CHAPTER XXIV MADAME BO-PEEP, OF THE RANCHES

I

THE WORLD AND THE DOOR

A favourite dodge to get your story read by the public is to assert

that it is true, and then add that Truth is stranger than Fiction. I do

not know if the yarn I am anxious for you to read is true; but the

Spanish purser of the fruit steamer _El Carrero_ swore to me by the

shrine of Santa Guadalupe that he had the facts from the U. S.

vice-consul at La Paz—a person who could not possibly have been

cognizant of half of them.

As for the adage quoted above, I take pleasure in puncturing it by

affirming that I read in a purely fictional story the other day the

line: “‘Be it so,’ said the policeman.” Nothing so strange has yet

cropped out in Truth.

When H. Ferguson Hedges, millionaire promoter, investor and

man-about-New-York, turned his thoughts upon matters convivial, and

word of it went “down the line,” bouncers took a precautionary turn at

the Indian clubs, waiters put ironstone china on his favourite tables,

cab drivers crowded close to the curbstone in front of all-night cafés,

and careful cashiers in his regular haunts charged up a few bottles to

his account by way of preface and introduction.

As a money power a one-millionaire is of small account in a city where

the man who cuts your slice of beef behind the free-lunch counter rides

to work in his own automobile. But Hedges spent his money as lavishly,

loudly and showily as though he were only a clerk squandering a week’s

wages. And, after all, the bartender takes no interest in your reserve

fund. He would rather look you up on his cash register than in

Bradstreet.

On the evening that the material allegation of facts begins, Hedges was

bidding dull care begone in the company of five or six good

fellows—acquaintances and friends who had gathered in his wake.

Among them were two younger men—Ralph Merriam, a broker, and Wade, his

friend.

Two deep-sea cabmen were chartered. At Columbus Circle they hove to

long enough to revile the statue of the great navigator,

unpatriotically rebuking him for having voyaged in search of land

instead of liquids. Midnight overtook the party marooned in the rear of

a cheap café far uptown.

Hedges was arrogant, overriding and quarrelsome. He was burly and

tough, iron-gray but vigorous, “good” for the rest of the night. There

was a dispute—about nothing that matters—and the five-fingered words

were passed—the words that represent the glove cast into the lists.

Merriam played the rôle of the verbal Hotspur.

Hedges rose quickly, seized his chair, swung it once and smashed wildly

down at Merriam’s head. Merriam dodged, drew a small revolver and shot

Hedges in the chest. The leading roysterer stumbled, fell in a wry

heap, and lay still.

Wade, a commuter, had formed that habit of promptness. He juggled

Merriam out a side door, walked him to the corner, ran him a block and

caught a hansom. They rode five minutes and then got out on a dark

corner and dismissed the cab. Across the street the lights of a small

saloon betrayed its hectic hospitality.

“Go in the back room of that saloon,” said Wade, “and wait. I’ll go

find out what’s doing and let you know. You may take two drinks while I

am gone—no more.”

At ten minutes to one o’clock Wade returned. “Brace up, old chap,” he

said. “The ambulance got there just as I did. The doctor says he’s

dead. You may have one more drink. You let me run this thing for you.

You’ve got to skip. I don’t believe a chair is legally a deadly weapon.

You’ve got to make tracks, that’s all there is to it.”

Merriam complained of the cold querulously, and asked for another

drink. “Did you notice what big veins he had on the back of his hands?”

he said. “I never could stand—I never could—”

“Take one more,” said Wade, “and then come on. I’ll see you through.”

Wade kept his promise so well that at eleven o’clock the next morning

Merriam, with a new suit case full of new clothes and hair-brushes,

stepped quietly on board a little 500-ton fruit steamer at an East

River pier. The vessel had brought the season’s first cargo of limes

from Port Limon, and was homeward bound. Merriam had his bank balance

of $2,800 in his pocket in large bills, and brief instructions to pile

up as much water as he could between himself and New York. There was no

time for anything more.

