CASA FUERTE
Winter would have said that he was too old a man to stay awake all
night, when he had a normal temperature; yet he saw the stars come
out and the stars fade on that fateful April night. He entered his
room at the hour when midnight brushes the pale skirts of dawn and
misguided cocks are vociferating their existence to an indifferent
world. Before he came there had been a long council with Mercer and
his aunt. Mercer, who had been successful in his mission, had barely
seen his chief for a moment before a gentle but imperious nurse ordered
him away. Winter caught a queer, abrupt laugh from the financier. The
latter beckoned to him. “See you are as obedient as I am when your time
comes,” he chuckled; and he chuckled again when both the soldier and
Miss Smith blushed over his awkward jocoseness. Yet, the next moment
he extended his hand with his formal, other-generation courtesy and
took Miss Janet’s shapely, firm fingers in his own lean and nervous
grasp. “Allow me to offer you both my sincere congratulations,” began
he, and halted, his eyes, which seemed so incurious but were so keen,
traveling from the woman’s confusion to the man’s. “I beg your pardon;
I understood--Archie who was here, gave me to understand--and I heard
you singing; you will hardly believe it, but years ago _I_ sang that to
my wife.”
“So far as I am concerned, it _is_ settled,” said the colonel steadily.
“We are all,” Keatcham continued, no longer with any trace of
embarrassment, as he touched the hand which he still held with his
own other hand, “we are all, as you know, my dear young lady, in
considerable personal peril; I regret that it should be on my account;
but it really is not my fault; it is because I will not relax my
pursuit of a great scoundrel who is dangerous to all decent people. But
being in such danger, I think you will be glad afterward if you are
generously frank, and give up something of the sex’s prerogative to
keep a lover on the anxious seat. Excuse me if--if I presume on my age
and my privileges as a patient.”
Janet lifted her sweet eyes and sent one glance as fleeting and light
as the flash of a bird’s wing. “I--I--reckon it is settled,” murmured
she; but immediately she was the nurse again. “Mr. Keatcham, you are
staying awake much too late. Here is Colvin, who will see to anything
you want. Good night.”
It was then that Mr. Keatcham had taken the colonel’s breath away by
kissing Janet’s hand; after which he shook hands with the colonel with
a strange new cordiality, and watched them both go away together with a
look on his gaunt face unlike any known to Colvin.
Only three minutes in the hall, with the moon through the arched
window; and his arm about her and the fragrance of her loosened hair
against his cheek and her voice stirring his heartstrings with an
exquisite pang. Only time for the immemorial questions of love: “Are
you sure, dear, it is really _I?_” and “When did you first--” To this
last she had answered with her half-humorous, adorable little lilt of
a laugh. “Oh, I reckon it was--a--little--all along, ever since I read
about your saving that poor little Filipino boy, like Archie; the one
who was your servant in Manila, and going hungry for him on the march
and jumping into the rapids to save him--when you were lame, too--”
Here the colonel burst in with a groan: “Oh, that monstrous newspaper
liar! The ‘dear little Filipino boy’ was a married man; and I didn’t go
hungry for him, and I didn’t jump into the river to save him. It wasn’t
more than wading depth--I only swore at him for an idiot and told him
to _walk_ out when he tipped over his boat and was floundering about.
And he _did_! He was the limit as a liar--”
To his relief, the most sensible as well as the most lovable woman in
the world had burst into a delicious fit of laughter; and returned:
“Oh, well, you _would_ have jumped in and saved him if the water had
been deep; it wasn’t _your_ fault it was shallow!” And just at this
point Mercer and Aunt Rebecca must needs come with a most unusual
premonitory racket, and Janet had fled.
Afterward had come the council. All the coil had been unraveled.
Birdsall appeared in person, as sleek, smiling and complacent over his
blunders as ever. One of his first sentences was a declaration of trust
in Miss Smith.
“I certainly went off at half-cock there,” said he amiably; “and just
because she was so awful nice I felt obliged to suspect her; but I’ve
got the real dog that killed the sheep this time; it’s sure the real
Red Wull!” It appeared that he had, of a verity, been usefully busy.
