fingers. It
+was an accident of Charlie's talk... one of those obiter dicta, that
+I mentioned a while ago. But I stopped Charlie and went over to the
+Metropolitan Library; there I got me an expert--an astronomer chap, as
+it happened, reading calculus in French for fun--I gave him a twenty and
+I looked him in the eye.
+
+"Now, Professor,' I said, 'this dope's got to be straight stuff, I'm
+risking money on it; every word you write has got to be the truth, and
+every line and figure that you put on your map has got to be correct
+with a capital K.'"
+
+"'Surely,' he said, 'I shall follow Huxley for the text and I shall
+check the chart calculations for error.'
+
+"'And there's another thing, professor. You've got to go dumb on this
+job, for which I double the twenty.' He looked puzzled, but when he
+finally understood me, he said 'Surely' again, and I went back to my
+apartment.
+
+"'Charlie,' I said, 'how much money would it take for this English
+country life business?'
+
+"His eyes lighted up a little.
+
+"'Well, Barclay, old man,' he replied, 'I've estimated it pretty
+carefully a number of times. I could take Eldon's place for six months
+with the right to purchase for two thousand dollars paid down; and
+I could manage the servants and the living expenses for another four
+thousand. I fear I should not be able to get on with a less sum than six
+thousand dollars.'
+
+"Then," he added--he was a child to the last--"perhaps Mr. Hardman will
+now be able to advance it; he promised me 'a further per cent'," those
+were his words, when the matter was finally concluded.
+
+"Then ten thousand would do?"
+
+"My word,' he said, 'I should go it like a lord on ten thousand. Do you
+think Mr. Hardman would consider that sum?'
+
+"'I'm going to try him,' I said, 'I've got some influence in a quarter
+that he depends on.'
+
+"And I went out. I went down to my bank and got twenty U. S. bonds of
+a thousand each. At five o'clock, the professor had his dope ready--the
+text and the chart, neatly folded in a big manilla envelope with a
+rubber band around it. And that evening I went up to see old Nute."
+
+Barclay got another cigarette. There was a queer cynicism in his big
+pitted face.
+
+"The church bunch," he said, "have got a strange conception of the
+devil; they think he's always ready to lie down on his friends. That's
+a fool notion. The devil couldn't do business if he didn't come across
+when you needed him.
+
+"And there's another thing; the old-timers, when they went after their
+god for a favor, always began by reciting what they'd done for him....
+That was sound dope! I tried it myself on the way up to old Nute's
+apartment on Fifth Avenue.
+
+"I went over a lot of things. And whenever I made a point, I rapped it
+on the pavement with the ferule of my walking stick; as one would say,
+'you owe me for that!'
+
+"You see I was worked up about Tavor. When a man's carried a dream over
+all the hell he'd pushed through he ought to have it in the end."
+
+Barclay paused and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.
+
+"You know the swell apartments on Fifth Avenue; no name, only a number;
+every floor a residence, only the elevators connecting them. I found old
+Nute in the seventh; and I was bucked the moment I got in.
+
+"The door from the drawing room to the library was open. The Harvard don
+was going out, the one Nute had employed to get up his thesis for the
+Royal Society of London--I mentioned him a while ago. And I heard his
+final remark, flung back at the door. 'What you require, Sir, is
+the example case of some new exploration--one that you have yourself
+conducted.'
+
+"That bucked me; the devil was on the job!"
+
+Barclay stopped again. He sat for a moment watching the smoke from the
+cigarette climb in a blue mist slowly into the beautiful fresco of the
+ceiling.
+
+"I told old Nute precisely what I've told you. How I'd backed Tavor for
+his last adventure, and where he'd been; all over Central Mongolia and
+finally across the Great Sandy Desert of El-Khali. And I told him what
+Charlie was after; the theory he started with and his final conclusion
+when he made his last push along the old caravan route west from Muscat.
+
+"I went into the details, and the big notion that Tavor had slowly
+pieced together; how the gold was mined in the ranges south of Siberia,
+carried in green skins to lower Mongolia, melted there and taken for
+trade Southwest across the El-Khali to an immense Babylon of Commerce of
+which the present Mecca is perhaps a decadent residuum.
+
+"I put it all in; the accessibility of this desert from the coast
+on three sides, how the old caravan route parallels the thirty-third
+meridian and how Charlie struck it four hundred miles out into the
+desert in a hundred miles travel due south in longitude between 50 and
+55 degrees; all the details of Tavor's hunt for the wreck of one of
+these treasure caravans.
+
+"Old Nute looked at me with his little hard eyes slipping about.
+
+"'And he didn't find it?' he said.
+
+"I didn't answer that. I went ahead and told him how I found Tavor and
+the shape he was in, and then I added, 'I'm not an explorer, and Charlie
+can't go back.'
+
+"Old Nute's thick neck shot out at that.
+
+"'Then he did find it?' he said.
+
+"'Now look here, Nute,' I said, 'you're not trading with Tavor on this
+deal. You're trading with me and I'm just as slick as you are. You'll
+get no chance to slip under on this. You forget all I've told you just
+as though it had nothing to do with what I'm going to tell you, and I'll
+come to the point.'
+
+"'Forget it?' he said.
+
+"'Yes,' I said, 'forget it. I'm not going to put you on to what Charlie
+knows, with any strings to it, or with any pointers that you can run
+down without us. I've told you all about Tavor's big hunt through the
+Shamo and the El-Khali for a purpose of my own and not for the purpose
+of enabling you to locate the thing that Charlie Tavor knows about.'
+
+"Hardman's voice went down into a low note. 'What does he know?' he
+said.
+
+"I looked him squarely in the little reptilian eyes. 'He knows where
+there is a treasure in gold equal in our money to three hundred thousand
+dollars!'
+
+"Old Nute's little eyes focused into his nose an instant. Then he took a
+chance at me.
+
+"'What's the country like?'
+
+"I went on as though I didn't see the drift.
+
+"'Tavor says this area of the earth's surface is a great plain
+practically level, sloping gradually on one side and rising gradually on
+the other.'
+
+"'Sand?' said Nute.
+
+"'No,' I replied, 'Tavor says that contrary to the common notion, this
+plain is not covered with sand, it's a kind of chalk deposit.'
+
+"'Hard to get to?'
+
+"Old Nute shot the query in with a little quick duck of his head.
+
+"I went straight on with the answer.
+
+"'Tavor says it's about a five or six days' journey from a sea coast
+town.'
+
+"'Hard traveling?'
+
+"'No, Tavor says you can get within two miles of the place without any
+difficulty whatever--he says anybody can do it. The only difficulties
+are on the last two miles. But up to the last two miles, it's a holiday
+journey for a middle-aged woman.'
+
+"Old Nute grunted. He put his fat hands together over his waistcoat and
+twiddled his thumbs.
+
+"'Well,'; he said, 'what's in your mind about it?'
+
+"We were now up to the trade and I stated the terms.
+
+"'It's like this,' I said, 'Tavor's down and out. He's got only six
+months to live. Fifth Avenue piled full of gold won't do him any good if
+he's got to wait for it. What he wants is a little money quick!'
+
+"Old Nute's eyes squinted.
+
+"'How much money?' he said.
+
+"'Well,' I said, 'Tavor will turn his map over to you for ten thousand
+dollars... Death's crowding him.'
+
+"Old Nute's fat fingers began to drum on his waistcoat.
+
+"'How do I know the gold's there and the map's straight?'
+
+"'Did you ever know Tavor to lie?' I said.
+
+"'No,' he said, 'Tavor's not a liar; but I am a business man, Mr.
+Barclay, and in business we do not go on verbal assurances, no matter
+how unquestioned.'
+
+"'That's right,' I replied, 'I'm a business man, too; that's why I came
+instead of sending Tavor.... you found out he wasn't a business man in
+the first deal.'
+
+"Then I took my 'shooting irons' out of my pocket and laid them on the
+table.
+
+"There,' I said, 'are twenty, one-thousand United States bonds, not
+registered,' and I put my hand on one of the big manilla envelopes;
+'and here,' I said, 'is an accurate description of the place where this
+treasure lies and a map of the route to it,' and I put my hand on the
+other.
+
+"'Now,' I went on, 'I believe every word of this thing. Charles Tavor is
+the best all-round explorer in the world. I've known him a lifetime
+and what he says goes with me. We'll put up this bunch of stuff with a
+stakeholder for the term of a year, and if the gold isn't there and if
+the map showing the route to it isn't correct and if every word I've
+said about it isn't precisely the truth, you take down my bonds and keep
+them.'
+
+"Old Nute got up and walked about the room. I knew what he was thinking.
+'Here's another one of them--there's all kinds.'
+
+"But it hooked him. We wrote out the terms and put the stuff up with old
+Commodore Harris--the straightest sport in America. Nute had the right
+to copy the map, and the text and a year to verify it. And I took the
+ten thousand back to Charlie Tavor."
+
+Barclay got up and went over to the window. He drew back the heavy
+tapestry curtains. It was morning; the blue dawn was beginning to
+illumine Monaco and the polished arc of the sea. He stood looking down
+into it, holding the curtain in his hand.
+
+"I give the devil his due for that, Sir Henry," he said. "Charlie
+Tavor got his dream at the end; he died like a gentleman in his English
+country house with the formal garden and the lackeys."
+
+"And the other man got the treasure?" I said. Barclay replied without
+moving.
+
+"No, he didn't get it."
+
+"Then you lost your bonds?"
+
+"No, I didn't lose them; Commodore Harris handed them back to me on the
+last day of the year."
+
+I sat up in my big lounge chair.
+
+"Didn't Hardman make a fight for them; if he didn't find the
+treasure--didn't he squeal?"
+
+Barclay turned about, drawing the curtain close behind him.
+
+"And be laughed out of the high-brow bunch that he was trying to get
+into?... I said old Nute was a crook, but I didn't say he was a fool."
+
+I turned around in the chair.
+
+"I don't understand this thing, Barclay. If the treasure was there,
+and you gave Hardman a correct map of the route to it, and it lay on a
+practically level plain, and he could get within two miles of it without
+difficulty in four or five days' travel from a sea coast town, why
+couldn't he get it? Was it all the truth?"
+
+"It was every word precisely the truth," he said.
+
+"Then why couldn't he get it?"
+
+Barclay looked down at me; his big pitted face was illumined with a
+cynical smile.
+
+"Well, Sir Henry," he said, "'the trouble is with those last two miles.
+They're water... straight down. The level plain is the bed of the
+Atlantic ocean and that gold is in the hold of the Titanic."
+
+
+
+
+XI.-American Horses
+
+
+The thing began in the colony room of the Empire Club in London. The
+colony room is on the second floor and looks out over Piccadilly Circus.
+It was at an hour when nobody is in an English club. There was a drift
+of dirty fog outside. Such nights come along in October.
+
+Douglas Hargrave did not see the Baronet until he closed the door behind
+him. Sir Henry was seated at a table, leaning over, his face between his
+hand, and his elbows resting on the polished mahogany board. There was
+a sheet of paper on the table between the Baronet's elbows. There were a
+few lines written on the paper and the man's faculties were concentrated
+on them. He did not see the jewel dealer until that person was half
+across the room, then he called to him.
+
+"Hello, Hargrave," he said. "Do you know anything about ciphers?"
+
+"Only the trade one that our firm uses," replied the jewel dealer. "And
+that's a modification of the A B C code."
+
+"Well," he said, "take a look at this."
+
+The jewel dealer sat down at the other side of the table and the Baronet
+handed him the sheet of paper. The man expected to see a lot of queer
+signs and figures; but instead he found a simple trade's message, as it
+seemed to him.
+
+P.L.A. shipped nine hundred horses on freight steamer Don Carlow from N.
+Y.
+
+Have the bill of lading handed over to our agent to check up.
+
+"Well," said the jewel dealer, "somebody's going to ship nine hundred
+horses. Where's the mystery?"
+
+The Baronet shrugged his big shoulders.
+
+"The mystery," he said, "is everywhere. It's before and after and in the
+body of this message. There's hardly anything to it but mystery."
+
+"Who sent it?" said Hargrave.
+
+"That's one of the mysteries," replied the Baronet.
+
+"Ah!" said the jewel dealer. "Who received it?"
+
+"That's another," he answered.
+
+"At any rate," continued Hargrave, "you know where you got it."
+
+"Right," replied the Baronet. "I know where I got it." He took three
+newspapers out of the pocket of his big tweed coat. "There it is," he
+said, "in the personal column of three newspapers--today's Times printed
+in London; the Matin printed in Paris; and a Dutch daily printed in
+Amsterdam."
+
+And there was the message set up in English, in two sentences precisely
+word for word, in three newspapers printed on the same day in London,
+Paris and Amsterdam.
+
+"It seems to be a message all right," said Hargrave: "But why do you
+imagine it's a cipher?"
+
+The Baronet looked closely at the American jewel dealer for a moment.
+
+"Why should it be printed in English in these foreign papers," he said,
+"if it were not a cipher?"
+
+"Perhaps," said Hargrave, "the person for whom it's intended does not
+know any other language."
+
+The Baronet shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"The persons for whom this message is intended," he said, "do not
+confine themselves to a single language. It's a pretty well-organized
+international concern."
+
+"Well," said Hargrave, "it doesn't look like a mystery that ought
+to puzzle the ingenuity of the Chief of the Criminal Investigation
+Department of the metropolitan police." He nodded to Sir Henry. "You
+have only to look out for the arrival of nine hundred horses and when
+they get in to see who takes them off the boat. The thing looks easy."
+
+"It's not so easy as it looks," replied the Baronet. "Evidently these
+horses might go to France, Holland or England. That's the secret in this
+message. That's where the cipher comes in. The name of the port is in
+that cipher somewhere."
+
+"But you can, watch the steamer," said Hargrave, "the Don Carlos."
+
+The Baronet laughed.
+
+"There's no such steamer!" He got up and began to walk round the table.
+"Nine hundred horses," he said. "This thing has got to stop. They're on
+the sea now, on the way over from America: We have got to find out where
+they will go ashore."
+
+He stopped, stooped over and studied the message which he had written
+out and which also lay before him in the three newspapers.
+
+"It's there," he said, "the name of the port of arrival, somewhere in
+those two sentences. But I can't get at it. It's no cipher that I have
+ever heard of. It's no one of the hundred figure or number ciphers that
+the experts in the department know anything about. If we knew the port
+of arrival we could pick up the clever gentleman who comes to take away
+the horses. But what's the port--English, French or Dutch? There are a
+score of ports." He struck the paper with his hand. "It's there, my word
+for it, if we could only decode the thing."
+
+Then he stood up, his face lifted, his fingers linked behind his
+back. He crossed the room and stood looking out at the thin yellow fog
+drifting over Piccadilly Circus. Finally he came back, gathered up his
+papers and put them in the pocket of his big tweed coat.
+
+"There's one man in Europe," he said, "who can read this thing. That's
+the Swiss expert criminologist, old Arnold, of Zurich. He's lecturing at
+the Sorbonne in Paris. I'm going to see him."
+
+Then he went out.
+
+Now that, as has been said, is how the thing began. It was the first
+episode in the series of events that began to go forward on this
+extraordinary night. One will say that the purchasing agent for a great
+New York jewel house ought to be accustomed to adventures. The writers
+of romance have stimulated that fancy. But the fact is that such persons
+are practical people. They never do any of the things that the story
+writers tell us. They never carry jewels about with them. Of course they
+know the police departments of foreign cities. All jewel dealers make a
+point of that. Hargrave's father was an old friend of Sir Henry Marquis,
+chief of the C. I. D., and the young man always went to see him when he
+happened in London. That explains the freedom of his talk to Hargrave on
+this night in the Empire Club in Piccadilly.
+
+The young man went over and sat down by the fire. The big room was
+empty. The sounds outside seemed muffled and distant. The incident that
+had just passed impressed him. He wondered why people should imagine
+that a purchasing agent of a jewel house must be a sort of expert in the
+devices of mystery. As has been said, the thing's a notion. Everything
+is shipped through reliable transportation companies and insured. There
+was much more mystery in a shipload of horses--the nine hundred horses
+that were galloping through the head of Sir Henry Marquis--than in all
+the five prosaic years during which young Hargrave had succeeded his
+father as a jewel buyer. The American was impressed by this mystery of
+the nine hundred horses. Sir Henry had said it was a mystery in every
+direction.
+
+Now, as he sat alone before the fire in the colony room of the Empire
+Club and thought about it, the thing did seem inexplicable. Why should
+the metropolitan police care who imported horses, or in what port a
+shipload of them was landed? The war was over. Nobody was concerned
+about the importation of horses. Why should Sir Henry be so disturbed
+about it? But he was disturbed; and he had rushed off to Paris to see an
+expert on ciphers. That seemed a tremendous lot of trouble to take. The
+Baronet knew the horses were on the sea coming from America, he said. If
+he knew that much, how could he fail to discover the boat on which
+they were carried and the port at which they would arrive? Nobody could
+conceal nine hundred horses!
+
+Hargrave was thinking about that, idly, before the glow of the coal
+fire, when the second episode in this extraordinary affair arrived.
+
+A steward entered.
+
+"Visitor, please," he said, "to see Mr. Hargrave."
+
+Then he presented his tray with a card. The jewel dealer took the card
+with some surprise. Everybody knew that he was at the Empire Club. It is
+a colony thing with chambers for foreign guests. A list of arrivals is
+always printed. He saw at a glance that it was not a man's card; the
+size was too large. Then he turned it over before the light of the fire.
+The name was engraved in script, an American fashion at this time.
+
+The woman's card had surprised him; but the name on it brought him up
+in his chair--"Mrs. A. B. Farmingham." It was not a name that he knew
+precisely; but he knew its genera, the family or group to which it
+belonged. Mr. Jefferson removed titles of nobility in the American
+republic, but his efforts did not eliminate caste zones. It only made
+the lines of cleavage more pronounced. One knew these zones by the name
+formation. Everybody knew "Alfa Baba" Farmingham, as the Sunday Press
+was accustomed to translate his enigmatical initials. Some wonderful
+Western bonanza was behind the man. Mrs. "Alfa Baba" Farmingham would
+be, then, one of the persons that Hargrave's house was concerned to
+reach. He looked again at the card. In the corner the engraved address,
+"Point View, Newport," was marked out with a pencil and "The Ritz"
+written over it.
+
+He got his coat and hat and followed the steward out of the club. There
+was a carriage at the curb. A footman was holding the door open, and a
+woman, leaning over in the seat, was looking out. She was precisely what
+Hargrave expected to see, one of those dominant, impatient, aggressive
+women who force their way to the head of social affairs in America. She
+shot a volley of questions at him the moment he was before the door.
+
+"Are you Douglas Hargrave, the purchasing agent for Bartholdi & Banks?"
+
+The man said that he was, and at her service, and so forth. But she did
+not stop to listen to any reply.
+
+"You look mighty young, but perhaps you know your business. At any rate,
+it's the best I can do. Get in."
+
+Hargrave got in, the footman closed the door, and the carriage turned
+into Piccadilly Circus. The woman did not pay very much attention to
+him. She made a laconic explanation, the sort of explanation one would
+make to a shopkeeper.
+
+"I want your opinion on some jewels," she said. "I have a lot to do--no
+time to fool away. When I found that I could see the jewels to-night I
+concluded to pick you up on my way down. I didn't find out about it in
+time to let you know."
+
+Hargrave told her that he would be very glad to give her the benefit of
+his experience.
+
+"Glad, nonsense!" she said. "I'll pay your fee. Do you know a jewel when
+you see it?"
