"He isn't; it's just because he is delirious."
There was a long pause, broken finally by a curt "Well?" from the
father.
"I've been thinking," was the slow response. "Of course, there is a
chance that he has friends in Wahaska, and that some one will be at the
train to meet him. But it is only a chance."
"Why doesn't the conductor telegraph ahead and find out?"
"He doesn't know the man's name. I tried to get him to look for a card,
or to break into the suit-cases under the berth, but he says the
regulations won't let him."
"Well?" said the father again, this time with a more decided upward
inflection. Then he added: "You've made up your mind what you're going
to do: say it."
Margery's decision was announced crisply. "There is no hospital to send
him to--which is Wahaska's shame. Maybe he will be met and taken care of
by his friends: if he is, well and good; if he isn't, we'll put him in
the carriage and take him home with us."
The cast-iron smile with the indulgent attachment wrinkled frostily upon
Jasper Grierson's heavy face.
"The Good Samaritan act, eh? I've known you a long time, Madgie, but I
never can tell when you're going to break out in a brand-new spot.
Didn't lose any of your unexpectedness in Florida, did you?"
Miss Margery tossed her pretty head, and the dark eyes snapped.
"Somebody in the family has to think of something besides making money,"
she retorted. "Please lend me your pencil; I want to do some wiring."
All other gifts apart, Miss Grierson could boast of a degree of
executive ability little inferior to her father's; did boast of it when
the occasion offered; and by the time the whistle was sounding for
Wahaska, all the arrangements had been made for the provisional rescue
of the sick man in Lower Six.
At the station a single inquiry served to give the Good Samaritan
intention the right of way. There were no friends to meet Lower Six; but
the Grierson carriage was waiting, with the coachman and a Mereside
gardener for bearers. From that to putting the sick man to bed in one of
the guest-chambers of the lake-fronting mansion at the opposite end of
the town was a mere bit of routine for one so capable as Miss Grierson;
and twenty minutes after the successful transfer, she had Dr. Farnham at
the nameless one's bedside, and was telephoning the college infirmary
for a nurse.
Naturally, there were explanations to be made when the doctor came down.
To her first anxious question the answer came gravely: "You have a very
sick man on your hands, Miss Margery." Then the inevitable: "Who is he?"
She spread her hands in a pretty affectation of embarrassment.
"What will you think of me, Doctor Farnham, when I tell you that I
haven't the littlest atom of an idea?"
Charlotte's father was a small man, with kindly eyes and the firm,
straight-lined mouth of his Puritan forebears. "Tell me about it," he
said concisely.
"There is almost nothing to tell. He was sick and out of his head, and
his ticket read to Wahaska. No one on the train seemed to know anything
about him; and he couldn't tell us anything himself. So when we found
there was no one to meet him at the station, we put him into the
carriage and brought him home. There didn't seem to be anything else to
do."
A shrewd smile flickered for an instant in the kindly eyes of Wahaska's
best-beloved physician.
"Almost any one else would have found plenty of other things to do--or
not to do," was his comment. "Are you prepared to go on, Miss Margery?"
"Taking care of him until he is able to take care of
himself?--certainly," was the quick reply.
"Then I'll tell you that it is likely to be a long siege, and probably a
pretty serious one. I can't tell positively without the microscope, but
I'm calling it malaria, with complications. There seems to be a general
break-down, as if he had been overworking or starving himself. You'll
need help."
"I know; I've just been 'phoning the college, but they can't spare
anybody out of the infirmary. Find me some one, doctor."
Dr. Farnham took time to think.
"Let me see: you'll need a good, strong fellow who can be patient and
kind and inflexible and even brutal, by turns. I wonder if we couldn't
get Sven Oleson? The Raymers had him when Edward was down with typhoid,
and he was a treasure when we could make him understand what was
wanted."
