difficult it might be to follow. Assuming that there had been a previous
meeting or meetings, or rather the passing acquaintance which was all
that the young woman's later betrayal of the man made conceivable, would
the writer of the accusing letter be willing to add to her burden of
responsibility by giving the true name and standing of the man whose
real identity--if she knew it--she had been careful to conceal in the
unsigned note to Mr. Galbraith? Broffin read the note again--"a
deck-hand, whose name on the mate's book is John Wesley Gavitt," was the
description she had given. It might, or it might not, be an
equivocation; but the longer Broffin dwelt upon it the more he leaned
toward the conclusion to which his theory and the few known facts
pointed. The young woman knew the man in his proper person; she had been
reluctant to betray him--that, he decided, was sufficiently proved by
the lapse of time intervening between the date of her note and its
postmark date; having finally decided to give him up, she had told only
what was absolutely necessary, leaving him free to conceal his real name
and identity if he would--and could.
Having come thus far on the road to convincement, Broffin knew what he
had to do and set about the doing of it methodically. A telegram to the
clerk of the _Belle Julie_ served to place the steamer in the lower
river; and boarding a night train he planned to reach Vicksburg in time
to intercept the witnesses whose evidence would determine roughly how
many hundreds or thousands of miles he could safely cut out of the
zigzag journeyings to which the following up of the hypothetical clew
would lead.
For, cost what it might, he was determined to find the writer of the
unsigned letter.
XVIII
THE ZWEIBUND
On his second visit to the sick man lodged in the padded luxuries of one
of the guest-rooms at Mereside, made on the morning following the
Grierson home-coming, Dr. Farnham found the hospital status established,
with the good-natured Swede installed as nurse, the bells muffled, and
Miss Margery playing the part of Sister Superior and dressing it, from
the dainty, felt-soled slippers to the smooth banding of her hair.
An hour later, however, it was the Margery of the Wahaskan Renaissance,
joyously clad and radiant, who was holding the reins over a big English
trap horse, parading down Main Street and smiling greetings to
everybody.
By one of the chances which he was willing to call fortunate, Edward
Raymer was at the curb to help her down from her high seat in the trap
when she pulled the big horse to a stand in front of her father's bank.
"I'm the luckiest man in Red Earth County; I was just wondering when I
should get in line to tell you how glad we are to have you back," he
said, with his eyes shining.
"Are you, really? You are not half as glad as I am to be back. There is
no place like home, you know."
"There isn't, and there oughtn't to be," was his quick response. "I've
been hoping you'd come to look upon Wahaska as your home, and now I know
you do."
"Why shouldn't I?" she laughed, and she was reaching for a paper-wrapped
package on the trap seat when he got it for her.
"You are going somewhere?--may I carry it for you?" he asked; but she
shook her head and took it from him.
"Only into the bank," she explained; and she was beginning to tell him
he must come to Mereside when the sick-man episode obtruded itself, and
the invitation was broken in the midst, very prettily, very effectively.
"I know," Raymer said, in instant sympathy. "You have your hands full
just now. Will you let me say that it's the finest thing I ever heard
of--your taking that poor fellow home and caring for him?"
Gertrude Raymer had once said in her brother's hearing that Miss
Grierson's color would be charming if it were only natural. Looking into
Miss Grierson's eyes Raymer saw the refutation of the slander in the
suffusing wave of generous embarrassment deepening in warm tints on the
perfect neck and cheek.
"Oh, dear me!" she said in pathetic protest; "is it all over town so
soon? I'm afraid we are still dreadfully 'country' in Wahaska, Mr.
Raymer. Please cut it down to the bare, commonplace facts whenever you
have a chance, won't you? The poor man was sick, and nobody knew him,
and somebody _had_ to take care of him."
Like the doctor, Raymer asked the inevitable question, "Who is he, Miss
Margery?" and, like the doctor again, he received the same answer, "I
haven't the smallest notion of an idea. But that doesn't make the
slightest difference," she went on. "He is a fellow human being, sick
and helpless. That ought to be enough for any of us to know."
Raymer stood watching her as she tripped lightly into the bank, and when
he went to catch his car the conservative minority had lost whatever
countenance or support he had ever given it.
"She's pure gold when you dig down through the little top layer of
harmless scheming for the social Grand-Viziership," he told himself,
tingling with the exultant thrills of the discoverer of buried treasure.
"If all Wahaska doesn't open its doors to her after this, it'll sure
earn what's coming to it."
