SUCH FRIENDS ARE EXULTATION’S AGONY
“ARRAH, now, Misther Jarvis, ’tis no use your flatthering me the like
of that. Fwhat I know, I know; and that I’ll keep to myself. Besides,
wasn’t it Misther Brant himself, poor dear! that says, says he, ‘Mum’s
the wurrud, Mary, me jool; sure ’tis but a b’y’s thrick, and I’ll not
be having it talked about at all at all.’”
“Yes; but that was before it all came out in the newspapers,” Jarvis
cut in glibly. “He doesn’t mind your talking about it now; in fact, he
told me to ask you.”
For something better than a week the reporter had been assiduously
cultivating Mrs. Seeley’s housemaid, and one of the results of the
intimacy was a second visit to Brant’s room, made in the landlady’s
absence and connived at and arranged by Mary McCarthy. Jarvis hoped
little from a second inspection of the room, and not much from anything
the housemaid could tell. Yet he lied brazenly to make her talk, and
the lie accomplished that whereunto it was sent.
“Ah, then, did he tell you that, poor man?” said the unsuspecting Mary.
“He did, for a fact; couldn’t come himself, you know, poor fellow!”
rejoined the reporter, clinching the falsehood promptly. “Now show me
just what you did and tell me what you saw.”
Thus absolved and adjured, Mary McCarthy went circumstantially over the
account of her discovery of the burglar, Jarvis absorbing the story as
it was told, and leaving the journalistic compartment of his brain to
sift the salient facts from the mass of embellishment and exaggeration.
“Black clothes, you say?” he interrupted, when the housemaid came to
the describing of the intruder.
“Black as Father Callahan’s cassock.”
“Then he didn’t look like a tramp or a tough?”
“On’y for the oogly face av him I might have mistook him for Misther
Brant himself.”
Jarvis strolled to the window and stood with his hands deep in his
pockets, looking out upon the tin roof of the porch.
“Dang the thing!” he muttered. “It gets blinder with every move. Now,
who the mischief is this gentleman burglar whom Brant wants to screen,
and what was he here for? By Jove! I wonder if it was young Langford?
He always wears gamblers’ mourning. But what the dickens was he trying
to steal?”
He turned away from the window and made another slow circuit of the
room in the vague hope that he might stumble upon some overlooked clew
to the puzzle. There was none, and he was about to give it up when he
came to the closet at the foot of the bed.
“Does this door open into the next room?” he asked.
“No, sure; ’tis on’y the closet where Misther Brant does be keeping his
clothes.”
Jarvis turned the knob and glanced at the garments hanging in an
orderly row at the back of the shallow recess. “These are all Brant’s,
I suppose,” he said carelessly.
“’Deed and they are, then. Whose else would they be?”
“Are these all he has?”
Mary McCarthy picked a fancied suspicion out of the meaningless
question and promptly resented it.
“D’ye think annybody would be shtealing them?” she demanded. “Av coorse
they are all there, barring fwhat Misther Antrim and the b’y tuk to him
at the jail.”
“Boy? What boy was this?”
“’Deed, then, I don’t know; some little scaramouch from the sthreets,
I’m thinking. But he did be bringing a letther from Misther Brant; ’tis
there on the table.”
Jarvis sauntered across the room and took a dirty scrap of paper from
beneath a paperweight on the small writing table. It was a misspelled
pencil scrawl, signed with Brant’s name, but he did not have to look
twice to decide that it was the clumsiest of forgeries, written
evidently by some one who had never so much as seen Brant’s handwriting.
“Mary, dear,” he said feelingly, “you are a pearl of price, and the
mate to you has never been found.”
“Be off wid you wid your flatthering tongue!”
“It’s not flattery--never a word of it. Did Mrs. Seeley see this
letter?”
“Sure, she did that same. ’Twas to her that the b’y did be giving it.”
“And she gave the boy the suit of clothes it calls for?”
“Av coorse she did. And ’tis myself as was wondering fwhat Misther
Brant would be wanting wid them ould rags.”
“From all our friends--so they be women--good Lord deliver us!” said
Jarvis under his breath; then aloud: “That was quite right, of course.
Did you happen to see the clothes yourself, Mary?”
“I did that; an ould dirty suit of pepper-and-salt it was, the likes
of fwhat Misther Brant never did be wearing in the whole swate life av
him.”
“Exactly.”
Jarvis slipped the note into his pocket and got away as quickly as he
could. It was but the slenderest thread of a clew, but it spanned one
of the many gaps he had been vainly trying for a fortnight to bridge.
At the very beginning of his investigation the reporter had stumbled
upon Harding’s disguise--the wig and the false beard--in the West
Denver _Gasthaus_; and a painstaking inquiry into the habits of the
red-haired and fiery-bearded lodger had developed the fact that he was
seen often in company with another man whose description Jarvis had
gathered from many sources, but whom he was as yet unable to identify.
So far as could be ascertained, the unidentified one had disappeared
on the night of the tragedy. He had been seen alone at Draco’s in
the earlier hours of that night, and he had not been seen by any
of Jarvis’s informants since that time. Apart from the overheard
conference in Heddrigg’s restaurant--a conference in which Jarvis had
long since recognised Harding in his character of red-beard and the
unknown man as the two participants--there was nothing to remotely
connect the unidentified man with Brant’s affair; nothing, unless the
forged letter to Mrs. Seeley might be taken as a connecting link. But
just here the reporter’s incomplete knowledge of the facts hampered
him. He knew nothing of the papers at which the burglary pointed,
and could only guess from the overheard conversation in Heddrigg’s
restaurant that the burglar was an emissary of Harding’s. At the
finding of the forged letter he had jumped to the conclusion that the
house-breaker and Harding’s unknown companion were one and the same
person; but cooler after-thought brought doubt, and a leaning toward
the William Langford hypothesis.
“I am afraid it was the young fellow, after all,” he said at the
summing up. “That guess fits the other guesses a little more as if it
belonged. Nobody but a fool of a boy would do such a thing and get
stone blind in the middle of it; and there is nobody else in the whole
shooting match that Brant would go out of his way to shield. As for the
clothes and the letter, they don’t count very hard. Even as big a fool
as the boy would have sense enough not to wear his everyday clothes
while he burgled a house.”
So Jarvis concluded; and he did not change his mind when, later in the
day, in another talk with Deverney, he learned that Harding’s unknown
companion had always appeared in dingy “pepper-and-salt.” That was
a mere coincidence, he argued; and the pattern was certainly common
enough to warrant the supposition.
It was in the evening of this same day that the reporter asked his
chief to procure him an order to visit the prisoner, or, rather, asked
if such an order could be procured.
“I don’t know,” said the night editor. “It’s after hours. But we can
try. What have you stumbled upon--anything new?”
“Nothing much. Write me the request for an order, and I’ll tell you
about it when I come back. I have an idea.”
The request was written and Jarvis forthfared to the jail. His idea was
but the piecing together of some irrelevant facts. He had learned from
his chief that Brant had at one time taken a pistol from Harding, and
from the editor’s description the weapon was a _facsimile_ of the one
found on the floor of the card room after the murder. Out of this the
reporter built a new theory, and an interview with Brant was needed to
confirm or disprove it.