From Port Limon Merriam worked down the coast by schooner and sloop to

Colon, thence across the isthmus to Panama, where he caught a tramp

bound for Callao and such intermediate ports as might tempt the

discursive skipper from his course.

It was at La Paz that Merriam decided to land—La Paz the Beautiful, a

little harbourless town smothered in a living green ribbon that banded

the foot of a cloud-piercing mountain. Here the little steamer stopped

to tread water while the captain’s dory took him ashore that he might

feel the pulse of the cocoanut market. Merriam went too, with his suit

case, and remained.

Kalb, the vice-consul, a Græco-Armenian citizen of the United States,

born in Hessen-Darmstadt, and educated in Cincinnati ward primaries,

considered all Americans his brothers and bankers. He attached himself

to Merriam’s elbow, introduced him to every one in La Paz who wore

shoes, borrowed ten dollars and went back to his hammock.

There was a little wooden hotel in the edge of a banana grove, facing

the sea, that catered to the tastes of the few foreigners that had

dropped out of the world into the _triste_ Peruvian town. At Kalb’s

introductory: “Shake hands with ––––,” he had obediently exchanged

manual salutations with a German doctor, one French and two Italian

merchants, and three or four Americans who were spoken of as gold men,

rubber men, mahogany men—anything but men of living tissue.

After dinner Merriam sat in a corner of the broad front _galeria_ with

Bibb, a Vermonter interested in hydraulic mining, and smoked and drank

Scotch “smoke.” The moonlit sea, spreading infinitely before him,

seemed to separate him beyond all apprehension from his old life. The

horrid tragedy in which he had played such a disastrous part now began,

for the first time since he stole on board the fruiter, a wretched

fugitive, to lose its sharper outlines. Distance lent assuagement to

his view. Bibb had opened the flood-gates of a stream of long-dammed

discourse, overjoyed to have captured an audience that had not suffered

under a hundred repetitions of his views and theories.

“One year more,” said Bibb, “and I’ll go back to God’s country. Oh, I

know it’s pretty here, and you get _dolce far niente_ handed to you in

chunks, but this country wasn’t made for a white man to live in. You’ve

got to have to plug through snow now and then, and see a game of

baseball and wear a stiff collar and have a policeman cuss you. Still,

La Paz is a good sort of a pipe-dreamy old hole. And Mrs. Conant is

here. When any of us feels particularly like jumping into the sea we

rush around to her house and propose. It’s nicer to be rejected by Mrs.

Conant than it is to be drowned. And they say drowning is a delightful

sensation.”

“Many like her here?” asked Merriam.

“Not anywhere,” said Bibb, with a comfortable sigh. She’s the only

white woman in La Paz. The rest range from a dappled dun to the colour

of a b-flat piano key. She’s been here a year. Comes from—well, you

know how a woman can talk—ask ’em to say ‘string’ and they’ll say

‘crow’s foot’ or ‘cat’s cradle.’ Sometimes you’d think she was from

Oshkosh, and again from Jacksonville, Florida, and the next day from

Cape Cod.”

“Mystery?” ventured Merriam.

“M—well, she looks it; but her talk’s translucent enough. But that’s a

woman. I suppose if the Sphinx were to begin talking she’d merely say:

‘Goodness me! more visitors coming for dinner, and nothing to eat but

the sand which is here.’ But you won’t think about that when you meet

her, Merriam. You’ll propose to her too.”

To make a hard story soft, Merriam did meet her and propose to her. He

found her to be a woman in black with hair the colour of a bronze

turkey’s wings, and mysterious, _remembering_ eyes that—well, that

looked as if she might have been a trained nurse looking on when Eve

was created. Her words and manner, though, were translucent, as Bibb

had said. She spoke, vaguely, of friends in California and some of the

lower parishes in Louisiana. The tropical climate and indolent life

suited her; she had thought of buying an orange grove later on; La Paz,

all in all, charmed her.

