himself in the fallow interval; and for two complete days he was lost,
even to the small world of the summer resort, tramping for hours in the
lake shore forests or drifting about in one of the hotel skiffs, and
returning to the Inn only to eat and sleep when hunger or weariness
constrained him. On the whole, the discipline was good. He flattered
himself that the sense of proportion was returning slowly, and with it
some saner impulses. Truly, it had been his misfortune to be obliged to
compromise with evil to some extent, and to involve others, but was not
that rather due to the ineradicable faults of an imperfect social system
than to any basic defect in his own theories? And was not the same
imperfect social system partly responsible for the _quasi_-criminal
attitude which had been forced upon him? He was willing to believe it;
willing, also, to believe that he could rise above the constraining
forces and be the man he wished to be. That he could so rise was proved,
he decided, on the morning of the third day, when he chanced to overhear
the hotel clerk telling the man whose room was across the corridor from
his own that Andrew Galbraith still had a fighting chance for life. In
the pleasant glow of the high resolve the news awakened none of the
murderous promptings, but rather the generous hope that it might be
true.
It was late in the afternoon of this third day, upon his return from a
long pull in the borrowed skiff around the group of islands in the upper
and unfrequented part of the lake, that he found a note awaiting him. It
was from Miss Farnham, and its brevity, no less than its urgency,
stirred him apprehensively, bringing a suggestive return of the furtive
fierceness which he promptly fought down. "I must see you before eight
o'clock this evening. It is of the last importance," was the wording of
the note; and the heavy underscoring of the "last," and a certain
tremulous characteristic in the handwriting, stressed the urgency.
Griswold thrust the note into his pocket and made his preparations to go
to town, still fighting down the furtive malevolence which was unnerving
him; fighting also an unshakable premonition that his hour had come.
Once, before the Inn brake was ready to make its evening trip to Wahaska
and the railway station, the premonition gripped him so benumbingly that
he was sorely tempted. There was another railroad fourteen miles to the
westward; a line running a fast day-train to the north with connections
for Winnipeg. One of the Inn guests was driving over to catch this fast
train at a country crossing, and there was a spare seat in the hired
carry-all. Griswold considered the alternative for the length of time it
took the hotel porter to put the departing guest's luggage into the
waiting vehicle. Then he turned his back and let the chance escape. The
issue was fairly defined. To become a fugitive now was to plead guilty
as charged--to open the door to chaos.
It was still quite early in the evening when the Inn conveyance set him
down at the door of his lodgings in upper Shawnee Street. To the
care-taking widow, who would have prepared a late dinner for him, he
explained that he was going out again almost at once; and taking time
only for a bath and a change, he set forth on the cross-town walk. It
lacked something less than a half-hour of the time limit set in Miss
Farnham's note, but he attached no special importance to that. He knew
that the doctor's dinner-hour was early, and that in any event he could
choose his own time for an evening call.
It nettled him angrily to find that the premonition of coming disaster
was still with him when he crossed the Court House square and came into
the main street a few doors from the Winnebago entrance. Attacking from
a fresh vantage-ground it was warning him that the town hotel was the
stopping-place of the man Broffin, and that he was taking an unnecessary
hazard in passing it. Brushing the warning aside, he went on defiantly,
and just before he came within identifying range of the loungers on the
hotel porch an omnibus backed to the curb to deliver its complement of
passengers from the lately met northbound train.
Griswold walked on until he was stopped by the sidewalk-blocking group
of freshly arrived travellers pausing to identify their luggage as it
was handed down from the top of the omnibus. Alertly watchful, he
quickly recognized Broffin among the porch loungers, and saw him leave
his tilted chair to saunter toward the steps. Then the fateful thing
happened. One of the luggage-sorters, a clean-limbed, handsome young
fellow with boyish eyes and a good-natured grin, wheeled suddenly and
gripped him.
"Why, Griswold, old man!--well, I'll be dogged! Who on the face of the
earth would ever have thought of finding you here? So this is where you
came up, after the long, deep, McGinty dive, is it?" Then to one of his
fellow travellers: "Hold on a minute, Johnson; I want you to shake hands
with an old newspaper pal of mine from New York, Mr. Kenneth Griswold.
