Perhaps a week after the conversation between St. Clair and
Walcott, Randolph Mason stood in the private waiting-room of the
club with his hands behind his back.
He was a man apparently in the middle forties; tall and reasonably
broad across the shoulders; muscular without being either stout or
lean. His hair was thin and of a brown color, with erratic streaks
of gray. His forehead was broad and high and of a faint reddish
color. His eyes were restless inky black, and not over-large. The
nose was big and muscular and bowed. The eyebrows were black and
heavy, almost bushy. There were heavy furrows, running from the
nose downward and outward to the corners of the mouth. The mouth
was straight and the jaw was heavy, and square.
Looking at the face of Randolph Mason from above, the expression in
repose was crafty and cynical; viewed from below upward, it was
savage and vindictive, almost brutal; while from the front, if
looked squarely in the face, the stranger was fascinated by the
animation of the man and at once concluded that his expression was
fearless and sneering. He was evidently of Southern extraction and
a man of unusual power.
A fire smoldered on the hearth. It was a crisp evening in the
early fall, and with that far-off touch of melancholy which ever
heralds the coming winter, even in the midst of a city. The man’s
face looked tired and ugly. His long white hands were clasped
tight together. His entire figure and face wore every mark of
weakness and physical exhaustion; but his eyes contradicted. They
were red and restless.
In the private dining-room the dinner party was in the best of
spirits. Samuel Walcott was happy. Across the table from him was
Miss Virginia St. Clair, radiant, a tinge of color in her cheeks.
On either side, Mrs. Miriam Steuvisant and Marshall St. Clair were
brilliant and lighthearted. Walcott looked at the young girl and
the measure of his worship was full. He wondered for the
thousandth time how she could possibly love him and by what earthly
miracle she had come to accept him, and how it would be always to
have her across the table from him, his own table in his own house.
They were about to rise from the table when one of the waiters
entered the room and handed Walcott an envelope. He thrust it
quickly into his pocket. In the confusion of rising the others did
not notice him, but his face was ash white and his hands trembled
violently as he placed the wraps around the bewitching shoulders of
Miss St. Clair.
“Marshall,” he said, and despite the powerful effort his voice was
hollow, “you will see the ladies safely cared for, I am called to
attend a grave matter.”
“All right, Walcott,” answered the young man, with cheery good
nature, “you are too serious, old man, trot along.”
“The poor dear,” murmured Mrs. Steuvisant, after Walcott had helped
them to the carriage and turned to go up the steps of the club,—
“The poor dear is hard hit, and men are such funny creatures when
they are hard hit.”
Samuel Walcott, as his fate would, went direct to the private
writing-room and opened the door. The lights were not turned on
and in the dark he did not see Mason motionless by the mantel-
shelf. He went quickly across the room to the writing-table,
turned on one of the lights, and, taking the envelope from his
pocket, tore it open. Then he bent down by the light to read the
contents. As his eyes ran over the paper, his jaw fell. The skin
drew away from his cheekbones and his face seemed literally to sink
in. His knees gave way under him and he would have gone down in a
heap had it not been for Mason’s long arms that closed around him
and held him up. The human economy is ever mysterious. The moment
the new danger threatened, the latent power of the man as an
animal, hidden away in the centers of intelligence, asserted
itself. His hand clutched the paper and, with a half slide, he
turned in Mason’s arms. For a moment he stared up at the ugly man
whose thin arms felt like wire ropes.
“You are under the dead-fall, aye,” said Mason. “The cunning of my
enemy is sublime.”
“Your enemy?” gasped Walcott. “When did you come into it? How in
God’s name did you know it? How your enemy?”
Mason looked down at the wide bulging eyes of the man.
“Who should know better than I?” he said. “Haven’t I broken
through all the traps and plots that she could set?”
“She? She trap you?” The man’s voice was full of horror.
“The old schemer,” muttered Mason. “The cowardly old schemer, to
strike in the back; but we can beat her. She did not count on my
helping you—I, who know her so well.”