He had secured the mechanic who had given Atkins a plan of the secret
passages of Casa Fuerte. He had found the policeman who had arrested
Tracy (he swore because he was going too fast) and the magistrate
who had fined him; and not only that, he had captured the policeman,
a genuine officer, not a criminal in disguise, who had been Atkins’
instrument in kidnapping Archie. This man, whom Birdsall knew how to
terrify completely, had confessed that it was purely by chance that
Atkins had seen the boy, left outside in the motor-car. Atkins, so
he said, had pretended that the boy was a tool of some enemies of
Keatcham’s, whose secretary he was, trading, not for the only time, on
his past position. In reality, Birdsall had come to believe Atkins knew
that Keatcham was employing Mercer in his place.
“Why, he knew the old gentleman was just off quietly with Mr. Mercer
and some friends; knew they were all friendly, just as well as you
or me,” declared Birdsall. He had seen Archie on the train, for, as
the colonel remembered, he had been in the Winters’ car on the night
of the robbery. Somehow, also, Atkins had found out about Archie’s
disappearance from the hotel.
“I can’t absolutely put my finger on his information,” said Birdsall;
“but I _suspect_ Mrs. Melville Winter; I know she was talking to him,
for one of my men saw her. The lady meant no harm, but she’s one of the
kind that is always slamming the detectives and being took in by the
rascals.”
He argued that Mrs. Winter and Miss Smith knew where the boy was; for
some reason they had let him go and were pretending not to know where
he was. “Ain’t that so?” the detective appealed to Aunt Rebecca, who
merely smiled, saying: “You’re a wonder, Mr. Birdsall!” According to
Birdsall’s theory, Atkins was puzzled by Archie’s part in the affair.
But he believed could he find the boy’s present hosts he would find
Edwin Keatcham. It would not be the first time Keatcham had hidden
himself, the better to spin his web for the trapping of his rivals.
That Mercer was with his employer the ex-secretary had no manner of
doubt, any more than he doubted that Mercer’s scheme had been to
oust him and to build his own fortunes on Atkins’ ruin. He knew both
Tracy and young Arnold very well by sight. When he couldn’t frighten
Archie into telling anything, probably he went back to his first plan
of shadowing the Winter party at the Palace. He must have seen Tracy
here. He penetrated his disguise. (“He’s as sharp as the devil, I tell
you, Colonel.”) He either followed him himself or had him followed;
and he heard about the telephone. (“Somebody harking in the next room,
most likely.”) Knowing Tracy’s intimacy with Arnold it was not hard
for so clever and subtle a mind as Atkins’ to jump to the conclusion
and test it in the nearest telephone book. (“At least that is how _I_
figure it out, Colonel.”) Birdsall had traced the clever mechanic who
was interrogated by the Eastern gentleman about to build; this man
had given the lavish and inquisitive Easterner a plan of the secret
passages--to use in his own future residence. Whether Atkins went alone
or in company to the Casa Fuerte the detective could only surmise. He
couldn’t tell whether his object would be mere blackmail, or robbery
of the cipher, or assassination. Perhaps he found the insensible man
in the _patio_ and was tempted by the grisly opportunity; victim and
weapon both absolutely to his hand; for it was established that the
dagger had been shown Tracy by Mercer as a curio, and left on the
stone bench.
Perhaps he had not found the dagger, but had his own means to make
an end of his enemy and his own terror. Birdsall believed that he
had accomplices, or at least one accomplice, with him. He conceived
that they had lain in ambush watching until they saw Kito go away.
Then an entry had been made. “Most like,” Birdsall concluded, “he
jest flung that dagger away for you folks to find and suspect the
domestics, say Kito, ’cause he was away.” But this was not all that
Birdsall had to report. He had traced Atkins to the haunts of certain
unsavory Italians; he had struck the trail, in fine. To be sure, it ran
underground and was lost in the brick-walled and slimy-timbered cellars
of Chinatown which harbored every sin and crime known to civilization
or to savagery. What matter? By grace of his aunt’s powerful friend
they could track the wolves even through those noisome burrows.
“Yes,” sighed the colonel, stretching out his arms, with a resonant
breath of relief, “we’re out of the maze; all we have to do now is to
keep from being killed. Which isn’t such a plain proposition in ’Frisco
as in Massachusetts! But I reckon we can tackle it! And then--then, my
darling, I shall dare be happy!”