There were fine little lines coming and going between Miss Margery's
straight black brows. "We needn't do it by halves, doctor," she said
decisively. "If it would be better to wire St. Paul or Minneapolis and
get a trained nurse----"
"--You'd stand the extra expense, of course," laughed the doctor. "You
are all the world's good angel when you set out to be, Miss Margery. But
it won't be necessary; Oleson will do, if I can get him. And I'll send
him or somebody else before bedtime. Meanwhile, there's nothing to do
but to keep your patient quiet; and he'll do that for himself for a few
hours. I gave him a bit of an anodyne before I came down."
Margery went to the outer door with her kindly counsellor, playing the
part of the gracious hostess as one who is, or who means to be,
precisely letter-perfect.
"It will soon be time for your daughter and Miss Gilman to come home,
won't it, doctor?" she asked.
"Yes. I had a letter from Charlotte to-day. They are coming by boat to
Winona, and they should have left St. Louis this morning." Then, to
match the neighborly interest: "You are looking extremely well, Miss
Margery. Your few weeks in Florida were pleasant ones, I know."
"Yes; they were pleasant. But I'm always well. Has poppa been working
himself to death while I've been away?"
There was the faintest glimmer of an amused smile in the doctor's eyes
when he said: "No, not quite, I guess. He has been out here with the
masons and carpenters who are building the stables, every fine day, I
think, and that was by way of being a recreation for him."
Margery nodded brightly. "I thought perhaps he would do that if I went
away. But I mustn't keep you. Be sure and telephone me about Sven. I'll
send the cart after him if you tell me to."
The doctor promised; and after he was gone, she went slowly up-stairs
and let herself softly into the room of shaded lights. The sick man was
resting quietly, and he did not stir when she crossed to the bed and
laid a cool palm on his forehead.
"You poor castaway!" she murmured. "I wonder who you are, and to whom
you belong? I suppose somebody has got to be mean and sneaky and find
out. Would you rather it would be I than some one else who might care
even less than I do?"
The sleeping man opened unseeing eyes and closed them again heavily. "I
found the money, _Carlotta mia_; you didn't know that, did you?" he
muttered; and then the narcotic seized and held him again.
His clothes were on a chair, and when she had carried them to a light
that could be shaded completely from the bed and its occupant, she
searched the pockets one by one. It was a little surprising to find all
but two of them quite empty; no cards, no letters, no pen, pencil,
pocket-knife, or purse; nothing but a handkerchief, and in one pocket of
the waistcoat a small roll of paper money, a few coins and two small
keys.
She held the coat up to the electric and examined it closely; the
workmanship, the trimmings. It was not tailor-made, she decided, and by
all the little signs and tokens it was quite new. And the same was true
of the other garments. But there was no tag or trade-mark on any of them
to show where they came from.
Failing to find the necessary clew to the castaway's identity in this
preliminary search, she went on resolutely, dragging the two suit-cases
over to the lighted corner and unlocking them with the keys taken from
the pocket of the waistcoat.
The first yielded nothing but clothing, all new and evidently unworn.
The second held more clothing, a man's toilet appliances, also new and
unused, but apparently no scrap of writing or hint of a name. With a
little sigh of bafflement she took the last tightly rolled bundle of
clothing from the suit-case. While she was lifting it a pistol fell out.
In times past, Jasper Grierson's daughter had known weapons and their
faults and excellences. "That places him--a little," she mused, putting
the pistol aside after she had glanced at it: "He's from the East; he
doesn't know a gun from a piece of common hardware."
Further search in the tightly rolled bundle was rewarded by the
discovery of a typewritten book manuscript, unsigned, and with it an
oblong packet wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. She slipped
the string and removed the wrapping. The brick-shaped packet proved to
be a thick block of bank-notes held together by heavy rubber bands
snapped over the ends.
While the little ormolu clock on the dressing-case was whirring softly
and chiming the hour she stared at the money-block as if the sight of it
had fascinated her. Then she sprang up and flew to the door, not to
escape, but to turn the key noiselessly in the lock. Secure against
interruption, she pulled the rubber bands from the packet. The block was
built up in layers, each layer banded with a paper slip on which was
printed in red the name of the certifying bank and the amount. "Bayou
State Security, $5,000." There were twenty of these layers in all,
nineteen of them unbroken. But through the printed figures on the
twentieth a pen-stroke had been drawn, and underneath was written
"$4,000."
