The Girl in the Picture
I advanced to meet the man with a sense of victory. The United
States Secret Service had searched the world for him. He had been
long concealed. But my sense of victory vanished when I saw him.
He sat in a great chair on the long terrace that overlooked the
sweep of lawn and the dark, rapid river. He had been, all the time,
under our very noses. We had thought of every other place except an
English country house within a jump of London. And he had been
sitting here in every comfort that money could assemble.
He did not rise when I was brought out to him.
He leaned back in the chair, lifted his heavy face, and laughed!
“And so,” he said, “you finally wormed it out of her.”
I could not keep my voice level—so effectively was the man escaping
us after all this search.
And I did not know what the huge creature meant. On the night
before, some one had called up Scotland Yard and said our man was
here; the English Secret Service was giving us all the aid it could.
The call from some shop in Regent Street could not be traced—so it
had been a woman! I replied as though I were in his secret.
“She knew you were safe.”
He laughed again. “Sure, she knew it!”
He pointed to a chair a few feet beyond him across a table.
“Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk about her—that’s the reason I
wanted you to come.” He laughed again. “You thought you’d sleuthed
it out, eh? Not by a jugful. I sent her word to put you wise. I
wanted to clear some things up before I cashed in. But it was a
clean lie. What I wanted was somebody to listen while I talked about
her. Sit down.”
It was a strange introductory. But it was a mystery that had puzzled
everybody, and I was willing to hear all that he had to say about
it. I took the chair beyond him.
He shot his head forward suddenly, in a tense gesture.
“She’s a heavenly angel!” he said. “I don’t know what God Almighty
meant by setting her in the game with the bunch of crooks that He’s
got running the world—unless He counted on me.” The laugh became a
sort of chuckle in his big throat—“Ain’t she a heavenly angel?”
He whipped a worn photograph out of his pocket and reached it across
the table to me.
It was the photograph of a girl with a narrow slit cut out across
the face. It had been taken from a painting; one could tell from the
flat surface. A strange background of beauty and an indescribable
charm in the pose of the girl remained even in the mutilated
picture.
“I cut the face,” he added, “so she wouldn’t come into the case if
you caught me; your little Westridge must have been slaughtered at
the loss of her.”
Again he touched me at an unexpected point.
Shortly after the thing had happened, Lord Westridge returned to
England. He had come to visit some rich Americans, and there was a
rumor that some adventure had befallen him. Nothing definite ever
came to me, and I liked the man too little to inquire; all the blood
from the original Glasgow solicitor would “bite a shilling.” But
again I replied as though I were in his secret.
“What happened to Westridge?” I said.
The man twisted around in his chair.
“Friend,” he said, “you’ve got a head full of brains or you wouldn’t
be Chief of the United States Secret Service; now answer me a
question—What’s the biggest notion in the Christian Church?”
“I don’t know,” I answered him truthfully.
“Well, I know,” he went on. “It’s the notion that you’ll get what’s
a-comin’ to you!”
He looked at me with a big, cynical leer.
“That’s what happened to your little Westridge—and the next time you
see him he’s a-goin’ to get another jolt. He will be damned sorry
that you found me. He couldn’t squeal, any place along the line, but
I’ll bet a finger he didn’t let Scotland Yard forget about me.”
And again I saw an incident of this long search, for the man before
me, from another angle. The Blackacre Bank had kept the search hot
for him, pretending the public welfare. I saw it now, that was
Westridge’s money box—that would be little Westridge in the
background.
He eyed me curiously in a moment’s pause.
“He kept slippin’ you the word, eh? Well, she blocked him at that,
even if she didn’t know it.”
There came a sudden energy into his voice.
“An’ if the plague hadn’t got me I’d ’a’ saved her that trouble; I’d
’a’ played ring-a-round-a-rosy with you.”
He lifted himself in the chair with the strength of his hands on the
broad arm-rests. And I realized more fully what a physical wreck he
was—the lower part of his body was motionless.
“I want to tell you about this thing,” he said. “And then you can go
ahead with your warrant.”
“I fear,” I replied, “that a somewhat higher authority has got in
before the King’s writ.”
He chuckled as though the deadly fact were a sort of pleasantry.
