about the most is how us insurance people come to figger out that you
wasn't dead but 'live and kickin'," continued the smoker. "I know good
and well that if I was in your fix that's what I would be interested in
the most. That's right, ain't it?"
Chaney raised his head from the pillow and nodded, and was, as the
saying is, all ears.
"Well, sir, I got to take the compliments for that part of it all by
myself. You might not believe it, but if it hadn't been for me they or
nobody else would probably never have suspicioned anything out of the
way about you bein' squashed out nice and flat under that landslide.
The way it come up was this way: I live at Kalispel, out in the
Flathead valley, you know. I'm the resident agent there for the Equity
and Warranty Company and on the side I'm a deputy sheriff for Flathead
County, or the other way around, whichever way you want to put it. And
it so happened I was the second human bein' to get into that Scalded
Creek basin after the quake last year. But this boy Hurley's brother
was the first.
"Just as soon as they felt the quake down on the river, this here
brother, name Sherman Hurley, he took a notion into his head that
something was wrong up in the mountains with his brother, the one that
had hired out to guide you. It was almost like as if he'd got a message
from his brother's spirit. So nothin' would do but what he must start
right in and make sure, one way or the other. So he lit out and he
traveled all that night, him knowin' all the trails and the lay of the
land, and by movin' about as fast over them ridges as his pony could
take him he made the trip in four or five hours less time than 'twould
take doin' it the regular easy way.
"By daylight next mornin' he was there and he took one look around
him and didn't see hide nor hair of you two nor of the horses, but he
did see that slide where it had come down right square on top of the
camp-ground along the creek, and he decided to himself, the same as
anybody else with good sense would, that the whole outfit of you was
under that mess of truck. He didn't waste no time foolin' around. If he
went in there fast, he came out still faster. It wasn't noon yet when
he got back to Polebridge with the news. His pony had went lame and
he'd finished the trip, jumpin' and runnin'.
"Well, they telephoned down to Kalispel and the sheriff sent me on up
by automobile to sort of represent the county, and he sent word on
ahead for the gang that was goin' in to wait till I got there. Well,
I burnt up the road gettin' through. They had quite a posse organized
when I pulled in--rangers and several kinfolks of the Hurleys and some
neighbors and part of a road crew out of the Park. This young Sherm
Hurley was practically all in from what he'd been through with and
mighty near grieved to death besides--he took on worse than any of his
family did--but he was still bent and determined on goin' back the
second time. He just would go, takin' the lead, tired as he was.
"Somehow him and me was ahead of the rest when we hit the rim and purty
soon after that I seen somethin' that set me to thinkin'. I always did
have kind of a turn for the detectin' business; that was partly what
induced me to be a deputy sheriff. Yes, sir, I seen something. Guess
what it was I seen?"
Chaney shook his head.
"Tracks, that's what. But I seen something a heap more significant
right shortly after that. But these first things were tracks. I didn't
tell nobody what was sproutin' in my mind, but I motioned everybody to
stay where they was for a minute and then I got down off the plug I was
ridin' and made one or two rough measurements and sized up things. Then
I holloed back to the others to come ahead and we went on down.
"So in a few minutes more we was all down there together in that basin.
But while the crowd was prowlin' round, with young Hurley beggin' 'em
to fix up some way of gettin' his brother's body out from under those
jagged rocks and them all keepin' on tellin' him it looked to them like
it was goin' to be an impossible job, I was doin' some prowlin' on my
own hook. Inside of three minutes I'd run onto something else that set
me to thinkin' harder than ever. Try guessin' what that was."
"Was it--was it the fishing rod?" asked Chaney. The question popped out
of him of its own accord.
"Nope--you're gettin' warm though. It was something right close by.
Say"--he raised his voice admiringly--"say, plantin' that busted bamboo
pole there wasn't such a bad idea on your part. I've said that to
myself often since then and I still say so. It showed you two had been
there before the slide and it made it look like you'd been took by
surprise when the big disturbance started. But the thing I'm speakin'
about now wasn't anything you'd fixed up for a plant. It was something
you must have overlooked in the excitement. Well, nobody could have
blamed you much for that. It must have been pretty squally times down
in that deep hole when the earth began to rock and the cliffs began to
crumble. You bet!
