MR. DORRIGAN
Carl, traveling north after a day of earnest discussion in his cousin's
camp, thought much of the second candlestick. Since that night in
Philip's wigwam, it had haunted him persistently. Now with Diane's
permission to probe its secret--if, indeed, it had one like its charred
companion--he was fretting again, as he had intermittently fretted in
the lodge of Mic-co, at the train of circumstances that had interposed
delay.
Train and taxi were perniciously slow. Carl found his patience taxed
to the utmost.
The grandfather's clock was booming eight when at length, after a
gauntlet of garrulous servants, he pushed back the great, iron-bound
doors of the old Spanish room in his cousin's house and entered. The
war-beaten slab of table-wood, the old lanterns, the Spanish grandee
above the mantel, the mended candlestick and its unmarred mate, all
brought memories of another night when Starrett's glass had struck the
marble fireplace. Vividly, too, he recalled how the firelight had
stained the square-paneled ceiling of oak overhead, and how Diane had
stood in the doorway. The room was the same. It was a little hard,
however, to reconcile the sullen, resentful, impudent young scapegrace
of that other night with the man of to-night.
He put out his hand to touch the second candlestick--the telephone bell
rang.
Carl frowned impatiently and answered it.
"Hello," said he. "Yes, this is Carl Granberry speaking . . .
Who? . . . Oh! Hello, Hunch, is that you?"
It plainly was. Moreover, Mr. Dorrigan was very nervous and ill at
ease. Carl laughed with relish.
"What's the trouble?" he demanded. "You're stuttering like a kid . . .
Shut up and begin over again. . . . Hello. . . . Yes. . . . Well,
I've been out of town since January. . . . Hum! . . . Well," he
hinted dryly, "there was sufficient time for an explanation before I
went. . . . I guess you're right. . . . I went up to the farm in
October with Wherry."
Mr. Dorrigan desperately admitted that some of the time between the
escape of His Nibs and Carl's departure for the farm had been spent in
panic-stricken remorse and dread--some in the hospital due to an
altercation with Link Murphy, who for reasons not immediately apparent
wished jealously to obliterate his other eye. He begged Carl to give
him an immediate opportunity of squaring himself, for he had telephoned
the house so frequently of late that the butler had grown insulting.
Mr. Dorrigan added that he hoped Mr. Granberry's wholly justified wrath
had somewhat abated, but that for purposes of initial communication the
telephone had seemed more prudent.
He was plainly relieved at the answer.
Carl glanced at the tormenting candlestick and sighed. Another delay!
"All right," he said finally to Hunch, "come along. I'll give you
twenty minutes. If you're not through then, like as not I'll stir up
the grudge again--"
The telephone at the other end clicked instantly. Conceivably Hunch
was already on his way up town.
Carl impatiently busied himself with some mail upon the table. It had
followed him from the farm to Palm Beach and from Palm Beach to New
York. There were half a dozen wild letters of gratitude from Wherry
and a letter from the old doctor, Wherry's father, that brought a flush
of genuine pleasure to Carl's face.
"Wherry, too!" said he softly. "Of course. He stuck that other night.
I've been too blind to see." Drawing his flute from his pocket, he
glanced with a curious smile and glow at a row of notches in the wood.
The first notch he had cut in the flute after the rainy night in
Philip's wigwam, the second by Mic-co's pool, the third was subtly
linked with the marshes of Glynn, and a fourth had been furtively added
in the camp of his cousin. Now with a glance at Wherry's letters, he
was quietly carving a fifth. Who may say what they portended--this
record of notches carved upon the one friend who had always understood!
Carl was to carve another, of which he little dreamed, before the
summer waned; and the spur to its making was close at hand.
The doorbell rang as he finished, and dropping the flute back into his
pocket, he rang for some whiskey and cigars for the entertainment of
Mr. Dorrigan, who presently appeared, at the heels of a servant,
twirling his hat with a nonchalant ease much too elaborate and at
variance with the look in his good eye to be genuine.
"'Lo!" said Hunch uncomfortably.
"Hello!" said Carl pleasantly, pushing the decanter across the table.
Hunch stared at his host, fidgeted, poured himself a generous drink and
waited suggestively.
Carl merely laughed good-humoredly and lighted a cigar.
"Sorry, Hunch," he regretted, "but I've joined the Lithia League!"