True to her latest characterization of herself, Margery had a nod and a
pleasant smile for the young men behind the brass grilles as she passed
on her way to the president's room in the rear. She found her father at
his desk, thoughtfully munching the unburned half of one of the huge
cigars, and named her errand.
"I want a safety-deposit box big enough to hold this," she said briefly,
exhibiting the paper-wrapped packet.
Jasper Grierson, deeply immersed in a matter of business to which he had
given the better part of the forenoon, replied without looking up: "Go
and tell Murray; he'll fix you out," and it was not until after she had
gone that it occurred to him to wonder what use she was going to make of
a private box in the safety vault--a wonder that had lost itself in a
multiplicity of other things before he saw her again.
* * * * *
For a week after his unmarked arrival in Wahaska, the castaway in the
upper room at Mereside made hard work of it, giving the good little
doctor with the kindly eyes and the straight-line Puritan lips a rather
anxious fight to gain the upper hand of the still unnamed malady.
During the week there were many callers at the lake-fronting mansion;
some coming frankly to welcome the returned house-mistress, others to
make the welcoming an excuse for finding out the particulars in the
castaway episode. But neither faith nor good works seemed to have any
effect on the rebellious minority, and at the end of the week Raymer
once more had the pleasure of lifting Miss Grierson from the high trap
at the door of the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank, and of exchanging a few
words with her before she went in to see her father.
As on any other business day, President Grierson was solidly planted in
his heavy arm-chair before a desk well littered with work. He nodded
absently to his daughter as she entered, and knowing that the nod meant
that he would come to the surface of things--her surface--when he
could, she turned aside to the window and waited.
Though she had seen him develop day by day in less than three of the
thirty-odd years of his Western exile, her father offered a constant
succession of surprises to her. When she opened the door to
retrospection, which was not often, she remembered that the man who had
stumbled upon the rich quartz vein in Yellow Dog Gulch could scarcely
sign his name legibly to the papers recording his claim; that in those
days there was no prophecy of the ambitious present in the man, half
drunkard and half outlaw, whose name in the Yellow Dog district had been
a synonym for--but these were unpleasant memories, and Margery rarely
indulged them.
Just now she put them aside by turning her back upon the window and
taking credit for the tasteful and luxurious appointments of the private
office, with its soft-piled rug and heavy mahogany furnishings. Her
father was careless of such things; totally indifferent to them in
business hours; but she saw to it that his surroundings kept pace with
the march of prosperity. Here in Wahaska, as elsewhere, a little
judicious display counted for much, even if there were a few bigoted
persons who affected to despise it.
She was in the midst of a meditated attack upon the steamship
lithographs on the walls--sole remaining landmarks of the ante-Grierson
period--when her father wheeled in his pivot-chair and questioned her
with a lift of his shaggy eyebrows.
"Want to see me, Madgie?"
"Just a moment." She crossed the room and stood at the end of the big
desk. He reached mechanically for his check-book, but she smiled and
stopped him. "No; it isn't money, this time: it's something that money
can't buy. I met Mr. Edward Raymer at the front door a few minutes ago;
does he have an account with you?"
"Yes."
"Is it an accommodation to the bank, or to him?"
Jasper Grierson's laugh was grimly contemptuous.
"The bank isn't making anything out of him. The shoe is on the other
foot."
"Do you mean that he is a borrower?"
"Not yet; but he wants to be. He was in to see me about it just now."
"What is the matter? Isn't he making money with his plant?"
"Oh, yes; his business is good enough. But he's like all the other young
fools, nowadays; he ain't content to bet on a sure thing and grow with
his capital. He wants to widen out and build and put in new machinery
and cut a bigger dash generally. Thinks he's been too slow and sure."
"Are you going to stake him?" Margery waged relentless war with her
birthright inclination to lapse into the speech of the mining-camps, but
she stumbled now and then in talking to her father.
"I don't know; I guess not. Somehow, I've never had much use for him;
and, besides, I've had another plan in mind."
"And that was?"
"To organize another company and build a plant big enough to run him
out."
Margery was turning the leaves of an illustrated prospectus of an Idaho
irrigation company, and was apparently much more deeply interested in
the electrotyped pictures than in the fortunes of Mr. Edward Raymer. And
when she went on, she ignored the obliterative business suggestion and
remained in the narrower channel of the personalities.
"Why haven't you any use for him?"