“Sure,” he said, “the big Judge has beat you to it.”
He looked out, a moment, at the woolly Highland cattle in the
distant meadow, at the age-old beech-trees and the dark, swift,
silent water, and then the upper part of his big body settled in the
chair.
“I thought it was a slick trick, but maybe it was God Almighty.
Anyway when the thing was pulled off I slid up to Bar Harbor and set
down in a hotel. I figured it out like this—you look for a crook in
the places that crooks go, and you look for a gentleman in the
places where gentlemen go. I’ll switch it.
“I got me some quiet clothes. I limped a little to show that I
wasn’t golf-fit and I didn’t talk. I just set about with the New
York _Times_ and the _Financial Register_ and let the days pass.
When there was doings in the hotel I was there in my all-right
evening clothes, in a chair against the wall, and I limped along the
sea path in the afternoon for a little exercise.
“I looked some bored to keep the proper form. But I wasn’t bored. I
was seeing something new and I was getting more light on it all the
time.
“I was seeing that this bunch was living up to a standard that
nearly all the people I’d ever seen were only pretending. That was
the difference, I soon figured it out.”
He flung up his hand in a curious, expressive gesture.
“I’m a crook, keep that in your head, and the thing was like a
theater to me. I began to watch the actors; then I saw _her_ and
Westridge.”
He moved in his chair.
“She was there with an old faded grandmother that read novels and
smoked cigarettes—and was a lady. And right there is where this real
bunch has got the goods! They don’t let down because they do some
things that would make you cross your fingers on the other set.”
He leaned back in the chair.
“Well! I got to watching her and your Englishman. I watched them
dancing in the hotel, and riding, and playing tennis at the
Casino—I’d never seen any people like them.
“And pretty soon I got on to something; this Westridge gentleman was
trying to buy the girl, but he didn’t want to pay for her. He was
putting out the bait, but he had a string to it.
“I got on to his dope.
“If he could dazzle her into marrying him she’d get her board and
clothes. The real thing that was next to his hide was his money.
‘All for _me_,’ that was the notion.”
He went on with no break in his words.
“I got to thinking about it. This little Westridge was forty; he’d
never change; and the girl was at the age when the things he was
dangling were all mixed up with moonshine. He might win, and if he
did she was headed for hell.
“I saw it all clean out to the end.”
He moved in the chair.
“I used to set about, and look at her, and it made me cold all over.
The devil was on the job right here just as he was in the
Tenderloin. He was working on a higher-class line, but it was only a
different sort of road to his same old hell.
“It would be a heavenly angel flung to a wolf no matter how you
dressed the situation up; an’ I said to myself, ‘You can’t beat him.
The devil’s got a set of traps for any kind of a layout!’”
He lifted himself on his great hands and turned the whole of his
body toward me.
“Now,” he said, “what’s the difference how you ruin a woman? When
you got the job finished, ain’t it finished? If you string it out
over a dozen years and kill everything nice and generous and lovely
in her with your little, contemptible ‘all for _me_’ meanness,
inside of a preacher’s permit, ain’t you ruined her, just the same
as if you’d white-slaved her? And ain’t it the same motive, ‘all for
_me_,’ darn the difference?
“I tell you,” he shook the arms of the chair in his great hands,
“the thing begun to get my goat. Her father, a lawyer in the South,
was dead. She had only the old Boston grandmother (I heard the talk
among the women) and the coin was getting scarce. Your little
Englishman played in form, every point correct, and he was goin’ to
get her.
“I seen it!
“She was standing before the hotel desk with the bill that the clerk
puts in your box at the end of the week, when his big motor snorted
in against the wooden steps. Your little Westridge understood it for
the grin started. It was the same old grin that goes with the
job—I’ve seen it on all of ’em.
“An’ that settled it!”
His voice became cold, level, even like a metallic click.
“‘Now, my little gentleman,’ I said to myself, ‘we’ll just see if
you do! Right here is where “Alibi Al” sets in with a stack of
blues.’
“I got up, folded my newspaper, and took a turn up and down the
veranda, as though I was trying out my game leg, an’ then I limped
down to the fashionable church just across from the library.
