detectives who are searching for him have been here to see me--or, at
least, one of them has."
The hunted one laid hold of the partial reprieve with a mighty grip and
drew himself out of the reactionary whirlpool.
"To see you? Why should they trouble you?"
"On general man-hunting principles, I suppose," was the calm reply.
"Since I gave the necessary information once, they seem to think I can
give it again. It is very annoying."
"It is an outrage!" declared the listener warmly. And afterward, with
only the proper friendly emphasis: "I hope it is an annoyance past."
His companion leaned forward in her chair and cautiously parted the
leafy vine screen.
"Look across the street--under those trees at the water's edge: do you
see him?"
Griswold looked and was reasonably sure that he could make out the
shadowy figure of a man leaning against one of the trees.
"That is my shadow," she said, lowering her voice; "Mr. Matthew Broffin,
of the Colburne Detective Agency, in New Orleans. He has a foolish idea
that I am in communication with the man he is searching for, and he was
brutal enough to tell me so. What he expects to accomplish by keeping an
absurd watch upon our house and dogging everybody who comes and goes, I
can't imagine."
"You have told your father?" said Griswold, anxious to learn how far
this new alarm fire had spread.
"Certainly; and he has made his protest. But it doesn't do any good; the
man keeps on spying, as you see. But we have wandered a long way from
your book. I've been trying to prove to you that I am not fit to
criticise it."
"No; you mustn't mistake me. I haven't been coming to you for
criticism," was Griswold's rather incoherent reply; and when the talk
threatened to lapse into the commonplaces, he took his leave. Oddly
enough, as he thought, when he was unlatching the gate and had shifted
one of the newly purchased automatic pistols from his hip pocket to an
outside pocket of the light top-coat he was wearing, the shadowy figure
under the lake-shading trees had disappeared.
It was only a few minutes after the lingering dinner guest had gone when
the doctor came out on the porch, bringing his long-stemmed pipe for a
bedtime whiff in the open air.
"You are losing your beauty sleep, little girl," he said, dropping into
the chair lately occupied by the guest. "Did you find out anything more
to-night?"
The daughter did not reply at once, and when she did there was a note of
freshly summoned hardihood in her voice.
"We were both mistaken," she affirmed. "Coincidences are always likely
to be misleading. I am sorry I told you about them. He has certainly
been a present help in time of need to Edward."
"How did you reach your conclusion?" inquired the pipe smoker, upon whom
the coincidences were still actively exerting their influence.
"It came out in the talk this evening. He has been rather ridiculously
putting me upon a pedestal, trying to make me fit an ideal character in
his book, I think. To prove to him that I am only human, I told him the
story of what happened on the _Belle Julie_. And, to cap the climax, I
pointed out our friend Mr. Broffin, who was on guard again--as
usual--and told him who the house watcher was and what he wanted. It
didn't affect him any more than it would any friend of the family. He
was interested in the story as a story, and--and in its bearing upon me
as a--as a life-experience. But that was all."
"You may be right; you probably are right," was the father's comment
after a thoughtful whiff or two had intervened. "Just the same, I've
looked up the dates in my case book: if your Gavitt man, escaping from
the officers in St. Louis, had taken the first train for Wahaska, he
would have reached here at precisely the same moment that the sick Mr.
Griswold did. Also, he would have been careful to remove all the little
tags and telltales from his brand-new clothes--which was what Mr.
Griswold very evidently had done. Also, again, the amount of money which
Mr. Griswold has put into the Raymer capital stock tallies to within ten
thousand dollars of the amount your Gavitt fellow walked away with in
New Orleans. Also, number three, Mr. Griswold acted very much like a man
who had lost all he had in the world when I told him that Miss Grierson
and I had found no money in his suit-cases; and----"
"That is the weak link in your chain, isn't it?" objected the daughter.
"You remember he told me on the boat that he had lost the money?"
Again the father took counsel of the long-stemmed pipe.
"It might be," he said, after a reflective pause. "It would be, if Miss
Grierson could be safely eliminated from the equation. Unhappily, she
can't be."
