McLagan Achieves an End
Claire Carver was alone in the sun-parlour, which was one of the
many small comforts she had added to the square, frame building
which, since the bettering of her fortunes, had become her home.
She was occupying a large rocker-chair, engaged upon a task hardly
to be expected in a woman whose nights were spent at the gaming
tables of the Speedway, and whose skill, and nerve, and capacity
in holding her own against the vulture-like flotsam haunting that
gambling hell, was a by-word of the countryside.
Her busy needle was plying swiftly and skilfully upon some intimate
silken garment, the contemplation of which gave her the deepest
sense of womanly satisfaction. A small table was near to her
hand littered with all the odds and ends which usually overflow
a woman’s work-basket. She was quite alone with her work and her
thoughts. She was even glad that her mother was somewhere in the
domestic quarters of the house engaged, as was her wont at all
times, upon matters relating to creature comfort. She knew that
the older woman had found solace in their new life and she was
glad. She had found something like happiness in the care of her one
remaining offspring who had become all in all to her since those
days of her earlier disaster.
The afternoon was well advanced. The sun was pouring out of the
western sky, moving on with that speed which ever seems to
increase as the day progresses. It was hot but pleasant. The
day was quite windless, and the hum of mosquitoes and flies was
incessant beyond the netting covering to the range of open windows
with which the place was almost completely surrounded.
After a while the girl looked up and her pretty blue eyes were
unsmiling. The satisfaction she had in her work found no reflection
in them. There was even a suggestion of unhappiness in the
preoccupation of the gaze she turned upon the scene beyond the
netted windows.
Perhaps she was tired. Perhaps there was weariness of mind behind
her eyes. Her beauty was no less. There were no outward and visible
signs of wear for all the high pressure of the artificial sort of
life she lived. But the buoyancy, the intensity her wonderful eyes
usually displayed under the shaded lights of the Speedway’s poker
room were utterly lacking now. It almost suggested that the fierce
fires of the gambler spirit had already begun to burn the youth out
of her.
The scene beyond the netted windows seemed to hold her. The city
lay there sprawling on the lake shore. A scattering of small
dwellings intervened between her and the main buildings. It was
squalid. It was as ugly as only a collection of primitive human
dwellings could make it. From where she sat she could see the
pretentious dome of Max’s Speedway, which was the medium of her
fortune. She could see a flash of the sunlit waters of the lake,
and then beyond, overshadowing all the puny human handiwork, rose
the dark outline of the splendid hills of her childhood.
It was the latter that held her, and in a moment the precious
silken garment upon which she had spent more dollars than a year
ago she could have spent cents, was completely forgotten.
Her thought had flung back to another life and its people; folk,
who, unlike herself, lived in the open and the daylight. She was
thinking of the rugged coast with its fiercely alluring bays,
its inlets and its upstanding headlands. She was thinking of the
rough, strong man who lived in a home like an eagle’s eyrie so that
he could gaze upon God’s good world and revel in those fierce,
bracing elements which so appealed to and matched his own nature.
She remembered that last recent meeting with him on the deck of
the wreck in the bay from which she had fled in utter and complete
panic.
It was a moment not easily to be forgotten. She still shrank from
contemplating her own display of weakness, but it robbed her of
not one moment’s delight in the memory of the quiet nerve and calm
resolution with which Ivor McLagan had reassured and comforted her.
Then she remembered the time when he had deliberately picked her up
in his arms and helped her over the vessel’s side. He had done it
without a second thought, and as though he had been dealing with
some terrified child. And then she remembered his plain face as it
had smiled back into hers over the side of the vessel as returning
courage had once more restored her confidence.
He was quite plain and generally unsmiling for all a certain humour
she sometimes saw lying behind his eyes. Then he was so harshly
rough--at times. It was not always so. And it was mostly manner.
Oh, she knew that, and she smiled softly to herself as she thought
of the fashion in which he had sought to drive her from the deck
of that vessel. She sighed. She liked him. She liked and trusted
him. Nobody could help liking him, she told herself. He was so
transparently honest and--and simple. Then she smiled again, almost
tenderly, as she reviewed those scenes in which he and she had been
the only actors. How many were they? How many times had he asked
her to----?
Her eyes sobered and her thought passed swiftly to another man.
