Frances Candler’s fingers trembled a little at the Guilford office desk
as she took out her card and penciled beneath her name: “Representing
the Morning Journal.”
She knew that Sunset Bryan’s success on the circuit, his midnight
prodigalities, his bewildering lavishness of life, and his projected
departure for New Orleans, had already brought the reporters buzzing
about his apartments. Even as she lifted the blotter to dry the line she
had written with such craven boldness, her eye fell on a well-thumbed
card before her, bearing the inscription:
ALBERT ERIC SPAULDING
The Sunday Sun.
A moment later she had it in her white-gloved hand, with her own card
discreetly hidden away, and in the most matter-of-fact of voices she was
asking the busy clerk behind the desk if she could see Mr. Bryan.
“Mr. Bryan is a very late riser,” he explained.
“I know that,” she answered coolly, “but he’s expecting me, I think.”
The clerk looked at her, as he stamped the card, and he continued to
look at her, studiously and yet quizzically, as a bell-boy led her back
to the elevator. Sunset Bryan and the type of men he stood for, the
puzzled clerk knew well enough; but this type of woman he did not know.
Sunset, obviously, was branching out.
“You needn’t bother to wait!” she said to the youth who had touched the
electric button beside the great, high-paneled door of the apartment.
She stood there quietly until the boy had turned a corner in the
hallway; then she boldly opened the door and stepped inside.
The big, many-mirrored, crimson-carpeted room was empty, but from an
inner room came the clinking of chopped ice against glass and the hiss
of a seltzer siphon. The race-track king was evidently about to take his
morning pick-me-up. A heavy odor of stale cigar-smoke filled the place.
She wondered what the next step would be.
“Hello, there, Allie, old boy!” the gambler’s off-hand and surprisingly
genial bass voice called out, as he heard the door close sharply behind
Frances.
That must mean, thought the alert but frightened girl, that Albert Eric
Spaulding and the plunger were old friends. Once more the siphon hissed
and spat, and the ice clinked against the thin glass. Here was a
predicament.
“Hello!” answered the woman, at last, steeling herself into a careless
buoyancy of tone ill-suited to the fear-dilated pupils of her eyes.
She heard a muffled but startled “Good God!” echo from the inner room. A
moment later the doorway was blocked by the shadow of a huge figure, and
she knew that she was being peered at by a pair of small, wolfish eyes,
as coldly challenging as they were audacious.
She looked nervously at her gloved hands, at the little handkerchief she
was torturing between her slightly shaking fingers. Her gloves, she
noticed, were stained here and there with perspiration.
If she had not already passed through her chastening ordeal with a
half-drunken English butler, and if the shock of that untoward
experience had not in some way benumbed and hardened her shrinking
womanhood, she felt that she would have screamed aloud and then
incontinently fled—in the very face of those grim and countless
resolutions with which she had bolstered up a drooping courage. It
flashed through her, with the lightning-like rapidity of thought at such
moments, that for all her dubiously honest career she had been strangely
sheltered from the coarser brutalities of life. She had always shrunk
from the unclean and the unlovely. If she had not always been honest,
she had at least always been honorable. Durkin, from the first, had
recognized and respected this inner and better side of her beating so
forlornly and so ineffectually against the bars of actuality; and it was
this half-hidden fineness of fibre in him, she had told herself, that
had always marked him, to her, as different from other men.
But here was a man from whom she could look for no such respect, a
corrupt and evil-liver whom she had already practically taunted and
challenged with her own show of apparent evilness. So she still tortured
her handkerchief and felt the necessity of explaining herself, for the
big gambler’s roving little eyes were still sizing her up,
cold-bloodedly, judicially, terrifyingly.
“You’re all right, little girl,” he said genially, as his six feet of
insolent rotundity came and towered over her. “You’re all right! And a
little dimple in your chin, too.”
A new wave of courage seemed pumping through all of the shrinking girl’s
veins, of a sudden, and she looked up at her enemy unwaveringly, smiling
a little. Whereupon he smilingly and admiringly pinched her ear, and
insisted that she have a “John Collins” with him.
Again she felt the necessity of talking. Unless the stress of action
came to save her she felt that she would faint.
“I’m a Morning Journal reporter,” she began hurriedly.
“The devil you are!” he said with a note of disappointment, his wagging
head still on one side, in undisguised admiration.
“Yes, I’m from the Journal,” she began.
“Then how did you get this card?”
“That’s a mistake in the office—the clerk must have sent you the wrong
one,” she answered glibly.
“Come off! Come off! You good-looking women are all after me!” and he
pinched her ear again.
“I’m a Morning Journal reporter,” she found herself rattling on, as she
stood there quaking in mysterious fear of him, “and we’re going to run a
story about you being the Monte Cristo of modern circuit-followers, and
all that sort of thing. Then we want to know if it was true that you
copped one hundred and sixty thousands dollars on Africander at
Saratoga, and if you would let our photographer get some nice pictures
of your rooms here, and a good one of yourself—oh, yes, you would take
a splendid picture. And then I wanted to know if it is true that your
system is to get two horses that figure up as if they each had a good
square chance and then play the longer of the two and put enough on the
other for a place to cover your losses if the first one should lose. And
our sporting editor has said that you make that a habit, and that often
enough you are able to cash on both, and that you—”
“Say, look here, little girl, what in the devil are you driving at,
anyway?”