Mason’s face was red, and his eyes burned. In the midst of it all
he dropped his hands and went over to the fire. Samuel Walcott
arose, panting, and stood looking at Mason, with his hands behind
him on the table. The naturally strong nature and the rigid school
in which the man had been trained presently began to tell. His
composure in part returned and he thought rapidly. What did this
strange man know? Was he simply making shrewd guesses, or had he
some mysterious knowledge of this matter? Walcott could not know
that Mason meant only Fate, that he believed her to be his great
enemy. Walcott had never before doubted his own ability to meet
any emergency. This mighty jerk had carried him off his feet. He
was unstrung and panic-stricken. At any rate this man had promised
help. He would take it. He put the paper and envelope carefully
into his pocket, smoothed out his rumpled coat, and going over to
Mason touched him on the shoulder.
“Come,” he said, “if you are to help me we must go.”
The man turned and followed him without a word. In the hall Mason
put on his hat and overcoat, and the two went out into the street.
Walcott hailed a cab, and the two were driven to his house on the
avenue. Walcott took out his latchkey, opened the door, and led
the way into the library. He turned on the light and motioned
Mason to seat himself at the table. Then he went into another room
and presently returned with a bundle of papers and a decanter of
brandy. He poured out a glass of the liquor and offered it to
Mason. The man shook his head. Walcott poured the contents of the
glass down his own throat. Then he set the decanter down and drew
up a chair on the side of the table opposite Mason.
“Sir,” said Walcott, in a voice deliberate, indeed, but as hollow
as a sepulcher, “I am done for. God has finally gathered up the
ends of the net, and it is knotted tight.”
“Am I not here to help you?” said Mason, turning savagely. “I can
beat Fate. Give me the details of her trap.”
He bent forward and rested his arms on the table. His streaked
gray hair was rumpled and on end, and his face was ugly. For a
moment Walcott did not answer. He moved a little into the shadow;
then he spread the bundle of old yellow papers out before him.
“To begin with,” he said, “I am a living lie, a gilded crime-made
sham, every bit of me. There is not an honest piece anywhere. It
is all lie. I am a liar and a thief before men. The property
which I possess is not mine, but stolen from a dead man. The very
name which I bear is not my own, but is the bastard child of a
crime. I am more than all that—I am a murderer; a murderer before
the law; a murderer before God; and worse than a murderer before
the pure woman whom I love more than anything that God could make.”
He paused for a moment and wiped the perspiration from his face.
“Sir,” said Mason, “this is all drivel, infantile drivel. What you
are is of no importance. How to get out is the problem, how to get
out.”
Samuel Walcott leaned forward, poured out a glass of brandy and
swallowed it.
“Well,” he said, speaking slowly, “my right name is Richard Warren.
In the spring of 1879 I came to New York and fell in with the real
Samuel Walcott, a young man with a little money and some property
which his grandfather had left him. We became friends, and
concluded to go to the far west together. Accordingly we scraped
together what money we could lay our hands on, and landed in the
gold-mining regions of California. We were young and
inexperienced, and our money went rapidly. One April morning we
drifted into a little shack camp, away up in the Sierra Nevadas,
called Hell’s Elbow. Here we struggled and starved for perhaps a
year. Finally, in utter desperation, Walcott married the daughter
of a Mexican gambler, who ran an eating house and a poker joint.
With them we lived from hand to mouth in a wild God-forsaken way
for several years. After a time the woman began to take a strange
fancy to me. Walcott finally noticed it, and grew jealous.
“One night, in a drunken brawl, we quarreled, and I killed him. It
was late at night, and, beside the woman, there were four of us in
the poker room,—the Mexican gambler, a half-breed devil called
Cherubim Pete, Walcott, and myself. When Walcott fell, the half-
breed whipped out his weapon, and fired at me across the table; but
the woman, Nina San Croix, struck his arm, and, instead of killing
me, as he intended, the bullet mortally wounded her father, the
Mexican gambler. I shot the half-breed through the forehead, and
turned round, expecting the woman to attack me. On the contrary,
she pointed to the window, and bade me wait for her on the cross
trail below.
“It was fully three hours later before the woman joined me at the
place indicated. She had a bag of gold dust, a few jewels that
belonged to her father, and a package of papers. I asked her why
she had stayed behind so long, and she replied that the men were
not killed outright, and that she had brought a priest to them and
waited until they had died. This was the truth, but not all the
truth. Moved by superstition or foresight, the woman had induced
the priest to take down the sworn statements of the two dying men,
seal it, and give it to her. This paper she brought with her. All
this I learned afterwards. At the time I knew nothing of this
damning evidence.