+
+"I think I do, madam," he replied.
+
+She moved with energy.
+
+"It won't do to think," she said. "I have got to know. I don't buy
+junk."
+
+He tried to carry himself up to her level with a laugh.
+
+"I assure you, madam," he said, "our house is not accustomed to buy
+junk. It's a perfectly simple matter to tell a spurious jewel."
+
+And he began to explain the simple, decisive tests. But she did not
+listen to him.
+
+"I don't care how a vet knows that a hunter's sound. All that I want to
+be certain about is that he does know it. I don't want to buy hunters on
+my own hook. Neither do I want to buy jewels on what I know about
+them. If you know, that's all I care about it. And you must know or old
+Bartholdi wouldn't trust you. That's what I'm going on."
+
+She was a big aggressive woman, full of energy. Hargrave could not see
+her very well, but that much was abundantly clear. The carriage turned
+out of Piccadilly Circus, crossed Trafalgar Square and stopped before
+Blackwell's Hotel. Blackwell's has had a distinct clientele since
+the war; a sort of headquarters for Southeastern European visitors to
+London.
+
+When the carriage stopped Mrs. Farmingham opened the door herself,
+before the footman could get down, and got out. It was the restless
+American impatience always cropping out in this woman.
+
+"Come along, young man," she said, "and tell me whether this stuff is O.
+K. or junk."
+
+They got in a lift and went up to the top floor of the hotel. Mrs.
+Farmingham got out and Hargrave followed her along the hall to a door
+at the end of a corridor. He could see her now clearly in the light. She
+had gray eyes, a big determined mouth, and a mass of hair dyed as only a
+Parisian expert, in the Rue de la Paix, can do it. She went directly to
+a door at the end of the corridor, rapped on it with her gloved hand,
+and turned the latch before anybody could possibly have responded.
+
+Hargrave followed her into the room. It was a tiny sitting room, one
+of the inexpensive rooms in the hotel. There was a bit of fire in
+the grate, and standing by the mantelpiece was, a big old man with
+close-cropped hair and a pale, unhealthy face. It was the type of face
+that one associates with tribal races in Southeastern Europe. He was
+dressed in a uniform that fitted closely to his figure. It was a uniform
+of some elevated rank, from the apparent richness of it. There were one
+or two decorations on the coat, a star and a heavy bronze medal. The
+man looked to be of some importance; but this importance did not impress
+Mrs. Farmingham.
+
+"Major," she said in her direct fashion, "I have brought an expert to
+look at the jewels."
+
+She indicated Hargrave, and the foreign officer bowed courteously. Then
+he took two candles from the mantelpiece and placed them on a little
+table that stood in the center of the room.
+
+He put three chairs round this table, sat down in one of them,
+unbuttoned the bosom of his coat and took out a big oblong jewel case.
+The case was in an Oriental design and of great age. The embroidered
+silk cover was falling apart. He opened the case carefully, delicately,
+like one handling fragile treasure. Inside, lying each in a little
+pocket that exactly fitted the outlines of the stone, were three rows of
+sapphires. He emptied the jewels out on the table.
+
+"Sir," he said, speaking with a queer, hesitating accent, "it saddens
+one unspeakably to part with the ancient treasure of one's family."
+
+Mrs. Farmingham said nothing whatever. Hargrave stooped over the
+jewels and spread them out on top of, the table. There were twenty-nine
+sapphires of the very finest quality. He had never seen better sapphires
+anywhere. He remembered seeing stones that were matched up better; but
+he had never seen individual stones that were any finer in anybody's
+collection. The foreigner was composed and silent while the American
+examined the jewels. But Mrs. Farmingham moved restlessly in her chair.
+
+"Well," she said, "are they O. K.?"
+
+"Yes, madam," said Hargrave; "they are first-class stones."
+
+"Sure?" she asked.
+
+"Quite sure, madam," replied the American. "There can be no question
+about it."
+
+"Are they worth eighteen thousand dollars?"
+
+She put the question in such a way that Hargrave understood her
+perfectly.
+
+"Well," he said, "that depends upon a good many conditions. But I'm
+willing to say, quite frankly, that if you don't want the jewels I'm
+ready to take them for our house at eighteen thousand dollars."
+
+The big, dominant, aggressive woman made the gesture of one who cracks a
+dog whip.
+
+"That's all right," she said. Then she turned to the foreigner. "Now,
+major, when do you want this money?"
+
+The big old officer shrugged his shoulders and put out his hands.
+
+"To-morrow, madam; to-morrow as I have said to you; before midday I must
+return. I can by no means remain an hour longer; my leave of absence
+expires. I must be in Bucharest at sunrise on the morning of the twelfth
+of October. I can possibly arrive if I leave London to-morrow at midday,
+but not later."
+
+Mrs. Farmingham began to wag her head in a determined fashion.
+
+"Nonsense," she said, "I can't get the money by noon. I have telegraphed
+to the Credit Lyonnais in Paris. I can get it by the day after
+to-morrow, or perhaps to-morrow evening."
+
+The foreigner looked down on the floor.
+
+"It is impossible," he said.
+
+The woman interrupted him.
+
+"Now, major, that's all nonsense! A day longer can't make any
+difference."
+
+He drew himself up and looked calmly at her.
+
+"Madam," he said, "it would make all the difference in the world. If I
+should remain one day over my time I might just as well remain all the
+other days that are to follow it."
+
+There was finality and conviction in the man's voice. Mrs. Farmingham
+got up and began to walk about the room. She seemed to speak to
+Hargrave, although he imagined that she was speaking to herself.
+
+"Now this is a pretty how-de-do," she said "Lady Holbert told me about
+this find to-night at dinner. She said Major Mikos wanted the money at
+once; but I didn't suppose he wanted it cash on the hour like that. She
+brought me right away after dinner to see him. And then I went for you."
+She stopped, and again made the gesture as of one who, cracks a dog
+whip. "Now what shall I do?" she said.
+
+The last remark was evidently not addressed to Hargrave. It was not
+addressed to anybody. It was merely the reflection of a dominant nature
+taking counsel with itself. She took another turn about the room. Then
+she pulled up short.
+
+"See here," she said, "suppose you take these jewels and give the major
+his money in the morning. Then I'll buy them of you."
+
+"Very well, madam," said Hargrave; "but in that event we shall charge
+you a ten per cent commission."
+
+She stormed at that.
+
+"Eighteen hundred dollars?" she said. "That's absurd, ridiculous! I'm
+willing to pay you five hundred dollars."
+
+The American did not undertake to argue the matter with her.
+
+"We don't handle any sale for a less commission," he said.
+
+Then he explained that he could not act as any sort of agent in the
+matter; that the only thing he could do would be to buy the jewels
+outright and resell them to her. His house would not make any sale for
+a less profit than ten per cent. Hargrave did not propose to be involved
+in any but a straight-out transaction. He was quite willing to buy
+the sapphires for eighteen thousand dollars. There was five thousand
+dollars' profit in them on any market. He was perfectly safe either way
+about. If Mrs. Farmingham made the repurchase there was a profit of ten
+per cent. If not, there was five thousand dollars' profit in the bargain
+under any conditions.
+
+They were Siamese stones, and the cutting was of an old design. They
+were not from any stock in Europe. Hargrave knew what Europe held of
+sapphires. These were from some Oriental stock. And everybody bought an
+Oriental stone wherever he could get it. How the seller got it did not
+matter. Nobody undertook to verify the title of a Siamese trader or a
+Burma agent.
+
+Mrs. Farmingham walked about for several minutes, saying over to herself
+as she had said before:
+
+"Now what shall I do?"
+
+Then like the big, dominant, decisive nature that she was she came to a
+conclusion.
+
+"All right," she said, "bring in the money in the morning and get the
+sapphires. I'll take them up in a day or two. Good-by, major; come
+along, Mr. Hargrave." And she went out of the room.
+
+The American stopped at the door to bow to the old Rumanian officer who
+was standing up beside the table before the heap of sapphires. They got
+into the carriage at the curb before Blackwell's Hotel. Mrs. Farmingham
+put Hargrave down at the Empire Club, and the carriage passed on, across
+Piccadilly Circus toward the Ritz.
+
+The following morning Hargrave got the sapphires from Major Mikos, and
+paid him eighteen thousand dollars in English sovereigns for them. He
+wanted gold to carry back with him for the jewels that he had brought
+out of the kingdom of Rumania. He seemed a simple, anxious person. He
+wished to carry his treasures with him like a peasant. The sapphires
+looked better in the daylight. There ought to have been seven thousand
+dollars' profit in them, perhaps more; seven thousand dollars, at any
+rate, that very day in the London market. Hargrave took them to the
+Empire Club and put them in a sealed envelope in the steward's safe.
+
+The thin drift of yellow remained in the city; that sulphurous haze
+that the blanket of sea fog, moving over London, presses down into her
+streets. It was not heavy yet; it was only a mist of saffron; but it
+threatened to gather volume as the day advanced.
+
+At luncheon Hargrave got a note from Mrs. Farmingham, a line scrawled
+on her card to say that she would call for him at three o'clock.
+Her carriage was before the door on the stroke of the hour, and she
+explained that the money to redeem the jewels had arrived. The Credit
+Lyonnais had sent it over from Paris. She seemed a bit puzzled about it.
+She had telegraphed the Credit Lyonnais yesterday to send her eighteen
+thousand dollars. And she had expected that the French banking house
+would have arranged for the payment of the money through its English
+correspondent. But its telegram directed her to go to the United
+Atlantic Express Company and receive the money.
+
+A few minutes cleared the puzzle. The office of the company is on the
+Strand above the Savoy. Mrs. Farmingham went to the manager and showed
+him a lot of papers she had in an official-looking envelope. After a
+good bit of official pother the porters carried out a big portmanteau, a
+sort of heavy leather traveling case, and put it into the carriage. Mrs.
+Farmingham came to Hargrave where he stood by the door.
+
+"Now, what do you think!" she said. "Of all the stupid idiots, give me
+a French idiot to be the stupidest; they have actually sent me eighteen
+thousand dollars in gold!"
+
+"Well," said Hargrave, "perhaps you asked them to send you eighteen
+thousand dollars in gold."
+
+She closed her mouth firmly for a moment and looked him vacantly in the
+face.
+
+"What did I do?" she said, in the old manner of addressing an inquiry
+to herself. "The major wanted gold and perhaps I said gold. Why, yes, I
+must have said I wanted eighteen thousand dollars in gold. Well, at any
+rate, here's the money to pay you for the sapphires. I'll telegraph
+the Credit Lyonnais to send me your eighteen hundred, and you can come
+around to the Ritz for it in the morning."
+
+She wished Hargrave to see that the telegram was properly worded, so the
+stupid French would not undertake to ship another bag of coin to her.
+He wrote it out, so there could be no mistake, and sent it from Charing
+Cross on the way back to the club.
+
+Hargrave had to get two porters to carry the leather portmanteau into
+his room at the Empire Club. Mrs. Farmingham did not wait to receive the
+sapphires. She said he could bring them over to the Ritz after he had
+counted the money. She wanted a cup of tea; he could come along in an
+hour.
+
+It took Hargrave the whole of the hour to verify the money. The case had
+been shipped, the straps were knotted tight and the lock was sealed. He
+had to get a man from the outside to break the lock open. The man said
+it was an American lock and he hadn't any implement to turn it.
+
+There were eighteen thousand dollars in American twenty-dollar gold
+pieces packed in sawdust in the bag. The Credit Lyonnais had followed
+Mrs. Farmingham's directions to the letter. Such is the custom of the
+stupid French! She had asked for eighteen thousand dollars in gold, and
+they had sent her eighteen thousand dollars in gold. Hargrave put one of
+the pieces into his waistcoat pocket. He wanted to show Mrs. Farmingham
+how strangely the stupid French had made the blunder of doing precisely
+what she asked. Then he strapped up the portmanteau, pushed it under the
+bed, went out and locked the door. He asked the chief steward to put a
+man in the corridor to see that no one went into his room while he was
+out. Then he got the sapphires out of the safe and went over to the
+Ritz.
+
+He met Mrs. Farmingham in the corridor coming out to her carriage.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Hargrave," she said, "here you are. I just told the clerk to
+call you up and tell you to bring the sapphires over in the morning when
+you came for the draft. I promised Lady Holbert last night to come out
+to tea at five. Forgot it until a moment ago."
+
+She took Hargrave along out to the carriage and he gave her the
+envelope. She tore off the corner, emptied the sapphires into her hand,
+glanced at them, and dropped them loose into the pocket of her coat.
+
+"Was the money all right?" she said.
+
+"Precisely all right," replied the American. "The Credit Lyonnais,
+with amazing stupidity, sent you precisely what you asked for in your
+telegram." And he showed her the twenty-dollar gold piece.
+
+"Well, well, the stupid darlings!" Then she laughed in her big,
+energetic manner. "I'm not always a fool. Come in the morning at nine.
+Good-night, Mr. Hargrave."
+
+And the carriage rolled across Piccadilly into Bond Street in the
+direction of Grosvenor Square and Lady Holbert's.
+
+The fog was settling down over London. Moving objects were beginning to
+take on the loom of gigantic figures. It was getting difficult to see.
+
+It must have taken Hargrave half an hour to reach the club. The first
+man he saw when he went in was Sir Henry, his hands in the pockets of
+his tweed coat and his figure blocking the passage.
+
+"Hello, Hargrave!" he cried. "What have you got in your room that old
+Ponsford won't let me go up?"
+
+"Not nine hundred horses!" replied the American.
+
+The Baronet laughed. Then he spoke in a lower voice:
+
+"It's extraordinary lucky that I ran over to the Sorbonne. Come along up
+to your room and I'll tell you. This place is filling up with a lot of
+thirsty swine. We can't talk in any public room of it."
+
+They went up the great stairway, lined with paintings of famous
+colonials celebrated in the English wars, and into the room. Hargrave
+turned on the light and poked up the fire. Sir Henry sat down by the
+table. He took out his three newspapers and laid them down before him.
+
+"My word, Hargrave," he said, "old Arnold is a clever beggar! He cleared
+the thing up clean as rain." The Baronet spread the newspapers out
+before him.
+
+"We knew here at the Criminal Investigation Department that this thing
+was a cipher of some sort, because we knew about these horses. We had
+caught up with this business of importing horses. We knew the shipment
+was on the way as I explained to you. But we didn't know the port that
+it would come into."
+
+"Well," said the American, "did you find out?"
+
+"My word," he cried, "old Arnold laughed in my face. 'Ach, monsieur,'
+he cried, mixing up several languages, 'it is Heidel's cipher! It is
+explained in the seventeenth Criminal Archive at Gratz. Attend and I
+will explain it, monsieur. It is always written in two paragraphs. The
+first paragraph contains the secret message, and the second paragraph
+contains the key to it. Voila! This message is in two paragraphs:
+
+"'"P.L.A. shipped nine hundred horses on freight steamer Don Carlos from
+N. Y.
+
+"'"Have the bill of lading handed over to our agent to check up."
+
+"'The hidden message is made up of certain words and capital letters
+contained in the first paragraph, while the presence of the letter t in
+the second paragraph indicates the words or capital letters that count
+in the first. One has only to note the numerical position of the letter
+t in the second paragraph in order to know what capital letter or word
+counts in the first paragraph.'"
+
+The Baronet took out a pencil and underscored the words in the second
+paragraph of the printed cipher: "Have the bill of lading handed over to
+our agent to check up."
+
+"You will observe that the second, the eighth and the eleventh words
+in this paragraph begin with the letter t. Therefore, the second, the
+eighth and the eleventh capital letters or words in the first paragraph
+make up the hidden message."
+
+And again with his pencil he underscored the letters of the first
+paragraph of the cipher: "P.L.A. shipped nine hundred horses on freight
+steamer Don Carlos from N. Y."
+
+"So we get L, on, Don."
+
+"London!" cried Hargrave. "The nine-hundred horses are to come into
+London!"
+
+And in his excitement he took the gold piece out of his pocket and
+pitched it up. He had been stooping over the table. The fog was creeping
+into the room. And in the uncertain light about the ceiling he missed
+the gold piece and it fell on the table before Sir Henry. The gold piece
+did not ring, it fell dull and heavy, and the big Baronet looked at it
+openmouthed as though it had suddenly materialized out of the yellow fog
+entering the room.
+
+"My word!" he cried. "One of the nine hundred horses!"
+
+Hargrave stopped motionless like a man stricken by some sorcery.
+
+"One of the nine hundred horses!" he echoed.
+
+The Baronet was digging at the gold piece with the blade of his knife.
+
+"Precisely! In the criminal argot a counterfeit American twenty-dollar
+gold piece is called a 'horse.'
+
+"Look," he said, and he dug into the coin with his knife, "it's white
+inside, made of Babbit metal, milled with a file and gold-plated. Where
+did you get it?"
+
+The American stammered.
+
+"Where could I have gotten it?" he murmured.
+
+"Well," the Baronet said, "you might have got it from a big, old,
+pasty-faced Alsatian; that would be 'Dago' Mulehaus. Or you might have
+got it from an energetic, middle-aged, American woman posing as a social
+leader in the States; that would be 'Hustling' Anne; both bad crooks, at
+the head of an international gang of counterfeiters."
+
+
+
+
+XII. The Spread Rails
+
+
+It was after dinner, in the great house of Sir Henry Marquis in St.
+James's Square.
+
+The talk had run on the value of women in criminal investigation;
+their skill as detective agents... the suitability of the feminine
+intelligence to the hard, accurate labor of concrete deductions.
+
+It was the American Ambassadress, Lisa Lewis, who told the story.
+
+
+It was a fairy night, and the thing was a fairy story.
+
+The sun had merely gone behind a colored window. The whole vault of the
+heaven was white with stars. The road was like a ribbon winding through
+the hills. In little whispers, in the dark places, Marion told me it.
+We sat together in the tonneau of the motor. It was past midnight, of
+a heavenly September. We were coming in from a stately dinner at the
+Fanshaws'.
+
+A fairy story is a nice, comfortable human affair. It's about a hero,
+and a thing no man could do, and a princess and a dragon. It tells
+how the hero found the task that was too big for other men, how he
+accomplished it, circumvented the dragon and won the princess.
+
+The Arabian formula fitted snugly to the facts.
+
+The great Dominion railroad, extending from Montreal into New York, was
+having a run of terrible luck; one frightful wreck followed another.
+Nobody could get the thing straightened out. Old Crewe, the railroad
+commissioner of New York, was relentless in pressing hard conditions
+on the road. Then out of the West, had come young Clinton Howard, big,
+tawny, virile, like the race of heroes. He had cleaned out the tangles,
+set the thing going, restored order and method; and the confidence of
+Canada was flowing back. Then Howard had made love to Marion in
+his persistent dominating fashion.... and here, with her whispered
+confession, was the fairy story ended.
+
+Marion pointed her finger out north, where, far across the valley, a
+great country-house sat on the summit of a wooded hill.
+
+"Clinton has discovered the Commissioner's secret, Sarah," she said.
+"The safety of the public isn't the only thing moving old Crewe to
+hammer the railroad. He pretends it is. But in fact he wishes to get
+control of the road in a bankrupt court."
+
+She paused.
+
+"Crewe is a Nietzsche creature. Victory is the only thing with him.
+Nothing else counts. The way the road was going he would have got it
+in the bankrupt court by now. He's howling 'safety first' all over the
+country. 'Negligence' is the big word in every report he issues. It
+won't do for Clinton to have an accident now that any degree of human
+foresight could have prevented."