Kenneth, this is Mr. Beverly Johnson, of the Bayou State Security Bank,
in New Orleans."
Thus Bainbridge, sometime star reporter for the _Louisianian_, turning
up at the climaxing instant to prove the crowded condition of an
over-narrow world, much as Matthew Broffin had once turned up on the
after-deck of the coastwise steamer _Adelantado_ to prove it to him.
While Griswold, with every nerve on edge, was acknowledging the
introduction which he could by no means avoid, Broffin drew nearer. From
the porch steps he could both see and hear. Bainbridge, cheerfully
loquacious, continued to do most of the talking. He was telling Griswold
of the streak of good luck which had snatched him out of a reporter's
berth in the South to make him night editor of one of the St. Paul
dailies. Johnson was merely an onlooker. Broffin's eyes searched the
teller's face. Thus far it was a blank--a rather bored blank.
"And you are on your way to St. Paul now?" Griswold said to the
newspaper man. Broffin, whose ears were skilfully attuned to all the
tone variations in the voice of evasion, thought he detected a quaver of
anxious impatience in the half-absent query.
"Yes; I was going on through to-night, but Johnson, here, stumped me to
stop over. He said I might be able to get a news story out of his sick
president," Bainbridge rattled on. "Ever meet Mr. Galbraith? He is the
bank president who was held up last spring, you remember; fine old
Scotch gentleman of the Walter-Scott brand."
"When did you leave New Orleans?" Griswold asked; and now Broffin made
sure he distinguished the note of anxiety.
"Two days back: missed a connection on account of high water in the
Ohio. Might have stayed another twelve hours in the good old levee town
if we'd only known, eh, Johnson?" And then again to Griswold: "Remember
that supper we had at Chaudière's, the night I was leaving for the
banana coast? By George! come to think of it, I believe that was the
last time we forgathered in the--Say, Kenneth, what have you done with
your beard?"
Something clicked in Broffin's brain; then the wheels of the present
slipped into gear with those of the past and the entire train moved on
smoothly. The final doubt was cleared away. Griswold was the man whose
story Bainbridge had told under the after-deck awning of the
outward-bound fruit steamer; and the story in all its essentials was the
same that Miss Grierson had told on the veranda of the De Soto. Broffin
knew now why there had always been a haunting suggestion of familiarity
in Griswold's face for him. He had seen and marked the "bloody-minded
nihilist" of Bainbridge's story when the two were saying good-by on the
banquette in front of Chaudière's.
Broffin's right hand went swiftly to an inside pocket of his coat and
when it was withdrawn a pair of handcuffs, oiled to noiselessness, came
with it. Deftly the man-catcher worked them open, using only the fingers
of one hand, and never taking his eyes from the trio on the sidewalk.
One last step remained: if he could only manage to get speech with
Johnson first----
During the trying interval Griswold had been fully alive to his peril.
He had seen the swift hand-passing, and he knew what it was that Broffin
was concealing in the hand which had made the quick pocket-dive. He knew
that the crucial moment had come; and, as many times before, the savage
fear-mania was gripping him. In the cold vise-nip of it he had become
once more the cornered wild beast.
After the introduction to Johnson his hand had gone mechanically to his
coat pocket. The demon at his ear was whispering "kill! kill!" and his
fingers sought and found the weapon. While he was listening with the
outward ear to Bainbridge's cheerful reminiscences, the little minutiæ
were arranging themselves: he saw where Broffin would step, and was
careful to mark that none of the by-standers would be in range. He would
wait until there could be no possibility of missing; then he would
fire--from the pocket.
It was Johnson who broke the spell. While Bainbridge was insisting that
Griswold should come in and make a social third at the hotel
dinner-table, the teller picked up his hand-bag and mounted the steps.
Griswold's brain fell into halves. With one of them he was making
excuses to the newspaper man; with the other he saw Broffin stop Johnson
and draw him aside.
What the detective was saying was only too plainly evident. Johnson
wheeled short to face the sidewalk group, and Griswold could feel in
every fibre of him the searching scrutiny to which he was being
subjected. When he stole a glance at the pair on the porch, Johnson was
shaking his head slowly; and he did it again after a second thoughtful
stare. Griswold, missing completely now what Bainbridge was saying,
overheard the teller's low-toned rejoinder to the detective's urgings:
"It's no use, Mr. Broffin; I'd have to swear positively to it, you
know, and I couldn't do that.... No, I don't want to hear your
corroborative evidence; it might make me see a resemblance where there
is none. Wait until Mr. Galbraith recovers: he's your man."