It was the dark Italian face of Max Lepende that shut out her
vision of the other. The thing she feared, the thing she had even
discussed with Ivor, was impending. Her woman’s instinct was deeply
perturbed as she thought of a little scene that had occurred
just as she was leaving the Speedway the night before. Max had
approached her as her game broke up. She had had an especial run
of good luck. He came to her smiling, elaborate, and impressive in
his manner. He had asked her permission to ride with her in her
automobile to her home. There was a bunch of “toughs” around, he
told her. He had had word of a possible hold-up. She must bank with
him for the night and he begged her to accept his escort. Then had
come the demonstration of the man’s purpose. In the automobile he
had produced a jewelled pendant of great value. He had craved her
acceptance of it with all the display which his extravagant manner
made so sickening to her. He had almost forced it upon her. But she
had refused, definitely, even coldly, and she had witnessed the
instant effect of her refusal upon him.
The girl was more of a psychologist than perhaps she knew. She had
certainly learned to know something of the man who ruled over the
destinies of the Speedway. She had watched Max as he returned the
pendant to its case. Driving the automobile, with her eyes on the
disreputable road, she had still been aware of the sudden cold,
hard light that had replaced the smile in the man’s dark eyes, and
noted the almost vicious snap with which he closed the case over
the glittering jewels he had offered her. And in that moment she
had remembered her talk with Ivor on the subject of this man, and
was glad of it. It was good to think of Ivor McLagan, with his
plain strong face, at such a moment. And the more so when the car
had stopped at her home, and Max had alighted and was taking his
leave of her. What were his parting words? Oh, she remembered them.
They were not easily forgotten, and as much for their tone as their
text. He had spoken with the same old smile she knew by heart,
and which she knew to be as meaningless as all the rest of his
artificialities.
“I guess the hold-up didn’t mature,” he had said. “I sort of felt
it wouldn’t, Claire, with me around. You see, the folks of this
city mostly have more sense than to get across me. The toughest of
them wouldn’t take a chance that way. And they’re surely wise. I’m
feeling sore, my dear, you couldn’t feel like handling that toy I
was hoping to pass you. Think it over. Don’t leave it the way it
is. Get a sleep on it and maybe, like that hold-up, you’ll think
better of it.”
It was a threat and the girl knew it. It was that moment which
she had long since contemplated when she must choose between this
smooth, unscrupulous creature who had built his fortune upon the
human weakness of those about him, and abandoning the precincts of
the place which had represented salvation to her in her darkest
moments. Ivor was right. “You’re going to get it if you keep
on----” She remembered his words. They were right. She had known it
at the time he had uttered them. And, somehow she was glad and it
comforted her, that it was he who had uttered them, and begged her
to quit the game at the Speedway. Well----
She turned her head sharply. She heard voices talking beyond the
parlour doorway. They were her mother’s and another which she
recognised instantly. It was the voice of the man of whom she was
thinking. In a moment she had bundled the silken garment in her lap
out of sight.
* * * * *
There was no sign to indicate Claire’s mood of the moment before.
She was smiling up into McLagan’s face, and the man was telling her
without subterfuge the object of his visit.
“You see, Claire,” he said, “I had to come along for two reasons.
One is, I’m going right up into the hills for a month or so and
won’t be along back in Beacon till summer’s nigh through and so I
won’t see you in quite awhile. And the other is----” He laughed in
his short, unmirthful fashion, “why--something else.”
The mother had left him to make his way to the sun-parlour while
she returned to her interrupted labours. She was glad enough to
do so. There was never a moment in her simple life that she was
completely without hope of this man as a son-in-law.
McLagan had sprawled his great body into a protesting cane-rocker.
The table, with its feminine litter intervened between him and the
woman who was the most precious thing in all the world to him.
“Seeing there’s two reasons, I guess that’s so,” Claire said slily.
Then her smile lit anew. “But I’m real glad you came along now,
Ivor. I’d just have hated you going along up to the hills and being
away all that time without seeing me first.” Then she laughed
outright. “Say, what’ll your tame spook be doing with you away?”
The man shook his head.
“I don’t rightly know,” he said seriously. “Maybe the sea’ll
swallow him up. And I’d say it would be good that way.” Then a deep
light grew in his eyes. “But it’s real kind of you saying that,
Claire. I just had to come along, anyway.”
The girl wanted to ask him why. There was an impulse, a quick,
hot impulse to challenge him, and somehow it was an impulse which
only a brief while ago would never have been stirring. But she
refrained. Instead she turned her eyes to the wide-open windows,
and gazed away at the hills of her childhood.
“You see, I’ve got things to tell you--before I go. And they’re
important,” McLagan went on quietly.