+
+"Well," I said, "the dragon will give the hero no further trouble. Dr.
+Martin told mother to-day that Mr. Crewe's mind had broken down, and
+they had brought him out from New York. He got up in a directors'
+meeting and tried to kill the president of the Pacific Trust Company,
+with a chair. He went suddenly mad, Dr. Martin said."
+
+Marion put out her hands in an unconscious gesture.
+
+"I am not surprised," she said. "That sort of temperament in the strain
+of a great struggle is apt to break down and attempt to gain its end by
+some act of direct violence."
+
+Then she added:
+
+"My grandfather says in his work on evidence that the human mind if
+dominated by a single idea will finally break out in some bizarre act.
+And he cites the case of the minister who, having maneuvered in vain
+to compass the death of the king by some sort of accident, finally
+undertook to kill him with an andiron."
+
+She reflected a moment.
+
+"I am afraid," she continued, "that the harm is already done. Crewe has
+set the whole country on the watch. Clinton says there simply must not
+be a slip anywhere now. The road must be safe; he must make it safe."
+She repeated her expression.
+
+"An accident now that any sort of human foresight could prevent would
+ruin him."
+
+"Oh, dear, it's an awful strain on us... on him," she corrected. "He
+simply can't be everywhere to see that everything is right and everybody
+careful. And besides, there's the finances of the road to keep in shape.
+He had to go to Montreal to-day to see about that."
+
+She leaned over toward me in her eager interest.
+
+"I don't see how he can sleep with the thing on him. The big trains must
+go through on time, and every workman and every piece of machinery must
+be right as a clock. I get in a panic. I asked him to-day if he thought
+he could run a railroad like that, like a machine, everything in place
+on the second, and he said, 'Sure, Mike!'"
+
+I laughed.
+
+"'Sure, Mike,"' I said, "is the spirit in which the world is conquered."
+
+And then the strange attraction of these two persons for one another
+arose before me; this big, crude, virile, direct son of the hustling
+West, and this delicate, refined, intellectual daughter of New England.
+The ancestors of the man had been the fighting and the building pioneer.
+And those of the girl, reflective people, ministers of the gospel and
+counselors at law. Marion's grandfather had been a writer on the law.
+Warfield on Evidence, had been the leading authority in this country.
+And this ambitious girl had taken a special course in college to fit
+her to revise her grandfather's great work. There was no grandson to
+undertake this labor, and she had gone about the task herself. She would
+not trust the great book to outside hands. A Warfield had written it,
+and a Warfield should keep the edition up. Her revision was now in the
+hands of a publisher in Boston, and it was sound and comprehensive, the
+critics said; the ablest textbook on circumstantial evidence in America.
+I looked in a sort of wonder at this girl, carried off her feet by a
+tawny barbarian!
+
+Marion was absorbed in the thing; and I understood her anxiety. But the
+most pressing danger, she did not seem to realize.
+
+It lay, I thought, in the revenge of a discharged workman. Clinton
+Howard had to drop any number of incompetent persons, and they wrote him
+all sorts of threatening letters, I had been told. With all the awful
+things that happen over the country some of these angry people might do
+anything. There are always some half-mad people.
+
+She went on.
+
+"But Clinton says the public is as just as Daniel. If he has an accident
+in the ordinary course of affairs the public will hold him for it. But
+if anything should happen that he could not help, the public will not
+hold him responsible."
+
+I realized the force of that. What reasonable human care could prevent
+he must answer for, but the outrage of a criminal would not be taken in
+the public mind against him. On the contrary, the sympathy of the public
+would flow in. When the people feel that a man is making every effort
+for their welfare, the criminal act of an outsider brings them over
+wholly to his support. Profound interest carried Marion off her feet.
+
+"I was in a panic the other day, and Clinton said, 'Don't let rotten
+luck get your goat. I'm done if an engineer runs by a block, but nothing
+else can put it over on me'!"
+
+She laughed with me at the direct, virile idiom of young America in
+action.
+
+An event interrupted the discourse. The motor took a sharp curve and a
+young man running across the road suddenly flung himself face down in
+the grass beyond the curb.
+
+"Is he hurt?" said Marion to the chauffeur.
+
+"No, Miss, he's hiding, Miss," said the man, and we swept out of sight.
+
+I thought it more likely that the creature was in liquor. In spite
+of the great country-houses, it was not good hunting-ground for the
+criminal class, during the season when everybody was about. The very
+number of servants, when a place is open, in a rather effective way,
+police it. Besides the young man looked like a sort of workman. One gets
+such impressions at a glance.
+
+The motor descended the long hill toward the river and the flat valley.
+It hummed into the curves and hollows, through the pockets of chill air,
+and out again into the soft September night.
+
+Then finally it swept out into the flat valley, and stopped with a grind
+of the emergency brake that caused the wheels to skid, ripping up
+the dust and gravel. For a moment in the jar and confusion we did not
+realize what had happened, then we saw a great locomotive lying on its
+side, and a line of Pullmans, sunk to the axles in the soft earth.
+
+The whole "Montreal Express" was derailed, here in the flat land at the
+grade crossing. The thing had been done some time. The fire had been
+drawn from the engine; there was only a sputtering of steam. The
+passengers had been removed. A wrecking-car had come up from down the
+line. A telegrapher was setting up a little instrument on a box by the
+roadside. A lineman was climbing a pole to connect his wire. A track
+boss with a torch and a crew of men were coming up from an examination
+of the line littered with its wreck.
+
+I hardly know what happened in the next few minutes. We were out of the
+motor and among the men almost before the car stopped.
+
+No one had been hurt. The passenger-coaches were not turned over, and
+the engineer and fireman had jumped as the cab toppled. By the greatest
+good fortune the train had gone off the track in this low flat land
+almost level with the grade. Several things joined to avoid a terrible
+disaster; the flat ground that enabled the whole train to plow along
+upright until it stopped, the track lying flush with the highway where
+the engine went off, and the fact that trains must slow up for this
+grade crossing. Had there been an embankment, or a big ditch, or the
+train under its usual headway the wreck would have been a horror, for
+every wheel, from the engine to the last coach, had left the rails.
+
+We were an excited group around the train's crew, when the trackman
+came up with his torch. Everybody asked the same question as the man
+approached.
+
+"What caused the accident?"
+
+"Spread rails," he said. "These big brutes," he pointed to the mammoth
+engine sprawling like a child's top on its side, the gigantic wheels
+in the air, "and these new steel coaches, are awful heavy. There's an
+upgrade here. When they struck it, they just spread out the rails."
+
+And he pushed his closed hands out before him, slowly apart, in
+illustration.
+
+The man knew Marion, for he spoke directly to her in reply to our
+concerted query. Then he added "If you step down the track, Miss
+Warfield, I'll show you exactly how it happened."
+
+We followed the big workman with his torch. Marion walked beside him,
+and I a few steps behind. The girl had been plunged, on the instant,
+headlong into the horror she feared, into the ruin that she had lain
+awake over--and yet she met it with no sign, except that grim stiffening
+of the figure that disaster brings to persons of courage. She gave no
+attention to her exquisite gown. It was torn to pieces that night; my
+own was a ruin. The crushing effect of this disaster swept out every
+trivial thing.
+
+In a moment we saw how the accident happened, the workman lighting the
+sweep of track with his torch. Here were the plow marks on the wooden
+cross ties, where the wheels had run after they left the rails. One saw
+instantly that the thing happened precisely as the workman explained
+it. When the heavy engine struck the up-grade, the rails had spread,
+the wheels had gone down on the cross-ties, and the whole train was
+derailed.
+
+I saw it with a sickening realization of the fact.
+
+Marion took the workman's torch and went over the short piece of track
+on which the thing had happened. All the evidences of the accident were
+within a short distance. The track was not torn up when the thing began.
+There was only the displaced rail pushed away, and the plow marks of the
+wheels on the ties. The spread rails had merely switched the train off
+the track onto the level of the highway roadbed into the flat field.
+
+Marion and the workman had gone a little way down the track. I was quite
+alone at the point of accident, when suddenly some one caught my hand.
+
+I was so startled that I very nearly screamed. The thing happened so
+swiftly, with no word.
+
+There behind me was a woman, an old foreign woman, a peasant from some
+land of southern Europe. She had my hand huddled up to her mouth.
+
+And she began to speak, bending her aged body, and with every expression
+of respect.
+
+"Ah, Contessa, he is not do it, my Umberto. He is run away in fear to
+hide in the Barrington quarry. It is accident. It is the doing of the
+good God. Ah, Contessa," and her old lips dabbed against my hand. "I
+beg him to not go, but he is discharge; an' he make the threat like the
+great fool. Ah, Contessa, Contessa," and she went over the words with
+absurd repetition, "believe it is by chance, believe it is the doing
+of the good God, I pray you." And so she ran on in her quaint old-world
+words.
+
+Instantly I remembered the man lying by the roadside, and the threats of
+discharged workmen.
+
+I told her the thing was a clean accident, and tried to show her how it
+came about. She was effusive in gratitude for my belief. But she seemed
+concerned about Marion and the others. She did not go away; she went
+over and sat down beside the track.
+
+Presently the others returned. They were so engrossed that they did not
+notice my adventure or the aged woman seated on the ground.
+
+Marion was putting questions to the workman.
+
+"There was no obstruction on the track?"
+
+"No, Miss."
+
+"The engineer was watching?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Warfield, he had to slow up and be careful about the
+crossing. There is no curve on this grade, he could see every foot of
+the way. The track was clear and in place, and he was watching it. There
+was nothing on it.--The rails simply spread under the weight of the
+engine."
+
+And he began to comment on the excessive size and weight of the huge
+modern passenger engine.
+
+"The brute drove the rails apart," he said, "that's all there is to it."
+
+"Was the track in repair?" said Marion.
+
+"It was patrolled to-day, Miss, and it was all in shape."
+
+Then he repeated:
+
+"The big engine just pushed the rails out."
+
+"But the road is built for this type of engine," said Marion.
+
+"Yes, Miss Warfield," replied the man, "it's supposed to be, but every
+roadbed gets a spread rail sometimes."
+
+Then he added:
+
+"It has to be mighty solid to hold these hundred ton engines on the
+rails at sixty miles an hour."
+
+"It does hold them," said Marion.
+
+"Yes, Miss Warfield, usually," said the man.
+
+"Then why should it fail here?"
+
+The man's big grimy face wrinkled into a sort of smile.
+
+"Now, Miss Warfield," he said, "if we knew why an accident was likely to
+happen at one place more than another we wouldn't have any wrecks."
+
+"Precisely," replied Marion, "but isn't it peculiar that the track
+should spread at the synclinal of this grade with the train running at
+a reduced speed, when it holds on the synclinal of other grades with the
+train running at full speed?"
+
+The man's big face continued to smile.
+
+"All accidents are peculiar, Miss Warfield; that's what makes them
+accidents."
+
+"But," said Marion, "is not the aspect of these peculiarities indicatory
+of either a natural event or one designed by a human intelligence?"
+
+The man fingered his torch.
+
+"Mighty strange things happen, Miss Warfield. I've seen a train go
+over into a canal and one coach lodge against a tree that was standing
+exactly in the right place to save it. And I've seen a passenger engine
+run by a signal and through a block and knock a single car out of a
+passing freight-train, at a crossing, and that car be the very one that
+the freight train's brakeman had just reached on his way to the caboose;
+just like somebody had timed it all, to the second, to kill him. And
+I've seen a whole wreck piled up, as high as a house, on top of a man,
+and the man not scratched."
+
+"I do not mean the coincidence of accident," said Marion, "that is
+a mystery beyond us; what I mean is that there must be an organic
+difference in the indicatory signs of a thing as it happens in the
+course of nature, and as it happens by human arrangement."
+
+The trackman was a person accustomed to the reality and not the theory
+of things.
+
+"I don't see how the accident would have been any different," he said,
+"if somebody had put that tree in the right spot to catch the coach; or
+timed the minute with a stop-watch to kill that brakeman; or piled that
+wreck on the man so it wouldn't hurt him. The result would have been
+just the same."
+
+"The result would have been the same," replied Marion, "but the
+arrangement of events would have been different."
+
+"Just what way different, Miss Warfield?" said the man.
+
+"We cannot formulate an iron rule about that," replied Marion, "but as
+a general thing catastrophes in nature seem to lack a motive, and their
+contributing events are not forced."
+
+The big trackman was a person of sound practical sense. He knew what
+Marion was after, but he was confused by the unfamiliar terms in which
+the idea was stated.
+
+"It's mighty hard to figure out," he said. "Of course, when you find an
+obstruction on the track or a crowbar under a rail, or some plain thing,
+you know."
+
+Then he added:
+
+"You've got to figure out a wreck from what seems likely."
+
+"There you have it exactly," said Marion. "You must begin your
+investigation from what your common experience indicates is likely
+to happen. Now, your experience indicates that the rails of a track
+sometimes spread under these heavy engines."
+
+"Yes, Miss Warfield."
+
+"And your experience indicates that this is more likely to happen at
+the first rise of the synclinal on a grade than anywhere on a straight
+track."
+
+"Yes, Miss Warfield."
+
+"Good!" said Marion, "so far. But does not your experience also indicate
+that such an accident usually happens when the train is running at a
+high rate of speed?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Warfield," said the man. "It's far more likely to happen
+then, because the engine strikes the rails at the first rise of the
+grade with more force. Naturally a thing hits harder when it's going...
+But it might happen with a slow train."
+
+Marion made a gesture as of one rejecting the man's final sentence.
+
+"When you turn that way," she said, "you at once leave the lines of
+greatest probability. Why should you follow the preponderance of common
+experience on two features here, and turn aside from it on the third
+feature?"
+
+"Because the thing happened," replied the man, with the directness of
+those practical persons who drive through to the fact.
+
+"That is to say an unlikely thing happened!" Marion made a decisive
+gesture with her clenched fingers. "Thus, the inquiry, beginning with
+two consistent elements, now comes up against one that is inconsistent."
+
+"But not impossible," said the man.
+
+"Possible," said Marion, "but not likely. Not to be expected, not in
+line with the preponderance of common experience; therefore, not to
+be passed. We have got to stop here and try to find out why this track
+spread under a slow train."
+
+"But we see it spread, Miss Warfield," said the trackman with a
+conclusive gesture.
+
+"True," replied Marion, "we see that it did spread, under this
+condition, but why?"
+
+The old woman sitting beside the track seemed to realize what was
+under way; for she rose and came over to where I stood. "Contessa," she
+whispered, in those quaint, old world words, "do not reveal, what I have
+tol'. I pray you!"
+
+And she followed me across the few steps to where the others stood.
+
+I did not answer. I stood like one in some Hellenic drama, between
+two tragic figures. The love of woman lay in the solution of this
+problem--in the beginning and at the end of life.
+
+Marion and the big track boss continued with this woman looking on.
+
+I feared to speak or move; the thing was like a sort of trap, set with
+ghastly cunning, by some evil Fate. The ruin of a woman it would have.
+And perhaps on the vast level plain where it evilly dwelt, through
+its hard all-seeing eyes, the ruin and the sorrow either way would be
+precisely equal. How could I, then, lay a finger on the scale.
+
+"Now," said Marion, "when the engine reached this point on the track,
+one of the rails gave way first."
+
+The big workman looked steadily at her.
+
+"How do you know that, Miss Warfield?" he said.
+
+"Because," replied Marion, "the marks of the wheels of the locomotive
+on the ties are found, in the beginning, only on one side of the track,
+showing that the rail on that side gave way, when the engine struck it,
+and the other rail for some distance bore the weight of the train."
+
+She illustrated with her hands.
+
+"When the one rail was pushed out, the wheels on that side went down and
+continued on the ties, while the wheels on the other side went ahead on
+the firm rail."
+
+The workman saw it.
+
+"That's true, Miss Warfield," he said, "one rail sometimes spreads and
+the other holds solid."
+
+Marion was absorbed in the problem.
+
+"But why should the one rail give way like this and its companion hold?"
+
+"One of the rails might not be as solid as the other," said the man.
+
+"But it should have been nearly as solid," replied Marion. "This piece
+of track, you tell me, was examined to-day; the ties are equally
+sound on both sides, the rail is the same weight. We have the right to
+conclude then that each of these rails was about in the same condition.
+I do not say precisely in the same condition. Now, it is true that
+under these conditions one of the rails might have been pushed out of
+alignment before the other. We can grant a certain factor of difference,
+a certain reasonable factor of difference. But not a great factor of
+difference. We have a right to conclude that one rail would give way
+before the other. But not that one would very readily give way before
+the other. For some reason this particular rail did give way, much more
+readily than it ought to have done."
+
+The trackman was listening with the greatest interest.
+
+"Just how do you know that, Miss Warfield?" he said.
+
+"Why," replied Marion, "don't you see, from the mark on the ties, that
+the engine wheels left the rail almost at the moment they struck it. The
+marks of the wheels commence on the second tie ahead of the beginning of
+the rail. Therefore, this rail, for some reason, was more easily pushed
+out of alignment than it should have been. What was the reason?"
+
+The track boss reflected.
+
+"You see, Miss Warfield, this place is the beginning of an up-grade, the
+engine was coming down a long grade toward it, so when this train struck
+the first rails of the up-grade it struck it just like you'd drive in
+a wedge, and the hundred-ton brute of an engine jammed this rail out of
+alignment. That's all there is to it. When the rail sprung the wheels
+went down on the ties on that side and the train was ditched."
+
+"It was a clean accident, then, you think?" said Marion.
+
+"Sure, Miss Warfield," replied the man. "If anybody had tried to move
+that rail out of alignment, he would have to disconnect it at the other
+end, that is, take off the plate that joins it to the next rail. That
+would leave the end of the rail clean, with no broken plate. But the end
+of the rail is bent and the plate is twisted off. We looked at that the
+first thing. Nobody could twist that plate off. The engine did it when
+it left the track.
+
+"You see, Miss Warfield, the weight of the engine, like a wedge, simply
+forced one of these rails out of alignment. Don't you understand how a
+hundred ton wedge driven against the track, at the start of an upgrade,
+could do it?"
+
+The old peasant woman stood behind the track boss. The thing was a sort
+of awful game. She did not speak, but the vicissitudes of the inquiry
+advanced her, or retired her, with the effect of points, won or lost.
+
+"I understand perfectly," replied Marion, "how the impact of the heavy
+engine might drive both rails out of alignment, if they offered an equal
+resistance, or one of them out if it offered a less resistance. This is
+straight track. The wedge would go in even. It should have spread
+the rails equally. That's the probable thing. But instead it did the
+improbable thing; it spread one. I hold the improbable thing always in
+question. Human knowledge is built up on that postulate.
+
+"True, a certain factor of difference in conditions must be allowed, as
+I have said, but an excessive factor cannot be allowed. We have got
+to find it, or discard human reason as an implement for getting at the
+truth."
+
+Again the big track boss smashed through the niceties of logic.
+
+"These things happen all the time, Miss Warfield. You can't figure it
+out."
+
+"One ought to be able to determine it,"' replied the girl.
+
+The track boss shook his head.
+
+"We can't tell what made that rail give."
+
+"Of course, we can tell," said Marion. "It gave because it was
+weakened."
+
+"But what weakened it?" replied the man. "You can't tell that? The
+rail's sound."
+
+"There could be only two causes," said Marion. "It was either weakened
+by a natural agency or a human agency."
+
+The track boss made an annoyed gesture, like a practical person vexed
+with the refinements of a theorist.
