knowing of more.
"It was the name under which he was enrolled in the _Belle Julie's_
crew, and it was sufficient to identify him," she countered; adding: "It
did identify him. The officers found him and arrested him at St. Louis."
"Yes; and he made his get-away in about fifteen minutes after they had
nabbed him, as you probably read in the papers the next morning. He's
loose yet, and most naturally he ain't signing his name 'Gavitt' any
more whatever. I've come all the way from New Orleans, and a whole heap
farther, to get you to tell me his real name, Miss Farnham."
"Why do you think I can tell you?" was the undisturbed query.
"A lot of little things," said the detective, who was slowly coming to
his own in the matter of self-assurance. "In the first place, he spoke
to you in the bank, and you answered him. Isn't that so?"
She nodded, but the firm lips remained closed where the lips of another
woman might have opened to repeat what had been said at the teller's
wicket.
"Then, afterwards, on the boat, before you sent the letter, you talked
with him. It was one evening, just at dusk, on the starboard promenade
of the saloon-deck: he was comin' down from the pilot-house and you
stopped him. That was when he told you what his name was on the
steamboat's books, wasn't it?--what?"
She nodded again. "You know so much, it is surprising that you don't
know it all, Mr. Broffin," she commented, with gentle sarcasm.
"The one thing I don't know is the thing you're goin' to tell me--his
real name," he insisted. "That's what I've come here for."
In spite of her inexperience, which, in Mr. Broffin's field, was no less
than total, Charlotte Farnham had imagination, and with it a womanly
zest for the matching of wits with a man whose chief occupation was the
measuring of his own wit against the subtle cleverness of criminals.
Therefore she accepted the challenge.
"I did my whole duty at the time, Mr. Broffin," she demurred, with a
touch of coldness in her voice. "If you were careless enough to let him
escape you at St. Louis, you shouldn't come to me. I might say very
justly that it was never any affair of mine."
Matthew Broffin's gifts were subtle only in his dealings with other men;
but he was shrewd enough to know that his last and best chance with a
woman lay in an appeal to her fears.
"I don't know what made you write this letter, in the first place," he
said, taking the well-thumbed paper from his coat pocket; "but I know
well enough now why you didn't sign it, and why you didn't put the man's
real name in it. You--you and him--fixed it up between you so that you
could say to yourself afterwards what you've just said to me--that you'd
done your duty. But you haven't finished doin' your duty, yet. The law
says----"
"I know very well what the law says," was her baffling rejoinder; "I
have taken the trouble to find out since I came home. I am not hiding
your criminal."
Broffin was trying to gain a little ease by tilting his chair. But the
house wall was too close behind him.
"People will say that you are helpin' to hide him as long as you won't
tell his real name--what?" he grated.
"You still think I could tell you that, if I chose?" she said, wilfully
misleading him, or at least allowing him to mislead himself.
"I don't think anything about it: I _know_! You'd met him somewhere
before that day in the bank--before you knew he was goin' to turn
gentleman hold-up. That's why you don't want to give up his real name."
She had risen in answer to the distant chatter of an electric bell, and
in self-defence, Broffin had to grope on the floor for his hat and stand
up, too.
"I think my aunt is calling and I shall have to go in," she said, calmly
dismissing him. "You'll excuse me, I am sure, Mr. Broffin."
"In just one second, Miss Farnham. Ain't you goin' to tell me that
fellow's name?"
"No."
"Wait a minute. I'm an officer of the law, and I could arrest you and
take you to New Orleans on what evidence I've got. How about
that?--what?"
There was good fighting blood on the Farnham side, notwithstanding the
kindly Doctor Bertie's peaceful avocation, and the calm gray eyes that
met Broffin's were militantly angry when the retort came.
"If I had a brother, Mr. Broffin, he would be able to answer you better
than I can!" she flamed out. "Let me pass, please!"
It was not often that Broffin lost his head or his temper, but both were
gone when he struck back.
"That'll be all right, too!" he broke out harshly, blocking the way to
force her to listen to him. "You think you've bluffed me, don't
you?--what? Let me tell you: some fine day this duck whose name isn't
Gavitt will turn up here--to see you; then I'll nab him. If you find out
where he is, and write to him not to come, it'll be all the same; he'll
come anyway, and when he does come, I'll get him!"