He found himself leaning on his window-sill and staring like a boy on
the landscape, lost in the lovely hallucinations of moonlight. It was
no scene that he knew, it was a vision of old Spain; and by and by from
yonder turret the princess, with violets in her loosened hair and her
soft cheek like satin and snow, would lean and look.
_Y si te mueve á lastima mi eterno padecer.
Como te amo, amame, bellissima mujer!_
“Ah, no, little girl,” he muttered with a shake of the head, “I like
it better to have you a plain, American gentlewoman, as Aunt Becky
would say, who could send me to battle with a nice little quivery
smile--_sweetheart_! Oh, I’m not good enough for you, my dear, my
dear.” He felt an immense humility as he contrasted his own lot with
the loneliness of Keatcham and Mercer and the multitude of solitaries
in the world, who had lost, or sadder still, had never possessed, the
divine dream that is the only reality of the soul. As such thoughts
moved his heart, suddenly in the full tide of hope and thankfulness,
it stood still, chilled, as if by the glimpse of an iceberg in summer
seas. Yet how absurd; it was only that he had recalled his stoical
aunt’s most unexpected touch of superstition. Quite in jest he had
asked her if she felt any presentiments or queer things in her bones
to-night. He expected to be answered that Janet had driven every other
anxiety out of her mind; and how was she to break it to Millicent?--or
with some such caustic repartee. Instead, she had replied testily:
“Yes, I _do_, Bertie. I feel--horrid! I feel as if something out of the
common awful were going to happen. It isn’t exactly Atkins, either. Do
you reckon it could be the _I Suey When_, that bamboo-shoots mess we
had for dinner?”
Although they spent a good twenty minutes after that, joking over
superstitions, and he had repeated to her some of Tracy’s and Arnold’s
most ingenious “spooky stunts,” to make the neighborhood keep its
distance from Casa Fuerte, and they had laughed freely, she as heartily
as he, nevertheless he divined that her smile was a pretense. Suddenly,
an unruly tremor shook his own firm spirits. Looking out on the stepped
and lanterned arches of the wing, he was conscious of the same tragic
endowment of the darkened pile, which had oppressed him that night,
weeks before, when he had stood outside on the crest of the hill;
and the would-be murderers might have been skulking in the shadows of
the pepper-trees. He tried vainly to shake off this distempered mood.
Although he might succeed for a moment in a lover’s absorption, it
would come again, insidiously, seeping through his happiness like a
fume. After futile attempts to sleep he rose, and still at the bidding
of his uncanny and tormenting impulse he took his bath and dressed
himself for the day. By this time the ashen tints of dawn were in his
chamber and on the fields outside. He stood looking at the unloveliest
aspect of nature, a landscape on the sunless side, before the east
is red. The air felt lifeless; there were no depths in the pale sky;
the azure was a flat tint, opaque and thin, like a poor water-color.
While he gazed the motionless trees, live-oaks and olives and palms,
were shaken as by a mighty wind; the pepper plumes tossed and streamed
and tangled like a banner; the great elms along the avenue bent over
in a breaking strain. Yet the silken cord of the Holland window-shade
did not so much as swing. There was not a wing’s breath of air. But
gradually the earth and cloud vibrated with a strange grinding noise
which has been described a hundred times, but never adequately; a
sickening crepitation, as of the rocks in the hills scraping and
splintering. Before the mind could question the sound, there succeeded
an anarchy of uproar. In it was jumbled the crash of trees and
buildings, the splintering crackle of glass, the boom of huge chimneys
falling and of vast explosions, the hiss of steam, the hurling of
timbers and bricks and masses of stone or sand, and the awful rush of
frantic water escaping from engine or main.
“’Quake, sure’s you’re born!” said the colonel softly.
Now that his invisible peril was real, was upon him, his spirits leaped
up to meet it. He looked coolly about him, noting in his single glance
that the house was standing absolutely stanch, neither reeling nor
shivering; and that the chimney just opposite his eye had not misplaced
a brick. In the same instant he caught up his revolver and ran at his
best pace from the room. The hall was firm under his hurrying feet. As
he passed the great arched opening on the western balcony he saw an
awful sight. Diagonally across from Casa Fuerte was the great house of
the California magnate who did not worry his contractor with demands
for Colonial honesty of workmanship as well as Colonial architecture.