+
+"But how are you going to tell?"
+
+"Now," said Marion, "there is always a point as you follow a thing down,
+where the human design in it must appear, if there is a human design in
+it. The human mind can falsify events within a limited area. But if one
+keeps moving out, as from a center, he will find somewhere this point at
+which intelligence is no longer able to imitate the aspect of the result
+of natural forces... I think we have reached it."
+
+She paused and drove her query at the track boss.
+
+"The spikes on the outside of this rail held it in place, did they not?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Warfield."
+
+"Did the impact of the engine force these spikes out of the ties?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Warfield, it forced them out."
+
+"How do you know it forced them out?"
+
+"Well, Miss Warfield," said the man, pointing to the rail and the
+denuded cross-ties, don't you see they're out?"
+
+"I see that they are out," replied Marion, "but I do not yet see that
+they have been forced out."
+
+She moved a step closer to the track boss and her voice hardened. "If
+these spikes were forced out by the impact of the engine, we ought to
+find torn spike holes inclining toward the end of the crossties....
+Look!"
+
+The big practical workman suddenly realized what the girl meant.
+
+He stooped over and began to flash his torch along the end of the ties.
+We crowded against him. Every one of the spike holes, for the entire
+length of the rail, was straight and clean. The man seized one of the
+spikes and scrutinized it under his torch.
+
+Then he stood up. For a moment he did not speak. He merely looked at
+Marion. "It's the holy truth!" he said. "Somebody pulled these spikes
+with a clawbar. That weakened the rail, and she bowed out when the
+engine struck her."
+
+Then he turned around, and shouted down the track to his crew. "Hey,
+boys! Spread out along the right of way and see if you can't find
+a claw-bar. The devils that do these tricks always throw away their
+tools."
+
+We stood together in a little tragic group. The old peasant woman came
+over to where I stood, she walked with a dead, wooden step. "Contessa,"
+she whispered, her old lips against my hand. "You will save him?"
+
+And suddenly with a wild human resentment, I longed to cut a way out of
+the trap of this Fatality; to force its ruthless decree into a sort of
+equity, if I could do it.
+
+"Yes," I said, "I will save him!"
+
+It was an impulse with no plan behind it. But the dabbing of the
+withered mouth on my fingers was like actual physical contact with a
+human heart.
+
+For a moment she looked at me as one among the damned might look at
+Michael. Then she went slowly away, down through the wooded copse of the
+meadow. And I turned about to meet Marion. I knew that she was now after
+the identity of the wrecker, and I faced her to foul her lines.
+
+"This is not the work of one with murder in his heart," she said "A
+criminal agent set on a ruthless destruction of property and life would
+have drawn these spikes on a trestle or an embankment, at a point where
+the train would be running at high speed."
+
+She paused for a moment, then she went on speaking to me as though she
+merely uttered her mental comment to herself.
+
+"These spikes are drawn at a point where the train slows down for a
+crossing and precisely where the engine would go off onto the hard
+road-bed of the highway into a level meadow. That means some one planned
+this wreck to result in the least destruction of life and property
+possible. Now, what class of persons could be after the effect of a
+wreck, exclusive of a loss of life?"
+
+I saw where her relentless deductions would presently lead. This was
+precisely the result that a discharged foreign workman would seek in his
+reprisal. This man would have hot blood, the southern Europe instinct
+for revenge, but with such a mother, no mere lust to kill. I tried to
+divert her from the fugitive.
+
+"Train robbers," I said. "I wonder what was in the express-car?"
+
+She very nearly laughed. "This is New York," she said, "not Arizona. And
+besides there was no express-car. This thing was done by somebody who
+wanted the effect of a wreck, and nothing else, and it was done by some
+one who knew about railroads.
+
+"Now, what class of persons who know about railroads could be moved by
+that motive?"
+
+She was driving straight now at the boy I stood to cover. At another
+step she would name the class. Discharged workmen would know about
+railroads; they would be interested to show how less efficient the
+road was without them; and a desperate one might plan such a wreck as
+a demonstration. If so, he would wish only the effect of the wreck,
+and not loss of life. Marion was going dead ahead on the right line,
+in another moment she would remember the man we passed, and the "black
+band" letters. I made a final desperate effort to divert her.
+
+"Come along!" I called, "the first thing to do now is to talk with
+Clinton Howard. The nearest telephone will be at Crewe's house on the
+hill."
+
+And it won.
+
+"Lisa!" she cried, "you're right I We must tell him at once."
+
+We hurried down the track to the motor-car. I had gained a little time.
+But how could I keep my promise. And the next moment the problem became
+more difficult. The track boss came up with a short iron bar that his
+men had found in the weeds along the right of way.
+
+"There's the claw-bar, that the devil done it with," he said.
+
+"You can tell it's just been handled by the way the rust's rubbed off."
+
+It was conclusive evidence. Everybody could see how the workman's hands,
+as he labored with the claw-bar to draw the spikes, had cleaned off the
+rust.
+
+I hurried the motor away. We raced up the long winding road to Crewe's
+country-house, sitting like a feudal castle on the summit. And I
+wondered, at every moment, how I could keep my promise. The boy was a
+criminal, deserving to be hanged, no doubt, but the naked mother's heart
+that had dabbed against my fingers overwhelmed me.
+
+Almost in a flash, I thought, we were in the grounds and before Crewe's
+house. Then I noticed lights and a confusion of voices. No one came to
+meet us. And we got out of the motor and went in through the open door.
+We found a group of excited servants. An old butler began to stammer to
+Marion.
+
+"It was his heart, Miss... the doctor warned the attendants. But he
+got away to-night. It was overexertion, Miss. He fell just now as the
+attendants brought him in." And he flung open the library door.
+
+On a leather couch illumined by the brilliant light, Crewe lay; his
+massive relentless face with the great bowed nose, like the iron cast
+of what Marion had called a Nietzsche creature, motionless in death; his
+arms straight beside him with the great gloved hands open.
+
+And all at once, at the sight, with a heavenly inspiration, I kept my
+promise.
+
+"Look!" I cried. "Oh, everybody, how the palms of his gloves are covered
+with rust!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII. The Pumpkin Coach
+
+
+The story of the American Ambassadress was not the only one related on
+this night.
+
+Sir Henry Marquis himself added another, in support of the contention of
+his guest... and from her own country.
+
+
+The lawyer walked about the room. The restraint which he had assumed was
+now quite abandoned.
+
+"That's all there is to it," he said. "I'm not trying this case for
+amusement. You have the money to pay me and you must bring it up here
+now, tonight."
+
+The woman sat in a chair beyond the table. She was young, but she looked
+worn and faded. Misery and the long strain of the trial had worn her
+out. Her hands moved nervously in the frayed coat-cuffs.
+
+"But we haven't any more money," she said. "The hundred dollars I paid
+you in the beginning is all we have."
+
+The man laughed without disturbing the muscles of his face. "You
+can take your choice," he said. "Either bring the money up here now,
+to-night, or I withdraw from the case when court opens in the morning."
+
+"But where am I to get any more money?" the woman said.
+
+The lawyer was a big man. His hair, black and thin, was brushed close to
+his head as though wet with oil; his nose was thick and flattened at
+the base. The office contained only a table, some chairs and a file for
+legal papers. Night was beginning to descend. Lights were appearing in
+the city. The two persons had come in from the Criminal Court after the
+session for the day had ended.
+
+The woman seemed bewildered. She looked at the man with the curious
+expression of a child that does not comprehend and is afraid to ask for
+an explanation.
+
+"If we had any more money," she said, "I would bring it to you, but the
+hundred dollars was all we had."
+
+Then she began to explain, reiterating minute details. When the tragedy
+occurred and her husband was arrested by the police they had a small
+sum painfully saved up. It was now wholly gone. Like persons in profound
+misery, she repeated. The man halted the recital with a brutal gesture.
+
+"I'll not discuss it," he said. "You can bring the money in here before
+the court convenes in the morning, or I withdraw from the case."
+
+He went over to the file, took out a packet of legal papers and threw
+them on the table.
+
+"All right, my lady!" he said, "perhaps you think your husband can get
+along without a lawyer. Perhaps you think the devil will save him, or
+heaven, or Cinderella in a pumpkin coach!" There was biting irony in the
+bitter words.
+
+A sudden comprehension began to appear in the woman's face. She realized
+now what the man was driving at. The expression in her face deepened
+into a sort of wonder, a sort of horror.
+
+"You think he's guilty!" she said. "You think we got the money and we're
+trying to keep it, to hide it."
+
+The lawyer turned about, put both hands on the table and leaned across
+it. He looked the woman in the face.
+
+"Never mind what I believe; you heard what I said!"
+
+For a moment the woman did not move. Then she got up slowly and went
+out. In the street she seemed lost. She remained for some time before
+the entrance of the building. Night had now arrived. Crowds of people
+were passing, intent on their affairs, unconcerned. No one seemed to see
+the figure motionless in the shadow of the great doorway.
+
+Presently the woman began to walk along the street in the crowd without
+giving any attention to the people about her or to the direction she was
+taking. She was in that state of mental coma which attends persons in
+despair. She neither felt nor appreciated anything and she continued to
+walk in the direction in which the crowd was moving.
+
+Some block in the traffic checked the crowd and the woman stopped. The
+block cleared and the human tide drifted on, but the woman remained. The
+crowd edged her over to the wall and she stood there before the
+shutter of a shop-window. After a time the crowd passed, thinned and
+disappeared, but the woman remained as though thrown out there by the
+human eddy.
+
+The woman remained for a long time unmoving against the shutter of the
+shop-window. Finally she was awakened into life by a voice speaking to
+her. It was a soft, foreign voice that lisped the liquid accents of the
+occasional English words:
+
+"Ma pauvre femme!" it said; "come with me. Vous etes malade!"
+
+The woman followed mechanically in a sort of wonder. The person who had
+spoken to her was young and beautifully dressed in furs that covered her
+to her feet. She had gotten down from a motorcar that stood beside the
+curb--one of those modern vehicles, fitted with splendid trappings.
+
+Beyond the shop-window was a great cafe. The girl entered and the woman
+followed. The attendants came forward to welcome the splendid visitor as
+one whose arrival at this precise hour of the evening had become a sort
+of custom. She gave some directions in a language which the woman did
+not understand, and they were seated at a table.
+
+The waiters brought a silver dish filled with a clear, steaming soup and
+served it. The girl threw back her fur coat and the dazed woman realized
+how beautiful she was. Her hair was yellow like ripe corn and there were
+masses of it banked and clustered about her head; her eyes were blue,
+and her voice, soft and alluring, was like a friendly arm put around the
+heart.
+
+The miserable woman was so confused by this transformation--by the
+sudden swing of the door in the wall that had admitted her into this
+new, unfamiliar world--that she was never afterward able to remember
+precisely by what introductory words her story was drawn out. She found
+herself taken up, comforted and made to tell it.
+
+Her husband had been a butler in the service of a Mr. Marsh, an
+eccentric man who lived in one of the old downtown houses of the
+city. He was a retired banker with no family. The man lived alone. He
+permitted no servants in the house except the butler. Meals were sent
+in on order from a neighboring hotel and served by the butler as the man
+directed. He received few visitors in the house and no tradespeople were
+permitted to come in. There seemed no reason for this seclusion except
+the eccentricities of the man that had grown more pronounced with
+advancing years.
+
+It was the custom of the butler to leave the house at eight o'clock in
+the evening and return in the morning at seven. On the morning of
+the third of February, when the butler entered the house, as he was
+accustomed to do at eight o'clock in the morning, he found his master
+dead.
+
+The woman continued with her narrative, speaking slowly. Every detail
+was vividly impressed upon her memory and she gave it accurately,
+precisely.
+
+There was a narrow passage or hall, not more than three feet in width,
+leading from the butler's pantry into a little dining-room. This
+dining-room the old man had fitted up as a sort of library. It was
+farther than any other room from the noises of the city. His library
+table was placed with one end against the left wall of the room and he
+sat with his back toward the passage into the butler's pantry. On the
+morning of the third of February he was found dead in his chair. He had
+been stabbed in the back, on the left side, where the neck joins to
+the shoulder. A carving-knife had been used and a single blow had
+accomplished the murder.
+
+It was known that on the evening before the old banker had taken from a
+safety-deposit vault the sum of $20,000, which it was his intention
+to invest in some securities. This money, in bills of very large
+denominations, was in the top drawer on the right side of the desk. The
+dead man had apparently not been touched after the crime, but the drawer
+had been pried open and the money taken. An ice-pick from the butler's
+pantry had been used to force it. The assassin had left no marks,
+finger-prints or tell-tale stains. The victim had been instantly killed
+with the blow of the knife which lay on the floor beside him.
+
+The butler had been arrested, charged with the crime, and his trial was
+now going on in the Criminal Court. Circumstantial evidence was strong
+against him. The woman spoke as though she echoed the current comment of
+the courtroom without realizing how it affected her. She had done what
+she could. She had employed an attorney at the recommendation of a
+person who had come to interview her. She did not know who the person
+was nor why she should have employed this attorney at his suggestion,
+except that some one must be had to defend her husband, and uncertain
+what to do, she had gone to the first name suggested.
+
+The girl listened, putting now and then a query. She spoke slowly,
+careful to use only English words. And while the woman talked she made
+a little drawing on the blank back of a menu card. Now she began to
+question the woman minutely about the details of the room and the
+position of the furniture where the tragedy had occurred, the desk,
+the attitude of the dead man, the location of the wound, and exact
+distances. And as the woman repeated the evidence of the police officers
+and the experts, the girl filled out her drawing with nice mathematical
+exactness like one accustomed to such a labor.
+
+This was the whole story, and now the woman added the final interview
+with the attorney. She made a sort of hopeless gesture.
+
+"Nobody believes us," she said. "My husband did not kill him. He was at
+home with me. He knew nothing about it until he found his master dead
+at the table in the morning. But there is only our word against all the
+lawyers and detectives and experts that Mr. Thompson has brought against
+us."
+
+"Who is Mr. Thompson?" said the girl. She was deep in a study of her
+little drawing.
+
+"He's Mr. Marsh's nephew, Mr. Percy Thompson."
+
+The girl, absorbed in the study of her drawing, now put an unexpected
+question.
+
+"Has your husband lost an arm?"
+
+"No," she said, "he never had any sort of accident."
+
+A great light came into the girl's face. "Then I believe you," she said.
+"I believe every word.... I think your husband is innocent."
+
+The girl was aglow with an enthusiastic purpose. It was all there in her
+fine, expressive face.
+
+"Now," she said, "tell me about this nephew, this Mr. Percy Thompson.
+Could we by any chance see him?"
+
+"It won't do any good to see him," replied the woman. "He is determined
+to convict my husband. Nothing can change him."
+
+The girl went on without paying any attention to the comment. "Where
+does he live--you must have heard?"
+
+"He lives at the Markheim Hotel," she said.
+
+"The Markheim Hotel," repeated the girl. "Where is it?"
+
+The woman gave the street and number. The girl rose. "That's on my way;
+we'll stop."
+
+The two-went out of the cafe to the motor. The whole thing, incredible
+at any other hour, seemed to the woman like events happening in a dream
+or in some topsy-turvy country which she had mysteriously entered.
+
+She sat back in the tonneau of the motor, huddled into the corner, a rug
+around her shoulders. The flashing lights seemed those of some distant,
+unknown city, as though she were transported into the scene of an
+Arabian tale.
+
+The motor stopped before a little shabby hotel in a neighboring
+cross-street, and the footman, in livery beside the driver, got down at
+a direction of the girl and went up the steps. In a few moments a man
+came out and descended to the motor standing by the curb. He was
+about middle age. He looked as though Nature had intended him, in the
+beginning, for a person of some distinction, but he had the dissipated
+face of one at middle age who had devoted his years to a life of
+pleasure. There were hard lines about his mouth and a purple network of
+veins showing about the base of his nose.
+
+As he approached the girl, leaning out of the open window of the
+tonneau, dropped her glove as by inadvertence. The man stooped,
+recovered it and returned it to her. The girl started with a perceptible
+gesture. Then she cried out in her charming voice,
+
+"Merci, monsieur. I stopped a moment to thank you for the flowers you
+sent me last night. It was lovely of you!" and she indicated the bunch
+of roses pinned to her corsage.
+
+The man seemed astonished. For a moment he hesitated as though about
+to make some explanation, but the girl went on without regarding his
+visible embarrassment.
+
+"You shall not escape with a denial," she said. "There was no card and
+you did not do me the honor to wait at the door, but I know you sent
+them--an usher saw you; you shall not escape my appreciation. You did
+send them?" she said.
+
+The man laughed. "Sure," he said, "if you insist." He was willing to
+profit by this unexpected error, and the girl went on:
+
+"I have worn the roses to-day," she said, "for you. Will you wear one of
+them to-morrow for me?"
+
+She detached a bud and leaned out of the door of the motor. She pinned
+the bud to the lapel of the man's coat. She did it slowly, deliberately,
+like one who makes the touch of the fingers do the service of a caress.
+
+Then she spoke to the driver and the motor went on, leaving the amazed
+man on the curb before the shabby Markheim Hotel with the rosebud pinned
+to his coat--astonished at the incredible fortune of this favor from an
+inaccessible idol about whom the city raved.
+
+The woman accepted the enigma of this interview as she had accepted the
+wonder of the girl's sudden appearance and the other, incidents of this
+extraordinary night. She did not undertake to imagine what the drawing
+on the menu meant, the words about the one-armed man, the glove dropped
+for Thompson to pick up, the rose pinned on his coat; it was all of a
+piece with the mystery that she had stumbled into.
+
+When the motor stopped and she was taken through a little door by an
+attendant into a theater box, she accepted that as another of these
+things into which she could not inquire; things that happened to her
+outside of her volition and directed by authorities which she could not
+control.
+
+The staging of the opera refined and extended the illusion that she had
+been transported out of the world by some occult agency. The wonderful
+creature that had taken her up out of her abandoned misery before the
+sordid shop-shutter appeared now in a fairy costume glittering with
+jewels. And the gnomes, the monsters and goblins appearing about her
+were all fabulous creatures, as the girl herself seemed a fabulous
+creature.
+
+She sighed like one who must awaken from the splendor of a dream to
+realities of which the sleeper is vaguely conscious. Only the girl's
+voice seemed real. It seemed some great, heavenly reality like the
+sunlight or the sweep of the sea. It filled the packed places of the
+theater. She sang and one believed again in the benevolence of heaven;
+in immortal love. To the distressed woman effacing herself in the corner
+of the empty box it was all a sort of inconceivable witch-work.
+
+And it was witch-work, as potent if not as amply fitted with dramatic
+properties as the witchwork of ancient legend.
+
+The daughter of an obscure juge d'instruction of the Canton of Vaud,
+singing in a Swiss meadow, had been taken up by a wealthy American,
+traveling in Switzerland on an April morning-old, enervated with the sun
+of the Riviera, and displeased with life. And this rich old woman, her
+rheumatic fingers loaded with jewels, had transformed the daughter of
+the juge d'instruction of the Canton of Vaud into a singing wonder that
+made every human creature see again the dreams of his youth before him
+leading into the Elysian Fields.
+
+And to the girl herself this transformation also seemed the wonder
+of witch-work. Her early life lay so far below in a world remote and
+detached; a little house in a village of the Canton of Vaud with
+the genteel poverty that attended the slender salary of a juge
+d'instruction, and the weight of duties that accumulated on her
+shoulders. Her father's life was given over to the labors of criminal
+investigation, but it was a field that returned nothing in the way of
+material gain. Honorable mention, a medal, the distinction of having his
+reports copied into the official archives, were the fruits of the man's
+life. She remembered the minutely exhaustive details of those reports
+which she used to copy painfully at night by the light of a candle.