The girl’s gaze remained upon the hills so full of memory for her.
But suddenly her pulses had started to hammer in a fashion so
unruly that she was horrified lest the man might be aware of it.
“You mean about that--wreck?”
“Yes. About that--wreck.”
Claire sighed. Her pulses had suddenly sobered. But the calm that
replaced her moment of emotion had no satisfaction in it. Now her
gaze came back to the man’s face. And the wide blue eyes were
striving for a smile of interest she did not feel.
“Yes, tell me,” she said, with a pretence of eagerness. “It was
all very mystifying and horrible. I haven’t forgotten. I’d say it
isn’t easy to forget that sort of thing. My, I was scared.”
McLagan began to grope in his pockets.
“May I smoke?” He was holding up his cigar-case.
“Surely,” the girl laughed. “Isn’t it queer? You haven’t always
asked that.”
“No,” the man smiled back. He glanced about the handsome loggia
with its pretty comforts. “It’s queer the way we change with
circumstances.”
“Yes. Smoke up. I like the rougher things best. Maybe I didn’t
always feel that way. I’ve seen so much of the smooth and shining
since I came to Max’s Speedway that I kind of like to think of the
rough granite I used to know back there in the hills.”
McLagan glanced out of the window as he lit his long, lean cigar.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s stood up to things since the world began.
Say, kid, I want you to hand me anything you can about--Jim. I
mean, I know the story you and your Mum handed me at the time.
I know all that, but---- Say, he’d made a real big strike in
Australia and was on his way back to home. Was he bringing his
stuff along? Or was it banked? What were the plans he’d made? I
sort of remember a long letter he’d sent. Did he hand your Mum
details?”
Claire was startled. She sat up in her rocker and one beautifully
shaped hand was raised and passed across her smooth brow. Then it
rested for a moment upon her wealth of ruddy hair.
“We--we don’t know a thing, Ivor,” she said in a low voice, as she
gazed earnestly into his face. “Not a thing but what you’ve heard
from us. He’d made a strike. I--I believe it was a wonderful
strike. His letter conveyed that. And he was on his way home on
the _Imperial_ with the result of it. But whether in dust or a
bank credit I can’t even guess. Then the ship sank, and he was
drowned----”
McLagan shook his head.
“Not drowned,” he said.
For some moments there followed complete silence.
“But the ship sank. They picked up the S O S. She’s never been
heard of since. It was in mid-ocean. And Jim--Jim has never been
heard of again.”
The girl’s protest came with swift passionate intensity.
“The ship didn’t sink. And Jim wasn’t--drowned.”
McLagan spoke in that queer rough fashion he never failed to use in
moments of deep conviction.
Claire stared at him with questioning eyes. A surge of emotion
was driving through her. There was such conviction in the man’s
tone and manner. Jim was not drowned. The _Imperial_ did not sink.
Suddenly she leant forward.
“What do you mean, Ivor?” she urged in a tone almost as rough
as his. “Tell me. Tell me quick. I must know. Jim’s alive. The
_Imperial_----”
McLagan shook his head.
“I don’t think he’s alive. And the ship----”
“You mean he’s dead--killed--maybe----”
“Murdered for his stuff.”
Again there fell a silence and the man watched the face of the girl
through the smoke of his cigar. Her breath was coming quickly, and
she was struggling for composure. At last she steadied herself.
“Ivor, tell me. Oh, tell me all you know. Don’t keep me in
suspense. I know. I see. It’s--it’s something to do with that
wreck and--and the shadow----” She flung out one delicate finger,
pointing, “That figure. It--it--was--Jim’s--shadow. Oh!”
The girl’s intuition had leapt. There was excitement, passion,
horror in that final ejaculation and the man saw that it was no
moment for delay. There was a dreadful look in the beautiful eyes
that were gazing wildly into his. He removed his cigar.
“Get a grip on yourself, little girl,” he said quickly, and in
that tone of gentleness he only rarely used. “I’ll tell you what
I know. It’s not a deal. But it’s enough to say--to my mind--that
Jim was murdered. The wreck down on my coast is your Jim’s ship.
That I know beyond doubt. And that shadow--I don’t know how it
comes there, I don’t know the meaning of ghostly shadows, but I
guess I’ve convinced myself I’ve recognised in that shadow a crazy
sort of outline of your Jim. Jim was a mighty big man and he had
a walk I’d recognise dead easy. Do you remember, kid, that ghost,
or whatever it was, was moving. It was a queer figure of a man
walking--towards us. Do you remember? But of course you do. Do you
know I sort of recognised Jim’s walk in that thing’s movements?”