Merriam’s courtship of the Sphinx lasted three months, although he did

not know that he was courting her. He was using her as an antidote for

remorse, until he found, too late, that he had acquired the habit.

During that time he had received no news from home. Wade did not know

where he was; and he was not sure of Wade’s exact address, and was

afraid to write. He thought he had better let matters rest as they were

for a while.

One afternoon he and Mrs. Conant hired two ponies and rode out along

the mountain trail as far as the little cold river that came tumbling

down the foothills. There they stopped for a drink, and Merriam spoke

his piece—he proposed, as Bibb had prophesied.

Mrs. Conant gave him one glance of brilliant tenderness, and then her

face took on such a strange, haggard look that Merriam was shaken out

of his intoxication and back to his senses.

“I beg your pardon, Florence,” he said, releasing her hand; “but I’ll

have to hedge on part of what I said. I can’t ask you to marry me, of

course. I killed a man in New York—a man who was my friend—shot him

down—in quite a cowardly manner, I understand. Of course, the drinking

didn’t excuse it. Well, I couldn’t resist having my say; and I’ll

always mean it. I’m here as a fugitive from justice, and—I suppose that

ends our acquaintance.”

Mrs. Conant plucked little leaves assiduously from the low-hanging

branch of a lime tree.

“I suppose so,” she said, in low and oddly uneven tones; “but that

depends upon you. I’ll be as honest as you were. I poisoned my husband.

I am a self-made widow. A man cannot love a murderess. So I suppose

that ends our acquaintance.”

She looked up at him slowly. His face turned a little pale, and he

stared at her blankly, like a deaf-and-dumb man who was wondering what

it was all about.

She took a swift step toward him, with stiffened arms and eyes blazing.

“Don’t look at me like that!” she cried, as though she were in acute

pain. “Curse me, or turn your back on me, but don’t look that way. Am I

a woman to be beaten? If I could show you—here on my arms, and on my

back are scars—and it has been more than a year—scars that he made in

his brutal rages. A holy nun would have risen and struck the fiend

down. Yes, I killed him. The foul and horrible words that he hurled at

me that last day are repeated in my ears every night when I sleep. And

then came his blows, and the end of my endurance. I got the poison that

afternoon. It was his custom to drink every night in the library before

going to bed a hot punch made of rum and wine. Only from my fair hands

would he receive it— because he knew the fumes of spirits always

sickened me. That night when the maid brought it to me I sent her

downstairs on an errand. Before taking him his drink I went to my

little private cabinet and poured into it more than a tea-spoonful of

tincture of aconite—enough to kill three men, so I had learned. I had

drawn $6,000 that I had in bank, and with that and a few things in a

satchel I left the house without any one seeing me. As I passed the

library I heard him stagger up and fall heavily on a couch. I took a

night train for New Orleans, and from there I sailed to the Bermudas. I

finally cast anchor in La Paz. And now what have you to say? Can you

open your mouth?”

Merriam came back to life.

“Florence,” he said earnestly, “I want you. I don’t care what you’ve

done. If the world—”

“Ralph,” she interrupted, almost with a scream, “be my world!”

Her eyes melted; she relaxed magnificently and swayed toward Merriam so

suddenly that he had to jump to catch her.

Dear me! in such scenes how the talk runs into artificial prose. But it

can’t be helped. It’s the subconscious smell of the footlights’ smoke

that’s in all of us. Stir the depths of your cook’s soul sufficiently

and she will discourse in Bulwer-Lyttonese.

Merriam and Mrs. Conant were very happy. He announced their engagement

at the Hotel Orilla del Mar. Eight foreigners and four native Astors

pounded his back and shouted insincere congratulations at him. Pedrito,

the Castilian-mannered barkeep, was goaded to extra duty until his

agility would have turned a Boston cherry-phosphate clerk a pale lilac

with envy.