+The old man, absorbed by his deductions, with his trained habits of
+observation and his prodigious memory, never seemed to realize the
+drudgery imposed upon the girl by his endless dictation.
+
+"To-morrow," the heavenly creature had said softly, like a caress, in
+the woman's ear when an attendant had taken her through the little
+door into the empty box. But the to-morrow broke with every illusion
+vanished.
+
+The woman sat beside her husband in the dismal court-room when the court
+convened. The judge, old and tired, was on the bench. A sulphurous,
+depressing fog entered from the city. The court-room smelled of a
+cleaner's mop. The jury entered; and a few spectators, who looked as
+though they might have spent the night on the benches of the park out,
+side, drifted in. The attorneys and the officials of the court were
+present and the trial resumed.
+
+Every detail of the departed, evening was, to the woman, a mirage except
+the brutal threat of the attorney, uttered before she had gone down into
+the street. This threat, with that power of reality which evil things
+seem always to possess, now materialized. After the court had opened,
+but before the trial could proceed, the attorney for the defendant rose
+and addressed the court.
+
+He spoke for some moments, handling his innuendoes with skill. His
+intent was to withdraw from the case. He realized that this was an
+unusual procedure and that the course must be justified upon a high
+ethical plane. He was a person of acumen and of no inconsiderable skill
+and he succeeded. Without making any direct charge, and disclaiming any
+intent to prejudice the prisoner and his defense, or to deprive him of
+any safeguard of the law, he was able to convey the impression that
+he had been misled in undertaking the defense of the case; that
+his confidence in the innocence of the accused had been removed by
+unquestionable evidence which he had been led to believe did not exist.
+
+He made this explanation with profound regret. But he felt that, having
+been induced to undertake the defense by representations not justified
+in fact, and by an impression of the nature of the case which
+developments in the court-room had not confirmed, he had the right to
+step aside out of an equivocal position. He wished to do this without
+injury to the prisoner and while there was yet an opportunity for him to
+obtain other counsel. The whole tenor of the speech was the right to be
+relieved from the obligation of an error; an error that had involved him
+unwittingly by reason of assurances which the developments of the case
+had now set aside. And through it all there was the manifest wish to do
+the prisoner no vestige of injury.
+
+After this speech of his attorney the conviction of the man was
+inevitable. He sat stooped over, his back bent, his head down, his
+thin hands aimlessly in his lap like one who has come to the end of
+all things; like one who no longer makes any effort against a destiny
+determined on his ruin.
+
+The thing had the overpowering vitality which evil things seem always
+to possess, and the woman felt helpless against it; so utterly, so
+completely helpless that it was useless to protest by any word or
+gesture. She could have gotten up and explained the true motive behind
+this man's speech; she could have repeated the dialogue in his office;
+she could have asserted his unspeakable treachery; but she saw with an
+unerring instinct that against the skill of the man her effort would be
+wholly useless. With his resources and his dominating cunning he would
+not only make her words appear obviously false, but he would make them
+fasten upon her a malicious intent to injure the man who had undertaken
+her husband's defense; and somehow he would be able, she felt, to divert
+the obliquity and cause it to react upon herself.
+
+This was all clear to her, and like some little trapped creature of
+the wood that finds escape closed on every side and no longer makes any
+effort, she remained motionless.
+
+The judge was an honorable man, concerned to accomplish justice and not
+always misled by an obvious intent. The proceeding did not please him,
+but he knew that no benefit, rather a continued injury, would result to
+the prisoner by forcing the attorney to go on with a case which it
+was evident that he no longer cared to make any effort to support. He
+permitted the man to withdraw. Then he spoke to the prisoner.
+
+"Have you any other counsel?" he asked.
+
+The prisoner did not look up. He replied in a low, almost inaudible
+voice.
+
+"No, Your Honor," he said.
+
+"Then I shall appoint some one to go on with the case," and he looked up
+over the docket before him and out at the few attorneys sitting within
+the rail.
+
+It was at this moment that the woman, crying silently, without a sound
+and without moving in her chair, heard behind her the voice which she
+had heard the evening before, when, as now, at the bottom of the pit,
+she stood before the shutter of the shop-window.
+
+"Will it be necessary, monsieur le judge?"
+
+It was the same wonderful, moving, heavenly voice. Every sound in the
+court-room suddenly ceased. All eyes were lifted. And Thompson, sitting
+beside the district-attorney, saw, standing before the rail in the
+court-room, the splendid, alluring creature that had called him out
+of the sordid lobby of the Hotel Markheim and entranced him with an
+evidence of her favor. Unconsciously he put up his hand to feel for
+the bud in the lapel of his coat. It had remained there--not, as it
+happened, from her wish, but because he dare not lay the coat aside.
+
+In the interval of intense interest arising at the withdrawal of the
+attorney from the case the girl had come in unnoticed. She might have
+appeared out of the floor. Her voice was the first indication of her
+presence.
+
+The judge turned swiftly. "What do you mean?" he said.
+
+"I mean, monsieur," she answered, "that if a man is innocent of a crime,
+he cannot require a lawyer to defend him."
+
+The judge was astonished, but he was an old man and had seen many
+strange events happen along the way of a criminal trial.
+
+"But why do you say this man is innocent," he said.
+
+"I will show you, monsieur," and she came around the railing into the
+pit of the court before his bench. She carried in her hand the menu
+upon which, at the table in the cafe the night before, she had made a
+drawing of the scene of the homicide.
+
+The extraordinary event had happened so swiftly that the attorney for
+the prosecution had not been able to interpose an objection. Now the
+nephew of the dead man spoke hurriedly, in whispers, and the attorney
+arose.
+
+"I object to this irregular proceeding," he said. "If this person is a
+witness, let her be sworn in the usual manner and let her take her place
+in the witness-chair where she may be examined by the attorney whom the
+court may see fit to appoint for the defense."
+
+It was evident that Mr. Thompson, urging the prosecutor, was alarmed.
+The folds of his obese neck lying above the collar of his coat took on
+a deeper color, and his mouth visibly sagged as with some unexpected
+emotion. He felt that he was becoming entangled in some vast, invisible
+net spread about him by this girl who had appeared as if by magic before
+the Hotel Markheim.
+
+The judge looked down at the attorney. "I will have the witness sworn,"
+he said, "but I shall not at present appoint anybody to conduct an
+examination. When a prisoner before me has no counsel, I sometimes look
+after his case myself."
+
+He spoke to the girl. "Will you hold up your hand?" he said.
+
+"Why, yes, monsieur," she said, "if you will also ask Mr. Thompson to
+hold up his hand."
+
+"Do you wish him sworn as a witness?" said the judge.
+
+The girl hesitated. "Yes, monsieur," she said, "if that is the way to
+have him hold up his hand."
+
+Again Thompson was disturbed. Again he spoke to the prosecutor and again
+that attorney objected.
+
+"We have not asked to have Mr. Thompson testify in this case," he said.
+"It is true Mr. Thompson is concerned about the result of this trial. He
+is the nephew of the decedent and his heir. It is only natural that he
+should properly concern himself to see that the assassin is brought to
+justice."
+
+He spoke to the girl. "Do you wish to make Mr. Thompson your witness?"
+he said.
+
+And again she replied with the hesitating formula:
+
+"Why, yes, monsieur, if that is the way to cause him to hold up his
+hand."
+
+The judge turned to the clerk. "Will you administer the oath to these
+two persons?" he said.
+
+Thompson rose. His face was disconcerted and slack. He hesitated, but
+the prosecutor spoke to him. Then he faced the judge and put up his
+hand. Immediately the girl cried out:
+
+"Look, monsieur," she said. "It is his left hand he is holding up!"
+
+Immediately Thompson raised the other hand. "I beg your pardon, Your
+Honor," he muttered. "I am left-handed; I sometimes make that mistake."
+
+And again the girl cried out: "You see... you notice it... it is true,
+then... he is left-handed."
+
+"I see he is left-handed," said the judge, "but what has that to do with
+the case?"
+
+"Oh, monsieur," she said, "it has everything to do with it. I will show
+you."
+
+She moved up on the step before the judge's bench and laid the menu
+before him. The attorney for the prosecution also arose. He wished to
+prevent this proceeding, to object to it, but he feared to disturb the
+judge and he remained silent.
+
+"Monsieur," she said, "I have made a little drawing... I know how such
+things are done.... My father was juge d'instruction of the Canton
+of Vaud. He always made little drawings of places where crimes were
+committed.... Here you will see," and she put her finger on the
+card, "the narrow passage leading from the butler's pantry into the
+dining-room used for a library. You will notice, monsieur, that the
+writing-table stood with one end against the wall, the left wall of the
+room, as one enters from the butler's pantry. It is a queer table. One
+side of it has a row of drawers coming to the floor and the other side
+is open so one may sit with one's knees under it. On the night of the
+tragedy this table was sitting at right angles to the left wall, that
+is to say, monsieur, with this end open for the writer's knees close up
+against the left wall of the room. That meant, monsieur, that on this
+night Mr. Marsh was sitting at the table with his back to the passage
+from the butler's pantry, close up against the left wall of the room.
+
+"Therefore, monsieur," the girl went on, "the man who assassinated Mr.
+Marsh entered from the butler's pantry. He slipped into the room along
+the left wall close up behind his victim.... Did it not occur so."
+
+This was the evidence of the police officials and the experts. It was
+clear from the position of the desk in the room and from the details of
+the evidence.
+
+"And, monsieur," she said, "will you tell me, is it true that the stab
+wound which killed Mr. Marsh was in the shoulder on the side next to the
+wall?"
+
+"Yes," said the judge, "that is true."
+
+The prosecutor, urged by Thompson, now made a verbal objection. The
+case was practically completed. The incident going on in the court-room
+followed no definite legal procedure and could not be permitted to
+proceed. The judge stopped him.
+
+"Sit down," he said. He did not offer any explanation or comment. He
+merely silenced the man and returned to the girl standing eagerly on the
+step before the bench.
+
+"The wound was in the base of the man's neck at the top of the left
+shoulder on the side next to the wall," he said. "But what has this fact
+to do with the case?"
+
+"Oh, monsieur," she cried, "it has everything to do with it. If the
+assassin who slipped along the wall had carried the knife in his right
+hand, the wound would have been on the right side of the dead man's
+neck. But if, monsieur, the assassin carried the knife in his left hand,
+then the wound would be where it is, on the left side. That made me
+believe, at first, that the assassin had only one arm--had lost
+his right arm--and must use the other; then, a little later, I
+understood.... Oh, monsieur, don't you understand; don't you see that
+the assassin who stabbed Mr. Marsh was left-handed?"
+
+In a moment it was all clear to everybody. Only a left-handed man could
+have committed the crime, for only a left-handed man standing close
+against the left side of a room above one sitting at a desk against
+that wall could have struck straight down into the left shoulder of the
+murdered man. A right-handed assassin would have struck straight down
+into the right shoulder, he would not have risked a doubtful blow,
+delivered awkwardly across his body, into the left shoulder of his
+victim.
+
+The girl indicated Thompson with her hand. "He did it; he's left-handed.
+I found out by dropping my glove."
+
+Panic enveloped the cornered man. He began to shake as with an ague.
+Sweat like a thin oil spread over his debauched face and the folds of
+his obese neck. With his fatal left hand he began to finger the lapel
+of his coat where the faded rosebud hung pinned into the buttonhole. And
+the girl's voice broke the profound silence of the court-room.
+
+"He has the money, too," she said. "I felt a bulky packet when I gave
+him the flower out of my bouquet last night."
+
+The big, thin-haired lawyer, leaving the courtroom after his withdrawal
+from the case, stopped at a window arrested by the amazing scene: The
+police taking the stolen money out of Thompson's pocket; the woman in
+the girl's arms, and the transfigured prisoner standing up as in the
+presence of a heavenly angel. This before him... and the splendid motor
+below under the sweep of the window, waiting before the courthouse door,
+brought back the memory of his biting, sarcastic words:
+
+"... or Cinderella in a pumpkin coach!"
+
+And there occurred to him a doubt of the exclusive dominance of life by
+the gods he served.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. The Yellow Flower
+
+
+The girl sat in a great chair before the fire, huddled, staring into the
+glow of the smoldering logs.
+
+Her dark hair clouded her face. The evening gown was twisted and
+crumpled about her. There was no ornament on her; her arms, her
+shoulders, the exquisite column of her throat were bare.
+
+She sat with her eyes wide, unmoving, in a profound reflection.
+
+The library was softly lighted; richly furnished, a little beyond
+the permission of good taste. On a table at the girl's elbow were two
+objects; a ruby necklace, and a dried flower. The flower, fragile with
+age, seemed a sort of scrub poppy of a delicate yellow; the flower of
+some dwarfed bush, prickly like a cactus.
+
+The necklace made a great heap of jewels on the buhl top of the table,
+above the intricate arabesque of silver and tortoise-shell.
+
+It was nearly midnight. Outside, the dull rumble of London seemed a
+sound, continuous, unvarying, as though it were the distant roar of a
+world turning in some stellar space.
+
+It was a great old house in Park Lane, heavy and of that gloomy
+architecture with which the feeling of the English people, at an earlier
+time, had been so strangely in accord. It stood before St. James's Park
+oppressive and monumental, and now in the midst of yellow fog its heavy
+front was like a mausoleum.
+
+But within, the house had been treated to a modern re-casting, not
+entirely independent of the vanity of wealth.
+
+After the dinner at the Ritz, the girl felt that she could not go on;
+and Lady Mary's party, on its way to the dancing, put her down at the
+door. She gave the excuse of a crippling headache. But it was a deeper,
+more profound aching that disturbed her. She was before the tragic hour,
+appearing in the lives of many women, when suddenly, as by the opening
+of a door, one realizes the irrevocable aspect of a marriage of which
+the details are beginning to be arranged. That hour in which a woman
+must consider, finally, the clipping of all threads, except the single
+one that shall cord her to a mate for life.
+
+Until to-night, in spite of preparations on the way, the girl had not
+felt this marriage as inevitable. Her aunt had pressed for it, subtly,
+invisibly, as an older woman is able to do.
+
+Her situation was always, clearly before her. She was alone in the
+world; with very little, almost nothing. The estate her father inherited
+he had finally spent in making great explorations. There was no unknown
+taste of the world that he had not undertaken to enter. The final
+driblets of his fortune had gone into his last adventure in the Great
+Gobi Desert from which he had never returned.
+
+The girl had been taken by this aunt in London, incredibly rich, but on
+the fringes of the fashionable society of England, which she longed to
+enter. Even to the young girl, her aunt's plan was visible. With a great
+settlement, such as this ambitious woman could manage, the girl could be
+a duchess.
+
+The marriage to Lord Eckhart in the diplomatic service, who would one
+day be a peer of England, had been a lure dangled unavailingly before
+her, until that night, when, on his return from India, he had carried
+her off her feet with his amazing incredible sacrifice. It was the
+immense idealism, the immense romance of it that had swept her into this
+irrevocable thing.
+
+She got up now, swiftly, as though she would again realize how the thing
+had happened and stooped over the table above the heap of jewels. They
+were great pigeon-blood rubies, twenty-seven of them, fastened together
+with ancient crude gold work. She lifted the long necklace until it hung
+with the last jewel on the table.
+
+The thing was a treasure, an immense, incredible treasure. And it was
+for this--for the privilege of putting this into her hands, that the
+man had sold everything he had in England--and endured what the gossips
+said--endured it during the five years in India--kept silent and was
+now silent. She remembered every detail the rumor of a wild life, a
+dissolute reckless life, the gradual, piece by piece sale of
+everything that could be turned into money. London could not think of a
+ne'er-do-well to equal him in the memory of its oldest gossips--and
+all the time with every penny, he was putting together this immense
+treasure--for her. A dreamer writing a romance might imagine a thing
+like this, but had it any equal in the realities of life?
+
+She looked down at the chain of great jewels, and the fragment of
+prickly shrub with its poppy-shaped yellow flower. They were symbols,
+each, of an immense idealism, an immense conception of sacrifice that
+lifted the actors in their dramas into gigantic figures illumined with
+the halos of romance.
+
+Until to-night it had been this ideal figure of Lord Eckhart that the
+girl considered in this marriage. And to-night, suddenly, the actual
+physical man had replaced it. And, alarmed, she had drawn back. Perhaps
+it was the Teutonic blood in him--a grandmother of a German house. And,
+yet, who could say, perhaps this piece of consuming idealism was from
+that ancient extinct Germany of Beethoven.
+
+But the man and the ideal seemed distinct things having no relation.
+She drew back from the one, and she stood on tip-toe, with arms extended
+longingly toward the other.
+
+What should she do?
+
+Had the example of her father thrown on Lord Eckhart a golden shadow?
+She moved the bit of flower, gently as in a caress. He had given up the
+income of a leading profession and gone to his death. His fortune and
+his life had gone in the same high careless manner for the thing he
+sought. For the treasure that he believed lay in the Gobi Desert--not
+for himself, but for every man to be born into the world. He was the
+great dreamer, the great idealist, a vague shining figure before the
+girl like the cloud in the Hebraic Myth.
+
+The girl stood up and linked her fingers together behind her back. If
+her father were only here--for an hour, for a moment! Or if, in the
+world beyond sight and hearing, he could somehow get a message to her!
+
+At this moment a bell, somewhere in the deeps of the house, jangled, and
+she heard the old butler moving through the hall to the door. The
+other servants had been dismissed for the night, and her aunt on the
+preliminaries of this marriage was in Paris.
+
+A moment later the butler appeared with a card on his tray. It was
+a card newly engraved in some English shop and bore the name "Dr.
+Tsan-Sgam." The girl stood for a moment puzzled at the queer name, and
+then the memory of the strange outlandish human creatures, from the ends
+of the world, who used sometimes to visit her father, in the old time,
+returned, and with it there came a sudden upward sweep of the heart--was
+there an answer to her longing, somehow, incredibly on the way!
+
+She gave a direction for the visitor to be brought in. He was a big
+old man. His body looked long and muscular like that of some type
+of Englishmen, but his head and his features were Mongolian. He was
+entirely bald, as bald as the palm of a hand, as though bald from
+his mother he had so remained to this incredible age. And age was the
+impression that he profoundly presented. But it was age that a tough
+vitality in the man resisted; as though the assault of time wore it down
+slowly and with almost an imperceptible detritus. The great naked head
+and the wide Mongolian face were unshrunken; they presented, rather, the
+aspect of some old child. He was dressed with extreme care, in the very
+best evening clothes that one could buy in a London shop.
+
+He bowed, oddly, with a slow doubling of the body, and when he spoke
+the girl felt that he was translating his words through more than one
+language; as though one were to put one's sentences into French or
+Italian and from that, as a sort of intermediary, into English--as
+though the way were long, and unfamiliar from the medium in which the
+man thought to the one in which he was undertaking to express it. But at
+the end of this involved mental process his English sentences appeared
+correctly, and with an accurate selection in the words.
+
+"You must pardon the hour, Miss Carstair," he said, in his slow, precise
+articulation, "but I am required to see you and it is the only time I
+have."
+
+Then his eyes caught the necklace on the table, and advancing with two
+steps he stooped over it.
+
+For a moment everything else seemed removed, from about the man. His
+angular body, in its unfamiliar dress, was doubled like a finger; his
+great head with its wide Mongolian face was close down over the buhl top
+of the table and his finger moved the heap of rubies.