“We struck out together for the Pacific coast. The country was
lawless. The privations we endured were almost past belief. At
times the woman exhibited cunning and ability that were almost
genius; and through it all, often in the very fingers of death, her
devotion to me never wavered. It was doglike, and seemed to be her
only object on earth. When we reached San Francisco, the woman put
these papers into my hands.” Walcott took up the yellow package,
and pushed it across the table to Mason.
“She proposed that I assume Walcott’s name, and that we come boldly
to New York and claim the property. I examined the papers, found a
copy of the will by which Walcott inherited the property, a bundle
of correspondence, and sufficient documentary evidence to establish
his identity beyond the shadow of a doubt. Desperate gambler as I
now was, I quailed before the daring plan of Nina San Croix. I
urged that I, Richard Warren, would be known, that the attempted
fraud would be detected and would result in investigation, and
perhaps unearth the whole horrible matter.
“The woman pointed out how much I resembled Walcott, what vast
changes ten years of such life as we had led would naturally be
expected to make in men, how utterly impossible it would be to
trace back the fraud to Walcott’s murder at Hell’s Elbow, in the
wild passes of the Sierra Nevadas. She bade me remember that we
were both outcasts, both crime-branded, both enemies of man’s law
and God’s; that we had nothing to lose; we were both sunk to the
bottom. Then she laughed, and said that she had not found me a
coward until now, but that if I had turned chicken-hearted, that
was the end of it, of course. The result was, we sold the gold
dust and jewels in San Francisco, took on such evidences of
civilization as possible, and purchased passage to New York on the
best steamer we could find.
“I was growing to depend on the bold gambler spirit of this woman,
Nina San Croix; I felt the need of her strong, profligate nature.
She was of a queer breed and a queerer school. Her mother was the
daughter of a Spanish engineer, and had been stolen by the Mexican,
her father. She herself had been raised and educated as best might
be in one of the monasteries along the Rio Grande, and had there
grown to womanhood before her father, fleeing into the mountains of
California, carried her with him.
“When we landed in New York I offered to announce her as my wife,
but she refused, saying that her presence would excite comment and
perhaps attract the attention of Walcott’s relatives. We therefore
arranged that I should go alone into the city, claim the property,
and announce myself as Samuel Walcott, and that she should remain
under cover until such time as we would feel the ground safe under
us.
“Every detail of the plan was fatally successful. I established my
identity without difficulty and secured the property. It had
increased vastly in value, and I, as Samuel Walcott, soon found
myself a rich man. I went to Nina San Croix in hiding and gave her
a large sum of money, with which she purchased a residence in a
retired part of the city, far up in the northern suburb. Here she
lived secluded and unknown while I remained in the city, living
here as a wealthy bachelor.
“I did not attempt to abandon the woman, but went to her from time
to time in disguise and under cover of the greatest secrecy. For a
time everything ran smooth, the woman was still devoted to me above
everything else, and thought always of my welfare first and seemed
content to wait so long as I thought best. My business expanded.
I was sought after and consulted and drawn into the higher life of
New York, and more and more felt that the woman was an albatross on
my neck. I put her off with one excuse after another. Finally she
began to suspect me and demanded that I should recognize her as my
wife. I attempted to point out the difficulties. She met them all
by saying that we should both go to Spain, there I could marry her
and we could return to America and drop into my place in society
without causing more than a passing comment.
“I concluded to meet the matter squarely once for all. I said that
I would convert half of the property into money and give it to her,
but that I would not marry her. She did not fly into a storming
rage as I had expected, but went quietly out of the room and
presently returned with two papers, which she read. One was the
certificate of her marriage to Walcott duly authenticated; the
other was the dying statement of her father, the Mexican gambler,
and of Samuel Walcott, charging me with murder. It was in proper
form and certified by the Jesuit priest.
“‘Now,’ she said, sweetly, when she had finished, ‘which do you
prefer, to recognize your wife, or to turn all the property over to
Samuel Walcott’s widow and hang for his murder?’
“I was dumfounded and horrified. I saw the trap that I was in and
I consented to do anything she should say if she would only destroy
the papers. This she refused to do. I pleaded with her and
implored her to destroy them. Finally she gave them to me with a
great show of returning confidence, and I tore them into bits and
threw them into the fire.