They were both very happy. According to the strange mathematics of the

god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when

united became only half as dense instead of darker. They shut the world

out and bolted the doors. Each was the other’s world. Mrs. Conant lived

again. The remembering look left her eyes. Merriam was with her every

moment that was possible. On a little plateau under a grove of palms

and calabash trees they were going to build a fairy bungalow. They were

to be married in two months. Many hours of the day they had their heads

together over the house plans. Their joint capital would set up a

business in fruit or woods that would yield a comfortable support.

“Good night, my world,” would say Mrs. Conant every evening when

Merriam left her for his hotel. They were very happy. Their love had,

circumstantially, that element of melancholy in it that it seems to

require to attain its supremest elevation. And it seemed that their

mutual great misfortune or sin was a bond that nothing could sever.

One day a steamer hove in the offing. Bare-legged and bare-shouldered

La Paz scampered down to the beach, for the arrival of a steamer was

their loop-the-loop, circus, Emancipation Day and four-o’clock tea.

When the steamer was near enough, wise ones proclaimed that she was the

_Pajaro_, bound up-coast from Callao to Panama.

The _Pajaro_ put on brakes a mile off shore. Soon a boat came bobbing

shoreward. Merriam strolled down on the beach to look on. In the

shallow water the Carib sailors sprang out and dragged the boat with a

mighty rush to the firm shingle. Out climbed the purser, the captain

and two passengers, ploughing their way through the deep sand toward

the hotel. Merriam glanced toward them with the mild interest due to

strangers. There was something familiar to him in the walk of one of

the passengers. He looked again, and his blood seemed to turn to

strawberry ice cream in his veins. Burly, arrogant, debonair as ever,

H. Ferguson Hedges, the man he had killed, was coming toward him ten

feet away.

When Hedges saw Merriam his face flushed a dark red. Then he shouted in

his old, bluff way: “Hello, Merriam. Glad to see you. Didn’t expect to

find you out here. Quinby, this is my old friend Merriam, of New

York—Merriam, Mr. Quinby.”

Merriam gave Hedges and then Quinby an ice-cold hand. “Br-r-r-r!” said

Hedges. “But you’ve got a frappéd flipper! Man, you’re not well. You’re

as yellow as a Chinaman. Malarial here? Steer us to a bar if there is

such a thing, and let’s take a prophylactic.”

Merriam, still half comatose, led them toward the Hotel Orilla del Mar.

“Quinby and I,” explained Hedges, puffing through the slippery sand,

“are looking out along the coast for some investments. We’ve just come

up from Concepción and Valparaiso and Lima. The captain of this

subsidized ferry boat told us there was some good picking around here

in silver mines. So we got off. Now, where is that café, Merriam? Oh,

in this portable soda water pavilion?”

Leaving Quinby at the bar, Hedges drew Merriam aside.

“Now, what does this mean?” he said, with gruff kindness. “Are you

sulking about that fool row we had?”

“I thought,” stammered Merriam—“I heard—they told me you were—that I

had—”

“Well, you didn’t, and I’m not,” said Hedges. “That fool young

ambulance surgeon told Wade I was a candidate for a coffin just because

I’d got tired and quit breathing. I laid up in a private hospital for a

month; but here I am, kicking as hard as ever. Wade and I tried to find

you, but couldn’t. Now, Merriam, shake hands and forget it all. I was

as much to blame as you were; and the shot really did me good—I came

out of the hospital as healthy and fit as a cab horse. Come on; that

drink’s waiting.”

“Old man,” said Merriam, brokenly, “I don’t know how to thank

you—I—well, you know—”

“Oh, forget it,” boomed Hedges. “Quinby’ll die of thirst if we don’t

join him.”

Bibb was sitting on the shady side of the gallery waiting for the

eleven-o’clock breakfast. Presently Merriam came out and joined him.

His eye was strangely bright.