When Miss Farnham had gone in and there was nothing left for him to do
but to compass his own disappearance, Broffin went away, telling himself
with many embellishments that for once in his professional career he had
made an ass of himself. He had made a sorry botch of a measurably simple
detail, to say nothing of letting his temper push him into the final
foolish boast which might easily defeat him.
None the less, he was able to set some few gains over against the one
critical loss--if one may be said to lose what he has never had. Failing
to learn the true name and place of the Bayou State Security robber, he
told himself that he had established beyond question the correctness of
his hypothesis. The doctor's daughter knew the man; she had known him
before the robbery; she was willing to be his accomplice to the extent
of her ability. There was only one explanation of this attitude. In
Broffin's wording of it, Miss Farnham was "gone on him," if not openly,
at least to such an extent as to make her anxious to shield him.
That being the case, Broffin set it down as a fact as good as
accomplished that the man would sooner or later come to Wahaska. The
detective's knowledge of masculine human nature was as profoundly acute
as the requirements of his calling demanded. With a woman like Miss
Farnham for the lure, he could be morally certain that his man would
some time fling caution, or even a written prohibition, to the winds,
and walk into the trap.
This misfire of Broffin's happened upon a Wednesday, which, in its
calendar placing, chanced to be three weeks to a day after Griswold had
left Mereside to settle himself studiously in two quiet upper rooms in
the Widow Holcomb's house in upper Shawnee Street.
That it was also a day of other coincidences will appear in the casting
up of the items on the page of events.
For one thing, it marked the formal opening of the De Soto Inn for the
summer season; the De Soto being the resort hotel spoken of by the clerk
of the Hotel Chouteau in the little ante-dinner talk which had given
Griswold his first outline sketch of Wahaska. For another, the special
train from the far South arriving at noon and bearing the first
detachment of the Inn's guests, had for one of its Pullman passengers an
elderly gentleman with a strongly marked Scottish face; a gentleman with
the bushy white eyebrows of age, the long upper lip of caution, the
drooping eyelid of irascibility, and the bearing of a man of routine; in
other words, Mr. Andrew Galbraith, faring northward on his customary
summer vacation, which--the fates intervening--he had this time
determined to spend at the Wahaskan resort.
For a third item, it was at three o'clock of this same Wednesday that
Raymer came out of Jasper Grierson's bank with his head down and a cloud
on his brow; the cloud dating back to an interview just closed, a short
and rather brittle conference with the bank's president held in Jasper
Grierson's private room, with the president sitting at ease in his huge
arm-chair and his visitor standing, quite destitute of ease, at the
desk-end.
A little farther along, this third item dovetailed with a fourth and
fifth. Raymer, dropping into a friend's office to use the telephone,
chanced upon a crossed wire. He had called up Mrs. Holcomb, and while he
was waiting for the widow to summon Griswold from his up-stairs den,
there was a confused skirling of bells and Raymer, innocently
eavesdropping, overheard part of a conversation between two well-known
voices; namely, the voices of Miss Charlotte Farnham and her father. The
talk was neither confidential, nor of any special significance. Miss
Farnham was explaining that she had heard the bell, but could not answer
promptly because she had had a caller; and the doctor was telling her
that it was no matter--that he merely wanted to let her know that he was
going to bring a dinner guest, the guest prospective being his late
patient, Mr. Kenneth Griswold.
The mention of Griswold's name reminded Raymer of his own affair, and he
became suddenly anxious to have the connection with the Widow Holcomb's
house renewed. When the crossed wire was plugged out, Griswold was ready
and waiting.
"I was afraid you might be out somewhere, and I want to have a pow-wow
with you," said Raymer, when the reassuring voice came over the wire.
"Can you give me a little time if I drive around?" And when the prompt
assent came: "All right; thank you. I'll be with you in a pair of
minutes."
Raymer's horse was only a short half-square away, hitched in front of
the Winnebago House, and he went to get it. But at the instant of
unhitching, Miss Grierson's trap was driven up and the untying of knots
paused while he stepped from the curb to stand at the wheel of the
modish equipage.
