On the thirteenth day of March, 1906, Kerns received the following cable
from an old friend:
"Is there anybody in New York who can find two criminals for me? I
don't want to call in the police.
"J.T. BURKE."
To which Kerns replied promptly:
"Wire Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, N.Y."
And a day or two later, being on his honeymoon, he forgot all about his
old friend Jack Burke.
On the fifteenth day of March, 1906, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons,
received the following cablegram from Alexandria, Egypt:
"_Keen, Tracer, New York:_--Locate Joram Smiles, forty, stout,
lame, red hair, ragged red mustache, cast in left eye, pallid skin;
carries one crutch; supposed to have arrived in America per S. S.
_Scythian Queen_, with man known as Emanuel Gandon, swarthy, short,
fat, light bluish eyes, Eurasian type.
"I will call on you at your office as soon as my steamer, _Empress
of Babylon_, arrives. If you discover my men, keep them under
surveillance, but on no account call in police. Spare no expense.
Dundas, Gray & Co. are my bankers and reference.
"JOHN TEMPLETON BURKE."
On Monday, April 2d, a few minutes after eight o'clock in the morning,
the card of Mr. John Templeton Burke was brought to Mr. Keen, Tracer of
Lost Persons, and a moment later a well-built, wiry, sun-scorched young
man was ushered into Mr. Keen's private office by a stenographer
prepared to take minutes of the interview.
The first thing that the Tracer of Lost Persons noted in his visitor was
his mouth; the next his eyes. Both were unmistakably good--the eyes
which his Creator had given him looked people squarely in the face at
every word; the mouth, which a man's own character fashions agreeably or
mars, was pleasant, but firm when the trace of the smile lurking in the
corners died out.
There were dozens of other external characteristics which Mr. Keen
always looked for in his clients; and now the rapid exchange of
preliminary glances appeared to satisfy both men, for they advanced
toward each other and exchanged a formal hand clasp.
"Have you any news for me?" asked Burke.
"I have," said the Tracer. "There are cigars on the table beside
you--matches in that silver case. No, I never smoke; but I like the
aroma--and I like to watch men smoke. Do you know, Mr. Burke, that no
two men smoke in the same fashion? There is as much character in the
manner of holding a cigar as there is difference in the technic of
artists."
Burke nodded, amused, but, catching sight of the busy stenographer, his
bronzed features became serious, and he looked at Mr. Keen inquiringly.
"It is my custom," said the Tracer. "Do you object to my stenographer?"
Burke looked at the slim young girl in her black gown and white collar
and cuffs. Then, very simply, he asked her pardon for objecting to her
presence, but said that he could not discuss his case if she remained.
So she rose, with a humorous glance at Mr. Keen; and the two men stood
up until she had vanished, then reseated themselves _vis-a-vis_. Mr.
Keen calmly dropped his elbow on the concealed button which prepared a
hidden phonograph for the reception of every word that passed between
them.
"What news have you for me, Mr. Keen?" asked the younger man with that
same directness which the Tracer had already been prepared for, and
which only corroborated the frankness of eyes and voice.
"My news is brief," he said. "I have both your men under observation."
"Already?" exclaimed Burke, plainly unprepared. "Do you actually mean
that I can see these men whenever I desire to do so? Are these
scoundrels in this town--within pistol shot?"
His youthful face hardened as he snapped out his last word, like the
crack of a whip.
"I don't know how far your pistol carries," said Mr. Keen. "Do you wish
to swear out a warrant?"
"No, I do not. I merely wish their addresses. You have not used the
police in this matter, have you, Mr. Keen?"
"No. Your cable was explicit," said the Tracer. "Had you permitted me to
use the police it would have been much less expensive for you."
"I can't help that," said the young man. "Besides, in a matter of this
sort, a man cannot decently consider expense."
"A matter of what sort?" asked the Tracer blandly.
"Of _this_ sort."
"Oh! Yet even now I do not understand. You must remember, Mr. Burke,
that you have not told me anything concerning the reasons for your quest
of these two men, Joram Smiles and Emanuel Gandon. Besides, this is the
first time you have mentioned pistol range."
Burke, smoking steadily, looked at the Tracer through the blue fog of
his cigar.
"No," he said, "I have not told you anything about them."
Mr. Keen waited a moment; then, smiling quietly to himself, he wrote
down the present addresses of Joram Smiles and Emanuel Gandon, and,
tearing off the leaf, handed it to the younger man, saying: "I omit the
pistol range, Mr. Burke."