“Bibb, my boy,” said he, slowly waving his hand, “do you see those

mountains and that sea and sky and sunshine?—they’re mine, Bibbsy—all

mine.”

“You go in,” said Bibb, “and take eight grains of quinine, right away.

It won’t do in this climate for a man to get to thinking he’s

Rockefeller, or James O’Neill either.”

Inside, the purser was untying a great roll of newspapers, many of them

weeks old, gathered in the lower ports by the _Pajaro_ to be

distributed at casual stopping-places. Thus do the beneficent voyagers

scatter news and entertainment among the prisoners of sea and

mountains.

Tio Pancho, the hotel proprietor, set his great silver-rimmed

_anteojos_ upon his nose and divided the papers into a number of

smaller rolls. A barefooted _muchacho_ dashed in, desiring the post of

messenger.

“_Bien venido_,” said Tio Pancho. “This to Señora Conant; that to el

Doctor S-S-Schlegel—_Dios_! what a name to say!—that to Señor Davis—one

for Don Alberto. These two for the _Casa de Huespedes_, _Numero 6_, _en

la calle de las Buenas Gracias_. And say to them all, _muchacho_, that

the _Pajaro_ sails for Panama at three this afternoon. If any have

letters to send by the post, let them come quickly, that they may first

pass through the _correo_.”

Mrs. Conant received her roll of newspapers at four o’clock. The boy

was late in delivering them, because he had been deflected from his

duty by an iguana that crossed his path and to which he immediately

gave chase. But it made no hardship, for she had no letters to send.

She was idling in a hammock in the patio of the house that she

occupied, half awake, half happily dreaming of the paradise that she

and Merriam had created out of the wrecks of their pasts. She was

content now for the horizon of that shimmering sea to be the horizon of

her life. They had shut out the world and closed the door.

Merriam was coming to her house at seven, after his dinner at the

hotel. She would put on a white dress and an apricot-coloured lace

mantilla, and they would walk an hour under the cocoanut palms by the

lagoon. She smiled contentedly, and chose a paper at random from the

roll the boy had brought.

At first the words of a certain headline of a Sunday newspaper meant

nothing to her; they conveyed only a visualized sense of familiarity.

The largest type ran thus: “Lloyd B. Conant secures divorce.” And then

the subheadings: “Well-known Saint Louis paint manufacturer wins suit,

pleading one year’s absence of wife.” “Her mysterious disappearance

recalled.” “Nothing has been heard of her since.”

Twisting herself quickly out of the hammock, Mrs. Conant’s eye soon

traversed the half-column of the “Recall.” It ended thus: “It will be

remembered that Mrs. Conant disappeared one evening in March of last

year. It was freely rumoured that her marriage with Lloyd B. Conant

resulted in much unhappiness. Stories were not wanting to the effect

that his cruelty toward his wife had more than once taken the form of

physical abuse. After her departure a full bottle of tincture of

aconite, a deadly poison, was found in a small medicine cabinet in her

bedroom. This might have been an indication that she meditated suicide.

It is supposed that she abandoned such an intention if she possessed

it, and left her home instead.”

Mrs. Conant slowly dropped the paper, and sat on a chair, clasping her

hands tightly.

“Let me think—O God!—let me think,” she whispered. “I took the bottle

with me . . . I threw it out of the window of the train . . . I— . . .

there was another bottle in the cabinet . . . there were two, side by

side—the aconite—and the valerian that I took when I could not sleep .

. . If they found the aconite bottle full, why—but, he is alive, of

course—I gave him only a harmless dose of valerian . . . I am not a

murderess in fact . . . Ralph, I—O God, don’t let this be a dream!”