"I don't care!" came from the depths of the porch rocking-chair. "If
this miserable detective arrests him and appeals to me, I shall simply
refuse to know anything about it! I wish you'd tell this man Broffin so
when you meet him again."
As before, the good little doctor had recourse to his pipe, and it was
not until his daughter got up to go in that he said gently: "One other
word, Charlie, girl: are you altogether sure that the wish isn't father
to the thought--about Griswold?"
"Don't be absurd, papa!" she said scornfully, passing swiftly behind his
chair to reach the door; and with that answer he was obliged to be
content.
XXVIII
BROKEN LINKS
It was on the second day after the pistol-buying incident in Simmons &
Kleifurt's that Broffin, wishful for solitude and a chance to think in
perspective, took to the woods.
In the moment of lost temper, when he had threatened angrily to play an
indefinite waiting game, prolonging it until his man should walk into
the trap, nothing had really been farther from his intentions. As a
matter of fact, there were the best of business reasons why he should
not waste another day in following, or attempting to follow, the cold
trail. Other cases were pressing, and his daily mail from the New
Orleans head-quarters brought urgings impatient and importunate; and on
the third day following the sleeveless interview with the doctor's
daughter he had paid his bill at the Winnebago House and had packed his
grip for the southward flight by the afternoon train.
Twenty minutes before train-time a telegram from the New Orleans office
had reopened the closed and crossed-off account of the Bayou State
Security robbery. It was a bare line in answer to his own wire advising
the office that he was about to return, but its significance was out of
all proportion to its length. "B. S. S. man is in your town. Important
letter to-day's mail," was all it said, but that was sufficient. Broffin
had promptly told the clerk of the Winnebago that he had changed his
mind, and forty-eight hours afterward he had the letter.
Like the telegram, the mail communication was significant but
inconclusive. One Patrick Sheehan, a St. Louis cab driver, dying, had
made confession to his priest. For a bribe of two hundred dollars he had
aided and abetted the escape of a criminal on a day and date
corresponding to the mid-April arrival of the steamer _Belle Julie_ at
St. Louis. Afterward he had driven the man to an up-town hotel (name not
given) and had obtained from the clerk the man's name and destination.
In his letter enclosing the confession the priest went on to say that
the penitent had evidently had a severe struggle with his conscience. A
mistaken sense of gratitude to the man who had bribed him had led him to
tear off and destroy the upper half of the card given him by the up-town
hotel clerk, and with the reminder gone he could not recall the man's
name. But the destination address, "Wahaska, Minnesota," had been
preserved, and the torn portion of the card bearing it was submitted
with the confession.
With this new clue for an incentive, Broffin had immediately put his
nose to the cold trail again. All other things apart, the torn card
conclusively proved the correctness of the obstinately maintained
hypothesis. If the robber had really chosen Wahaska for his
hiding-place, he had done so merely because it was Miss Farnham's home.
The boldness of the thing appealed instantly to a like quality in the
detective, and he was not entirely unprepared for the eye-opening shock
which came when he began to suspect that Griswold, the writing-man, was
the man he was looking for.
The premonitory symptoms of the shock had manifested themselves when he
began to note the regularity of Griswold's visits to the house in Lake
Boulevard. Then came the pistol-buying episode, closely following an
investment of money possible only to a capitalist--or a robber. Broffin
worked quickly after this, tracing Griswold's record back to its
Wahaskan beginnings and shadowing his man so faithfully that at any hour
of the day or night he could have clapped the arresting hand upon his
shoulder. Still he hesitated. Once, in his Secret Service days, he had
arrested the wrong man, and the smart of the prosecution for false
imprisonment would rankle as long as he lived.
This was why he took to the woods on the afternoon of the second day
following Griswold's pistol purchase. He felt himself growing
short-sighted from the very nearness of things. The single necessity now
was for absolute and unshakable identification. To establish this, three
witnesses, and three only, could be called upon. Of the three, two had
failed signally--Miss Farnham because she had her own reasons for
blocking the game, and President Galbraith.... That was another chapter
in the book of failure. Broffin had learned that the president was
stopping at the De Soto Inn, and he had manoeuvred to bring Mr.