"Oh, I don't know: because, until just lately, he has never seemed to
have much use for me, I guess. It's a stand-off, so far as likings go. I
offered to reincorporate his outfit for him six months ago, and told him
I'd take fifty-one per cent of the reorganization stock myself; but he
wouldn't talk about it. Said what little he had was his own, and he
proposed to keep it."
"But now he is willing to let you help him?"
"Not much; he don't look at it in that light. He wants to borrow money
from the bank and put up the stock of his close corporation as
collateral. It's safe enough, but I don't believe I'll do it."
The chatelaine of Mereside laid the prospectus aside and came abruptly
to the point.
"I want you to do it," she said, decisively.
"The devil you do!" Then, with the dry door-hinge chuckle: "It was a
waste of good money to put in the ice plant while you're here, Madgie.
What's in the wind, now?"
"Maybe I'll tell you--sometime."
The president chuckled again and tilted to the comfortable angle in the
arm-chair.
"Tell me now; you don't need to beat any of the bushes with me, little
girl. If you say the word, I'll pinch him for you."
"I didn't say that I wanted him pinched. But I do want you to put him
under obligations to you--the heavier the better. His mother and sister
have gone out of their way to snub me, and I want to play even."
Grierson wagged his huge head, and this time the chuckle grew to a
guffaw.
"I thought maybe that was the game. But it won't work with him; not for
a single minute."
"Why won't it?"
"Because he ain't the man to go to his women-folks when he gets into hot
water. He'll keep it to himself; and they'll go on bluffing you, same as
ever."
Miss Grierson pulled on her gauntlets and made ready to go, leisurely,
as befitted her pose.
"That is where you are mistaken," she objected, coolly. "It isn't very
often that I can give you a business tip, but this is one of the times
when I can. When John Raymer died, he left an undivided half of his
estate to his wife, the other half to be shared equally by the two
children. At the present moment, every dollar the entire family has is
invested in the iron plant. So, you see, I know what I am doing."
Jasper Grierson turned the leaf of a calendar-pad and made a brief
memorandum.
"I _savez_: I'll break the three-cornered syndicate for you."
"You will do nothing of the kind," asserted the radiant daughter of men,
with serene assurance. "You will let Mr. Raymer get himself into hot
water, as you call it, and then, when I say the word, you'll reach in
and pull him out."
"Oh, that's the how of it, is it? All right; anything you say goes as it
lays. But I'm going to make one condition, this time: you'll have to
keep cases on the game yourself, and say when. I can't be bothered
keeping the run of your society tea-parties."
"I don't want you to. Don't be late for dinner: we are going to the
Rodneys' for the evening."
When she was gone, the president selected another of the overgrown
cigars from a box in the desk drawer, lighted it, and tilted back in the
big arm-chair to envelop himself in a cloud of smoke. It was his single
expensive habit--the never-empty box of Brobdingnagian cigars in the
drawer--and the indulgence helped him to push the Yellow-Dog period into
a remoter past.
After a time the smoke cloud became articulate, rumbling forth
chucklings and Elizabethan oaths, mingling with musings idiomatic and
profane. "By God, I believe she thought she was fooling me--I do, for a
fact! But it's too thin. Of course, she wants to make the women kow-tow,
but that ain't all there is to it--not by a jugful. But it's all right:
she plays her own hand, and she's bully good and able to play it. If
she's after Raymer's scalp, he might as well get ready to wear a wig,
right now. I'll back her to win, every time."
Accordingly, when Mr. Edward Raymer came out of the president's room at
the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank the following morning, he was treading
upon air. For in his mind's eye there was a fair picture of a great and
successful industry to be built upon the substantial extension of credit
promised by the capitalist whose presence chamber he had just quitted.
XIX
LOSS AND GAIN
Striving feebly as one who gathers up the shards and fragments after an
explosion, Griswold remembered cloudily the supper of tasteless courses
at the Hotel Chouteau, still less distinctly, a drive through the
streets to a great, echoing railway station, a glare of lights too
painful to be borne, and, last of all, an overpowering weariness
shutting down upon him like a sudden closing in of darkness become thick
and stifling.
Afterward there were vague impressions, momentary breaches in the wall
of inclosing darkness when he had realized that he was curiously
helpless, and that he was still on the train going somewhere, though he
could not remember where. In one of these intervals a woman had stood
beside him, and he seemed to remember that she had put her cool hand on
his forehead.