"You are getting to be as bad as all the others," was the greeting he
got from the high driving-seat. "You haven't been at Mereside for an
age--only once since the night you took Mr. Griswold away from us. By
the way, what has become of Mr. Griswold? He doesn't show himself in
public much oftener than you do."
"I think he has been getting to work on his writing," said Raymer,
good-naturedly apologizing for his friend. "He'll come down out of the
clouds after a little." And then, before he could stop it, out came the
bit of unchartered information: "I understand he dines at Doctor
Bertie's to-night."
The young iron-founder was looking up into the eyes of beguiling when he
said this, and, being a mere man, he wondered what made them flash and
then grow suddenly fathomless and brooding.
"When you see him, tell him that we are still on earth over at
Mereside," said the magnate's daughter pertly; and a moment later Raymer
was free to keep his appointment with Griswold.
All in all, the little interruption had consumed no more than five
minutes, but the time interval was sufficient to form another link in
the chain of Wednesday incidents. For, as Raymer was turning out of Main
Street into Shawnee, he narrowly missed running over a heavy-set man
with a dark face and drooping mustaches; a pedestrian whose
preoccupation seemed so great as to make him quite oblivious to street
crossings and passing vehicles until Raymer pulled his horse back into
the shafts and shouted.
When the man looked up, Raymer recognized him as the stranger from the
South who was stopping at the Winnebago House and who gave himself out
as a Louisiana lumberman open to conviction on the subject of Minnesota
pine lands as an investment. But he had no means of knowing that
Broffin's momentary preoccupation was chargeable to a fruitless
interview lately concluded; or that in driving away to the house three
squares up the street he was bridging the narrow gap between a
man-hunter and his quarry--a gap which had suddenly grown into a chasm
for the man-hunter himself.
One more small coincidence will serve to total the items on the
Wednesday page. If Broffin had not stopped to look after the man who had
so nearly run him down, he might not have been crossing Main Street in
front of the Winnebago at the precise instant when Miss Grierson, with
young Dahlgren in the second seat of the trap, came around the square
and pulled up to let her horse drink at the public fountain.
"Who is that Bitter-Creekish-looking man crossing over to the Winnebago
House?" asked Miss Grierson of her seatmate, indicating Broffin with a
wave of the whip, and skilfully making the query sound like the voicing
of the idlest curiosity.
"Fellow named Broffin, from Louisiana," said Dahlgren, who, as assistant
editor of the _Daily Wahaskan_, knew everybody. "Says he's in the lumber
business down there, but, 'I doubt it,' said the carpenter, and shed a
bitter tear."
"Why do you doubt it?" queried Miss Grierson, neatly flicking a fly from
the horse's back with the tip of the whiplash.
"Oh, on general principles, I guess. You wouldn't say he had any of the
ear-marks of a business man."
"What kind of ear-marks has he got?" persisted Miss Grierson--merely to
make talk, as Dahlgren decided.
"I don't know. We were talking about him around at the club the other
night, and Sheffield--he's from Kentucky, you know--thought he
remembered the name as the name of a 'moonshine' raider he'd heard of
down in his home State."
"A moonshine raider? What is that?" By this time Miss Margery's
curiosity was less inert than it had been, or had seemed to be, at
first.
"A deputy marshal, you know; a sort of Government policeman and
detective rolled into one. He looks it, don't you think?"
Miss Grierson did not say what she thought, then, or later, when she set
Dahlgren down at the door of his newspaper office in Sioux Avenue. But
still later, two hours later, in fact, she gave a brief audience in the
Mereside library to a small, barefooted boy whose occupation was
sufficiently indicated by the bundle of evening papers hugged under one
arm.
"Well, Johnnie; what did you find out?" she asked.
"Ain't had time," said the boy. "But he ain't no milyunaire
lumber-shooter, I'll bet a nickel. I sold him a pape' jes' now, down by
Dutchie's lumber yard, and I ast him what kind o' lumber that was in the
pile by the gate. He didn't know, no more'n a goat."
Miss Margery filliped a coin in the air and the newsboy caught it
dexterously.