Quite coolly and methodically Margery Grierson verified the bank's count
as indicated by the paper bands. There were one hundred thousand
dollars, lacking the one thousand taken from the broken packet. The
counting completed, she replaced the rubber bands and the brown-paper
wrapping. Then she repacked the suit-cases, arranging the contents as
nearly as might be just as she had found them, locking the cases and
returning the keys to the waistcoat pocket from which she had taken
them.
When all was done, she tiptoed across to the bed, with the brown-paper
packet under her arm. The sick man stirred uneasily and began to mutter
again. She bent to catch the words, and when she heard, the light of
understanding leaped swiftly into the dark eyes. For the mumbled words
were the echo of a fierce threat: "Sign it: sign it _now_, or, by God,
I'll shoot to kill!"
XVII
GROPINGS
The robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank was already an old story
when Mr. Matthew Broffin, chief of the New Orleans branch of a notable
detective agency, returned from Guatemala with the forger Mortsen as his
travelling companion.
Broffin was a successful man in his calling. Beginning as a deputy
marshal in the "moonshining" districts of Kentucky and Tennessee, he had
shifted first to the Secret Service, and later to the more highly
specialized ranks of the private agencies. With nothing very spectacular
to his credit, he had earned repute as a follower of long trails, and as
an acute unraveller of tangled clews. Hence, his docket was never empty.
It was not altogether for the sake of the reward that he took over the
case of the bank robbery a few days after his return from Central
America. As a matter of fact, there was an express-company case waiting
which promised more money. But emulation counts for something, even in
the thief-catching field; and since two members of his own staff had
fired and missed their mark in St. Louis, there was a blunder to be
retrieved.
Reasoning logically upon the new problem, Broffin did not at once try to
take up the chase at the point to which it had been carried by the two
who had failed. Since the man had disappeared, the first necessity was
the establishing of his true identity, and for a week Broffin devoted
himself to the task of disentangling the two personalities: that of the
decently dressed, parlor-anarchist bank-raider, and that of the man who
figured in the anonymous letter as Gavitt, the deck-hand.
At the end of the week two facts were sufficiently apparent. The first
was that there had been a real John Gavitt, a consumptive roustabout on
the New Orleans river-front; a person easily traceable up to the time of
his disappearance on or about the day of the robbery, and whose
description, gathered from those who had known him well, tallied not at
all with the best obtainable word-picture of the bank-robber. Fact the
second was a corollary of the first: by some means the robber had
contrived to change places with Gavitt; to take his place in the _Belle
Julie's_ crew and to assume his name.
Broffin called this step in the outworking of his problem an incident
closed when he had wired the post-master of the little Iowa river town
from which the true Gavitt had migrated, and had received the expected
reply. John Wesley Gavitt had reached home two days after the date of
the bank robbery, had died within the week, and had been buried beside
his wife.
The next step was purely constructive; an attempt to build, upon the
description given by President Galbraith and the teller Johnson, a
likeness which would fit some notorious "strong-arm man" known to the
criminal records and the rogues' galleries. Broffin was not greatly
disappointed when the effort failed.
"It's just about as I've been putting it up, all along," he mused,
lighting his pipe and filling with a fragrant cloud the cramped little
office in which he did his research work. "The fellow ain't a crook;
he's an amateur, and this is his first break. That being the lay-out,
he's liable to do all the things, the different kinds of things, that a
sure-enough 'strong-arm man' wouldn't do."
It was to Bainbridge, sitting at the desk's end and turning the leaves
of a rogues'-gallery reprint, that the musing conclusion was directed.
The reporter was freshly returned from his jaunt to the banana coast,
and he had climbed Broffin's stair to get the story of the Mortsen
capture.
"He did one of the different things when he worked his way out of here
in a deck crew," suggested Bainbridge. "The real thug wouldn't have done
anything so honestly toilsome as that."