“I’m a reporter on the Morning Journal,” she reiterated, vacuously,
foolishly, passing her hand across her forehead with a weak little
gesture of bewilderment. She could feel her courage withering away.
Alcohol, she was learning, was an ally of untimely retreats.
“Well, it’s a shame for a girl like you to get afraid of me this way!
Hold on, now, don’t butt in! It’s not square to use a mouth like that
for talking—I’d rather see it laughing, any day. So just cool down and
tell me, honest and out-and-out, what it is you’re after.”
She flung herself forward and hung on him, in a quite unlooked for
paroxysm of hysteria, apparently reckless of the moment and the menace.
“It’s this,” she sobbed in a sudden mental obsession, the tears of
actual anguish running down her face. “It’s this,” she went on shrilly,
hurriedly. “_I’ve put my money on the Duke of Kendall today—and if he
doesn’t come in, I’m going to kill myself!_”
Sunset Bryan let his arm drop from her shoulder in astonishment. Then he
stepped back a few paces, studying her face as she mopped it with her
moistened handkerchief. She would never drink brandy again, was the idle
and inconsequential thought that sped through her unstable mind. For it
was not she herself that was speaking and acting; it was, she felt, some
irresponsible and newly unleashed spirit within her.
“Why’d you do it?” he demanded.
“Because—because Clara—that’s Clara Shirley, his rider’s sister—told
me the Duke of Kendall was fixed to win on a long shot this afternoon!”
“Now, look here—are you, or are you not, a newspaper woman?”
“No, I’m not,” she shrilled out. “I lied, just to get in to see you!”
“And you’ve put your money on this Duke of Kendall?”
“Every cent I own—every cent! If I lose it—oh—It will kill me to lose
it!”
“But what the devil did you come here for?”
“Because I am desperate! I’ve—I’ve—”
“Now, don’t spoil those lovely eyes by crying this way, honey-girl! What
would I get if I told you something about that race this afternoon?”
“Oh, I’d give you anything!” she cried, almost drunkenly, snatching some
belated hope from the change in his tone.
“Do you mean that?” he demanded suddenly, stepping back and looking at
her from under his shaggy brows.
“No—no, not that,” she gasped quickly, in terror, for then, and then
only, did she catch an inkling of his meaning. She felt that she had
floundered into a quagmire of pollution, and that the more fiercely she
struggled and fought, the more stained with its tainted waters she was
destined to remain.
She was afraid to look up at the crafty, sunburnt, animal-like face
before her, with its wrinkles about the heavy line of the mouth, and its
minutely intersecting crow’s-feet in the corners of the shrewd and
squinting eyes.
She felt that the very air of life was being walled and held away from
her. Still another fierce longing for escape took hold of her, and she
shuddered a little as she fought and battled against it. She seemed
without the strength to speak, and could only shake her head and try not
to shrink away from him.
“Still afraid of me, eh?” he asked, as he lifted her drooping head
brazenly, with his forefinger under her chin. He studied her
tear-stained, colorless face for a minute or two, and then he went on:
“Well, I’m not so rotten as I might be! Here’s a tip for you, little
girl! The Duke of Kendall is goin’ to come in on a long shot and what’s
more, he’s goin’ to run on odds of fifty to one!”
“You’re certain of it?” she gasped.
“Dead sure of it, between you and me! There’s a gang down at the
Rossmore’d cover this floor with gold just to know that tip!”
“Then we _can_ win! It’s _not_ too late!” she broke out fervently,
forgetting where she stood, forgetting the man before her. She was
already reaching up to draw down her veil, with a glance over her
shoulder at the door.
“Am I goin’ to see you again?” he still wheedled.
Again their eyes met. She had to struggle desperately to keep down the
inward horror of it all. And now above all things there must be no
missteps.
“Yes,” she murmured.
“When?” he demanded.
“I’ll come back—tomorrow!”
She already had her hand on the door-handle, when he called to her
sharply.
“Here, wait one minute!”
She paused, in some deadly new fear of him.
“Look here, little girl, I began to follow this business of mine when I
was nineteen years old. I’m forty-three now, and in those twenty-four
years I’ve hauled in a heap of money. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“And I’ve hauled in something besides money!”
Still she waited.
“What I haven’t made by plunging I’ve made by poker. And I’d never have
come out the long end if I didn’t know a thing or two about faces. I
know a bluff when I see it. Now I want to tell you something.”
“Well?” she faltered.
“You’re not comin’ back tomorrow! You’re not comin’ back at all, my
pink-and-white beauty! I’m tellin’ you this for two reasons. One is that
I don’t want you to carry off the idea that you’ve been breakin’ me all
up, and the other is that I’m not so rotten bad as—well, as Bob
Pinkerton would try to make me out. That’s all.”
“Good-bye!” murmured the humbled woman from the doorway.
“Good-bye, and good luck!” answered Sunset Bryan in his genial bass.