She went into the part of the house that she rented from the old

Peruvian man and his wife, shut the door, and walked up and down her

room swiftly and feverishly for half an hour. Merriam’s photograph

stood in a frame on a table. She picked it up, looked at it with a

smile of exquisite tenderness, and—dropped four tears on it. And

Merriam only twenty rods away! Then she stood still for ten minutes,

looking into space. She looked into space through a slowly opening

door. On her side of the door was the building material for a castle of

Romance—love, an Arcady of waving palms, a lullaby of waves on the

shore of a haven of rest, respite, peace, a lotus land of dreamy ease

and security—a life of poetry and heart’s ease and refuge. Romanticist,

will you tell me what Mrs. Conant saw on the other side of the door?

You cannot?—that is, you will not? Very well; then listen.

_She saw herself go into a department store and buy five spools of silk

thread and three yards of gingham to make an apron for the cook. “Shall

I charge it, ma’am?” asked the clerk. As she walked out a lady whom she

met greeted her cordially. “Oh, where did you get the pattern for those

sleeves, dear Mrs. Conant?” she said. At the corner a policeman helped

her across the street and touched his helmet. “Any callers?” she asked

the maid when she reached home. “Mrs. Waldron,” answered the maid, “and

the two Misses Jenkinson.” “Very well,” she said. “You may bring me a

cup of tea, Maggie.”_

Mrs. Conant went to the door and called Angela, the old Peruvian woman.

“If Mateo is there send him to me.” Mateo, a half-breed, shuffling and

old but efficient, came.

“Is there a steamer or a vessel of any kind leaving this coast to-night

or to-morrow that I can get passage on?” she asked.

Mateo considered.

“At Punta Reina, thirty miles down the coast, señora,” he answered,

“there is a small steamer loading with cinchona and dyewoods. She sails

for San Francisco to-morrow at sunrise. So says my brother, who arrived

in his sloop to-day, passing by Punta Reina.”

“You must take me in that sloop to that steamer to-night. Will you do

that?”

“Perhaps—” Mateo shrugged a suggestive shoulder. Mrs. Conant took a

handful of money from a drawer and gave it to him.

“Get the sloop ready behind the little point of land below the town,”

she ordered. “Get sailors, and be ready to sail at six o’clock. In half

an hour bring a cart partly filled with straw into the patio here, and

take my trunk to the sloop. There is more money yet. Now, hurry.”

For one time Mateo walked away without shuffling his feet.

“Angela,” cried Mrs. Conant, almost fiercely, “come and help me pack. I

am going away. Out with this trunk. My clothes first. Stir yourself.

Those dark dresses first. Hurry.”

From the first she did not waver from her decision. Her view was clear

and final. Her door had opened and let the world in. Her love for

Merriam was not lessened; but it now appeared a hopeless and

unrealizable thing. The visions of their future that had seemed so

blissful and complete had vanished. She tried to assure herself that

her renunciation was rather for his sake than for her own. Now that she

was cleared of her burden—at least, technically—would not his own weigh

too heavily upon him? If she should cling to him, would not the

difference forever silently mar and corrode their happiness? Thus she

reasoned; but there were a thousand little voices calling to her that

she could feel rather than hear, like the hum of distant, powerful

machinery—the little voices of the world, that, when raised in unison,

can send their insistent call through the thickest door.

Once while packing, a brief shadow of the lotus dream came back to her.

She held Merriam’s picture to her heart with one hand, while she threw

a pair of shoes into the trunk with her other.

At six o’clock Mateo returned and reported the sloop ready. He and his

brother lifted the trunk into the cart, covered it with straw and

conveyed it to the point of embarkation. From there they transferred it

on board in the sloop’s dory. Then Mateo returned for additional

orders.

Mrs. Conant was ready. She had settled all business matters with

Angela, and was impatiently waiting. She wore a long, loose black-silk

duster that she often walked about in when the evenings were chilly. On

her head was a small round hat, and over it the apricot-coloured lace

mantilla.

Dusk had quickly followed the short twilight. Mateo led her by dark and

grass-grown streets toward the point behind which the sloop was

anchored. On turning a corner they beheld the Hotel Orilla del Mar

three streets away, nebulously aglow with its array of kerosene lamps.