Griswold hardly knew how he made shift to get away from Bainbridge
finally; but when it was done, and he was crossing the little triangular
park which filled the angle between the business squares and the
lake-fronting residence streets, he was sweating profusely, and the
departing fear-mania was leaving him weak and tremulous.
Passing the stone-basined fountain in the middle of the park he stopped,
jerked the pistol from his pocket, spilled the cartridges from its
magazine, and stooped to grope for a loose stone in the walk-border.
With the fountain base for an anvil and the loosened border stone for a
hammer he beat the weapon into shapeless inutility and flung it away.
"God knows whom I shall be tempted to kill, next!" he groaned; and the
trembling fit was still unnerving him when he went on to keep the
appointment made by Charlotte Farnham.
XXXIX
DUST AND ASHES
A full moon, blood-red from the smoke of forest fires far to the
eastward, was rising over the Wahaska Hills when Griswold unlatched the
gate of the Farnham enclosure and passed quickly up the walk.
Since the summoning note had stressed the urgencies, he was not
surprised to find the writer of it awaiting his coming on the
vine-shadowed porch. In his welcoming there was a curious mingling of
constraint and impatience, and he was moved to marvel. Miss Farnham's
outlook upon life, the point of view of the ideally well-balanced, was
uniformly poiseful and self-contained, and he was wondering if some
fresh entanglement were threatening when she motioned him to a seat and
placed her own chair so that the light from the sitting-room windows
would leave her in the shadow.
"You had my note?" she began.
"Yes. It came while I was away from the hotel, and the regular trip of
the Inn brake was the first conveyance I could catch. Am I late?"
Her reply was qualified. "That remains to be seen."
There was a hesitant pause, and then she went on: "Do you know why I
sent for you to come."
"No, not definitely."
"I was hoping you would know; it would make it easier for me. You owe me
something, Mr. Griswold."
"I owe you a great deal," he admitted, warmly. "It is hardly putting it
too strong to say that you have made some part of my work possible which
would otherwise have been impossible."
"I didn't mean that," she dissented, with a touch of cool scorn. "I have
no especial ambition to figure as a character, however admirable, in a
book. Your obligation doesn't lie in the literary field; it is real--and
personal. You have done me a great injustice, and it seems to have been
carefully premeditated."
The blow was so sudden and so calmly driven home that Griswold gasped.
"An injustice?--to you?" he protested; but she would not let him go on.
"Yes. At first, I thought it was only a coincidence--your coming to
Wahaska--but now I know better. You came here, in goodness knows what
spirit of reckless bravado, because it was my home; and you made the
decision apparently without any consideration for me; without any
thought of the embarrassments and difficulties in which it might involve
me."
Truly, the heavens had fallen and the solid earth was reeling! Griswold
lay back in the deep lounging-chair and fought manfully to retain some
little hold upon the anchorings. Could this be his ideal; the woman whom
he had set so high above all others in the scale of heroic
faultlessness and sublime devotion to principle? And was she so much a
slave of the conventional as to be able to tell him coldly that she had
recognized him again, and that her chief concern was the embarrassment
it was causing her? Before he could gather the words for any adequate
rejoinder, she was going on pointedly:
"You have done everything you could to make the involvement complete.
You have made friends of my friends, and you came here as a friend of my
father. You have drawn Edward Raymer into the entanglement and helped
him with the stolen money. In every way you have sought to make it more
and more impossible for me to give information against you--and you have
succeeded. I can't do it now, without facing a scandal that would never
die in a small place like this, and without bringing trouble and ruin
upon a family of our nearest friends. And that is why I sent for you
to-day; and why I say you owe me something."
Griswold was sitting up again, and he had recovered some small measure
of self-possession.
"I certainly owe you many apologies, at least," he said, ironically. "I
have really been doing you a great injustice, Miss Farnham--a very grave
injustice, though not exactly of the kind you mention. I think I have
been misapprehending you from the beginning. How long have you known me
as the man who is wanted in New Orleans?"