Galbraith face to face with Griswold in the Grierson bank on the day
after the pistol-buying. To his astonishment and disgust the president
had shaken his head irritably, adding a rebuke. "Na, na, man; your trade
makes ye over-suspeecious. That's Mr. Griswold, the writer-man and a
friend of the Griersons. Miss Madgie was telling me about him last week.
He's no more like the robber than you are. Haven't I told ye the man was
bearded like a tyke?"
With two of the three eye-witnesses refusing to testify, there remained
only Johnson, the paying teller of the Bayou State Security. Broffin was
considering the advisability of wiring for Johnson when he passed the
last of the houses on the lakeside drive and struck into the country
road which led by cool and shaded forest windings to the resort hotel at
the head of the southern bay. If Johnson should fail--and in view of the
fact that President Galbraith had failed it was a possibility to be
reckoned with--there remained only two doubtful expedients. With Patrick
Sheehan's confession to point the way it might be possible to trace the
transformed deck-hand from his final interview with McGrath on the
_Belle Julie_ step by step to his appearance, sick and delirious, in
Wahaska twenty-four hours later. This was one of the expedients. The
other was to take the long chance by clapping the handcuffs upon
Griswold in some moment of unpreparedness. It was a well-worn trick,
and it did not always succeed in surprising the admission of guilt
necessary to make it hold good. And if it should not hold good, there
might be consequences. As we have noted, Broffin had once clapped the
handcuffs on the wrong man.
Chewing an extinct cigar and ruminating thoughtfully over his problem,
Broffin had followed the windings of the country road well into the
lake-enclosing forest when he heard the rattle of wheels and the
hoof-beats of a horse. Presently the vehicle overtook and passed him. It
was Miss Grierson's trap, drawn by the big English trap-horse, with Miss
Grierson herself holding the reins and Raymer lounging comfortably in
the spare seat.
The sight of the pair moved Broffin to speech apostrophic--when the two
were out of earshot. "You're the little lady I'd like to back into a
corner," he muttered. "What you know about this business--and wouldn't
tell, not if you was gettin' the third degree for it--would tie up all
the broken strings in a hurry. How do I know you didn't help him to get
out of St. Louis? How do I know that the whole blame sick play wasn't a
plant from start to finish?" He stopped and struck viciously at a
roadside weed with the switch he had cut. It was a new idea, an idea
with promise; and when he went on, the reflective excursion had become a
journey with a purpose. Chance had been good to him now and then in his
hard-working career: perhaps it would be good to him again. Having let
one woman put a stumbling-block in his way, perhaps it was going to
even things up by making another woman remove it.
Half an hour later Broffin had followed the huge hoof-prints of the
great English trap-horse to the driveway portal of the De Soto grounds
where they were lost on the pebbled carriage approach. Strolling on
through the grounds into the lake-fronting lobby of the Inn, he was soon
able to account for Raymer. The young iron-founder was evidently on
business bent. He was sitting in the lobby with a man whom Broffin
recognized as the master car builder of the Pineboro Railroad, and the
two were discussing mechanical details over a thick file of blue-prints
spread out on Raymer's knees. The smile under Broffin's drooping
mustaches was a grin of instant comprehension. Miss Grierson, driving
Raymer's way, had picked up the iron-founder and brought him along to
the business appointment. It was a way she had--when the candidate for
the spare seat in the trap happened to be young and good-looking.
Having placed Raymer, Broffin went in search of Miss Grierson. He found
her on the broad veranda, alone, and for the moment unoccupied. How to
make the attack so direct and so overwhelming that it could not be
withstood was the only remaining question; and Broffin had answered it
to his own satisfaction, and was advancing through an open French window
directly behind Miss Grierson's chair to put the answer into effect,
when the opportunity was snatched away. Raymer, with his roll of
blue-prints under his arm and his business with the master car builder
apparently concluded, came down the veranda and took the chair next to
Miss Grierson's.
Broffin dropped back into the writing-room alcove for which the open
French window was the outlet and sat down to bide his time, taking care
that the chair which he noiselessly placed for himself should be out of
sight from the veranda, but not out of earshot. It seemed very unlikely
that the two young people who were enjoying the Minnedaskan view would
say anything worth listening to; but the ex-harrier of moonshine-makers
was of those who discount all chances.