"Try to think of something besides the pole," he prompted. "Go on and
try!"
His prisoner, who was sitting up now, made a gesture to indicate that
he still was entirely at a loss.
"I'll give you a hint to help tip you off. What was you doin' just
before the hell-raisin' broke loose?"
"Well, my line got twisted in a sapling--"
"No, no, before that even."
"I--let's see? I--oh, by gosh!"
It all came back to Chaney; the answer to the riddle that had pestered
him that afternoon on the rim-rock nearly a year before. The thing that
had made him hesitate, half persuaded to return. The same thing which
subconsciously had fretted him through his sleeping on that first night
of flight. It came back vividly--how his duplicate false upper plate
had fallen out of his shirt pocket on the wet shale; how, absently,
he had wondered why the plate should be in his pocket when properly
it belonged in the canvas carryall which fitted under a flap of his
ground-cloth; how he had picked it up and balanced it momentarily on a
flat stone, not restoring it to his pocket for fear of another fall;
how then he noticed a sizable trout nosing in out of deep water to the
shallows and how, hoping to land him, he cast. And then the gut leader
snagging and he turning to free it and then--the first astounding
quiver underfoot.
"Exactly," affirmed the deputy as though he read what rolled in
Chaney's mind. "Your extry set of store teeth! There they was, settin'
on a rock, smilin' at me as pleasant as you please and shinin' in the
sunlight.
"I don't know why 'twas, but right then and there there popped into my
head something that happened once up in Nevada when I was a kid livin'
with my folks just outside of Carson City. A fellow in Carson that had
a glass eye hired a lot of Piute Indians to clean up a piece of ground
for him--get the rocks and stumps out, you know. Well, them Piutes
would work along all right as long as he stood right over them, but the
minute he'd go away they'd every last single one of 'em lay down and
take a nap. So finally he got an idea. He took his glass eye out of the
socket and set it on a stump facing down the field and he says to old
Johnson Sides, the Peacemaker of the Piutes, who could speak English
and acted as interpreter for the gang, he says to him:
"'You tell your bunch that I'm goin' away a little while, but I'm
leavin' my eye behind me to watch and see that none of 'em don't loaf
on the job.'
"And old Johnson translated it and he put off somewheres. Well, sir,
it worked fine for several days. Every time he quit the job he left his
eye behind him on the stump. And every time a buck felt like loafing
he'd look around and see that glass eye glarin' his way, or anyhow
seemin' to, and he'd duck his head and spit on his hands and go to it
again.
"But one day the boss came back and every blamed Indian in sight was
stretched out on the ground snorin' to beat thunder. One smart one had
slipped up behind the glass eye and slipped an empty tomato can down
over it so it couldn't spy on 'em. And so when I seen your false teeth
I thought of that Carson City feller's false eye, only his was covered
up with an old tin can and yours was settin' out in the open, tellin'
me things.
"For one thing they was tellin' me I maybe might be right on the
suspicions I'd had about them tracks up above. First, though, I asked
some questions without lettin' on to anybody what I had in my mind. A
detective on a case don't go round blabbin' his business to everybody
in sight, you know. I found out Hurley never had a bad tooth in his
head. So this plate must belong to the fellow that was with him, which
was you. That was point number one.
"I found out what size foot Hurley had and what kind of a boot he was
wearin.' Point number two: them fake tracks up above couldn't have been
made by him. They must have been made by you. Question then was, why
should you want to sneak out of that basin and duck your nut without
spreadin' the word? Says I to myself, 'That's for me to find out.' So
havin' quietly confisticated that plate for evidence, I climbed up to
the sandy stretch of the trail without bein' noticed particular by any
of the party and I made certain I hadn't been wrong in the first place
about them tracks."
"You keep harping on that," said Chaney with irritation. "What was
wrong with those tracks? Mind you, I'm not admitting anything nor
confessing anything, but I'm asking you what was wrong there?"
The under-sheriff grinned in appreciation of his own shrewdness.
"Nothin' much was wrong with them, only this," he explained. "There
was one set too many, that's all. When you backed across that sand you
done a first-rate job, but you plumb forgot to brush out the prints
you'd already made comin' in. You'd got down out of the saddle and
was walking your horse when you started down that day. I'm right,
ain't I? You needn't answer--I know I am. Well, that was your mistake,
brother--not wipin' out the first set. So there they was as plain as
the nose on your face--two sets of prints, about a yard and a half
apart and both pointin' in the same direction!