+
+The girl had a sudden inspiration.
+
+"Lord Eckhart got these jewels from you?"
+
+The man paused, he seemed to be moving the girl's words backward through
+the intervening languages.
+
+Then he replied.
+
+"Yes," he said, "from us."
+
+The girl's inspiration was now illumined by a further light.
+
+"And you have not been paid for them?"
+
+The man stood up now. And again this involved process of moving the
+words back through various translations was visible--and the answer up.
+
+"Yes--" he said, "we have been paid."
+
+Then he added, in explanation of his act.
+
+"These rubies have no equal in the world--and the gold-work attaching
+them together is extremely old. I am always curious to admire it."
+
+He looked down at the girl, at the necklace, at the space about them, as
+though he were deeply, profoundly puzzled.
+
+"We had a fear," he said, "--it was wrong!"
+
+Then he put his hand swiftly into the bosom pocket of his evening coat,
+took out a thin packet wrapped in a piece of vellum and handed it to the
+girl.
+
+"It became necessary to treat with the English Government about the
+removal of records from Lhassa and I was sent--I was directed to get
+this packet to you from London. To-night, at dinner with Sir Henry
+Marquis in St. James's Square, I learned that you were here. I had then
+only this hour to come, as my boat leaves in the morning." He spoke with
+the extreme care of one putting together a delicate mosaic.
+
+The girl stood staring at the thin packet. A single thought alone
+consumed her.
+
+"It is a message from--my--father."
+
+She spoke almost in a whisper.
+
+The big Oriental replied immediately.
+
+"No," he said, "your father is beyond sight and hearing."
+
+The girl had no hope; only the will to hope. The reply was confirmation
+of what she already knew. She removed the thin vellum wrapper from the
+packet. Within she found a drawing on a plate of ivory. It represented
+a shaft of some white stone standing on the slight elevation of what
+seemed to be a barren plateau. And below on the plate, in fine English
+characters like an engraving, was the legend, "Erected to the memory of
+Major Judson Carstair by the monastery at the Head."
+
+The man added a word of explanation.
+
+"The Brotherhood thought that you would wish to know that your father's
+body had been recovered, and that it had received Christian burial, as
+nearly as we were able to interpret the forms. The stone is a sort of
+granite."
+
+The girl wished to ask a thousand questions: How did her father meet his
+death, and where? What did they know? What had they recovered with his
+body?
+
+The girl spoke impulsively, her words crowding one another. And the
+Oriental seemed able only to disengage the last query from the others.
+
+"Unfortunately," he said, "some band of the desert people had passed
+before our expedition arrived, nothing was recovered but the body. It
+was not mutilated."
+
+They had been standing. The girl now indicated the big library chair in
+which she had been huddled and got another for herself. Then she wished
+to know what they had learned about her father's death.
+
+The Oriental sat down. He sat awkwardly, his big body, in a kind of
+squat posture, the broad Mongolian face emerging, as in a sort of
+deformity, from the collar of his evening coat. Then he began to speak,
+with that conscious effect of bringing his words through various mediums
+from a distance.
+
+"We endeavored to discourage Major Carstair from undertaking this
+adventure. We were greatly concerned about his safety. The sunken
+plateau of the Gobi Desert, north of the Shan States, is exceedingly
+dangerous for an European, not so much on account of murderous attacks
+from the desert people, for this peril we could prevent; but there is a
+chill in this sunken plain after sunset that the native people only can
+resist. No white man has ever crossed the low land of the Gobi."
+
+He paused.
+
+"And there is in fact no reason why any one should wish to cross it. It
+is absolutely barren. We pointed out all this very carefully to Major
+Carstair when we learned what he had in plan, for as I have said his
+welfare was very pressingly on our conscience. We were profoundly
+puzzled about what he was seeking in the Gobi. He was not, evidently,
+intending to plot the region or to survey any route, or to acquire any
+scientific data. His equipment lacked all the implements for such work.
+It was a long time before we understood the impulse that was moving
+Major Carstair to enter this waste region of the Gobi to the north."
+
+The man stopped, and sat for some moments quite motionless.
+
+"Your father," he went on, "was a distinguished man in one of the
+departments of human endeavor which the East has always neglected; and
+in it he had what seemed to us incredible skill--with ease he was able
+to do things which we considered impossible. And for this reason the
+impulse taking him into the Gobi seemed entirely incredible to us; it
+seemed entirely inconsistent with this special ability which we knew the
+man to possess; and for a long time we rejected it, believing ourselves
+to be somehow misled."
+
+The girl sat straight and silent, in her chair near the brass fender
+to the right of the buhl table; the drawing, showing the white granite
+shaft, held idly in her fingers; the illuminated vellum wrapper fallen
+to the floor.
+
+The man continued speaking slowly.
+
+"When, finally, it was borne in upon us that Major Carstair was seeking
+a treasure somewhere on the barren plateau of the Gobi, we took every
+measure, consistent with a proper courtesy, to show him how fantastic
+this notion was. We had, in fact, to exercise a certain care lest
+the very absurdity of the conception appear too conspicuously in our
+discourse."
+
+He looked across the table at the girl.
+
+The man's great bald head seemed to sink a little into his shoulders, as
+in some relaxation.
+
+"We brought out our maps of the region and showed him the old routes
+and trails veining the whole of it. We explained the topography of this
+desert plateau; the exact physical character of its relief. There was
+hardly a square mile of it that we did not know in some degree, and
+of which we did not possess some fairly accurate data. It was entirely
+inconceivable that any object of value could exist in this region
+without our knowledge of it."
+
+The man was speaking like one engaged in some extremely delicate
+mechanical affair, requiring an accuracy almost painful in its
+exactness.
+
+"Then, profoundly puzzled, we endeavored to discover what data Major
+Carstair possessed that could in any way encourage him in this fantastic
+idea. It was a difficult thing to do, for we held him in the highest
+esteem and, outside of this bizarre notion, we had before us, beyond any
+question, the evidence of his especial knowledge; and, as I have said,
+his, to us, incredible skill."
+
+He paused, as though the careful structure of the long sentence had
+fatigued him.
+
+"Major Carstair's explanations were always in the imagery of romance.
+He sought 'a treasure--a treasure that would destroy a Kingdom.' And his
+indicatory data seemed to be the dried blossom of our desert poppy."
+
+Again the Oriental paused. He put up his hand and passed his fingers
+over his face. The gaunt hand contrasted with the full contour.
+
+"I confess that we did not know what to do. We realized that we had
+to deal with a nature possessing in one direction the exact accurate
+knowledge of a man of science, and in another the wonder extravagances
+of a child. The Dalai Lama was not yet able to be consulted, and it
+seemed to us a better plan to say no more about the impossible treasure,
+and address our endeavors to the practical side of Major Carstair's
+intelligence instead. We now pointed out the physical dangers of the
+region. The deadly chill in it coming on at sunset could not fail to
+inflame the lungs of a European, accustomed to an equable temperature,
+fever would follow; and within a few days the unfortunate victim would
+find his whole breathing space fatally congested."
+
+The man removed his hand. The care in his articulation was marked.
+
+"Major Carstair was not turned aside by these facts, and we permitted
+him to go on."
+
+Again he paused as though troubled by a memory.
+
+"In this course," he continued, "the Dalai Lama considered us to have
+acted at the extreme of folly. But it is to be remembered, in our
+behalf, that somewhat of the wonder at Major Carstair's knowledge of
+Western science dealing with the human body was on us, and we felt
+that perhaps the climatic peril of the Gobi might present no difficult
+problem to him.
+
+"We were fatally misled."
+
+Then he added.
+
+"We were careful to direct him along the highest route of the plateau,
+and to have his expedition followed. But chance intervened. Major
+Carstair turned out of the route and our patrol went on, supposing him
+to be ahead on the course which we had indicated to him. When the error
+was at last discovered, our patrol was entering the Sirke range. No one
+could say at what point on the route Major Carstair had turned out, and
+our search of the vast waste of the Gobi desert began. The high wind on
+the plateau removes every trace of human travel. The whole of the region
+from the Sirke, south, had to be gone over. It took a long time."
+
+The man stopped like one who has finished a story. The girl had not
+moved; her face was strained and white. The fog outside had thickened;
+the sounds of the city seemed distant. The girl had listened without a
+word, without a gesture. Now she spoke.
+
+"But why were you so concerned about my father?"
+
+The big Oriental turned about in the chair. He looked steadily at the
+girl, he seemed to be treating the query to his involved method of
+translation; and Miss Carstair felt that the man, because of this
+tedious mental process, might have difficulty to understand precisely
+what she meant.
+
+What he wished to say, he could control and, therefore, could accurately
+present--but what was said to him began in the distant language.
+
+"What Major Carstair did," he said, "it has not been made clear to you?"
+
+"No," she replied, "I do not understand."
+
+The man seemed puzzled.
+
+"You have not understood!"
+
+He repeated the sentence; his face reflective, his great bare head
+settling into the collar of his evening coat as though the man's neck
+were removed.
+
+He remained for a moment thus puzzled and reflective. Then he began
+to speak as one would set in motion some delicate involved machinery
+running away into the hidden spaces of a workshop.
+
+"The Dalai Lama had fallen--he was alone in the Image Room. His head
+striking the sharp edge of a table was cut. He had lost a great deal of
+blood when we found him and was close to death. Major Carstair was at
+this time approaching the monastery from the south; his description
+sent to us from Lhassa contained the statement that he was an American
+surgeon. We sent at once asking him to visit the Dalai Lama, for the
+skill of Western people in this department of human knowledge is known
+to us."
+
+The Oriental went on, slowly, with extreme care.
+
+"Major Carstair did not at once impress us. 'What this man needs,' he
+said, 'is blood.' That was clear to everybody. One of our, how shall I
+say it in your language, Cardinals, replied with some bitterness, that
+the Dalai Lama could hardly be imagined to lack anything else. Major
+Carstair paid no attention to the irony. 'This man must have a supply
+of blood,' he added. The Cardinal, very old, and given to imagery in his
+discourse answered, that blood could be poured out but it could not be
+gathered up... and that man could spill it but only God could make.
+
+"We interrupted then, for Major Carstair was our guest and entitled to
+every courtesy, and inquired how it would be possible to restore blood
+to the Dalai Lama; it was not conceivable that the lost blood could be
+gathered up.
+
+"He explained then that he would transfer it from the veins of a healthy
+man into the unconscious body."
+
+The Oriental hesitated; then he went on.
+
+"The thing seemed to us fantastic. But our text treating the life of
+the Dalai Lama admits of no doubt upon one point--'no measure presenting
+itself in extremity can be withheld.' He was in clear extremity and this
+measure, even though of foreign origin, had presented itself, and we
+felt after a brief reflection that we were bound to permit it."
+
+He added.
+
+"The result was a miracle to us. In a short time the Dalai Lama had
+recovered. But in the meantime Major Carstair had gone on into the Gobi
+seeking the fantastic treasure."
+
+The girl turned toward the man, a wide-eyed, eager, lighted face.
+
+"Do you realize," she said, "the sort of treasure that my father
+sacrificed his life to search for?"
+
+The Oriental spoke slowly.
+
+"It was to destroy a Kingdom," he said.
+
+"To destroy the Kingdom of Pain!" She replied, "My father was seeking
+an anesthetic more powerful than the derivatives of domestic opium. He
+searched the world for it. In the little, wild desert flower lay, he
+thought, the essence of this treasure. And he would seek it at any cost.
+Fortune was nothing; life was nothing. Is it any wonder that you could
+not stop him? A flaming sword moving at the entrance to the Gobi could
+not have barred him out!"
+
+The big Oriental made a vague gesture as of one removing something
+clinging to his face.
+
+"Wherefore this blindness?" he said.
+
+The girl had turned away in an effort to control the emotion that
+possessed her. But the task was greater than her strength; when she
+came back to the table tears welled up in her eyes and trickled down her
+face. Emotion seemed now to overcome her.
+
+"If my father were only here," her voice was broken, "if he were only
+here!"
+
+The big Oriental moved his whole body, as by one motion, toward her. The
+house was very still; there was only the faint crackling of the logs on
+the fire.
+
+"We had a fear," he said. "It remains!"
+
+The girl went over and stood before the fire, her foot on the brass
+fender, her fingers linked behind her back. For sometime she was silent.
+Finally she spoke, without turning her head, in a low voice.
+
+"You know Lord Eckhart?"
+
+A strange expression passed over the Oriental's face.
+
+"Yes, when Lhassa was entered, the Head moved north to our monastery on
+the edge of the Gobi--the English sovereignty extends to the Kahn line.
+Lord Eckhart was the political agent of the English government in the
+province nearest to us."
+
+When the girl got up, the Oriental also rose. He stood awkwardly, his
+body stooped; his hand as for support resting on the corner of the
+table. The girl spoke again, in the same posture. Her face toward the
+fire.
+
+"How do you feel about Lord Eckhart?"
+
+"Feel!" The man repeated the word.
+
+He hesitated a little.
+
+"We trusted Lord Eckhart. We have found all English honorable."
+
+"Lord Eckhart is partly German," the girl went on.
+
+The man's voice in reply was like a foot-note to a discourse.
+
+"Ah!" He drawled the expletive as though it were some Oriental word.
+
+The girl continued. "You have perhaps heard that a marriage is arranged
+between us."
+
+Her voice was steady, low, without emotion.
+
+For a long time there was utter silence in the room.
+
+Then, finally, when the Oriental spoke his voice had changed. It was
+gentle, and packed with sympathy. It was like a voice within the gate of
+a confessional.
+
+"Do you love him?" it said.
+
+"I do not know."
+
+The vast sympathy in the voice continued. "You do not know?--it is
+impossible! Love is or it is not. It is the longing of elements torn
+asunder, at the beginning of things, to be rejoined."
+
+The girl turned swiftly, her body erect, her face lifted.
+
+"But this great act," she cried. "My father, I, all of our blood, are
+moved by romance--by the romance of sacrifice. Look how my father died
+seeking an antidote for the pain of the world. How shall I meet this
+sacrifice of Lord Eckhart?"
+
+Something strange began to dawn in the wide Mongolian face.
+
+"What sacrifice?"
+
+The girl came over swiftly to the table. She scattered the mass of
+jewels with a swift gesture.
+
+"Did he not give everything he possessed, everything piece by piece, for
+this?"
+
+She took the necklace up and twisted it around her fingers. Her hands
+appeared to be a mass of rubies.
+
+A great light came into the Oriental's face.
+
+"The necklace," he said, "is a present to you from the Dalai Lama. It
+was entrusted to Lord Eckhart to deliver."
+
+
+
+
+XV. Satire of the Sea
+
+"What was the mystery about St. Alban?" I asked.
+
+The Baronet did not at once reply. He looked out over the English
+country through the ancient oak-trees, above the sweep of meadow across
+the dark, creeping river, to the white shaft rising beyond the wooded
+hills into the sky.
+
+The war was over. I was a guest of Sir Henry Marquis for a week-end at
+his country-house. The man fascinated me. He seemed a sort of bottomless
+Stygian vat of mysteries. He had been the secret hand of England for
+many years in India. Then he was made a Baronet and put at the head of
+England's Secret Service at Scotland Yard.
+
+A servant brought out the tea and we were alone on the grass terrace
+before the great oak-trees. He remained for some moments in reflection,
+then he replied:
+
+"Do you mean the mystery of his death?"
+
+"Was there any other mystery?" I said.
+
+He looked at me narrowly across the table.
+
+"There was hardly any mystery about his death," he said. "The man shot
+himself with an old dueling pistol that hung above the mantel in his
+library. The family, when they found him, put the pistol back on the
+nail and fitted the affair with the stock properties of a mysterious
+assassin.
+
+"The explanation was at once accepted. The man's life, in the public
+mind, called for an end like that. St. Alban after his career, should by
+every canon of the tragic muse, go that way."
+
+He made a careless gesture with his fingers.
+
+"I saw the disturbed dust on the wall where the pistol had been moved,
+the bits of split cap under the hammer, and the powder marks on the
+muzzle.
+
+"But I let the thing go. It seemed in keeping with the destiny of the
+man. And it completed the sardonic picture. It was all fated, as the
+Gaelic people say.... I saw no reason to disturb it."
+
+"Then there was some other mystery?" I ventured.
+
+He nodded his big head slowly.
+
+"There is an ancient belief," he said, "that the hunted thing always
+turns on us. Well, if there was ever a man in this world on whom the
+hunted thing awfully turned, it was St. Alban."
+
+He put out his hand.
+
+"Look at the shaft yonder," he said, "lifted to his memory, towering
+over the whole of this English country, and cut on its base with his
+services to England and the brave words he said on that fatal morning on
+the Channel boat. Every schoolboy knows the words:
+
+"'Don't threaten, fire if you like!'
+
+"First-class words for the English people to remember. No bravado, just
+the thing any decent chap would say. But the words are persistent. They
+remain in the memory. And it was a thrilling scene they fitted into.
+One must never forge that: The little hospital transport lying in the
+Channel in a choppy sea that ran streaks of foam; the grim turret and
+the long whaleback of a U-boat in the foam scruff; and the sun lying on
+the scrubbed deck of the jumping transport.
+
+"Everybody was crowded about. St. Alban was in the center of the human
+pack, in a pace or two of clear deck, his injured arm in a sling; his
+split sleeve open around it; his shoulders thrown back; his head lifted;
+and before him, the Hun commander with his big automatic pistol.
+
+"It's a wonderful, spirited picture, and it thrilled England. It was in
+accord with her legends. England has little favor of either the gods of
+the hills or the gods of the valleys. But always, in all her wars, the
+gods of the seas back her."
+
+The big Baronet paused and poured out a cup of tea. He tasted it and set
+it down on the table.
+
+"That's a fine monument," he said, indicating the white shaft that shot
+up into the cloudless evening sky. "The road makes a sharp turn by it.
+You have got to slow up, no matter how you travel. The road rises there.
+It's built that way; to make the passer go slow enough to read the
+legends on the base of the monument. It's a clever piece of business.
+Everybody is bound to give his tribute of attention to the conspicuous
+memorial.
+
+"There are two faces to the monument that you must look at if you go
+that road. One recounts the man's services to England, and the other
+face bears his memorable words:
+
+"'Don't threaten, fire if you like!'"
+
+The Baronet fingered the handle of his teacup.
+
+"The words are precisely suited to the English people," he said. "No
+heroics, no pretension, that's the whole spirit of England. It's the
+English policy in a line: We don't threaten, and we don't wish to be
+threatened by another. Let them fire if they like,--that's all in the
+game. But don't swing a gun on us with a threat. St. Alban was lucky
+to say it. He got the reserve, the restraint, the commonplace
+understatement that England affects, into the sentence. It was a piece
+of good fortune to catch the thing like that.
+
+"The monument is tremendous. One can't avoid it. It's always before the
+eye here, like the White Horse of Alfred on the chalk hill in Berkshire.
+All the roads pass it through this countryside. But every mortal thing
+that travels, motor and cart, must slow up around the monument."
+
+He stopped for a moment and looked at the white needle shimmering in the
+evening sun.
+
+"But St. Alban's greatest monument," he said, "was the lucky sentence.
+It stuck in the English memory and it will never go out of it. One
+wouldn't give a half-penny for a monument if one could get a phrase
+fastened in a people's memory like that."
+
+Sir Henry moved in his chair.
+
+"I often wonder," he said, "whether the thing was an inspiration of St.