For a time nothing happened. The two on the veranda talked of the view,
of the coming regatta, of the latest lawn social given by the Guild of
St. John's. Broffin surmised that they were waiting for the trap to be
brought around from the hotel stables, though why there should be a
delay was not so evident. But in any event his opportunity was lost
unless he could contrive to isolate the young woman again. It was while
he was groping for the compassing means that Raymer said:
"It's a shame to make you wait this way, Miss Madge. McMurtry said he
had an appointment with Mr. Galbraith for three o'clock, and he had to
go and keep it. But he ought to be down again by this time. Don't wait
for me if you want to go back to town. I can get a lift from somebody."
"That would be nice, wouldn't it?" was the good-natured retort. "To
make you tie up your own horse in town and then to leave you stranded
away out here three miles from nowhere! I think I see myself doing such
a thing! Besides, I haven't a thing to do but to wait."
Broffin shifted the extinct cigar he was chewing from one corner of his
mouth to the other and pulled his soft hat lower over his eyes. He, too,
could wait. There was a little stir on the veranda; a rustling of silk
petticoats and the click of small heels on the hardwood floor. Broffin
could not forbear the peering peep around the sheltering window
draperies. Miss Grierson had left her seat and was pacing a slow march
up and down before Raymer's chair, apparently for Raymer's benefit. The
watcher behind the window draperies drew back quickly when she made the
turn to face his way, arguing sapiently that whatever significance their
further talk might hold would be carefully and thoughtfully neutralized
if Miss Grierson should see him. That she had not seen him became a fact
sufficiently well-assured when she sat down again and began to speak of
Griswold.
"How is the new partnership going, by this time," she asked, after the
manner of one who re-winnows the chaff of the commonplaces in the hope
of finding grain enough for the immediate need.
"So far as Griswold is concerned, you wouldn't notice that there is a
partnership," laughed the iron-founder. "I can't make him galvanize an
atom of interest in his investment. All I can get out of him is, 'Don't
bother me; I'm busy.'"
"Mr. Griswold is in a class by himself, don't you think?" was the
questioning comment.
"He is all kinds of a good fellow; that's all I know, and all I ask to
know," answered Raymer loyally.
"I believe that--now," said his companion, with the faintest possible
emphasis upon the time-word.
Broffin marked the emphasis, and the pause that preceded it, and leaned
forward to miss no word.
"Meaning that there was a time when you didn't believe it?" Raymer
asked.
"Meaning that there was a time when he had me scared half to death,"
confessed the one who seemed always to say the confidential thing as if
it were the most trivial. "Do you remember one day in the library, when
you found me looking over the files of the newspapers for the story of
the robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank in New Orleans?"
Raymer remembered it very well, and admitted it.
"That was the time when the dreadful idea was scaring me stiff," she
went on. "You remember the story, don't you? how the president--our Mr.
Galbraith here--was held up at the point of a pistol and marched to the
paying teller's window, and how the robber escaped on a river steamboat
and was recognized by somebody and was arrested at St. Louis?"
"Yes; I remember it all very clearly. Also I recollect how the second
newspaper notice told how he escaped from the officers at St. Louis.
Wasn't there something about a young woman being mixed up in it some
way?"
"There was: _she_ was the one who recognized the robber disguised as a
deck-hand on the boat."
Raymer seemed to have forgotten his impatience for a renewal of the
interview with the Pineboro Railroad master car builder.
"I don't seem to recall any mention of that in the newspapers," he said
half-doubtfully.
"The newspaper reporters didn't put two and two together, but I did,"
asserted the sharer of confidences. "There was a young woman getting a
draft cashed at the teller's window when the robbery was committed. The
bank people didn't know her, so she must have been travelling. You see
it's simple enough when you put your mind to it."
"But you haven't told me how you were scared," Raymer suggested.
"I'm coming to that. This escape we read about happened on a certain day
in April. It was the very day on which poppa met me on my way back from
Florida, and we took the eleven-thirty train north that night. You
haven't forgotten that Mr. Griswold was a passenger on that same train?"