"That will do nicely for a beginning, Johnnie," she said sweetly. "Come
and see me every once in a while, and perhaps there'll be more little
white cart-wheels for you. Only don't tell; and don't let him catch you.
That's all."
XXIV
THE FORWARD LIGHT
During the days which followed his setting up of the standard of
independence in Mrs. Holcomb's second-floor front, Griswold found
himself entering upon a new world--a world corresponding with gratifying
fidelity to that prefigured future which he had struck out in the waking
hours of his first night on the main-deck of the _Belle Julie_.
Wahaska, as a fortunate field for the post-graduate course in
Experimental Humanity, was all that his fancy had pictured it. It was
neither so small as to scant the variety of subjects, nor so large as to
preclude the possibility of grasping them in their entirety. In strict
accord with the forecast, it promised to afford the writing craftsman's
happy medium in surroundings: it would reproduce, in miniature, perhaps,
but none the less in just proportions, the social problems of the wider
world; and for a writer's seclusion the village quiet of upper Shawnee
Street was all that could be desired.
When he came to go about in the town, as he did daily after the pleasant
occupation of refurnishing his study and bed-room was a pleasure past,
he found that in some mysterious manner his fame had preceded him.
Everybody seemed to know who he was; to be able to place him as a New
Yorker, as an author in search of health, or local color or environment
or some other technical quality not to be found in the crowded cities;
to be able to place him, also, as Miss Margery Grierson's friend and
beneficiary--which last, he surmised, was his best passport to the good
graces of his fellow-townsmen.
Coincidently he discovered that, in the same mysterious manner,
everybody seemed to know that he was, in the Wahaskan phrase,
"well-fixed." Here, again, he guessed that something might be credited
to Margery. Beyond a hint to Raymer, he had told no one of the
comfortable assurance against want lying snugly secure in the small
strong-box in the Farmers' and Merchants' safety vault, and he was
reasonably certain that Raymer could not have passed the hint so fast
and so far as the town-wide limits to which the fact of the "well-fixed"
phrase had spread.
All this was very nourishing, not to say stimulating, to the starved
soul of a proletary. Not in any period of the past had he so fully
understood that an acute appreciation of the wrongs of the race is no
bar to an equally acute hungering and thirsting after the commonplace
flesh-pots, or to a very primitive and soul-satisfying enjoyment of the
same when they were to be had. Nevertheless, the reaction into
self-indulgence proved to be only temporary. God had been good to him,
enabling him to realize in miraculous fulfilment the ideal environment
and opportunity: therefore he would do his part, proclaiming the holy
war and fighting, single-handed if need be, the battle of the weak
against the strong.
So ran the renewed determination, dusted off and re-pedestaled after
many days. As to the manner of conducting the war against inequality and
the crime of plutocracy, the plan of campaign had been sufficiently
indicated in that white-hot moment of high resolves on the cargo-deck of
the _Belle Julie_. For the propaganda, there was his book; for the
demonstration, he would put the sacred fund into some industry where the
weight of it would give him the casting vote in all questions involving
the rights of the workers. It was absurdly simple, and he wondered that
none of the sociological reformers whose books he had read had
anticipated him in the discovery of such an obviously logical point of
attack.
With the re-writing of the book fairly begun, he was already looking
about for the practical opportunity when the growing friendship with
Edward Raymer promised to offer an opening exactly fulfilling the
experimental requirements. Raymer had over-enlarged his plant and was
needing more capital. So much Griswold had gathered from the talk of the
street; and some of Raymer's half-confidences had led him to suspect
that the need was, or was likely to become, imperative. It was only the
finer quality of friendship that had hitherto kept him from offering
help before it was asked, and thus far he had contented himself with
hinting to Raymer that he had money to invest. From every point of view
a partnership with the young iron-founder promised to afford the golden
opportunity. The industry was comparatively small and self-contained;
and Raymer was himself openly committed to the cause of uplifting.
Griswold waited patiently; he was still waiting on the Wednesday
afternoon when Raymer called him over the telephone and made the
appointment for a meeting at the house in Shawnee Street.