+Alban's that morning on the deck of the hospital transport, or had he
+thought about it at some other time? Was the sentence stored in
+the man's memory, or did it come with the first gleam of returning
+consciousness from a soul laid open by disaster? I think racial words,
+simple and unpretentious, may lies in any man close to the bone like
+that to be rived out with a mortal hurt. That's what keeps me wondering
+about the words he used. And he did use them.
+
+"I don't doubt that a lot of our hero stuff has been edited after the
+fact. But this sentence wasn't edited. That's what he said, precisely.
+A hundred wounded soldiers on the hospital transport heard it. They were
+crowding round him. And they told the story when they got ashore. The
+story varied in trifling details as one would expect among so many
+witnesses to a tragic event like that. But it didn't vary about what
+the man said when the Hun commander was swinging his automatic pistol on
+him.
+
+"There was no opportunity to edit a brave sentence to fit the affair.
+St. Alban said it. And he didn't think it up as he climbed out of the
+cabin of the transport. If he had been in a condition to think, he
+had enough of the devil's business to think about just then; a brave
+sentence would hardly have concerned him, as I said awhile ago.
+
+"Besides, we have his word that, after what happened in the cabin,
+everything else that occurred that morning on the transport was a blank
+to the man; was walled off from his consciousness, and these words were
+the first impulse of one returning to a realization of events."
+
+Sir Henry Marquis reflected.
+
+"I think they were," he continued. "They have the mark of spontaneity;
+of the first disgust of one grasping the fact that he was being
+threatened."
+
+The Baronet paused.
+
+"The event had a great effect on England," he said. "And it helped to
+restore our shattered respect for a desperate enemy. The Hun commander
+didn't sink the transport, and he didn't shoot St. Alban. It's true
+there was a sort of gentleman's agreement among the enemies that
+hospital transports should not be sunk.
+
+"But anything was likely to happen just then. The Hun had failed to
+subjugate the world, and he was a barbarous, mad creature. England
+believed that something noble in St. Alban worked the miracle.
+
+"'You're a brave man!'
+
+"Some persons on the transport testified to such a comment from the
+submarine commander. At any rate, he went back to his U-boat and the
+undersea.
+
+"That's the last they saw of him. The transport came on into Dover.
+
+"England thought the affair was one of the adventures of the sea.
+A chance thing, that happened by accident. But there was one man in
+England who knew better."
+
+"You?" I said.
+
+The Baronet shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"St. Alban," he answered.
+
+He got up and began to walk about the terrace. I sat with the cup of
+tea cooling before me. The big man walked slowly with his fingers linked
+behind him. Finally he stopped. His voice was deep and reflective.
+
+"'Man is altogether the sport of fortune!'... I read that in Herodotus,
+in a form at Rugby. I never thought about it again. But it's God's
+truth. St. Alban was at Rugby. I often wonder if he remembered it. My
+word, he lived to verify it! Herodotus couldn't cite a case to equal
+him. And the old Greek wasn't hemmed in by the truth. I maintain that
+the man's case has no parallel.
+
+"To have all the painstaking labor of years negatived by one enveloping,
+vicious misfortune; to be beaten out of life by it, and at the same time
+to gain that monument out yonder and one's niche as hero by the grim
+device of an enemy's satire; by the acting of a scene that one
+would never have taken part in if one had realized it, is beyond any
+complication of tragedy known to the Greek.
+
+"Look at the three strange phases of it: To be a mediocre Englishman
+with no special talent; to die in horrible despair; and to leave behind
+a glorious legend. And for all these three things to contradict one
+another in the same life is unequaled in the legends of any people."
+
+The Baronet went on in a deep level voice.
+
+"There was a vicious vitality behind the whole desperate business. Every
+visible impression of the thing was wrong. Every conception of it held
+today by the English people is wrong!
+
+"The German submarine didn't overhaul the hospital transport in the
+Channel by accident. The Hun commander didn't fail to sink the transport
+out of any humane motives. He didn't fail to shoot St. Alban because he
+was moved by the heroism of the man. It was all grim calculation!
+
+"He thought it was safe to let St. Alban go ahead. And he would have
+been right if St. Alban had been the great egotist that he was.
+
+"The commander of that submarine was Plutonburg of Prussia. He was the
+right-hand man of old Von Tirpitz. He was the one man in the German navy
+who never ceased to urge its Admiralty to sink everything. He loathed
+every fiber of the English people. We had all sorts of testimony to
+that. The trawlers and freightboat captains brought it in. He staged
+his piracies to a theatrical frightfulness. 'Old England!' he would say,
+when he climbed up out of the sea onto the deck of a British ship and
+looked about him at the sailors, 'Old, is right, old and rotten!' Then
+he would smite his big chest and quote the diatribes of Treitschke.
+'But in a world that the Prussian inhabits a nation, old and rotten, may
+endure for a time, but it shall not endure forever!'
+
+"Plutonburg didn't let St. Alban and the transport go ahead out of the
+promptings of a noble nature. He did it because he hated England, and
+he wanted St. Alban to live on in the hell he had trapped him into. He
+counted on his keeping silent. But the Hun made a mistake.
+
+"St. Alban didn't measure up to the standard of Prussian egoism by which
+Plutonburg estimated him."
+
+Sir Henry continued in the same even voice. The levels of emotion in his
+narrative did not move him.
+
+"Did you ever see the picture of Plutonburg, in Munich? He had a face
+like Chemosh. And he dressed the part. Other under-boat commanders wore
+the conventional naval cap, but Plutonburg always wore a steel helmet
+with a corrugated earpiece. Some artist under the frightfulness dogma
+must have designed it for him. It framed his face down to the jaw. The
+face looked like it was set in iron, and it was a thick-lidded, heavy,
+menacing face; the sort of face that a broad-line cartoonist gives to a
+threatening war-joss. At any rate, that's how the picture presents him.
+One thinks of Attila under his ox head. You can hardly imagine anything
+human in it, except a cruel satanic humor.
+
+"He must have looked like Beelzebub that morning, on the transport, when
+he let St. Alban go on."
+
+The Baronet looked down at me.
+
+"Now, that's the truth about the fine conduct of Plutonburg that England
+applauded as an act of chivalry. It was a piece of sheer, hellish
+malignity, if there ever was an instance."
+
+Sir Henry took a turn across the terrace, for a moment silent. Then he
+went on:
+
+"And in fact, everything in the heroic event on the deck of the
+transport was a pretense. The Hun didn't intend to shoot St. Alban. As I
+have said, Plutonburg had him in just the sort of hell he wanted him in,
+and he didn't propose to let him out with a bullet. And St. Alban ought
+to have known it, unless, as he afterwards said, the whole thing
+from the first awful moment in the cabin was simply walled out of his
+consciousness, until he began dimly to realize up there in the sun, in
+the crowd, that he was being threatened and blurted out his words from a
+sort of awful disgust."
+
+Again he paused.
+
+"Plutonburg was right about having St. Alban in the crater of the pit.
+But he was wrong to measure him by his Prussian standard. St. Alban came
+on to London. He got the heads of the War Office together and told
+them. I was there. It was the devil's own muddle of a contrast. Outside,
+London was ringing with the man's striking act of personal heroism.
+And inside of the Foreign Office three or, four amazed persons were
+listening to the bitter truth."
+
+The Baronet spread out his hands with a sudden gesture.
+
+"I shall always remember the man's strange, livid face; his fingers that
+jumped about the cuff of his coat sleeve; and his shaking jaw."
+
+Sir Henry went over and sat down at the table. For a good while he was
+silent. The sun filtering through the limbs of the great oak-trees made
+mottled spots on his face. He seemed to turn away from the thing he had
+been concerned with, and to see something else, something wholly apart
+and at a distance from St. Alban's affairs.
+
+"You must have wondered like everybody else," he said, "why the Allied
+drive on the Somme accomplished so little at first. Both England and
+France had made elaborate preparations for it over a long period of
+time. Every detail had been carefully, worked out. Every move had been
+estimated with mathematical exactness.
+
+"The French divisions had been equipped and strategically grouped.
+England had put a million of fresh troops into France. And the line of
+the drive had been mapped. The advance, when it was opened on the first
+day of July, ought to have gone forward irresistibly from cog to cog
+like a wheel of a machine on the indentations of a track. But the thing
+didn't happen that way. The drive sagged and stuck."
+
+The big Englishman pressed the table with his clinched hand.
+
+"My word!" he said, "is it any wonder that the devil, Plutonburg,
+grinned when he put up his automatic pistol? Why shoot the Englishman?
+He would do it himself soon enough. He was right about that. If he had
+only been right about his measure of St. Alban, the drive on the Somme
+would have been a ghastly catastrophe for the Allied armies."
+
+I hesitated to interrupt Sir Henry. But he had got my interest
+desperately worked up about what seemed to me great unjointed segments
+of this affair, that one couldn't understand till they were put
+together. I ventured a query.
+
+"How did St. Alban come to be on the hospital transport?" I said. "Was
+he in the English army in France?"
+
+"Oh, no," he said. "When the war opened St. Alban was in the Home
+Office, and, he set out to make England spy-proof. He organized the
+Confidential Department, and he went to work to take every precaution.
+He wasn't a great man in any direction, but he was a careful, thorough
+man. And with tireless, never-ceasing, persistent effort, he very nearly
+swept England clean of German espionage."
+
+Sir Henry spoke with vigor and decision.
+
+"Now, that's what St. Alban did in England--not because he was a man of
+any marked ability, but because he was a persistent person dominated by
+a single consuming idea. He started out to rid England of every form of
+espionage. And when he had accomplished that, as the cases of Ernest,
+Lody, and Schultz eloquently attest, he determined to see that every
+move of the English expeditionary force on the Continent should be
+guarded from German espionage."
+
+Sir Henry paused and poured out a cup of tea. He tasted it. It was cold,
+and he put the cup down on the table.
+
+"That's how St. Alban came to be in France," he said. "The great drive
+on the Somme had been planned at a meeting of military leaders in Paris.
+The French were confident that they could keep their plans secret from
+German espionage. They admitted frankly that signals were wirelessed out
+of France. But they had taken such precautions that only the briefest
+signals could go out.
+
+"The Government radio stations were always alert. And they at once
+negatived any unauthorized wireless so that German spies could only snap
+out a signal or two at any time. They could do this, however.
+
+"They had a wireless apparatus inside a factory chimney at Auteuil. It
+wasn't located until the war was nearly over.
+
+"The French didn't undertake to say that they could make their country
+spy-proof. They knew that there were German agents in France that nobody
+could tell from innocent French people. But they did undertake to say
+that nothing could be carried over into the German lines. And they
+justified that promise. They did see that nothing was carried out of
+France." The Baronet looked at me across the table.
+
+"Now, that's what took St. Alban across the Channel," he said. "The
+English authorities wanted to be certain that there was no German
+espionage. And there was no man in England able to be certain of that
+except St. Alban. He went over to make sure. If the plans for the Somme
+drive should get out of France, they should not get out through any
+English avenue."
+
+The Baronet paused.
+
+"St. Alban went about the thing in his thorough, persistent manner. He
+didn't trust to subordinates. He went himself. That's what took him out
+on the English line. And that's how he came to be wounded in the elbow.
+
+"It wasn't very much of a wound--a piece of shrapnel nearly spent when
+it hit him. But the French hospital service was very much concerned. It
+gave him every attention.
+
+"The man came into Paris when he had finished. The French authorities
+put him up at the Hotel Meurice. You know the Hotel Meurice. It's on
+the Rue de la Rivoli. It looks out over the garden of the Tuileries. St.
+Alban was satisfied with the condition of affairs in France, and he was
+anxious to go back to London. Arrangements had been made for him to go
+on the hospital transport.
+
+"He was in his room at the Meurice waiting for the train to Calais. He
+was, in fact, fatigued with the attention the French authorities had
+given him. Everything that one could think of had been anticipated, he
+said. He thought there could be nothing more. Then there was a timid
+knock, and a nurse came in to say that she had been sent to see that the
+dressing on his arm was all right. He said that he had found it easier
+to submit to the French attentions than to undertake to explain that he
+didn't need them.
+
+"He was busy with some final orders, so he put out his arm and allowed
+the nurse to take the pins out of the split sleeve and adjust the
+dressing. She put on some bandages, made a little timid curtsey and went
+out.
+
+"St. Alban didn't think of it again until the German U-boat stopped the
+transport the next morning in the Channel. He wasn't disturbed when the
+submarine commander came into his cabin. He knew enough not to carry
+any papers about with him. But Plutonburg didn't bother himself about
+luggage. He'd had his signal from the factory chimney at Auteuil.
+He stood there grinning in the cabin before St. Alban; that Satanic,
+Chemosh grin that the artist got in the Munich picture.
+
+"'I used to be something of a surgeon,' he said, 'Doctor Ulrich von
+Plutonburg, if you will remember. I'll take a look at your arm.'
+
+But, Alban said he thought the man might be moved by some humane
+consideration, so he put out his arm.
+
+"Plutonburg took the pins out of the sleeve and removed the bandage that
+the nurse had put on in the Hotel Meurice. Then he held it up. The
+long, cotton bandage was lined with glazed cambric, and on it, in minute
+detail, was the exact position of all the Allied forces along the whole
+front in the region of the Somme, precisely as they had been massed for
+the drive on July first!"
+
+I cried out in astonishment. "So that's what you meant," I said, "by the
+trailed thing turning on him!"
+
+"Precisely," replied the Baronet. "The very thing that St. Alban labored
+to prevent another from doing, he did awfully himself!"
+
+The big Englishman's fingers drummed on the table.
+
+"It was a great moment for Plutonburg," he said. "No living man but that
+Prussian could have put the Satanic humor into the rest of the affair."
+
+He paused as under the pressure of the memory.
+
+"St. Alban always maintained that from the moment he saw the long map on
+the bandage everything blurred around him, and began to clear only when
+he spoke on the deck. He used to curse this blur. It made him a national
+figure and immortal, but it prevented him, he said, from striking the
+Prussian in the face."
+
+
+
+
+XVI. The House by the Loch
+
+
+There was a snapping fire in the chimney. I was cold through and I was
+glad to stand close beside it on the stone hearth. My greatcoat had kept
+out the rain, but it had not kept out the chill of the West Highland
+night. I shivered before the fire, my hands held out to the flame.
+
+It was a long, low room. There was an ancient guncase on one side,
+but the racks were empty except for a service pistol hanging by its
+trigger-guard from the hook. There were some shelves of books on the
+other side. But the conspicuous thing in the room was an image of Buddha
+in a glass box on the mantelpiece.
+
+It was about four inches high, cast in silver and, I thought, of immense
+age.
+
+I had to wait for my uncle to come in. But I had enough to think about.
+Every event connected with this visit seemed to touch on some mystery.
+There was his strange letter to me in reply to my note that I was in
+England and coming up to Scotland. Surely no man ever wrote a queerer
+letter to a nephew coming on a visit to him.
+
+It dwelt on the length of the journey and the remoteness of the place. I
+was to be discouraged in every sentence. I was to carry his affectionate
+regards to the family in America and say that he was in health.
+
+It stood out plainly that I was not wanted.
+
+This was strange in itself, but it was not the strangest thing about
+this letter. The strangest thing was a word written in a shaky cramped
+hand on the back of the sheet: the letters huddled together: "Come!"
+
+I would have believed my uncle justified in his note. It was a long
+journey. I had great difficulty to find anyone to take me out from the
+railway station. There were idle men enough, but they shook their heads
+when I named the house. Finally, for a double wage, I got an old gillie
+with a cart to bring me as far on the way as the highroad ran. But he
+would not turn into the unkept road that led over the moor to the house.
+I could neither bribe nor persuade him. There was no alternative but to
+set out through the mist with my bag on my shoulder.
+
+Night was coming on. The moor was a vast wilderness of gorse. The house
+loomed at the foot of it and beyond the loch that made a sort of estuary
+for the open sea. Nor was this the only thing. I got the impression as I
+tramped along that I was not alone on the moor. I don't know out of what
+evidences the impression was built up. I felt that someone was in the
+gorse beyond the road.
+
+The house was closed up like a sleeping eye when I got before it. It was
+a big, old, rambling stone house with a tangle of vines half torn away
+by the winds: I hammered on the door and finally an aged man-servant
+holding a candle high above his head let me in.
+
+This was the manner of my coming to Saint Conan's Landing.
+
+I had some supper of cold meat brought in by this aged servant. He was a
+shrunken derelict of a human figure. He was disturbed at my arrival
+and ill at ease. But I thought there was relief and welcome in his
+expression. The master would be in directly; he would light a fire in
+the drawing-room and prepare a bedchamber for me.
+
+One would hardly find outside of England such faithful creatures
+clinging to the fortunes of descending men. He was at the end of life
+and in some fearful perplexity, but one felt there was something stanch
+and sound in him.
+
+I had no doubt that there, under my eye, was the hand that had added the
+cramped word to my uncle's letter.
+
+I stood now before the fire in the long, low room. The flames and a tall
+candle at either end of the mantelpiece lit it up. I was looking at the
+Buddha in the glass box. I could not imagine a thing more out of note.
+Surely of all corners of the world this wild moor of the West Highlands
+was the least suited to an Oriental cult. The elements seemed under no
+control of Nature. The land was windswept, and the sea came crying into
+the loch.
+
+I suppose it was the mood of my queer experiences that set me at this
+speculation.
+
+One would expect to find some evidences of India in my uncle's house.
+He had been a long time in Asia, on the fringes of the English service.
+Toward the end he had been the Resident at the court of an obscure Rajah
+in one of the Northwest Provinces. It was on the edge of the Empire
+where it touches the little-known Mongolian states south of the Gobi.
+
+The Home Office was only intermittently in touch with him. But
+something, never explained, finally drew its attention and he was put
+out of India. No one knew anything about it; "permitted to retire," was
+the text of the brief official notice.
+
+And he had retired to the most remote place he could find in the British
+islands. There was no other house on that corner of the coast. The man
+was as alone as he would have been in the Gobi.
+
+If he had planned to be alone one would have believed he had succeeded
+in that intention. And yet from the moment I got down from the gillie's
+cart I seemed drawn under a persisting surveillance. I felt now that
+some one was looking at me. I turned quickly. There was a door at the
+end of the room opening onto a bit of garden facing the sea. A man
+stood, now, just inside this door, his hand on the latch. His head and
+shoulders were stooped as though he had been there some moments, as
+though he had let himself noiselessly in, and remained there watching me
+before the fire.
+
+But if so, he was prepared against my turning. He snapped the latch and
+came down the room to where I stood.
+
+He was a big stoop-shouldered Englishman with a pale, pasty face
+beginning to sag at the jowls. There was a queer immobility about the
+features as though the man were always in some fear. His eyes were a
+pale tallow color and seemed too small for their immense sockets. One
+could see that the man had been a gentleman. I write it in the past,
+because at the moment I felt it as in the past. I felt that something
+had dispossessed him.
+
+"This will be Robin," he said. "My dear fellow, it was fine of you to
+travel all this way to see me."
+
+He had a nervous cold hand with hardly any pressure in the grasp of it.
+His thin black hair was brushed across the top of his bald head, and the
+distended, apprehensive expression on his face did not change.
+
+He made me sit down by the fire and asked me about the family
+in America. But there was, I thought, no real interest in this
+interrogation until he came to a reflective comment.
+
+"I should like to go to America," he said; "there must be great wastes
+of country where one would be out of the world."