"A long time; though I tried not to believe it at first. It seemed
incredible that the man I had spoken to on the _Belle Julie_ would come
here and put me in such a false position."
"Good heavens!" he broke out; "is your position all you have been
thinking of? Is that the only reason why you haven't set the dogs on
me?"
"It is the chief reason why I couldn't afford to do anything more than I
have done. Goodness knows, I have tried in every way to warn you, even
to pointing out the man who is shadowing you. To do it, I have had to
deceive my father. I have been hoping that you would understand and go
away."
"Wait a minute," he commanded. "Let me get it straight; you still
believe that the thing I did was a criminal thing?"
"We needn't go into that part of it again," she returned, with a sort of
placid impatience. "Once I thought that there might be some way in which
you had justified yourself to yourself, but now----"
"That isn't the point," he interrupted roughly. "What I want to know is
this: Do you still believe it is a crime?"
"Of course, it is a crime; I know it, you know it, all the world knows
it."
Again he sat back and took time to gather up a few of the scattered
shards and fragments. When he spoke it was to say: "I think the debt is
on the other side, Miss Charlotte; I think you owe me something. You
probably won't understand when I say that you have robbed me of a very
precious thing--my faith in the ultimate goodness of a good woman. You
believe--you have always believed--that I am a criminal; and yet you
have been weak enough to let expediency seal your lips. I am truer to my
code than you are to yours, as you shall see if the day ever comes when
I shall be convinced that I did wrong. But that is neither here nor
there. You sent for me: what is it that you want me to do?"
"I want to give you one more chance to disappoint the Wahaska gossips,"
she replied, entirely unmoved, as it seemed, by his harsh arraignment.
"Do you know why this man Broffin is still waiting?"
"I can guess. He is taking a long chance on the chapter of accidents."
"Not altogether. Three days ago, Mr. Galbraith had Miss Grierson
telegraph to New Orleans for some one of the bank officials. Yesterday I
learned that the man who is coming is the teller who waited on me and
who gave you the money. As soon as I heard that, I began to try to find
you."
Griswold did not tell her that the danger she feared was a danger past.
"Go on," he prompted.
"You are no longer safe in Wahaska," she asserted. "The teller can
identify you, and the detective will give him the opportunity. That is
doubtless what he is waiting for."
"And you would suggest that I make a run for it? Is that why you sent
for me?"
"It is. You are tempting fate by staying; and, notwithstanding what you
have said, I still insist that you owe me something. There is a fast
train west at ten o'clock. If you need ready money----"
Griswold laughed. It had gone beyond the tragic and was fast lapsing
into comedy, farce.
"We are each of us appearing in a new rôle to-night, Miss Farnham," he
said, with sardonic humor; "I as the hunted criminal, and you as the
equally culpable accessory after the fact. If I run away, what shall be
done with the--the 'swag,' the bulk of which, as you know, is tied up in
Raymer's business?"
"I have thought of that," she returned calmly, "and that is another
reason why you shouldn't let them take you. Right or wrong, you have
incurred a fresh responsibility in your dealings with Mr. Raymer; and
Edward, who is perfectly innocent, must be protected in some way."
It was not in human nature to resist the temptation to strike back.
"I have told Raymer how he can most successfully underwrite his
financial risk," he said, with malice intentional.
"How?"
"By marrying Miss Grierson."
He had touched the springs of anger at last.
"That woman!" she broke out. And then: "If you have said that to Edward
Raymer, I shall never forgive you as long as I live! It is your affair
to secure Edward against loss in the money matter--your own individual
responsibility, Mr. Griswold. He accepted the money in good faith,
and----"
Again Griswold gave place to the caustic humor and finished for her.
"--And, though it is stolen money, it must not be taken away from him.
Once, when I was even more foolish than I am now, I said of you that you
would be a fitting heroine in a story in which the hero should be a man
who might need to borrow a conscience. It's quite the other way around."
"We needn't quarrel," she said, retreating again behind the barrier of
cold reserve. "I suppose I have given you the right to say disagreeable
things to me, if you choose to assert it. But we are wasting time which
may be very precious. Will you go away, as I have suggested?"
He found his hat and got upon his feet rather unsteadily.