"Your 'pair of minutes' must have found something to grow upon," laughed
the patient waiter, when Raymer, finding Mrs. Holcomb's front door open,
had climbed the stair to the newly established literary workshop. "I've
had time to smoke a pipe and write a complete paragraph since you called
up."
Raymer flung himself into a chair at the desk-end and reached for a pipe
in the curiously carved rack which had been one of Griswold's small
extravagances in the refurnishing.
"Yes," he said; "Margery Grierson drove up while I was unhitching, and I
had to stop and talk to her. Which reminds me: she says you're giving
Mereside the go-by since you set up for yourself. Are you?"
"Not intentionally," Griswold denied; and he let it stand at that.
"I shouldn't, if I were you," Raymer advised. "Margery Grierson is any
man's good friend; and pretty soon you'll be meeting people who will
lift their eyebrows when you speak of her. You mustn't make her pay for
that."
"I'm not likely to," was the sober rejoinder. "My debt to Miss Grierson
is a pretty big one, Raymer; bigger than you suspect, I imagine."
"I'm glad to hear you put the debt where it belongs, leaving her father
out of it. You don't owe him anything; not even a cup of cold water.
There's a latter-day buccaneer for you!" he went on, warming to his
subject like a man with a sore into which salt has been freshly rubbed.
"That old timber-wolf wouldn't spare his best friend--allowing that
anybody could be his friend. By Jove! he's making me sweat blood, all
right!"
"How is that?" asked Griswold.
"I've been on the edge of telling you two or three times, but next to a
quitter I do hate the fellow who puts his fingers into a trap and then
squawks when the trap nips him. Grierson has got me down and he is about
to cut my throat, Griswold."
"Tell me about it," said the one who had been patiently waiting to be
told.
"It begins back a piece, but I'll brief it for you. I suppose you've
been told how Grierson came here a few years ago with a wad of money and
a large and healthy ambition to own the town?"
Griswold nodded.
"Well, he has come pretty close to making a go of it. What he doesn't
own or control wouldn't make much of a town by itself. A year ago he
tried to get a finger into my little pie. He wanted to reorganize the
Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and offered to furnish the additional
capital and take fifty-one per cent of the reorganization stock.
Naturally, I couldn't see it. My father had left the plant as an
undivided legacy to my mother, my sister, and myself; and while we
haven't been getting rich out of it, we've managed to hold our own and
to grow a little. Don't let me bore you."
"You couldn't do that if you should try. Go on."
"This spring Wahaska began to feel the boost of the big crop year.
Everything was on the upward slant, and I thought we ought to move along
with other people. Before the snow was off the ground we had hit the
capacity limit in the old plant and the only thing to do was to enlarge.
I borrowed the money at Grierson's bank and did it."
"And you can't make the enlarged plant pay?"
"Oh, yes, it's paying very well, indeed; we're earning dividends, all
right. But in the money matter I simply played the fool and let Grierson
cinch me. As I've told you more than once, I'm an engineer and no
finance shark. My borrow at the bank was one hundred thousand dollars,
and there was a verbal understanding that it was to be repaid out of the
surplus earnings, piecemeal. I told Grierson that I should need a year
or more, and he didn't object."
"This was all in conversation?" said Griswold: "no writing?"
Raymer made a wry face.
"Don't rub it in. I'm admitting that I was all the different kinds of a
fool. There was no definite time limit mentioned. I was to give my
personal notes and put up the family stock as collateral. A day or two
later, when I went around to close the deal, the trap was standing wide
open for me and a baby might have seen it. Grierson said he had proposed
the loan to his directors, and that they had kicked on taking the stock
as collateral. He said they wanted a mortgage on the plant."
Griswold nodded. "Which brought on more talk," he suggested.
"Which brought on a good bit more talk. Really, it didn't make any
intrinsic difference. Stock collateral or property collateral, the bank
would have us by the throat until the debt should be paid. But you know
how women are: my mother would about as soon sign her own death warrant
as to put her name on a mortgage; so there we were--blocked. Grierson
was as smooth as oil; said he wanted to help me out, and was willing to
stretch his authority to do it. Then he sprung the trap."
"Having got you just where he wanted you," put in the listener.