+
+The sincerity of this expression stood out in the trivial talk. It
+indicated something that disturbed the man. He was as isolated as he
+could get in England, but that was not enough.
+
+He sat for a moment silent, the fingers of his nervous hand moving on
+his knee. When he glanced up, with a sudden jerk of his head, he
+caught me looking at the little image of Buddha in its glass box on the
+mantelpiece.
+
+Was this longing for solitude the influence of this mysterious religion?
+
+Remote, lonely isolation was a cult of Buddha. The devotees of that cult
+sought the waste places of the earth for their meditations. To be out
+of the world, in its physical contact, was a prime postulate in the
+practice of this creed.
+
+"Ah, Robin," he cried, as though he were in a jovial mood and careless
+of the subject, "do you have a hobby?"
+
+I answered that I had not felt the need of one. The inquiry was a
+surprise and I could think of nothing better to reply with.
+
+"Then, my boy," he went on, "what will you do when you are old? One must
+have something to occupy the mind."
+
+He got up and turned the glass box a little on the mantelpiece.
+
+"This is a very rare image," he said; "one does not find this image
+anywhere in India. It came from Tibet. The expression and the pose of
+the figure differ from the conventional Buddha. You might not see that,
+but to any one familiar with this religion these differences are
+marked. This is a monastery image, and you will see that it is cast, not
+graven."
+
+He beckoned me to come closer, and I rose and stood beside him. He went
+on as with a lecture:
+
+"The reason given by the natives why this image is not found in Southern
+Asia is that it cannot be cast anywhere but in the Tibetan monasteries.
+A certain ritual at the time of casting is necessary to produce a
+perfect figure. This ritual is a secret of the Khan monasteries.
+Castings of this form of image made without the ritual are always
+defective; so I was told in India."
+
+He moved the glass box a little closer to the edge of the mantelpiece.
+
+"Naturally," he went on, "I considered this story, to be a mere piece of
+religious pretension. It amused me to make some experiments, and to
+my surprise the castings were always defective. I brought the image to
+England."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders as with a careless gesture.
+
+"In my idle time here I tried it again. And incredibly the result was
+always the same; some portion of the figure showed a flaw. My interest
+in the thing was permanently aroused. I continued to experiment."
+
+He laughed in a queer high cackle.
+
+"And presently I found myself desperately astride a hobby. I got all the
+Babbitt metal that I could buy up in England and put in the days and
+not a few of the nights in trying to cast a perfect figure of this
+confounded Buddha. But I have never been able to do it."
+
+He opened a drawer of the gun-case and brought over to the fire half a
+dozen castings of the Buddha in various sizes.
+
+Not one among the number was perfect. Some portion of the figure was in
+every case wanting. A hand would be missing, a portion of a shoulder, a
+bit of the squat body or there would be a flaw where the running metal
+had not filled the mold.
+
+"I'm hanged," he cried, "if the beggars are not right about it. The
+thing can't be done! I've tried it in all sorts of dimensions. You will
+see some of the big figures in the garden. I've used a ton of metal and
+every sort of mold."
+
+Then he flung his hand out toward the bookcase.
+
+"I've studied the art of molding in soft metal. I have all the books
+on it, and I've turned the boathouse into a sort of shop. I've spent a
+hundred pounds--and I can't do it!"
+
+He paused, his big face relaxed.
+
+"The country thinks I'm mad, working with such outlandish deviltry. But,
+curse the thing, I have set out to do it and I am not going to throw it
+up."
+
+And suddenly with an unexpected heat he damned the Buddha, shaking his
+clenched hand before the box.
+
+"Your pardon, Robin," he cried, the moment after. "But the thing's
+ridiculous, you know. The ritual story would be sheer rubbish. The
+beggars could not affect a metal casting with a form of words."
+
+I have tried to set down here precisely what my uncle said. It was
+the last talk I ever had with the man in this world, and it profoundly
+impressed me. He was in fear, and his jovial manner was a ghastly
+pretence. I left him sitting by the fire drinking neat whisky from a
+tumbler.
+
+The old man-servant took me up to my room. It was a big room in a wing
+of the house looking out on the garden and the sea. I saw that it had
+been cleaned and made ready against my coming; clearly the old man
+expected me.
+
+He put the candle on the table and laid back the covers of the bed. And
+suddenly I determined to have the matter out with him.
+
+"Andrew," I said, "why did you add that significant word to my uncle's
+letter?"
+
+He turned sharply with a little whimpering cry.
+
+"The master, sir!" he said, and then he stopped as though uncertain
+in what manner to go on. He made a hopeless sort of gesture with his
+extended hands.
+
+"I thought your coming might interrupt the thing.... You are of his
+family and would be silent."
+
+"What threatens my uncle?" I cried, "What is the thing?"
+
+He hesitated, his eyes moving about the floor.
+
+"Oh, sir," he said, "the master is in some wicked and dangerous
+business. You heard his talk, sir; that would not be the talk of a man
+at peace.... He has strange visitors, sir, and the place is watched. I
+cannot tell you any more than that, except that something is going to
+happen and I am shaken with the fear of it."
+
+I looked out through the musty curtains before I went to bed. But
+the whole world was dark, packed down in the thick mist. Once, in the
+direction of the open sea, I thought I saw the flicker of a light.
+
+I was tired and I slept profoundly, but somewhere in the sleep I saw my
+uncle and a priest of Tibet gibbering over a ladle of molten silver.
+
+It was nearly midday when I awoke. The whole world had changed as under
+some enchantment; there was brilliant sun and afresh stimulating air
+with the salt breath of the sea in it. Old Andrew gave me some breakfast
+and a message.
+
+His manner like everything else seemed to have undergone some
+transformation. He was silent and, I thought, evasive. He repeated the
+message without comment, as though he had committed it to memory from an
+unfamiliar language:
+
+"The master directed me to say that he must make a journey to Oban. It
+is urgent business and will not be laid over."
+
+"When does my uncle return," I said.
+
+The old man shifted his weight from one foot to the other; he looked
+out through the open window onto the strip of meadow extending into the
+loch. Finally he replied:
+
+"The master did not name the hour of his return."
+
+I did not press the interrogation. I felt that there was something here
+that the old man was keeping back; but I had an impression of equal
+force that he ought to be allowed the run of his discretion with it.
+Besides, the brilliant morning had swept out my sinister impressions.
+
+I got my cap and stick from the rack by the door and went out. The house
+was within a hundred paces of the loch, in a place of wild beauty on
+a bit of moor, yellow with gorse, extending from the great barren
+mountains behind it right down into the water. Immense banners of mist
+lay along the tops of these mountain peaks, and streams of water like
+skeins of silk marked the deep gorges in dazzling whiteness.
+
+The loch was a crooked finger of the sea hooked into the land. It was
+clear as glass in the bright morning. The open sea was directly beyond
+the crook of the finger, barred out by a nest of needlepointed rocks. On
+this morning, with the sea motionless, they stood up like the teeth of a
+harrow, but in heavy weather I imagined that the waves covered them. To
+the eye they were not the height of a man above the level water; they
+glistened in the brilliant sun like a sheaf of black pikes.
+
+This was Saint Conan's Landing, and it occurred to me that if the holy
+man came in rough weather from the Irish coast he required, in truth,
+all the perspicacity of a saint to get his boat in without having it
+impaled on these devil's needles.
+
+There was no garden to speak of about the house. It was grown up like
+the moor. Two or three images of Buddhas stood about in it; one of them
+was quite large--three feet in height I should say at a guess. They
+were on rough stone pedestals. I examined them carefully. They were all
+defective; the large one had an immense flaw in the shoulder. The gorse
+nearly covered them; the unkept hedge let the moor in and there were no
+longer any paths, except one running to the boathouse.
+
+I did not follow the path. But I looked down at the boathouse with some
+interest. This was the building that my uncle had turned into a sort of
+foundry for his weird experiments. There was a big lock on the door and
+a coal-blacked chimney standing above the roof.
+
+It was afternoon. The whole coast about me was like an undiscovered
+country. I hardly knew in what direction to set out on my exploration.
+I stood in the path digging my stick into the gravel and undecided.
+Finally I determined to cross the bit of moor to the high ground
+overlooking the loch. It was the sloping base of one of the great peaks
+and purple with heather. It looked the best point for a full sweep of
+the sea and the coast.
+
+I jumped the hedge and set out across the moor to the high ground.
+
+There was no path through the gorse, but when I reached the heather
+where the foot of the mountain peak descended into the loch there was
+a sort of newly broken trail. The heather was high and dense and I
+followed the trail onto the high ground overlooking the sweep of the
+coast.
+
+The loch was dappled with sun. The air was like wine. The mountains
+above the moor and the heather were colored like an Oriental carpet.
+I was full of the joy of life and swung into an immense stride, when
+suddenly a voice stopped me.
+
+"My lad," it said, "which one of the Ten Commandments is it the most
+dangerous to break?"
+
+Before me, at the end of the trail, seated on the ground, was a big
+Highlander. He was knitting a woolen stocking and his needles were
+clicking like an instrument. I was taken off my feet, but I tried to
+meet him on his ground.
+
+"Well," I answered, "I suppose it would be the one against murder, the
+sixth."
+
+"You suppose wrong," he replied. "It will be the first. You will read
+in the Book how Jehovah set aside the sixth. Aye, my lad, He ordered it
+broken when it pleased Him. But did you ever read that He set aside the
+first or that any man escaped who broke it?"
+
+He spoke with the deep rich burr of his race and with a structure of
+speech that I cannot reproduce here.
+
+"Did you observe," he added, "the graven images that your uncle has set
+up?... Where is the man the noo?"
+
+"He is gone to Oban," I said.
+
+He sprang up and thrust the stocking and needles into his sporran.
+
+"To Oban!" He stood a moment in some deep reflection. "There will be
+ships out of Oban." Then he put another question to me:
+
+"What did auld Andrew say about it?"
+
+"That my uncle was gone to Oban," I answered, "and had set no time for
+his return."
+
+He looked at me queerly for a moment, towering above me in the deep
+heather.
+
+"Do you think, my lad, that your uncle could be setting out for heathen
+parts to learn the witch words for his hell business in the boathouse?"
+
+The suggestion startled me. The thing was not beyond all possibility.
+
+But I felt that I had come to the end of this examination. I was not
+going to be questioned further like a small boy overtaken on the road I
+had answered a good many questions and I determined to ask one.
+
+"Who are you?" I said. "And what have you got to do with my uncle's
+affairs?"
+
+He cocked his eye at me, looking down as one looks down at a child.
+
+"The first of your questions," he said, "you will find out if you
+can, and the second you cannot find out if you will." And he was gone,
+striding past me in the deep heather.
+
+"I have some business with your uncle, of a pressing nature," he called
+back. "I will just take a look through Oban, the night and the morn's
+morn."
+
+I was utterly at sea about the big Highlander. He might be a friend
+or an enemy of my uncle. But clearly he knew all about the man and the
+mysterious experiment in which he was engaged. He was keeping the place
+well within his eye; that was also evident. From his seat in the heather
+the whole place was spread out below him.
+
+And his queer speech fitted with old Andrew's fear. Surely the Buddha
+was a heathen image and my uncle had set it up. The stern Scotch
+conscience would be outraged and see the Decalogue violated in its
+injunctions. This would explain the dread with which my uncle's house
+was regarded and the reason I could find no man to help me on the way to
+it. But it would not explain my uncle's apprehension.
+
+But my adventure on this afternoon did not end with the big Highlander.
+I found out something more.
+
+I returned along the edge of the loch and approached the boathouse from
+the waterside.
+
+Here the path passed directly along the whole wall of the building. The
+path was padded with damp sod, and as it happened I made no sound on it.
+It was late afternoon, the shadows were beginning to extend, there was
+no wind and the whole world was intensely quiet. Midway of the wall I
+stopped to listen.
+
+The house was not empty. There was some one in it. I could hear him
+moving about.
+
+It was of no use to try to look in through the wall; every joint and
+crack of the stones was plastered. I went on.
+
+Old Andrew was about setting me some supper. He came over and stood a
+moment by the window looking at the shadows on the loch. And I tried to
+take him unaware with a sudden question:
+
+"Has my uncle returned from Oban?"
+
+But I had no profit of the venture.
+
+"The master," he said, "is where he went this morning."
+
+The strange elements in this affair seemed on the point of converging
+upon some common center. The thing was in the air. Old Andrew voiced it
+when he went out with his candle.
+
+"Ah, sir," he said, "it was the fool work of an old man to bring you
+into this affair. The master will have his way and he must meet what
+waits for him at the end of it."
+
+I saw how he hoped that my visit might interrupt some plan that my uncle
+was about to put into effect, but realized that it was useless.
+
+Clearly my uncle had not left the place; he had been at work all day in
+the boathouse. The journey was to account to me for his disappearance. I
+had passed the lie along to the queer sentinel that sat watching in the
+heather and I wondered whether I had sent a friend or an enemy into Oban
+on an empty mission, and whether I had fouled or forwarded my uncle's
+enterprise.
+
+I put out the candle and sat down by the window to keep watch, for the
+boathouse, the loch and the open sea were under the sweep of it. But,
+alas, Nature overreaches our resolves when we are young. It was far into
+the night when I awoke.
+
+A wind was coming up and I think it was the rattle of the window that
+aroused me. There was no moon, but under the open stars the world was
+filled with a thin, ghostly light, and the scene below the window was
+blurred a little like an impalpable picture.
+
+A low-masted sailing ship lay in the open sea; there was a boat at the
+edge of the loch, and human figures were coming out of the boathouse
+with burdens which they were loading into the boat. Almost immediately
+the boat, manned with rowers, turned about and silently traversed the
+crook of the loch on its way to the ship. But certain of the human
+figures remained. They continued between the boathouse and the beach.
+
+And I realized that I had opened my eyes on the loading of a ship. The
+boat was taking off a cargo.
+
+Something stored in the boathouse was being transferred to the hold of
+the sailing ship. The scene was inconceivably unreal. There was no
+sound but the intermittent puffs of the wind, and the figures were like
+phantoms in a sort of lighted mist. Directly as I looked two figures
+came out of the boathouse and along the path to the drawing-room door
+under my window. I took off my shoes and crept carefully out of the room
+and down the stairway. The door from the hall into the long, low room
+was ajar. I stood behind it, and looked in through the crack.
+
+My uncle was burning letters and papers in the fireplace with a candle,
+and in the chair beyond him sat the strangest human creature that I had
+ever seen in the world.
+
+He was a big Oriental with a sodden, brutal face fixed as by some
+sorcery into an expression of eternal calm. He wore the uniform of an
+English skipper. It was dirty and sea-stained as though picked up at
+some sailor's auction. He was speaking to my uncle and his careful
+precise sentences in the English tongue, coming from the creature,
+seemed thereby to take on added menace.
+
+"Is it wise, Sahib," he said, "to leave any man behind us in this
+house?"
+
+"We can do nothing else," replied my uncle.
+
+The Oriental continued with the same carefully selected words:
+
+"Easily we can do something else, Sahib," he said, "with a bar of pig
+securely lashed to the ankles, the sea would receive them."
+
+"No, no," replied my uncle, busy with his letters and the candle. The
+big Oriental did not move.
+
+"Reflect, Sahib," he went on. "We are entering an immense peril. The
+thing that will be hunting us has innumerable agencies everywhere in
+its service. If it shall discover that we have falsified its symbols,
+it will search the earth for us. And what are we, Sahib, against this
+thing? It does not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary."
+
+"The lad knows nothing," replied my uncle, "and old Andrew will keep
+silent."
+
+"Without trouble, Sahib," the creature continued, "I can put the young
+one beyond all knowledge and the old one beyond all speech. Is it
+permitted?"
+
+My uncle got up from the fireplace, for he had finished with his work.
+
+"No," he said, "let there be an end of it."
+
+He turned about, and under the glimmer of the candle I could see that
+the man had changed; his big pale face was grim with some determined
+purpose, and there was about him the courage and the authority of one
+who, after long wavering, at last hazards a desperate venture. He broke
+the glass box and put the Buddha into his pocket.
+
+"It is good silver," he said, "and it has served its purpose."
+
+The Oriental got softly onto his feet like a great toy of cotton wood.
+His face remained in its expression of equanimity, and he added no
+further word of gesture to his argument.
+
+My uncle held the door open for him to pass out, and after that he
+extinguished the candle and followed, closing the door noiselessly
+behind him.
+
+The thing was like a scene acted in a playhouse. But it accomplished
+what the playhouse fails in. It put the fear of death into one who
+watched it. To me in the dark hall, looking through the crack of the
+door, the placid Oriental in his English uniform, and with his precise
+words like an Oxford don, was surely the most devilish agency that ever
+urged the murder of innocent men on an accomplice.
+
+The wind was continuing to rise and the mist now covered the loch and
+the open sea. It was of no use to stand before the window, for the world
+was blotted out. I was cold and I lay down on the bed and wrapped the
+covers around me. It seemed only a moment later when old Andrew's hand
+was on me, and his thin voice crying in the room.
+
+"Will you sleep, sir, and God's creatures going to their death!"
+
+He ran, whimpering in his thin old voice, down the stair, and I followed
+him out of the house into the garden.
+
+It was midmorning. A man was standing before the door, his hands behind
+him, looking out at the sea. In his long trousers and bowler hat I
+did not at once recognize him for the Highlander of my yesterday's
+adventure.
+
+The coast was in the tail of a storm. The wind boomed, as though puffed
+by a bellows, driving in gusts of mist.
+
+The ship I had seen in the night was hanging in the sea just beyond the
+crook of the loch. It fluttered like a snared bird. One could see
+the crew trying every device of sail and tacking, but with all their
+desperate ingenuities the ship merely hung there shivering like a
+stricken creature.
+
+It was a fearful thing to look at. Now the mist covered everything and
+then for a moment the wind swept it out, and all the time, the silent,
+deadly struggle went on between the trapped ship and the sea running in
+among the needles of the loch. I don't think any of us spoke except the
+Highlander once in comment to himself.
+
+"It's Ram Chad's tramp.... So that's the craft the man was depending
+on!"
+
+Then the mist shut down. When it lifted, the doom of the ship was
+written. It was moving slowly into the deadly maw of the loch.
+
+Again the mist shut down and, when again the wind swept it out, the ship
+had vanished.
+
+There was the open sea and the long swells and the murderous current
+boiling around the sharp points of the needles; but there was no ship
+nor any human soul of the crew. Old Andrew screamed like a woman at the
+sight.
+
+"The ship!" he cried. "Where is the ship and the master?"
+
+The thing was so swift and awful that I spoke myself.
+
+"My God!" I said. "How quickly the thing they feared destroyed them!"
+
+The big Highlander came over where I stood. The burr of his speech and
+its sacred imagery were gone with his change of dress.
+
+"No," he said, "they escaped the thing they feared.... What do you think
+it was?"
+
+"I don't know," I answered. "The creature in the English uniform said
+that it did not die, nor wax old, nor grow weary."
+
+"Ram Chad was right," replied the Highlander. "The British government
+neither dies, ages, nor tires out. Do you realize what your uncle was
+doing here?"
+
+"Molding images of Buddha," I said.
+
+"Molding Indian rupees," he retorted.
+
+"The Buddha business was a blind.... I'm Sir Henry Marquis, Chief of the
+Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. ... We got track of
+him in India."
+
+Then he added:
+
+"There's a hundred thousand sterling in false coin at the bottom of the
+loch yonder!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sleuth of St. James's Square, by 
+Melville Davisson Post
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SLEUTH OF ST. JAMES'S SQUARE ***
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