“I stepped up inside the door.”
He paused, and his voice changed to its former note.
“You see I had to have a little help on this job. It had a big loose
end.
“I went in and sat down in a pew. It was dim and quiet and I got
right down to business. I didn’t run in any of the prayer-book
curtain-raisers. I put the thing right up to the boss.
“‘Now, look here, Governor,’ I said, ‘has a helpless little girl got
a pull with you, or is it bunk? Because I’m a-goin’ to call you, and
if the line your barkers are putting out is on the level, you’ve got
to come across with the goods. If there’s nothing to it, the
Government ought to shut ’em up on a fraud order—I’m a-goin’ to
carry one end of this thing; get busy at the other end!’
“Then I went out.
“That night I went over to see little Westridge.
“They’d been to dinner at Jordan’s Pond and had come in early.
Westridge wasn’t in the hotel; he was stopping with the
Lesterfields; a big, gray stone house facing the sea. The butler
showed me in. There wasn’t anybody about but Westridge. The
Lesterfields were down at Newport.
“He was surprised to see me—didn’t understand it; he’d never met me
in the social line. But it was America where anything might happen,
even a man come to see you that you hadn’t been introduced to.”
The speaker paused to move one of his knees; he lifted it with his
hands.
“I didn’t waste any time cutting brush before Mr. Westridge. I went
right in to what I had to say. My line was: friend of the girl’s
father, blunt old Western business man, no manners, and don’t give a
cuss for you. Easy stuff, you see, and the kind of thing your
Englishman expects in the ‘States.’
“He was mighty formal, as you’d say, but he didn’t throw any
stuttering into Alibi Al. I set down, just as if the place belonged
to me, and I waved a hand at him. I said to myself, ‘You’re a little
piker; line up and take what’s coming to you.’
“But what I said out loud was like this,
“‘Carrots has got a little bunch of stuff that’s goin’ to be wiped
out if it ain’t covered.’
“That was her nickname among the youngsters, because her blue-black
hair in the sun had a heavenly copper glint.
“He looked mixed up.
“‘What, precisely, do you mean?’ he says.
“I didn’t pay any attention to him. I went on just as if he hadn’t
said a word.
“‘Women’s got no sense about business—she’s agoin’ to lose it?’
“‘Lose what?’ he says.
“‘Rotten the way they bring girls up,’ I says, the same as if he
hadn’t spoke. ‘Here’s this steel bunch beating the stuff down; her
broker wires for somethin’ to cover it, an’ she sticks the telegram
up against the lookin’-glass so she’ll remember to write to him next
week—can you beat it?’
“I saw everything that was goin’ through him, same as if you’d
rolled it out on the picture reel.
“The ‘old friend, no manners, darn the difference’ stuff had hooked
him. And there were two other hooks: this girl had some property
that he didn’t know of, and the friends of the family, like me, was
a-coming to him about it.
“Because what?
“Because it was settled stuff on our side that she was goin’ to take
his arm up the church aisle. It was the first straight dope he’d
had, an’ it bucked him, same as it bucked me to know that she was
dangling him with no word passed.
“He set up now pleasant as you please.
“‘Ah—er, yes,’ he says; he hadn’t got the name I was playing under.
“I bellowed at him, an’ he mighty near jumped.
“‘Johnson!’ I said. ‘Alonzo Johnson, Kansas City!’
“‘Quite so, Mr. Johnson,’ he says, quick, same as you’d apologize,
‘there’s some business affair to discuss, I fauncy?’
“He fell right in with the line of dope mighty easy and comfortable.
You see it was something like the way they do things up in his
country. The old uncle or the family lawyer calls on you, when ma
thinks that things are pretty well understood with the young people,
and gits down to figgerin’. It was near enough to my line to go
across with him. He knew that the girl hadn’t got any men folk, so
an old friend of the family would fit the form as a sort of
next-of-kin, as the law-books say.”
The big man linked his fingers together on the chair arm.
“As I was sayin’, he walked right in and made himself at home with
the notion. He called her ‘Carrots’ straight back at me; it was
‘Kiss her, pap; she’s our’n now,’ and he begun to grin.