"They say a feller that's fixin' to commit a cold-blooded murder always
leaves something behind him to convict him, and I judge it's the same
way with a feller that takes it in his head all of a sudden to try
to work a fraud on an insurance company or somebody. Lawsy me, that
double set of tracks showin' there to give you away, and no doubt you
sayin to yourself how smart you was all the time you was makin' 'em!
Why, say, listen, the only way it could 'a' been possible for you to
make 'em honest would for you to be twins.
"Well, later on when I found out more about you, I wouldn't been much
surprised to hear you was twins and carried the other twin hid on your
person somewheres and trotted him out when you wanted to use him.
Because by all accounts you certainly are a great one, Chaney, for
havin' an extry supply of everything in your war bags. Well, maybe that
is good medicine--I won't say; but it certainly turned out bad for you
this one time.
"Well, anyhow, I kept my mouth shut, not takin' nobody in my
confidence, on the trip back to Polebridge. As soon as I could get
a minute to myself I called up Kalispel--and say, talk about your
coincidences! The news of you and young Hurley bein' missin' had been
given out the day before by the sheriff and it was telegraphed all over
the country to the newspapers, and the home office of our company in
New Haven, Connecticut, had seen the dispatch and wired to the district
agency at Helena sayin' you carried a policy with us and for them to
start an inquiry into the circumstances and get confirmation and all;
and the district agency had wired to me sayin' the same thing.
"Maybe them home-office folks wasn't astonished when the word came
right back to 'em that their local representative was already on the
job and smellin' a rat. Just to show you, they thought so well of me
on account of what I'd already nosed out they didn't send no special
investigator out from headquarters to handle the matter. They turned it
over to me, with an expense account and a drawin' account and all; just
told me to drop everything else and stick to this case till I found
you. So I got a leave of absence from the sheriff's office, and, buddy,
I've been on your trail ever since, and that's goin' on eleven months.
"Sometimes I'd think I was right close up behind you and then again
there'd be times when I'd lose the scent altogether and have to scout
round on the loose till I crossed it again. There's been gaps and
breaks to your movements where I just had to take a chance and bridge
over the jump and bulge ahead. Why, I'd lose sign of you and your
probable whereabouts for weeks and months hand-runnin'. But I didn't
quit you, not for a single minute, never, at no time."
Having achieved the somewhat difficult feat of incorporating four
separate negatives into one positive sentence, the pleased man-hunter
contemplated his legs outstretched before him with a gloating,
reminiscent smile.
"Well, that's about all of the yarn," he added after a short pause.
"No, it ain't quite all, neither. There was the way I first came to
come to get you spotted definite. Startin' off, I says to myself:
'He wouldn't go east or south; if he did, he'd run into one of the
Park hotels or a bunch of dude tourists on one of the main trails. He
couldn't come back out at the west side because that's where people who
saw him when he went into the mountains would be sure to meet him and
remember him. So, if he's got any gumption at all, he's went north.'
That's what I says, dopin' things out.
"So I goes north my own self. About all I had to go on for a spell
was a photograph of you that the home-office people dug up--that and
a pretty complete schedule of your ways and your habits. I banked on
them more'n I did on the picture--a fellow can change the way he looks,
but he ain't so apt to change the way he does. As it turned out, I was
right. Because when I'd worked along as far as Vancouver and made a
canvass of all the dentists in the telephone directory, and run across
one dentist over on a back street that had only just lately finished
makin' an extra upper plate for a feller answering to your general
plans and specification--a feller, by gee, that already had a perfectly
good plate in his top jaw--why, then I knowed I was on the right track.
"When you come right down to it, old-timer, that was what finally fixed
your clock for you. Say, you certainly are a great hand, ain't you, for
havin' two of everything? Yes, sir, you bet, two of everything!"
Seeming to like the phrase, he repeated it again and once again. All
at once then it flashed to Chaney's brain that in the drawled and
deliberate repetition was a special emphasis, the hint and the menace
of a special meaning. What was this guy driving at, anyhow? What
revelation as yet unmentioned was impending? Then, with the next words
from his captor it came--the realization.