"I am very grateful to you," said Burke. "The efficiency of your system
is too famous for me to venture to praise it. All I can say is 'Thank
you'; all I can do in gratitude is to write my check--if you will be
kind enough to suggest the figures."
"Are you sure that my services are ended?"
"Thank you, quite sure."
So the Tracer of Lost Persons named the figures, and his client produced
a check book and filled in a check for the amount. This was presented
and received with pleasant formality. Burke rose, prepared to take his
leave, but the Tracer was apparently busy with the combination lock of a
safe, and the young man lingered a moment to make his adieus.
As he stood waiting for the Tracer to turn around he studied the writing
on the sheet of paper which he held toward the light:
Joram Smiles, no profession, 613 West 24th Street. Emanuel Gandon,
no profession, same address. Very dangerous men.
It occurred to him that these three lines of pencil-writing had cost him
a thousand dollars--and at the same instant he flushed with shame at the
idea of measuring the money value of anything in such a quest as this.
And yet--and yet he had already spent a great deal of money in his brief
quest, and--_was_ he any nearer the goal--even with the penciled
addresses of these two men in his possession? Even with these men almost
within pistol shot!
Pondering there, immersed in frowning retrospection, the room, the
Tracer, the city seemed to fade from his view. He saw the red sand
blowing in the desert; he heard the sickly squealing of camels at the El
Teb Wells; he saw the sun strike fire from the rippling waters of Saïs;
he saw the plain, and the ruins high above it; and the odor of the Long
Bazaar smote him like a blow, and he heard the far call to prayer from
the minarets of Sa-el-Hagar, once Saïs, the mysterious--Saïs of the
million lanterns, Saïs of that splendid festival where the Great Triad's
worship swayed dynasty after dynasty, and where, through the hot
centuries, Isis, veiled, impassive, looked out upon the hundredth king
of kings, Meris, the Builder of Gardens, dragged dead at the chariot of
Upper and Lower Egypt.
Slowly the visions faded; into his remote eyes crept the consciousness
of the twentieth century again; he heard the river whistles blowing, and
the far dissonance of the streets--that iron undertone vibrating through
the metropolis of the West from river to river and from the Palisades to
the sea.
His gaze wandered about the room, from telephone desk to bookcase, from
the table to the huge steel safe, door ajar, swung outward like the
polished breech of a twelve-inch gun.
Then his vacant eyes met the eyes of the Tracer of Lost Persons, almost
helplessly. And for the first time the full significance of this quest
he had undertaken came over him like despair--this strange, hopeless,
fantastic quest, blindly, savagely pursued from the sand wastes of Saïs
to the wastes of this vast arid city of iron and masonry, ringing to the
sky with the menacing clamor of its five monstrous boroughs.
Curiously weary of a sudden, he sat down, resting his head on one hand.
The Tracer watched him, bent partly over his desk. From moment to moment
he tore minute pieces from the blotter, or drew imaginary circles and
arabesques on his pad with an inkless pen.
"Perhaps I could help you, after all--if you'd let me try," he said
quietly.
"Dou you mean--_me_?" asked Burke, without raising his head.
"If you like--yes, you--or any man in trouble--in perplexity--in the
uncertain deductions which arise from an attempt at self-analysis."
"It is true; I am trying to analyze myself. I believe that I don't know
how. All has been mere impulse--so far. No, I don't know how to analyze
it all."
"I do," said the Tracer.
Burke raised his level, unbelieving eyes.
"You are in love," said the Tracer.
After a long time Burke looked up again. "Do you think so?"
"Yes. Can I help you?" asked the Tracer pleasantly.
The young man sat silent, frowning into space; then:
"I tell you plainly enough that I have come here to argue with two men
at the end of a pistol; and--you tell me I'm in love. By what logic--"
"It is written in your face, Mr. Burke--in your eyes, in every feature,
every muscle's contraction, every modulation of your voice. My tables,
containing six hundred classified superficial phenomena peculiar to all
human emotions, have been compiled and scientifically arranged according
to Bertillon's system. It is an absolutely accurate key to every phase
of human emotion, from hate, through all its amazingly paradoxical
phenomena, to love, with all its genera under the suborder--all its
species, subspecies, and varieties."
He leaned back, surveying the young man with kindly amusement.