“On the soul of Satan, man, it was all I could do to keep my foot
away from him. I wanted to hoist him out of that chair and skite him
around among the furniture—but I had to keep my poker face on.
“He bounced up and got a box of cigars and a little dish full of
matches and shoved them across the table. I took one, bit the end
off, scratched the match on my foot, lighted it, and went ahead.
“‘It’s the butt end of what she’s got,’ I says, ‘an’ it’s in the
door.’
“He knew all about business, and he picked the things right out.
“‘You mean,’ he says, ‘that her solicitor has invested her fortune
in a stock on margin and the market is declining?’
“‘You got it,’ I says, ‘only she done it herself, on some tip from
her swell friends.’
“‘How extraordinary!’ he piped; his voice got thin when it hit
money. ‘Is it a legitimate stock?’
“‘Sure,’ I answered, ‘one of the six good ones.’ I didn’t know how
many good ones there was.
“‘Why does it decline?’ His voice went up like a singing school.
“‘The steel bunch are clubbing it,’ I says.
“He understood that, and began to finger around his little wax
mustache.
“‘Quite so,’ he cheeped, ‘quite so.’ Then he squared toward me.
“‘Ah—er, Mr. Johnson,’ he says, ‘I fauncy you came with some plan
about it.’
“‘Plan nothin’,’ I says; ‘the stuff’s got to be covered—they’ll git
it beat under her figger in another day’s poundin’.’
“‘Ah—er—quite so,’ he was cool as a julep; ‘you are intending, I
fauncy, to cover the margin?’
“I leaned over the table and blew a mouthful of smoke on him.
“‘Sure!’ I roared in his face, ‘if I can get fifty thousand dollars,
quick.’
“He ducked out of the smoke.
“‘That’s a very large sum of money,’ he says.
“I lolled over the table an’ smoked on him like a Dutch uncle.
“‘Big money!’ I gurgled it, like a man choking on a laugh. ‘Do you
know how much Carrots has got hanging on it?’
“He didn’t answer that; I knew he wouldn’t.
“‘Where, precisely, do you expect to get this money?’ he says.
“I set up more calm like at that.
“‘Well,’ I says, ‘I thought maybe we could raise it together.’
“He wanted that fake fortune saved for him, so it would come along
with the girl, but he wanted somebody else to carry the chance.
“I knew it, and I smoked on him. I hung over the table and puffed it
in his face. He tried to duck out of it, and I followed him around.
It done me good. I couldn’t spit on the little tightwad.
“‘Now, look here, Mr. Westridge,’ I says, ‘don’t you get a wrong
notion in your head; I’m not a-goin’ to let you take any risk on
this. I’m a-goin’ to take the risk; there ain’t none, in fact; the
stuff’s got to bounce back. It’ll go to the sky when the steel bunch
get all they can grab of it. But whatever risk there may be,’ I
sputtered it out on him, ‘is _mine_. I’ll put up the backing an’ you
get me the money by to-morrow at noon.’ I was nearly across the
table, an’ I didn’t wait for him to cut in with a question. I took a
big envelope out of my pocket and flashed the stuff on him. He came
up with a chirp.
“‘My word!’ he says, ‘where did you get this?’
“‘Well,’ I answered, ‘London’s a big selling point with us—you can’t
trade with the English and not take their stuff, can you? The Johnny
whose name’s on that stuff put it up with me—same as I’m putting it
up with you. There’s fourteen of them. Ain’t they good for fifty
thousand?’”
“He spread the certificates out on the table and run his fingers
over them. It was old-fashioned love-touchin’.
“‘Oh!’ his voice flickered up, ‘beyond question.’
“‘Done!’ I says. ‘Keep it until I come back with your money—an’ get
me the cash before noon to-morrow.’
“‘Don’t you want a memorandum?’ he says.
“I waved my hand, careless, like it was nothin’.
“‘That’s all right,’ I says; ‘I don’t want any promises about that,
but there is a thing that I do want a promise about.’
“I threw my cigar in the fireplace and set down.
“‘I want you to promise me that you won’t ever say anything to
Carrots about this, nor to anybody; it’s between us—she’s a
high-strung youngster,’ I added; ‘this thing’s got to be buried with
us, no matter what happens. Is it a trade?’