The stately mansion with its beautiful piazzas and delicate harmony of
pillar and pediment, shone white and placid on the eye for a second;
then rocked in ghastly wise and collapsed like a house of cards.
Simultaneously a torchlike flame streamed into the air. A woeful din of
human anguish pierced the inanimate tumult of wreck and crash.
“Bully for Casa Fuerte!” cried the soldier, who now was making a
frenzied speed to the other side of the house. He cast a single glance
toward the door which he knew belonged to Janet’s room; and he thought
of the boy, but he ran first to his old aunt. He didn’t need to go the
whole way. She came out of her door, Janet and Archie at her side.
They were all perfectly calm, although in very light and semi-oriental
attire. Archie plainly had just plunged out of bed. His eyes were
dancing with excitement.
“This house is a dandy, ain’t it, Uncle Bertie?” he exclaimed. “Mr.
Arnold told me all about the way his father built it; he said it
wouldn’t bat its eye for an earthquake. It didn’t either; but that
house opposite is just kindling-wood! Say! here’s Cousin Cary;
and--look, Uncle Bertie, Mr. Keatcham has got up and he’s all dressed.
Hullo, Colvin! Don’t be scared. It’s only a ’quake!” Colvin grinned a
sickly grin and stammered, “Yes, sir, quite so, sir.” Not an earthquake
could shake Colvin out of his manners.
“Are you able to do this, Mr. Keatcham?” young Arnold called
breathlessly, plunging into the _patio_ to which they had all
instinctively gravitated. Keatcham laughed a short, grunting laugh.
“Don’t you understand, this is no little every-day ’quake? Look out! Is
there a way you can look and not see a spout of flame? I’ve got to go
down-town. Are the machines all right?”
“We must find Randall; the poor soul has a mortal terror of ’quakes--”
Aunt Rebecca’s well-bred accents were unruffled; she appeared a thought
stimulated, nothing more; danger always acted as tonic on Winter
nerves--“Archie, you go put your clothes on this minute, honey. And I
suppose we ought to look up Millicent.”
The colonel, however, had barely set foot on the threshold when Mrs.
Melville appeared, propelling Randall, whom she had rescued from the
maid’s closet where she was cowering behind her neat frocks, momently
expecting death, but decently ready for it in gown and shoes. Mrs.
Melville herself, in the disorder of the shock, had merely added her
best Paris hat and a skeleton bustle to her dainty nightgear. She had
not forgotten her kimono; she had only forgotten to don it; and it
draggled over her free arm. But her dignity was intact. The instant she
beheld her kindred she demanded of them, as if they were responsible,
whether _this_ was a sample of the Californian climate. Keatcham
blushed and fled with Colvin and the giggling Arnold and Archie, who
were too polite to giggle.
Mrs. Winter put on her eye-glasses. “Millicent,” said she in the
gentlest of tones, “your bustle is on crooked.”
One wild glance at the merciless mirror in the carved pier-glass did
Mrs. Melville give, and, then, without a word, she fled.
“Randall,” said Mrs. Winter, “you look very nice; come and help me
dress. There will most likely be some more shocks.”
Randall, trembling in every limb, but instinctively assuming a composed
mien, followed the undaunted old lady.
The colonel was going in another direction, having heard a telephone
bell. He was most anxious to put himself into communication with
Birdsall, because not even during the earthquake had he forgotten an
uglier peril; and it had occurred to him that Atkins was of a temper
not to be frightened by the convulsions of order; but rather to make
his account of it. Nor did the message through the telephone tend to
reassure him.
The man at the other end of the telephone was Birdsall. No telling how
long the telephone service would keep up, he reported; wires were down
around the corner; worse, the water mains were spouting; and from where
he stood since he felt the first shock he had counted thirty-six fires.
Ten of them were down in the quarter where some of his men had homes;
and a field-glass had shown that the houses were all tossed about
there; he couldn’t keep his men steady; it seemed inhuman to ask them
to stay when their wives and children might be dying; of course it was
his damn luck to have all married men from down there.
“Well, I reckon you will have to let them go; but watch out,” begged
the colonel, “for you know the men we are after will take advantage of
general disorder to get in their dirty work. Now is the most dangerous
time.”