Mrs. Conant paused, with streaming eyes. “I must, I _must_ see him once

before I go,” she murmured in anguish. But even then she did not falter

in her decision. Quickly she invented a plan by which she might speak

to him, and yet make her departure without his knowing. She would walk

past the hotel, ask some one to call him out and talk a few moments on

some trivial excuse, leaving him expecting to see her at her home at

seven.

She unpinned her hat and gave it to Mateo. “Keep this, and wait here

till I come,” she ordered. Then she draped the mantilla over her head

as she usually did when walking after sunset, and went straight to the

Orilla del Mar.

She was glad to see the bulky, white-clad figure of Tio Pancho standing

alone on the gallery.

“Tio Pancho,” she said, with a charming smile, “may I trouble you to

ask Mr. Merriam to come out for just a few moments that I may speak

with him?”

Tio Pancho bowed as an elephant bows.

“Buenas tardes, Señora Conant,” he said, as a cavalier talks. And then

he went on, less at his ease:

“But does not the señora know that Señor Merriam sailed on the _Pajaro_

for Panama at three o’clock of this afternoon?”

II

THE THEORY AND THE HOUND

Not many days ago my old friend from the tropics, J. P. Bridger, United

States consul on the island of Ratona, was in the city. We had wassail

and jubilee and saw the Flatiron building, and missed seeing the

Bronxless menagerie by about a couple of nights. And then, at the ebb

tide, we were walking up a street that parallels and parodies Broadway.

A woman with a comely and mundane countenance passed us, holding in

leash a wheezing, vicious, waddling, brute of a yellow pug. The dog

entangled himself with Bridger’s legs and mumbled his ankles in a

snarling, peevish, sulky bite. Bridger, with a happy smile, kicked the

breath out of the brute; the woman showered us with a quick rain of

well-conceived adjectives that left us in no doubt as to our place in

her opinion, and we passed on. Ten yards farther an old woman with

disordered white hair and her bankbook tucked well hidden beneath her

tattered shawl begged. Bridger stopped and disinterred for her a

quarter from his holiday waistcoat.

On the next corner a quarter of a ton of well-clothed man with a

rice-powdered, fat, white jowl, stood holding the chain of a devil-born

bulldog whose forelegs were strangers by the length of a dachshund. A

little woman in a last-season’s hat confronted him and wept, which was

plainly all she could do, while he cursed her in low sweet, practised

tones.

Bridger smiled again—strictly to himself—and this time he took out a

little memorandum book and made a note of it. This he had no right to

do without due explanation, and I said so.

“It’s a new theory,” said Bridger, “that I picked up down in Ratona.

I’ve been gathering support for it as I knock about. The world isn’t

ripe for it yet, but—well I’ll tell you; and then you run your mind

back along the people you’ve known and see what you make of it.”

And so I cornered Bridger in a place where they have artificial palms

and wine; and he told me the story which is here in my words and on his

responsibility.

One afternoon at three o’clock, on the island of Ratona, a boy raced

along the beach screaming, “_Pajaro_, ahoy!”

Thus he made known the keenness of his hearing and the justice of his

discrimination in pitch.

He who first heard and made oral proclamation concerning the toot of an

approaching steamer’s whistle, and correctly named the steamer, was a

small hero in Ratona—until the next steamer came. Wherefore, there was

rivalry among the barefoot youth of Ratona, and many fell victims to

the softly blown conch shells of sloops which, as they enter harbour,

sound surprisingly like a distant steamer’s signal. And some could name

you the vessel when its call, in your duller ears, sounded no louder

than the sigh of the wind through the branches of the cocoanut palms.

But to-day he who proclaimed the _Pajaro_ gained his honours. Ratona

bent its ear to listen; and soon the deep-tongued blast grew louder and

nearer, and at length Ratona saw above the line of palms on the low

“point” the two black funnels of the fruiter slowly creeping toward the

mouth of the harbour.