"I gotta hand it to you there, yes, sir. Two of everything for you,
includin' aliases--_and wives_. Whoa! Stiddy, boy! Stand hitched!"
For the bigamist, with a vision of state's prison before his eyes, had
jerked so hard in his scrambling leap that he almost dislocated his
shackled wrist and did rack the frail bed down.
WE OF THE OLD SOUTH
[Decoration]
Just as he was, Captain Ransom Teal might have stepped right out of
the pages of some story book. He looked like a refugee from a list
of illustrations. Still, and with all that, there was on his part no
conscious striving for effect. He looked that way because that was the
way he looked. And his general walk and conversation matched in. He
moved in the gentle prismatic shimmer of his own local color. He was
the genuine article, absolutely.
On the other hand, Miss Blossom Lamar Clayton was what you might call
self-assembled.
Hers was a synthetic blend, the name being borrowed in these quarters,
the accent in those. As for the spare parts, such as mannerisms and
tricks of gesture and the fashion of dressing the hair, they had been
picked up here, there and elsewhere, as the lady went along. Almost
the only honest thing about her was the original background of an
inconsequential little personality. She was so persistent a cadger,
though, that only once in a while did the primary tints show through
those pilfered, piled-on coats of overglazing.
She was living proof of what petty larceny will do for a practitioner
who keeps it up long enough and gets away with it most of the time. She
was guilty on twenty counts but the trouble was you couldn't convict
her. Not with the evidence on hand, anyhow.
They met--the escaped frontispiece and the human loan collection--in
Hollywood, hard by one of the larger moving-picture plants. It was a
first-rate site for such a meeting between two such specimens to take
place, and highly suitable, because out there so many of the fictions
are dressed up as facts and nearly every fact has a foundation of
fiction which lies under it and lies and lies and lies. Almost anything
can happen in Hollywood. And almost everything does, if you believe
what you read in the Sunday supplements.
To be exact, the trails of these two first crossed in the dining-room
of Mrs. H. Spicer. They crossed there and shortly thereafter became
more or less interwoven.
Miss Clayton had been a guest at Mrs. H. Spicer's for some weeks past
now, long enough to be able to describe beforehand what would be served
for dinner on any given day. In the matter of her menus Mrs. H. Spicer
was very High-church; she followed after ritual. This saved mental fag,
which is a thing to be avoided when one is conducting a high-grade
boarding-house mainly patronized by temperamental ladies and gentlemen
who either are connected with, or who hope ultimately to be connected
with, what used to be the largest single amusement industry in the
United States before bootlegging crowded it back down into second
place.
A tapeworm would have some advantage over a surviving sojourner beneath
Mrs. H. Spicer's roof because the tapeworm never can tell in advance
what it is going to have for its chief meal for the day, whereas if you
were hardy and lasted through the second week at Spicer's, you knew
that Monday's dinner would be based on the solid buttresses of corned
beef and cabbage, and Tuesday's on lamb stew with cole-slaw on the
side, and Wednesday's on liver and bacon, and so on through to Sunday's
crowning feast, which was signalized by chicken fricassee accompanied
by a very durable variety of flour dumpling with fig ice-cream for
dessert; then repeat again in serial order, as named.
It was Mrs. Spicer's brag that she ran a homelike establishment. She
said it really was more like one big happy family than a mere boarding
house; to make it such was her constant aim, she said. But Tobe Daly
said--behind her back, of course--that if this was home he knew now why
so many girls left it. Tobe was always pulling some comical line.
This, being a Friday, was fish day with rice pudding to follow. Miss
Clayton, having finished her rice pudding, was in the act of rising
from her chair to go out and join this same Mr. Tobe Daly on the porch
when Mrs. H. Spicer brought in a strange old gentleman. With the air
which she always wore when presenting a fresh recruit to the other
members of her constantly changing family groups--a kind of soothing
yet a fluttering air--the landlady piloted him to the small table for
four over in the far corner and presented him to the pair who still
lingered at it--Miss Clayton and a Mrs. Scofield--and assigned him to
the one vacant place there and told Katie, the second dining-room girl,
to bring him some dinner.