"Hardly," Broffin acquiesced. "There was about one chance in a thousand,
and on that chance I've been looking for a picture that would fit him.
There ain't any."
The reporter was glancing over his notes of the Mortsen story, and he
got up to go.
"Well, I'm glad it's your job and not mine," he said, by way of
leave-taking. "If your guess is right, it's like looking for the
traditional needle in the haystack."
"Ump," said Broffin; and for a good hour after the reporter had gone he
sat slowly swinging in the creaking office chair, smoking pipe after
pipe and thinking.
At the end of the reflective revery he closed his desk, locked his
office, and went once more to the bank. It was the hour of the noon
lull, and Johnson, the paying teller, was free to talk.
"I hope I'll get through bothering you, some day, Mr. Johnson," Broffin
began. "But when I get stuck, I have to come to you. What Mr. Galbraith
don't remember would crowd a dictionary."
The teller made good-natured apologies for his chief. "Mr. Galbraith was
a good bit upset, naturally. It was a pretty bad wrench for a man of his
age."
"Sure, it was; and he's feeling it yet. That's why I'm letting him alone
when I can. Just go once more carefully over the part of it that you
saw, won't you?"
Johnson retold the story of the cashing of the president's check,
circumstantially, and with the exactness of a man trained in a school of
business accuracy.
"You'd make a good witness, Mr. Johnson," was Broffin's comment. "You
can tell the same story twice, hand-running, which is more than most
folks can do. Would you know the young woman if you'd see her again?"
"Hardly, I think."
"You say she was cashing a draft: how was she identified?"
"She had credentials from her home bank, with her signature attested."
"Of course, she didn't surrender her letter of identification?"
"No; we don't require it when the letter is a general one and not a
credit letter."
Broffin pulled thoughtfully at his drooping mustaches. He was
rearranging the pieces on the mental chess-board. He had not yet asked
either of the questions he had come to ask. Without knowing the science
even by name, he was still enough of a psychologist to prepare the way
by leading the mind of the witness cleverly over the details of its own
memory picture.
"You say the hold-up made way for the lady here at the window: you saw
him do it?"
"Yes."
"Did any sign of recognition pass between them--anything to make you
think that they might be acquainted with each other?"
This was one of the two critical questions, and the teller took time to
consider.
"It's pretty hard to tag that with a definite 'yes' or 'no,'" he said,
when the memory-searching moment had passed. "He spoke to her; of that I
am quite sure, though I didn't hear what he said. She nodded and smiled.
She had a beautiful face, and I remember how it lighted up when he spoke
and stepped back."
"Then they might have been acquainted, you think?" Broffin said, adding
quickly: "Don't let the fact that she afterward tried to set the dogs on
him twist your judgment any. She might have known the man, and still be
unwilling, afterward, to shield the criminal."
Again Johnson took time to be accurate.
"I'll admit that my impression at the time was that they were
acquainted," he averred, at the end of the ends. "Of course you can't
bank much on that. He might have said to a perfect stranger, 'After
you,' or whatever it was that he did say; and she would acknowledge the
courtesy with the nod and the smile--any well-bred woman would. But you
can take it for what it is worth; my thought at the moment was that they
had met before; casually, perhaps, as people meet on trains or in
hotels; that there was at least recognition on both sides."
Broffin was nodding slowly. It was not often that he made a confidant of
a witness, even in the smaller details of a case, but he evidently
considered the helpful teller an exception.
"I've been working around to that notion myself, by the smalls, as the
cat eat the grind-rock," he said. "I said to myself, Would he, with the
big pull-off still trembling on the edge--would he have held back for a
woman he didn't know? And if he _did_ know her, it would be a good,
chunky reason why he shouldn't crowd in and take his turn: he'd _have_
to make good or lose whatever little ante he'd been putting up in the
sociable game. Now one other little thing: you counted him out the
single thousand in small bills first, you said: then what happened?"
"Then I went to the vault."
"And when you came back, the young woman was gone?"
"Oh, yes; she went while Mr. Galbraith was handing me his check."