"You talk of pistol range, but you are thinking of something more fatal
than bullets, Mr. Burke. You are thinking of love--of the first, great,
absorbing, unreasoning passion that has ever shaken you, blinded you,
seized you and dragged you out of the ordered path of life, to push you
violently into the strange and unexplored! That is what stares out on
the world through those haunted eyes of yours, when the smile dies out
and you are off your guard; that is what is hardening those flat, clean
bands of muscle in jaw and cheek; that is what those hints of shadow
mean beneath the eye, that new and delicate pinch to the nostril, that
refining, almost to sharpness, of the nose, that sensitive edging to the
lips, and the lean delicacy of the chin."
He bent slightly forward in his chair.
"There is all that there, Mr. Burke, and something else--the glimmering
dawn of desperation."
"Yes," said the other, "that is there. I am desperate."
"_Ex_actly. Also you wear two revolvers in a light, leather harness
strapped up under your armpits," said the Tracer, laughing. "Take them
off, Mr. Burke. There is nothing to be gained in shooting up Mr. Smiles
or converting Mr. Gandon into nitrates."
"If it is a matter where one man can help another," the Tracer added
simply, "it would give me pleasure to place my resources at your
command--without recompense--"
"Mr. Keen!" said Burke, astonished.
"Yes?"
"You are very amiable; I had not wished--had not expected anything
except professional interest from you."
"Why not? I like you, Mr. Burke."
The utter disarming candor of this quiet, elderly gentleman silenced the
younger man with a suddenness born of emotions long crushed, long
relentlessly mastered, and which now, in revolt, shook him fiercely in
every fiber. All at once he felt very young, very helpless in the
world--that same world through which, until within a few weeks, he had
roved so confidently, so arrogantly, challenging man and the gods
themselves in the pride of his strength and youth.
But now, halting, bewildered, lost amid the strange maze of byways
whither impulse had lured and abandoned him, he looked out into a world
of wilderness and unfamiliar stars and shadow shapes undreamed of, and
he knew not which way to turn--not even how to return along the ways his
impetuous feet had trodden in this strange and hopeless quest of his.
"How can you help me?" he said bluntly, while the quivering undertone
rang in spite of him. "Yes, I am in love; but how can any living man
help me?"
"Are you in love with the dead?" asked the Tracer gravely. "For that
only is hopeless. Are you in love with one who is not living?"
"Yes."
"You love one whom you know to be dead?"
"Yes; dead."
"How do you know that she is dead?"
"That is not the question. I knew that when I fell in love with her. It
is not that which appals me; I ask nothing more than to live my life out
loving the dead. I--I ask very little."
He passed his unsteady hand across his dry lips, across his eyes and
forehead, then laid his clinched fist on the table.
"Some men remain constant to a memory; some to a picture--sane,
wholesome, normal men. Some men, with a fixed ideal, never encounter its
facsimile, and so never love. There is nothing strange, after all, in
this; nothing abnormal, nothing unwholesome. Grünwald loved the marble
head and shoulders of the lovely Amazon in the Munich Museum; he died
unmarried, leaving the charities and good deeds of a blameless life to
justify him. Sir Henry Guest, the great surgeon who worked among the
poor without recompense, loved Gainsborough's 'Lady Wilton.' The
portrait hangs above his tomb in St. Clement's Hundreds. D'Epernay loved
Mlle. Jeanne Vacaresco, who died before he was born. And I--I love in
my own fashion."
His low voice rang with the repressed undertone of excitement; he opened
and closed his clinched hand as though controlling the lever of his
emotions.
"What can you do for a man who loves the shadow of Life?" he asked.
"If you love the shadow because the substance has passed away--if you
love the soul because the dust has returned to the earth as it was--"
"It has _not_!" said the younger man.
The Tracer said very gravely: "It is written that whenever 'the Silver
Cord' is loosed, 'then shall the dust return unto the earth as it was,
and the spirit shall return unto Him who gave it.'"
"The spirit--yes; _that_ has taken its splendid flight--"
His voice choked up, died out; he strove to speak again, but could not.
The Tracer let him alone, and bent again over his desk, drawing
imaginary circles on the stained blotter, while moment after moment
passed under the tension of that fiercest of all struggles, when a man
sits throttling his own soul into silence.
And, after a long time, Burke lifted a haggard face from the cradle of
his crossed arms and shook his shoulders, drawing a deep, steady breath.
"Listen to _me_!" he said in an altered voice.
And the Tracer of Lost Persons nodded.