“That was three months ago. We arranged to go to Spain and do as
she said. She was to sail this morning and I was to follow. Of
course I never intended to go. I congratulated myself on the fact
that all trace of evidence against me was destroyed and that her
grip was now broken. My plan was to induce her to sail, believing
that I would follow. When she was gone I would marry Miss St.
Clair, and if Nina San Croix should return I would defy her and
lock her up as a lunatic. But I was reckoning like an infernal
ass, to imagine for a moment that I could thus hoodwink such a
woman as Nina San Croix.
“To-night I received this.” Walcott took the envelope from his
pocket and gave it to Mason. “You saw the effect of it; read it
and you will understand why. I felt the death hand when I saw her
writing on the envelope.”
Mason took the paper from the envelope. It was written in Spanish,
and ran:
“Greeting to RICHARD WARREN.
“The great Senor does his little Nina injustice to think she would
go away to Spain and leave him to the beautiful American. She is
not so thoughtless. Before she goes, she shall be, Oh so very
rich! and the dear Senor shall be, Oh so very safe! The Archbishop
and the kind Church hate murderers.
“NINA SAN CROIX.
“Of course, fool, the papers you destroyed were copies.
“N. SAN C.”
To this was pinned a line in a delicate aristocratic hand saying
that the Archbishop would willingly listen to Madam San Croix’s
statement if she would come to him on Friday morning at eleven.
“You see,” said Walcott, desperately, “there is no possible way
out. I know the woman—when she decides to do a thing that is the
end of it. She has decided to do this.”
Mason turned around from the table, stretched out his long legs,
and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. Walcott sat with his
head down, watching Mason hopelessly, almost indifferently, his
face blank and sunken. The ticking of the bronze clock on the
mantel shelf was loud, painfully loud. Suddenly Mason drew his
knees in and bent over, put both his bony hands on the table, and
looked at Walcott.
“Sir,” he said, “this matter is in such shape that there is only
one thing to do. This growth must be cut out at the roots, and cut
out quickly. This is the first fact to be determined, and a fool
would know it. The second fact is that you must do it yourself.
Hired killers are like the grave and the daughters of the horse
leech,—they cry always, ‘Give, Give.’ They are only palliatives,
not cures. By using them you swap perils. You simply take a stay
of execution at best. The common criminal would know this. These
are the facts of your problem. The master plotters of crime would
see here but two difficulties to meet:
“A practical method for accomplishing the body of the crime.
“A cover for the criminal agent.
“They would see no farther, and attempt to guard no farther. After
they had provided a plan for the killing, and a means by which the
killer could cover his trail and escape from the theater of the
homicide, they would believe all the requirements of the problems
met, and would stop. The greatest, the very giants among them,
have stopped here and have been in great error.
“In every crime, especially in the great ones, there exists a third
element, preeminently vital. This third element the master
plotters have either overlooked or else have not had the genius to
construct. They plan with rare cunning to baffle the victim. They
plan with vast wisdom, almost genius, to baffle the trailer. But
they fail utterly to provide any plan for baffling the punisher.
Ergo, their plots are fatally defective and often result in ruin.
Hence the vital necessity for providing the third element—the
escape ipso jure.”
Mason arose, walked around the table, and put his hand firmly on
Samuel Walcott’s shoulder. “This must be done to-morrow night,” he
continued; “you must arrange your business matters to-morrow and
announce that you are going on a yacht cruise, by order of your
physician, and may not return for some weeks. You must prepare
your yacht for a voyage, instruct your men to touch at a certain
point on Staten Island, and wait until six o’clock day after
tomorrow morning. If you do not come aboard by that time, they are
to go to one of the South American ports and remain until further
orders. By this means your absence for an indefinite period will
be explained. You will go to Nina San Croix in the disguise which
you have always used, and from her to the yacht, and by this means
step out of your real status and back into it without leaving
traces. I will come here to-morrow evening and furnish you with
everything that you shall need and give you full and exact
instructions in every particular. These details you must execute
with the greatest care, as they will be vitally essential to the
success of my plan.”
Through it all Walcott had been silent and motionless. Now he
arose, and in his face there must have been some premonition of
protest, for Mason stepped back and put out his hand. “Sir,” he
said, with brutal emphasis, “not a word. Remember that you are
only the hand, and the hand does not think.” Then he turned around
abruptly and went out of the house.