“We shook hands on it and I got out.
“Before twelve the next day he sent me a draft on New York for the
money—an’ I’d won a lap.”
The afternoon sun lay on the terrace of the gray stone house, where
the big creature, dead to the middle, talked from his chair,
clearing the mystery that had covered his disappearance from the
world. It was an extraordinary story, and I wished to get it, in
detail, precisely clear.
“It was fiction,” I asked, “this explanation to Westridge?”
He looked at me in a sort of wonder.
“Sure,” he said. “I made it up.”
“There wasn’t any of it true?”
“Not a word,” he answered. “Don’t you understand? This was a little
game that me and God Almighty was settin’ up on the side.”
“You knew nothing of the girl’s affairs?” The thing seemed
incredible to me.
“That’s right,” he replied, “not a thing, except that her father, a
lawyer in the South, was dead, and the small coin was beginning to
mean something—an’ of course the little game of this Westridge
person—it was a blind pool; nobody in on it but God Almighty.”
I could not forbear a comment.
“He seems to have helped you in the opening.”
The big creature turned heavily toward me.
“With little Westridge?” There was deep irony in his voice. “I
didn’t need any help to handle him. That was ABC stuff. The big
trouble was ahead.”
“With the girl?” the query escaped me.
“No,” he replied; “that was my job too. You listen. I’m comin’ to
it.
“I looked out for a chance to get the girl by herself, an’ about
four o’clock I got it. There had been a fog in; it cleared a little
and she went for a walk. She took the path along the sea toward
Cromwell’s Harbor and I followed her. She turned back where the path
ends at the harbor, and just before a big house, that hadn’t been
opened that season, I met her.
“I stopped in the path.
“‘Missie,’ I said, ‘could I speak to you a minute?’
“There was no sham business about her. She was clean and straight
and afraid of nothin’, like an angel of God.
“‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘What is it, sir?’
“‘It’s about something I owe to your father,’ I said.
“She looked me straight in the face.
“‘My father’s executor, Mr. Lewis, would be the one to see,’ she
said. ‘I know nothing about business.’
“‘It ain’t business,’ I said, ‘it’s honor. Could I walk along with
you a step?’
“‘Why, yes,’ she answered, ‘if you like.’”
The big man moved his loose bulk in the chair.
“I know something about stories,” he said. “I’ve had to make ’em up
so a jury would believe ’em, an’ I done my best as I limped along by
her.
“‘I ain’t always been rich,’ I says. ‘I was down an’ out in the
eighties, an’ I was a-goin’ to do somethin’ that would have ruined
me, when by God’s luck I met Harry in Louisville.’ (I’d heard the
old women call her father Harry, so I had that much to go on.)
“‘Al,’ he says, ‘what’s the trouble?’
“I suppose it was in my face. I was broke down an’ I told him. He
got it all in his head, an’ then he patted me on the shoulder. ‘Old
man,’ he said, ‘a little money ain’t goin’ to do you any good. I’ll
get you fifty thousand dollars an’ you go out to the race course
this afternoon an’ pick a winner.’
“I tried to turn it down. I didn’t want to lose his money, I didn’t
know one horse from another. But he just laughed and kept patting me
on the back. ‘A beginner for luck,’ he says. ‘Where’s your nerve,
Al?’ Well, I picked that big Dercum colt that nobody had ever heard
of, a five-to-one shot, an’ he romped in!
“I was a-limpin’ along the sea-path, a-proddin’ the gravel with my
cane an’ a-talkin’ to my feet, same as if I was afraid the
recollection would get away with me if I wasn’t careful. The girl
didn’t say nothin’ and I went on.
“‘Harry wouldn’t touch the winnin’s; he picked out his fifty
thousand and put me out of the room.’
“I limped on, talking to my feet.
“‘And it saved me two ways, for the thing I was agoin’ to do would
have ruined me.’
“My voice got down pretty near in a whisper.
“‘I never saw Harry after that,’ I says, ‘until last night.’
“She stopped quick, an’ I went on a step or two.
“‘My father?’ she said.
“‘Yes,’ I says, not looking up, ‘Harry, just as he looked that
morning in Louisville—only he was troubled.’