Birdsall knew it; he had had intimations that some men were trying to
sneak up the hill; they had been turned back. They pretended to be
some wandering railway workers; but Birdsall distrusted them. He--No
use to ring! Vain to tap the carriage of the receiver! The telephone
was dead, jarred out of existence somewhere beyond their ken.
By this time the cold sunlight of the woefulest day that San Francisco
had ever seen was spread over the earth. The city was spotted with
blood-red spouts of flames. The ruin of the earthquake had hardly been
visible from their distance, although it was ugly enough and of real
importance; but, even in the brief space which they in Casa Fuerte
had waited before they should set forth, fires had enkindled in all
directions, most dreadful to see; nor did there seem to be any check
upon them.
Tracy had waked the domestic staff, and, dazed but stoical, they were
getting breakfast. But Keatcham could not wait; he was in a cold fury
of haste to get to the town.
He had consented to wait for his breakfast under Miss Smith’s
representation that it would be ready at once and her assurance that he
couldn’t work through the day without it.
“Happily, Archie,” explained Tracy, whose unquenchable college
levity no earthquake could affect, “happily my domestic jewel has
been stocked up with rice and oatmeal, two of the most nutritious of
foods; and Miss Janet is making coffee on her traveling coffee pot for
the Boss. That’s alcohol, and independent of gas-mains. Lucky; for
the gas-range is out of action, and we have to try charcoal. Notice
one interesting thing, Archie? Old Keatcham, whom we were fighting
tooth and nail three weeks ago, is now bossing us as ruthlessly as a
foot-ball coach; and Cousin Cary is taking his slack talk as meek as
a freshman. Great old boy, Keatcham! And--oh, I say! has any one gone
to the rescue of the Rogerses? I saw Kito speeding over that way from
the garage and Haley hiking after him. I hope the nine small yellow
domestics are not burned at the stake with Rogers; the bally fire-trap
is blazing like a tar-barrel!”
As it happened, the colonel had despatched a small party to their
neighbor’s aid. Haley and Kito were not among them; they were to guard
the garage which was too vital a point in their household economy to
leave unprotected. Nevertheless, Haley and Kito did both run away,
leaving a Mexican helper to watch; and when they returned they were
breathless and Haley’s face was covered with blood. He was carefully
carrying something covered with a carriage-robe in his hand.
“I’ve the honor to report, sir,” Haley mumbled, stiff and straight in
his military posture, a very grimy and blood-stained hand at salute,
“I’ve the honor to report, sor, that Private Kito and me discovered two
sushpicious characters making up the hillside by the sekrut road. We
purshooed thim, sor, and whin they wu’dn’t halt we fired on thim, sor,
ixploding this here bum which wint off whin the hindmost man tumbled.”
Kito smilingly flung aside the carriage-robe, disclosing the still
smoking shell of an ingenious round bomb, very similar to those used in
fireworks.
The colonel examined it closely; it was an ugly bit of dynamite craft.
“Any casualties, Sergeant?” the colonel asked grimly.
“Yes, sor. The man wid the bum was kilt be the ixplosion; the other
man was hit by Private Kito and wounded in the shoulder but escaped. I
mesilf have a confusion on me right arrum, me ankle is sprained; and
ivery tooth in me head is in me pockit! That’s all.”
“Report to Miss Smith at the hospital, Sergeant. Any further report?”
“I wu’d like to riccommind Private Kito for honorable minshun for
gallanthry.”
“I shall certainly remember him; and you also, Sergeant, in any report
that I may make. Look after the garage, Kito.”
Kito bowed and retired, beaming, while Haley hobbled into the house.
The consequences of the attack made on the garage did not appear at
once. One was that young Arnold had already brought the touring-car
into the _patio_ in the absence of Haley and Kito. Another was that
he and Tracy and Kito all repaired to the scene of the explosion to
examine the dead man’s body. They returned almost immediately, but for
a few moments there was no one of the house in the court. The colonel
went to Keatcham in a final effort to dissuade him from going into
the city until after he himself had gone to the Presidio and returned
with a guard. He represented as forcibly as he could the danger of
Keatcham’s appearance during a time of such tumult and lawlessness.