Of the transition from the train to the bed in the upper room at
Mereside, he recalled nothing, though the personalities of two
strangers, the doctor and the nurse, obtruded themselves frequently in
the later phases of the troubled dream, like figures in a shadow
pantomime. Also, that suggestion of the presence of the woman with the
cool palm became self-repeating; and finally, when complete
consciousness returned, the dream impression was still so sharply
defined that he was not surprised to find her standing at his bedside.
He did not recognize her. The memory of his supper companions of the
Hotel Chouteau café was deeply buried under the dream débris, and the
present moment was full of mild bewilderment. Yet the friendliness in
her eyes seemed to shine out of some past which ought to be remembered.
Before he could frame any of the queries which came thronging to the
door of the returned consciousness, she smiled and shook her head and
forbade him.
"No, you mustn't talk," she said, with gentle authority. "It's the
doctor's orders. By and by, when you are stronger, you may ask all the
questions you please; but not now."
He wagged his head on the pillow. "Can't I even ask where I am?" he
begged.
"Since you have asked, I'll tell you that much. You are in Wahaska,
Minnesota, in the house of your friends; and you have nothing to do but
to get well as fast and as comfortably as you can."
Her voice was even more remindful than her face of that elusive past
which ought to be remembered, and he closed his eyes to try to recall
it. When he opened them again, she was gone and her place was taken by
one of the figures of the dream; a man with a thick mop of fair hair and
a face of blank good-nature, and whose store of English seemed to be
comprised in a single sentence: "_Ja, ja_; Hae bane poorty vell, t'ank
yo'."
Later in the day the doctor came; and when the professional requirements
were satisfied, Griswold learned the bare facts of his succoring. It was
characteristic of the Griswold of other days that the immense obligation
under which the Griersons had placed him made him gasp and perspire
afresh.
"Who ever heard of such a thing, doctor?" he protested weakly. And then:
"How am I ever going to repay them?"
Dr. Farnham was crisply explicit. "You may leave Mr. Grierson out of
your problem. Miss Margery is an only child, and if she sees fit to turn
Mereside into a temporary hospital, he is abundantly able to indulge
her."
"Then I am indebted to the daughter, alone?"
"Entirely, I should say."
Griswold looked long and earnestly at the face of his professional
adviser. It was a good face, clearly lined, benevolent; and, above all,
trustworthy.
"Tell me one thing more, doctor, if you can. What was the motive? Was it
just heavenly good-heartedness?--or----"
The doctor's smile was the least possible shade wintry.
"When you have lived a few years longer in this world of ours, you will
not probe too deeply into motives; you will take the deed as the
sufficient exponent of the prompting behind it. If I say so much, you
will understand that I am not impugning Miss Grierson's motives. There
are times when she is the good angel of everybody in sight."
"And this is one of the times?" persisted the analyst.
"We shall say that this is one of the times: say it and stick to it,
Mr.----"
The pause after the courtesy title was significant, and Griswold filled
it promptly. "Griswold--Kenneth Griswold. Do you mean to say that you
haven't known my name, doctor?"
"We have not. We took the Good Samaritan's privilege and ransacked your
belongings--Miss Margery and I--thinking that there might be relatives
or friends who should be notified."
"And you found nothing?" queried the sick man, a cold fear gripping at
his heart.
"Absolutely nothing to tell us who you were; no cards, letters, or
memoranda of any kind. The conclusion was obvious: some one had taken
advantage of your illness on the train and had picked your pockets."
Griswold moistened his lips and swallowed hard. "There were two
suit-cases: were they lost?"
"No; they are here."
"And you found nothing in them?"
"Nothing but clothing and your toilet tools, a pistol, and a typewritten
book manuscript bearing no signature."
Griswold turned his face away and shut his eyes. Once more his stake in
the game of life was gone.
"There was another package of--of papers in one of the grips," he said,
faintly; "quite a large package wrapped in brown paper."
"Valuables?" queried the doctor, sympathetically curious.
"Y-yes; rather valuable."
"We found nothing but the manuscript. Could any one else make use of the
papers you speak of?"
Griswold was too feeble to prevaricate successfully.
"There was money in the package," he said, leaving the physician to
infer what he pleased.
"Ah; then you were robbed. It's a pity we didn't know it at the time. It
is pretty late to begin looking for the thief now, I'm afraid."
"Quite too late," said Griswold monotonously.
The doctor rose to go.