“Then I turned on her like I was makin’ a clean breast of it. I had
the tears startin’ and the right choke-up, an’ it wasn’t all jury
dope. I didn’t want that heavenly angel fouled over by little
Westridge. It balled the heart out of me.
“‘Now, Missie,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to help me even this thing up. I
don’t know nothin’ about your affairs—I don’t want to know. But
you’ve got to take that same bunch of money and chance it on
something.’
“She shook her head, and I had a bad hour. All along that sea-path,
with the fog dodging in and out, I kept right at her; I never lost a
step. I was old and rich; money was nothin’ to me. I didn’t have a
soul in the world. I couldn’t take it with me, an’ I couldn’t face
‘Harry’ with the debt hanging over—‘Have a heart! have a heart!’
That was my line of dope. I was pleading for myself—an’ it was the
only line that ever would have got her.
“‘But what should I do with the money?’ she said finally, in a sort
of queer hesitation.
“‘I’ll tell you that to-night,’ I answered.”
The huge creature seemed to relax, as though there had been a vital
tension in the mere memory of the thing.
“That cleaned up my end of it,” he continued, “and after dinner when
it was getting a little dark, I limped over to the church. I had the
last copy of the _Financial Register_ in my hand. I stopped in the
door. The church was closed and it was dark, but I didn’t need any
light for the business I come on.
“‘Governor,’ I says, ‘the rest of this job’s up to you. I’m a-goin’
to open this magazine here in the dark and the first thing that’s
advertised at the top of the page on the right-hand side is the
thing I’m a-goin’ to tell her to put the coin on—Ready,’ I says, ‘go
to it!’ and I folded back the page and went over to the hotel.”
Again he paused.
“I got a jolt when I saw the page. It was some sort of Canadian gold
mine, so fishy that the letters had scales on ’em. But I says to
myself, ‘That’s the Governor’s business,’ an’ I cut it out, put it
into an envelope with the draft, and left it at the desk for her.”
He paused.
“The next morning I slid out. Eight months later the plague struck
me. I crippled into England, asked her to hide me while I died, and
she put me here.”
“And the gold stock,” I said, “I suppose it turned her out a
fortune?”
The energy came back for an instant into his voice.
“It was so rotten,” he replied, “that the Governor General of Canada
summoned all the victims to meet with him for a conference in
Montreal.”
At this moment I caught the sound of a motor entering the gates at
some distance through the park. The huge paralytic also heard it,
and his attention was no longer toward me. It was on the great
coach-colored limousine drawing up at the end of the avenue of
ancient beech trees.
I looked with him.
A girl helped out by footmen stepped down into the avenue, carpeted
now with the yellow autumn leaves. Even at the distance it was
impossible to mistake her; her charm, her beauty were the wonder of
England. And on the instant, as in a flash of the eye, I recalled
the painted picture hanging in the great house in Berkeley Square,
the picture from which this creature’s mutilated photograph had been
taken, the picture of a young girl, in an ancient chair, with no
ornament but a bit of jade on a cord about her neck.
“It’s the young Duchess of Hurlingham,” I said.
The big creature beside me was struggling to rise, his voice in an
excited flutter.
“Sure,” he said, “God Almighty didn’t throw me down. When she went
up to that conference in Montreal, He had young Hurlingham on the
spot—fine, straight, clean youngster as ever was born. It was love
her at sight; an’ now”—he made a great gesture as though to include
something without a visible limit—“she’s got all these places in
England, an’ all that Standard Oil money that belonged to his
mother’s people.”
The girl, radiant as a vision, was advancing on the carpet of golden
beech leaves, and I hastened to put a final query, the thing I had
come here to find out. I had given up the idea of an arrest. The man
was dying.
“What did you do with the registered bonds that you got when you
cracked the vault of the British Embassy in Washington the night
before you went to Bar Harbor? They had Lord Dovedale’s name on
them, and they could not be negotiated.”
The whole sagging body of the unsteady creature strained toward the
advancing vision as toward an idol. His voice reached me, stuttering
as with fatigue.
“That’s the stuff I put up with Westridge for the loan—go and take
it away from him!”