"But, goodness gracious, Miss Margery! any number of people were
passengers on that train. You surely wouldn't----"
"Hush!" she said, and through the lace window hangings Broffin saw her
lift a warning finger. "What I am telling you, Mr. Raymer, is in the
strictest confidence; we mustn't let a breath of it get out. But that
wasn't all. Mr. Griswold was dreadfully sick, and, of course, he
couldn't tell us anything about himself. But while he was delirious he
was always muttering something about money, money; money that he had
lost and couldn't find, or money that he had found and couldn't lose.
Then when we thought he couldn't possibly get well, Doctor Bertie and I
ransacked his suit-cases for cards or letters or something that would
tell us who he was and where he came from. _There wasn't the littlest
thing!_"
"And that was when you began to suspect?" queried Raymer.
"That was when the suspicion began to torture me. I fought it; oh, you
don't know how hard I fought it! There he was, lying sick and helpless;
utterly unable to do a thing or say a word in his own defence; and yet,
if he were the robber, of course, we should have to give him up. It was
terrible!"
"I should say so," was Raymer's sympathetic comment. "How did you get it
straightened out, at last?"
"It hasn't been altogether straightened out until just lately--within
the past few days," she went on gravely. "After he began to get well, I
made him talk to me--about himself, you know. There didn't seem to be
anything to conceal. At different times he told me all about his home,
and his mother, whom he barely remembers, and the big-hearted,
open-handed father who made money so easily in his profession--he was
_the_ Griswold, the great architect, you know--that he gave it away to
anybody who wanted it--but I suppose he has told you all this?"
"No; at least, not very much of it."
Miss Grierson went on smoothly, falling sympathetically into the
reminiscent vein.
"Kenneth went to college without ever having known what it was to lack
anything in reason that money could buy. A little while after he was
graduated his father died."
"Leaving Kenneth poor, I suppose; he has intimated as much to me, once
or twice," said Raymer.
"Leaving him awfully poor. He wanted to learn to write, and for a long
time he stayed on in New York, living just any old way, and having a
dreadfully hard time of it, I imagine, though he would never say much
about that part of it. He says he was studying the under-dog, and he has
told me some of the most harrowing things he has seen and been through:
one of them had a little child in it--a baby that he found in a tenement
where the father and mother had both died of starvation ... think of it!
And he took the baby away and fed it and kept it...."
Broffin, sitting behind the window draperies, had his elbows on his
knees and his head tightly clamped between his hands. He was striving,
as the dying strive for breath, to remember. Where had he heard this
self-same story of the man who had fought some sort of a studying fight
in the back-water of the New York slums? In every detail it came back to
him like the recurring scenes of a vivid dream; but the key-notes of
time, place, and the man's identity were gone; lost beyond any power of
the groping mentality to recall them.
"That is why he thinks he is a Socialist," Miss Grierson was going on
evenly. "I've been wondering if you knew these things, and I've wanted
to tell you. I've thought it might help you to understand him better if
you knew something of what he has been through. But we were talking
about my dreadful suspicion. It persisted, you know, right along through
everything. At last, I felt that I just _must_ know, at whatever cost.
One day when we were driving, I brought him here and--and introduced him
to Mr. Galbraith. I was so scared that I could taste it--but I did it!"
Raymer laughed. "Of course, nothing came of it?"
"Nothing at all; and the reaction pretty nearly made me faint. They just
made talk, like any two freshly introduced people would, and that was
all there was of it. You'd say that was proof enough, wouldn't you?
Surely Mr. Galbraith would recognize the man who robbed him?"
"Certainly; there couldn't be any doubt of that."
"That's what I said. And then, right out of a clear sky, came another
proof that was even more convincing. Do you happen to know who the young
woman was who discovered the bank robber on the steamboat?"
"I? How should I know?"
"I didn't know but she had told you," was the demure rejoinder. "It was
Charlotte Farnham."
"What!" ejaculated Raymer. But he was not more deeply moved than was the
man behind the window curtains. If Broffin's dead cigar had not been
already reduced to shapeless inutility, Miss Grierson's cool
announcement, carrying with it the assurance that his secret was no
secret, would have settled it.