"Don't let the material loss depress you, Mr. Griswold," he said, with
encouraging kindliness. "The one loss that couldn't have been retrieved
is a danger past for you now, I'm glad to say. Be cheerful and patient,
and we'll soon have you a sound man again. You have a magnificent
constitution and fine recuperative powers; otherwise we should have
buried you within a week of your arrival."
It was not until after the doctor had gone that Griswold was able to
face the new misfortune with anything like a sober measure of
equanimity. Imaginative to the degree which facilely transforms the
suppositional into the real, he was still singularly free from
superstition. Nevertheless, all the legends clustering about the
proverbial slipperiness of ill-gotten gains paraded themselves
insistently. It was only by the supremest effort of will that he could
push them aside and address himself to the practical matter of getting
well. That was the first thing to be considered; with or without money,
he must relieve the Griersons of their self-assumed burden at the
earliest possible moment.
This was the thought with which he sank into the first natural sleep of
convalescence. But during the days which followed, Margery was able to
modify it without dulling the keen edge of his obligation. What perfect
hospitality could do was done, without ostentation, with the exact
degree of spontaneity which made it appear as a service rendered to a
kinsman. It was one of the gifts of the daughter of men to be able to
ignore all the middle distances between an introduction and a
friendship; and by the time Griswold was strong enough to let the big,
gentle Swede plant him in a Morris chair in the sun-warmed bay-window,
the friendship was a fact accomplished.
"Do you know, you're the most wonderful person I have ever known?" he
said to Margery, on the first of the sunning days when she had come to
perch in the window-seat opposite his chair.
"It's propinquity," she laughed. "You haven't seen any other woman for
days and weeks. Wait until you are strong enough to come down to one of
my 'evenings.'"
"No, it isn't propinquity," he denied.
"Then it's the unaccustomed. You are from the well-behaved East. There
are some people even here in Wahaska who will tell you that I have never
properly learned how to behave."
"Your looking-glass will tell you why they say that," he said gravely.
Her smile showed the perfect rows of white teeth. "You are recovering
rapidly, Mr. Kenneth; don't you think so? Or was that only a little
return of the fever?"
He brushed the bit of mockery aside. "I want to be serious to-day--if
you'll let me. There are a lot of things I'd like to know."
"About Wahaska?"
"About you, first. Where did we meet?--before I came out of the fever
woods and saw you standing by the bed?"
"We didn't 'meet,' in the accepted meaning of the word. My father and I
happened to sit at your table one evening in the Hotel Chouteau, in St.
Louis."
"Ah; I knew there was a day back of the other days. Do you believe in
destiny?"
She nodded brightly. "Sometimes I do; when it brings things out the way
I want them to come out."
"I've often wondered," he went on musingly. "Think of it: somewhere back
in the past you took the first step in a path which was to lead you to
that late supper in the Chouteau. Somewhere in my past I took the first
step in the crooked trail that was to lead me there."
"Well?" she encouraged.
"The paths crossed--and I am your poor debtor," he finished. "I can
never hope to repay you and your father for what you have done."
"Oh, yes you can," she asserted lightly. "You can pass it along to the
man farther down. Forget it, and tell me what you want to know about
Wahaska."
"First, I'd like to know my doctor's name."
"The idea!" she exclaimed. "Hasn't there been anybody to introduce you?
He is Wahaska's best-beloved 'Doctor Bertie'; otherwise Doctor Herbert
C. Farnham."
"_Doctor Farnham?_--not Miss Char----" He bit the name in two in the
middle, but the mischief was done.
"Yes; Charlotte's father," was the calm reply. Then: "Where did you meet
Miss Farnham?"
"I haven't met her," he protested instantly; "she--she doesn't know me
from Adam. But I have seen her, and I happened to learn her name and her
home address."
Miss Margery's pretty face took on an expression of polite disinterest,
but behind the mask the active brain was busily fitting the pegs of
deduction into their proper holes. Her involuntary guest did not know
the father; therefore he must have seen the daughter while she was away
from home. Charlotte Farnham had been South, at Pass Christian, and
doubtless in New Orleans. The convalescent had also been in New Orleans,
as his money packet with its Bayou State Security labels sufficiently
testified.
Miss Grierson got up to draw one of the window shades. It had become
imperative that she should have time to think and an excuse for hiding
her face from the eyes which seemed to be trying masterfully to read her
inmost thoughts.
"You think it is strange that I should know Miss Farnham's name and
address without having met her?" Griswold asked, when the pause had
become a keen agony.