He shook his head with a puzzled, far-off look in his eyes.
“Guess, maybe, it’s fancy. Maybe I’m all wrong. But, anyway, the
notion’s back of my head. Jim died right there on that deck. He was
killed--murdered--_while he was walking aft_.”
He went on at once as the girl remained silent.
“Who killed him? And why?” He shrugged his great shoulders. “That’s
the thing I’m going to find out. Where’s the skipper and crew of
that ship? They quit her in fair weather. Why? Who changed her
name? Why? Why kill your brother? For his wad? Sure. Not for any
bank credit. Where’s his partner, that boy, Len Stern? He’s not
showed up.”
Claire was listening to his every word with close attention. Such
was her intensity that her lips moved as though she were repeating
to herself the things he said. The instant he ceased speaking,
sharp and passionately came her challenge.
“You’ve more than that to tell, Ivor!” she cried. “Tell it me. You
must. Oh, you don’t know all this means to me. You don’t know the
ugly thing you’ve raised up in me. Ivor--Ivor--! I think I could
kill the man who murdered our Jim with my own two hands. He was my
brother. He hadn’t a thought but for us. There’s not a thing in all
the world I wouldn’t do to--to hand those folks who murdered him
the justice they need. It just frightens me the way I feel. Tell
me.”
“There isn’t a thing more to tell now, Claire. There surely isn’t.
I don’t know a thing yet but what I’ve told you. But I mean to
know.”
“And then you’ll come to me--and tell me?”
McLagan shook his head.
“Ther’ll be no need.” The man sat forward in his chair, and
reaching out one hand it closed over the slim hand of the girl,
which, in her urgent emotion, had been laid upon her work-table.
His whole manner had softened from his threat against those he
was seeking. And, listening to him, the girl grew calm under the
influence of his gentle tone of supreme confidence. “Say, Claire,
I’ve asked for the right to fix things for you. I’ve asked, and
you’ve always refused. Well, I’m asking nothing now. I’m just
telling you. Jim was your brother. Well, I’m just taking to myself
the right to get after the folks who’ve killed him. You can’t stop
me. No one can. And when I’ve located ’em, when I’ve got ’em where
I need ’em, they’ll be dealt with, sure as God, in the fashion they
deserve. It’s my right which you can’t deny me. Jim was a friend
of mine and I love his sister better than life. No,” he went on,
in the same gentle tone, as the girl released her hand from his.
“I’m making no break. I’m not asking a thing. I’m just telling you
the straight fact, and assuring you of the thing my mind’s fixed
on. Maybe I’ve made you angry. I can’t help it. I don’t want to.
There’s not a thing farther from my mind. I want you to get the
fact I’m claiming a right the world, and you, can’t deny me. Now I
want you to try and forget all about it.”
“How can I forget it all?”
The girl shook her head. The trouble in her eyes was almost
painful. But through it all there was something gazing out upon
this big plain creature which anybody but he must have interpreted
without a second thought.
“To you Jim has been dead nearly a year,” McLagan said. “It’s just
as it was. Only the circumstances are different--now.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“What did you mean?”
The man was startled. In an instant a flush dyed his
weather-stained cheek. Then it paled abruptly. He turned and flung
his cigar at an open window. It hit the netting and fell on the
floor. He sprang up and collected it again and turned to the girl
sitting with her face turned away so that he only beheld the charm
of its profile.
“Claire?”
“Yes, Ivor?”
“Would it worry you if I made another bad break?”
The girl shook her head.
“I don’t think so, Ivor.”
The man smoothed back his unruly hair.
“Here, I want to get it clear. There’s just one sort of break I
feel like making.”
His tone was rough and contained nothing of his real feelings.
The girl inclined her head and her eyes came frankly to his face.
She read the doubt there. She read a whole lot more.
“I only seem to remember one sort of break,” she said, with the
dawn of a smile that was irresistible.
“Thank God!”
In a moment all doubt had passed out of the man’s eyes. He was
smiling with all the transparent happiness of a schoolboy. He came
over to the girl’s chair, and, reaching down, took possession
of both her yielding hands. She stood up, tall and slight, and
infinitely beautiful in her pretty afternoon frock.
“Now the right is doubly mine, little girl,” he said. “And, by God!
there’s no one on this darn old earth going to rob me of it. Mine,
eh? Mine at last!” And caught her up in his arms.