"I don't know; possibly I shall. But in any event, you needn't borrow
any more trouble, either on your own account, or on Raymer's. By the
merest chance, I met Johnson, the teller you speak of, a few minutes ago
at the Winnebago House and was introduced to him. He didn't know me,
then, or later, when Broffin was telling him that he ought to know me.
Hence, the matter rests as it did before--between you and Mr.
Galbraith."
"Mr. Galbraith?"
"Yes. That was a danger past, too, a short time ago. I met him,
socially, and he didn't recognize me. Afterward, Broffin pointed me out
to him, and again he failed to identify me. But the other day, after I
had pulled him out of the lake, he remembered. I've been waiting to see
what he will do."
"He will do nothing. You saved his life."
Griswold shook his head.
"I am still man enough to hope that he won't let the bit of personal
service make him compound a felony."
"Why do you call it that?" she demanded.
"Because, from his point of view, and yours, that is precisely what it
is; and it is what you are doing, Miss Farnham. I, the criminal, say
this to you. You should have given me up the moment you recognized me.
That is your creed, and you should have lived up to it. Since you
haven't, you have wronged yourself and have made me the poorer by a
thing that----"
"Stop!" she cried, standing up to face him. "Do you mean to tell me that
you are ungrateful enough to----"
"No; ingratitude isn't quite the word. I'm just sorry; with the sorrow
you have when you look for something that you have a right to expect,
and find that it isn't there; that it has never been there; that it
isn't anywhere. You have hurt me, and you have hurt yourself; but there
is still a chance for you. When I am gone, go to the telephone and call
Broffin at the Winnebago House. You can tell him that he will find me at
my rooms. Good-by."
He was half-way to the foot of Lakeview Avenue, striding along moodily
with his head down and his hands behind him, when he collided violently
with Raymer going in the opposite direction. The shock was so unexpected
that Griswold would have been knocked down if the muscular young
iron-founder had not caught him promptly. At the saving instant came
mutual recognition.
"Hello, there!" said Raymer. "You are the very man I've been looking
for. Charlotte wants to see you."
"Not now she doesn't," was the rather grim contradiction. "I have just
left her."
"Oh."
There was a pause, and then Griswold cut in morosely.
"So you did take my way out of the labor trouble, after all, didn't
you?"
Raymer looked away.
"I don't know just how you'd like to have me answer that, Kenneth. How
much or how little do you know of what happened?"
"Nothing at all"--shortly.
"Well, it was Margery who wrought the miracle, of course. I don't know,
yet, just how she did it; but it was done, and done right."
"And you have asked her to marry you?"
"Suffering Scott! how you do come at a man! Yes, I asked her, if you've
got to know."
"Well?" snapped Griswold.
"She--she turned me down, Kenneth; got up and walked all over me. That's
a horrible thing to make me say, but it's the truth."
"I don't understand it, Raymer. Was it the No that means No?"
"I don't understand it either," returned the iron-founder, with grave
naïveté. "And, yes, I guess she meant it. But that reminds me. She knew
I was looking for you and she gave me a note--let me see, I've got it
here somewhere; oh, yes, here it is--gilt monogram and all."
Griswold took the note and pocketed it without comment and without
looking at it.
"Were you going to Doctor Bertie's?" he asked.
"I was. Have you any objection?"
"Not the least in the world. It's a good place for you to go just now,
and I guess you are the right man for the place. Good-night."
At the next corner where there was an electric light, Griswold stopped
and opened the monogrammed envelope. The enclosure was a single sheet of
perfumed note-paper upon which, without date, address or signature was
written the line:
"Mr. Galbraith is better--and he is grateful."
XL
APPLES OF ISTAKHAR
The swinging arc-light suspended above the street-crossing sputtered and
died down to a dull red dot of incandescence as Griswold returned
Margery's note to his pocket and walked on.
There are crises in which the chief contention looms so large as to
leave no room for the ordinary mental processes. Griswold saw no
significance in the broken line of Margery's message. The one tremendous
revelation--the knowledge that the dross-creating curse had finally
fallen upon the woman whose convictions should have saved her--was
blotting out all the subtler perceptive faculties; and for the time the
struggle with the submerging wave of disappointment and disheartenment
was bitter.