Immediately there was something about the newcomer to catch the fancy
and set the mind to work. There was more than a something, there was a
great deal. It was not so much that he wore white whiskers and wore his
white hair rather long. Hollywood is one spot where whiskers--a vast
number of them--command favorable attention and have a money value.
The reckless partisan who swore never to trim until William Jennings
Bryan had been elected president comes into his belated own there.
After all these long and cumbered years he has at last his place in
the sun--as a benevolent uncle, or a veteran mining prospector, or the
shaggy but kind-hearted keeper of the lighthouse on the coast where the
little child drifts ashore in the storm, lashed to a mast, or the aged
wanderer of the waste-lands who in Reel Three turns up and in Reel Six
turns out to be the long-lost father of the heroine. Or what not.
So it was not this new boarder's whiskers and his long hair which
centered the collective eye of the dining-room so much as it was his
tall, slim, almost straight old figure, his ruddy and distinguished
but rather vacuous face, his high white collar and black string tie,
his black frock coat with the three upper buttons of the waistcoat
unfastened so that the genteel white pleated shirt bosom ballooned out
of the vent, his slim "low quarter" shoes. More than these it was his
bearing, so courtly, which meant so old-fashioned, and most of all it
was the sweeping low salute he rendered to Mrs. Scofield and to Miss
Clayton before he sat down and drew up. It was as though he said: "As
examples of fair womanhood I render tribute to you both. Through you I
honor all the gracious sex of which you two are such shining ornaments."
You almost could hear him saying it; your imagination told you this was
precisely the sort of high-flown, hifalutin language he would use, and
use it naturally, too. For here was a type come to life, a character
bit in the flesh. And that's a rare bird to find even in Hollywood
where types do so freely abound.
He asked Miss Clayton a question or two, and she made hurried and, one
might have thought, confused answers before she escaped to the veranda
where Tobe Daly, that canny squire of dames, was holding space for her
alongside him on the top step.
"Gee," began Tobe, "did you make it?"
"Make what?" she asked, settling and smoothing her skirts.
"The old pappy guy, who else?"
"He's nice," said Miss Clayton, still engaged in the business of
drawing the skirt down over her knees.
"He's a freak," said Mr. Daly. He cocked a shrewd appraising squint
at her side face. "Say, I was piping it off through the front window
when the old battle-ax towed him in and interduced him to you gals, and
the way it looked to me you kind of ducked soon as he began shooting
conversation at you."
"Never mind that part of it," she countered. "Who is he and where did
he come from? Or, don't you know? All I caught was his name. Teal,
something like that."
"Teal, huh? Swell name for an old duck, I'll claim. Jimmy Hoster
yonder was just giving me the low-down on him. It seems like Chief
Gillespie--you know, director with the Lobel outfit--well, Gillespie he
piped him off down there in Alabama or wherever it was down South that
he's had his bunch on location, shooting stuff for that new costume
picture that Winifred Desiree and Basil Derby are being featured in.
So Gil brought him along with 'em when they got back this morning,
figuring, I guess, on using him in that picture or else in something
else.
"They had him over on the Lobel lot this afternoon and they tell
me he went big just on his looks. Well, you got to hand it to that
Gillespie--he's some picker. If that old boy only had one of these here
white goatees on his chin instead of those mountain-goat drapes, he'd
be the most perfect Southern Colonel ever I saw in the fillums or on
the talking stage, either one. But he's the first one ever I saw--you
know what I mean, O. K. in every touch--outside of a book or a show
shop. I figure quite a lot of 'em around here will be wanting him."
"I wish somebody would decide they wanted me," she said. "This just
hanging round and hanging round gets on my nerves--not to speak of
other reasons."
"Well, ain't I told you I'm on the look-out for something for you?
Ain't I told you all about what I been doing 'specially on your
account? But with a million of these janes from all over the country
swarming in here and fighting for every chance that turns up, it's kind
of hard making an opening for a new hand."
"If I could just get on once, even as an extra, I'd show 'em something."
"If you'd listen to reason, kid, and be good to me"--he sank his
voice--"you know, be a real little cozy pal, I'll guarantee you'll be
something better than an extra. A fella likes to be a good fella and a
good sport and all, and go through for somebody, but what I say is he's
due his reward. Now, ain't he?"
The girl seemed not to have heard him.