"She left before you started for the vault?"
"Yes."
"You didn't notice whether she said 'Good-by' or 'Thank you,' or
anything like that, I reckon?"
"No."
"But she might have, and you not see it?"
"Yes; she might have."
"All right; then we'll go on," Broffin continued, and the time having
arrived for the putting of the second critical question, he planted it
fairly. "You opened the wicket and passed the money out to the hold-up.
He took it and backed to the door--this nearest door. Mr. Galbraith
tells me he gave the alarm as quick as he could draw his breath. How
much time did the fellow have before somebody went after him?"
Johnson's answer was gratifyingly prompt.
"You might say, no time at all. There were a number of people in the
bank--perhaps a dozen or more--standing around waiting their turns at
the different wickets. I should say that every single one of them made a
rush for the doors, and I remember thinking at the time that the fellow
couldn't possibly get away."
"Yet he did get away; made his drop-out so neatly that none of the
rushers got to the doors soon enough to catch a sight of him?"
"That is the curious fact. Not a man of them saw him. They all told the
same story. The sidewalk wasn't crowded at the time: we are on the sunny
side of the street, and as you see now, the crowd is on the other side
in the shade. Yet the fellow had vanished before the nimblest one of
them got to the doors."
Broffin drew a deep breath and nodded slowly. The added details were
fitting the new theory to a nicety. In conversation with the president
he had previously marked the fact that the robber had claimed to be
starving.
"Thank you, Mr. Johnson; I reckon that's all for this time," he said to
the teller, and a minute later he was buying a cigar of the little
Gascon proprietor of the restaurant next door to the bank.
"You have an excellent memory, I've been told, Monsieur Pouillard," he
said, at the lighting of the cigar. "Do you recollect the day of the
bank robbery next door pretty well?"
The Gascon shrugged amiably. "_Vraiment_, M'sieu' Broffin; it ees not
possib' that one forgets."
"It was rather late for breakfast, and not quite late enough for lunch:
were you feeding many people just then?"
"H-onlee one; he is yo'ng man w'at don' nevveh come on my 'otel biffo'.
He is sit on dat secon' table; _oui_!"
Broffin pushed the probe of inquiry a little deeper. How did M.
Pouillard happen to remember? _Mais_, it was because the young man was
very droll; he was of the cold blood. When Victor, _le garçon_, would
have brought news of the _émeute_, he had said, breakfast first, and the
news afterward.
Questioned in his turn, the serving-man corroborated his employer's
particulars and was able to add a few of his own. The young man was
fair, with blue eyes and a reddish beard and mustaches. The mustaches
were untrimmed, but the beard was clipped to a point, _à les moeurs des
étudiants des Beaux Arts_. The waiter had once served tables in a Paris
café, and he seldom lost an opportunity of advertising the fact. Pressed
to account for his accurate memory picture of a chance patron, he
confessed naïvely; the tip had been princely and the young man was one
to mark and to remember--and to serve again.
Broffin left the restaurant with one more link in the chain neatly
forged. There was an excellent reason why none of the first-aid pursuers
had been able to catch a glimpse of the "strong-arm man." He had merely
stepped from the bank entrance to Monsieur Pouillard's. Between the café
breakfast and the departure of the _Belle Julie_ there lay an hour and a
quarter. In that interval he could easily perfect his simple disguise.
Broffin was not specially interested in the incidental minutiæ. It was
the identity of the man with the untrimmed mustaches and the pointed
beard that must be established.
After another week of patient groping, Broffin was obliged to confess
that the problem of identification was too difficult to be solved on
conventional lines. It presented no point of attack. With neither a name
nor a pictured face for reference, inquiry was crippled at the very
outset. None of the many boarding- and rooming-houses he visited had
lost a lodger answering the verbal description of the missing man. Very
reluctantly, for bull-dog tenacity was the detective's ruling
characteristic, he was forced to the conclusion that the only untried
solution lay in Teller Johnson's unfortified impression that the chance
meeting at his wicket was not the first meeting between the robber and
the young woman with the draft to be cashed.