“We are down to the primeval passions now,” he pleaded. “Do you suppose
if it had been Haley instead of that dago out there who was killed
that we could have punished the murderer? Not unless we did it with
our own hands. They are maybe lying in wait at the first street-corner
now. If you will only wait--”
Keatcham chopped off his sentence without ceremony, not irritably, but
with the brusquerie of one whose time is too precious for dilatory
amenities.
“Will the _fire_ wait?” he demanded. “Will the thieves and toughs and
ruffians whom we have to crush before they realize their strength,
will _they_ wait? This is _my_ town, Winter, the only town I care a
rap for; and I propose to help save it. I can. Danger? Of course there
is danger; there is danger in every battle; but do you keep out of
battles where you belong because you may get killed? This is my affair;
if I get killed it is in the way of business, and I can’t help it! No,
Arnold, I won’t have your father’s son mixed up in my fights; you can’t
go.”
“Somebody has to run the machine, sir,” insinuated young Arnold with a
coaxing smile; “and I fancy I shouldn’t be my father’s son if I didn’t
look after my guest--not very long; he’d cut me out. Tracy is going,
too, he’s armed--”
“You are not both going,” said the colonel; “somebody with a head on
him must stay here to guard the ladies.”
He would have detailed both Tracy and Mercer; but Mercer could really
help Keatcham better than any one in any business arrangements which
might need to be made. And Keatcham plainly wished his company. Had
not the situation been so grimly serious Winter could have laughed
at the grotesque reversal of their conditions; Tracy and Arnold did
laugh; they were all taking their orders from the man who had been
their defeated prisoner a little while back. Mercer alone kept his
melancholy poise; he had obtained the aim of years; he was not sure but
his revenge was subtler and completer than he had dared to hope. Being
a zealot he was possessed by his dreams. Suppose he had converted this
relentless and tremendous power to his own way of faith; what mightn’t
he hope to accomplish? Meanwhile, so far as the business in hand was
concerned, he believed in Keatcham and in Keatcham’s methods of help;
he bowed to the innate power of the man; and he was as simply obedient
and loyal as Kito would have been to his feudal lord.
In a very brief time all the arrangements were made; the four men went
into the _patio_ to enter the touring-car. They walked up to the
empty machine. The colonel stepped into the front seat of the machine.
Something in the noise of the engine which was panting and straining
against its control, some tiny sibilant undertone which any other ear
would have missed, warned his; he bent quickly. A dark object gyrated
above the heads of the other two just mounting the long step; it landed
with a prodigious splash in the fountain, flying into a multitude of
sputtering atoms and hurling a great column of water high up in air.
Unheeding its shrieking clamor, the soldier sprang over the side of
the car, darted through the great arched doorway out upon the terrace
toward a clump of rubber-trees. He fired; again he fired.
In every catastrophe the spectators’ minds lose some parts of the
action. There are blanks to be supplied by no one. Every one of the
men and women present on that fatal morning had a different story.
Colvin was packing; he could only remember the deafening roar and
the shouting; and when he got down-stairs and saw--he turned deadly
sick; his chief impression is the backs of people and the way their
hands would shake. Janet Smith, inside, dressing Haley’s wounds, was
first warned by the tumult and cries; she as well as Archie and Haley
who were with her could see nothing until they got outside. All Mrs.
Melville saw was the glistening back of the car and Mercer stepping
into the car and instantly lurching backward. The explosion seemed
to her simultaneous with Mercer’s entering the car. But Mrs. Rebecca
Winter, who perhaps had the coolest head of all, and who was standing
on the dais of the arcade exactly opposite the car, distinctly saw
Keatcham with an amazing exertion of vigor for a man just risen from a
sick-bed, and with a kind of whirling motion, literally hurl Mercer out
of the car. She is sure of this because of one homely little detail,
sickening in its very homeliness. As he clutched Mercer Keatcham’s
soft gray hat dropped off and the light burnished the bald dome of his
head. In the space of that glance she heard a crackle and a roar and
Kito screamed in Japanese, running in from the carriage side. She can
not tell whether Tracy or Arnold reached the mangled creature on the
pavement first. Arnold only remembers how the carriage-robe flapped in
Tracy’s shaking hands before he flung it over the man. Tracy’s fair
skin was a streaky, bluish white, and his under jaw kept moving up and
down like that of a fish out of water, while he gasped, never uttering
a sound.