"My Gawd!" burst forth Hunch despairingly, adding in heartfelt memory
of his host's enviable steadiness of head, "My Gawd, Carl, what a waste
o' talents!"
Carl laughed.
"Sit down," he invited, "and get it off your mind."
But Hunch's single eye was wandering in fascinated appraisal over
Carl's dark, pleasant face. Even he, coarse and brutal in perception
as he was, was conscious of a difference not wholly attributable to the
Lithia League and felt himself impelled to some verbal recognition of
his host's conspicuous well-being.
"Ye're on the level all right," he swore obscurely. "Ye're white!
Ye're lookin' good, ye're lookin' fine-- By the Lord Harry, Carl, I
don't know as I blame yuh!"
Unable to fathom the nature of the censure thus withheld, Carl remained
silent and Hunch fell again to staring, his immovable eye ridiculously
expressive in stony conjunction with the other. Whatever he found in
Carl's face this time plainly afforded him intense relief, for he
seated himself with a long breath and drew a yellowish paper from his
pocket.
"I says to meself," he explained, "'Hunch, old sport, ye're in for it.
He'll like as not drop yuh out of the window with an electric wire,
feed yuh to an electric wolf or make yuh play hell-for-a-minute chess
or some other o' them woozy stunts 'at pop up in his bean like
mushrooms, but yuh gotta square yerself with that paper. Yuh gotta get
up yer nerve an' hike up there to the brownstone with it.' I ask yuh,"
he finished dramatically, and evidently laboring under the momentary
conviction that Carl, too, was optically afflicted, "I ask yuh, Carl,
to cast yer good lamp over that there paper."
Carl opened the paper and stared.
"Hunch," he exclaimed with an involuntary glance at the mended
candlestick, "where in the devil did you get this?"
"I ask yuh to remember," went on Hunch in some excitement, "that I was
drunk an' the old she-wol--Gr-r-r-r-r!" Hunch cleared his heavy throat
in a panic, with a rasp like the stripping of gears, and corrected
himself. "The Old One," he spoke somewhat as if this singular title
was a degree, "the Old One put one over on me."
"My aunt, I imagine," said Carl, "has given me a fairly accurate
version of His Nibs' escape. I'll admit a pardonable anxiety to
interview you for a while. As a matter of fact there was a night--when
I was not in the Lithia League--that I drove down to look you up. Tell
me," he added, "where you found this."
"It was not, stric'ly speakin', found," said Hunch with a modest cough.
Once more, overwhelmed afresh by Carl's appearance, he let his good eye
go roving.
"Tell it," said Carl with what patience he could muster, "in your own
way."
"I ask yuh to remember," urged Hunch with a firm belief in the dignity
of this phrase, "that I was still drunk an' batty in me thinker when
the old she-wol--Gr-r-r-r-r-r--the Old One told me to dig out. So I
halts on the corner to collect me wits an' by'm'by I sees a guy wid a
darkish face an' lips like Link. He comes along, looks up an' down
suspicious, sees the door ain't tight shut an' heel-taps it up the
steps. He opens the door an' by'm'by he helps the Old One to a taxi
an' makes out to walk off--see--whiles she's a watchin'. Later, when
the taxi turns the corner, back he goes, heel-taps it up the steps
ag'in, an' goes in at the door he ain't locked, though he'd made out he
had. An' right there," said Hunch impressively, "right there is where
yer Uncle Hunch feels a real glimmer in his bean an' goes back.
Thin-lips ain't in sight. Yer Uncle Hunch softly heel-taps it upstairs
an' finds the darkish guy adoptin' a paper with a fatherly pat, which
he slips in his coat pocket. Whereupon--whiles he's lockin' the desk
drawer ag'in, aforesaid uncle slips downstairs an' out. By'm'by,
Thin-lips trots out with an ugly grin on his mug--an' Uncle Hunch,
gettin' soberer an' soberer by the minute, trots after him with his
good lamp workin' overtime."
Carl glanced at the paper.
"Yes?" he encouraged.
"Well," said Hunch with a sheepish grin that was rendered somewhat
sinister by the fixed eye, "I jostled him real rude in a crowd an'
picked his pocket. An' there yuh are!"
There was some slight rustle of greenish paper in the handshake.
"I'm mighty grateful," said Carl. "That paper cost me a couple of
hours of laborious preparation. It's a duplicate, Hunch, for the
purpose of decoy. The original's in safe deposit."