Young Arnold was trembling so that his hands shook when he would have
raised the wounded man. Mercer alone was composed although deathly
pale. He had the presence of mind to throw the harmless fragments of
the bomb into the fountain and to examine the interior of the car lest
there should be more of destruction hidden therein. Then he approached
the heap on the flags; but Keatcham was able to motion him away, saying
in his old voice, not softened in the least: “Don’t you do that! I’m
all in. No use. They got me. But it won’t do them any good; you boys
know that will you witnessed; it gives a fifty thousand for the arrest
and conviction or the killing of Atkins; his own cutthroats will betray
him for that. But--where’s Winter? You damn careless fools didn’t let
_him_ get hurt?”
“Shure, sor, he didn’t let himsilf git hurted,” Haley blurted out; he
had run in after Miss Smith, brandy bottle in hand; “’tis the murdering
dagoes is gettin’ hurted off there behind the big rubber-trees; I kin
see the dead legs of thim, this minnit. ’Tis a grand cool shot the
colonel is, sor.”
“Bring him in, let them go; they were only tools,” panted Keatcham
weakly; but the brandy revived him; and his lips curled in a faint
smile as Janet Smith struck a match to heat the teaspoonful of water
for her hypodermic. “Make it good and strong, give me time to say
something to Mercer and Winter--there he comes; good runners those boys
are!”
[Illustration: He kept death at bay by the sheer force of his will.
Page 368]
Tracy and Arnold, acting on a common unspoken impulse, had dashed after
Winter and were pushing him forward between them. Keatcham was nearly
spent, but he rallied to say the words in his mind. He kept death at
bay by the sheer force of his will. When Winter knelt down beside him,
with a poignant memory of another time in the same place when he had
knelt beside a seemingly dying man, and gently touched the unmarred
right hand lying on the carriage-robe, he could still form a smile
with his stiff lips and mutter: “Only thing about me isn’t in tatters;
of course you touched it and didn’t try to lift me where I’m all in
pieces. You always understood. Listen! You, too, Mercer. Winter knows
the things I’m bound to have go through. I’ve explained them to him.
You’ll be my executors and trustees? A hundred thousand a year; not too
big a salary for the work--you can do it. It’s a bigger job than the
army one, Winter. Warnebold will look after the other end. He’s narrow
but he is straight. I’ve made it worth his while. Some loose ends--it
can’t be helped now. Maybe you’ll find out there are more difficulties
in administering a big fortune than you fancied; and that it isn’t the
easiest thing in the world helping fools who can’t ... help themselves.
There are all those Tidewater idiots ... made me read about ... you’ll
have to attend to them, Mercer ... old woman in the queer clothes ...
chorus girl ... those old ladies who had one egg between them for
breakfast ... you’ll see to them all?”
“Yes,” said Mercer, looking down on the shrunken features with a look
of pain and bewilderment. “Yes, suh, I’ll do my best.”
“And--we’re even?”
“I reckon I am obliged to call it so, suh,” returned Mercer with a
long, gasping sigh, “but--my Lord! you’d better have let _me_ go!”
“Very likely,” said Keatcham dryly, “the city needs me. Well, Winter,
you must look after that. I’ve been thinking why a man throws his life
away as I did; he _has_ to, unless he’s a poltroon. He can’t count
whether he’s more useful than the one he saves ... he has simply _got_
to save him ... you were a good deal right, Winter, about not doing the
evil thing to get the good. No, it’s a bad time for me to be taken; but
it’s an honorable discharge.... Helen will be glad ... you know I’m not
a pig, Winter ... do what I tried to do ... where’s my kind nurse?”
Janet was trying by almost imperceptible movements to edge a pillow
under his shoulders; he was past turning his head, but his eyes moved
toward her. “I’ve left you ... a wedding gift ... if I lived ... given
to you; but made it safe, anyhow. Mercer?”
His voice had grown so feeble and came in such gasps from his torn
and laboring chest that Mercer bent close to his lips to hear the
struggling sentences. “Mercer,” he whispered, “I want ... just ... to
tell you ... _you didn’t convert me_!”
Thus, having made amends to his own will, having also, let us humbly
hope, made amends to that greater and wiser Will which is of more
merciful and wider vision that our weakness can comprehend, Edwin
Keatcham very willingly closed his eyes on earth.