You must know that Ratona is an island twenty miles off the south of a

South American republic. It is a port of that republic; and it sleeps

sweetly in a smiling sea, toiling not nor spinning; fed by the abundant

tropics where all things “ripen, cease and fall toward the grave.”

Eight hundred people dream life away in a green-embowered village that

follows the horseshoe curve of its bijou harbour. They are mostly

Spanish and Indian _mestizos_, with a shading of San Domingo Negroes, a

lightening of pure-blood Spanish officials and a slight leavening of

the froth of three or four pioneering white races. No steamers touch at

Ratona save the fruit steamers which take on their banana inspectors

there on their way to the coast. They leave Sunday newspapers, ice,

quinine, bacon, watermelons and vaccine matter at the island and that

is about all the touch Ratona gets with the world.

The _Pajaro_ paused at the mouth of the harbour, rolling heavily in the

swell that sent the whitecaps racing beyond the smooth water inside.

Already two dories from the village—one conveying fruit inspectors, the

other going for what it could get—were halfway out to the steamer.

The inspectors’ dory was taken on board with them, and the _Pajaro_

steamed away for the mainland for its load of fruit.

The other boat returned to Ratona bearing a contribution from the

_Pajaro’s_ store of ice, the usual roll of newspapers and one

passenger—Taylor Plunkett, sheriff of Chatham County, Kentucky.

Bridger, the United States consul at Ratona, was cleaning his rifle in

the official shanty under a bread-fruit tree twenty yards from the

water of the harbour. The consul occupied a place somewhat near the

tail of his political party’s procession. The music of the band wagon

sounded very faintly to him in the distance. The plums of office went

to others. Bridger’s share of the spoils—the consulship at Ratona—was

little more than a prune—a dried prune from the boarding-house

department of the public crib. But $900 yearly was opulence in Ratona.

Besides, Bridger had contracted a passion for shooting alligators in

the lagoons near his consulate, and was not unhappy.

He looked up from a careful inspection of his rifle lock and saw a

broad man filling his doorway. A broad, noiseless, slow-moving man,

sunburned almost to the brown of Vandyke. A man of forty-five, neatly

clothed in homespun, with scanty light hair, a close-clipped

brown-and-gray beard and pale-blue eyes expressing mildness and

simplicity.

“You are Mr. Bridger, the consul,” said the broad man. “They directed

me here. Can you tell me what those big bunches of things like gourds

are in those trees that look like feather dusters along the edge of the

water?”

“Take that chair,” said the consul, reoiling his cleaning rag. “No, the

other one—that bamboo thing won’t hold you. Why, they’re

cocoanuts—green cocoanuts. The shell of ’em is always a light green

before they’re ripe.”

“Much obliged,” said the other man, sitting down carefully. “I didn’t

quite like to tell the folks at home they were olives unless I was sure

about it. My name is Plunkett. I’m sheriff of Chatham County, Kentucky.

I’ve got extradition papers in my pocket authorizing the arrest of a

man on this island. They’ve been signed by the President of this

country, and they’re in correct shape. The man’s name is Wade Williams.

He’s in the cocoanut raising business. What he’s wanted for is the

murder of his wife two years ago. Where can I find him?”

The consul squinted an eye and looked through his rifle barrel.

“There’s nobody on the island who calls himself ‘Williams,’” he

remarked.

“Didn’t suppose there was,” said Plunkett mildly. “He’ll do by any

other name.”

“Besides myself,” said Bridger, “there are only two Americans on

Ratona—Bob Reeves and Henry Morgan.”

“The man I want sells cocoanuts,” suggested Plunkett.

“You see that cocoanut walk extending up to the point?” said the

consul, waving his hand toward the open door. “That belongs to Bob

Reeves. Henry Morgan owns half the trees to loo’ard on the island.”

“One, month ago,” said the sheriff, “Wade Williams wrote a confidential

letter to a man in Chatham county, telling him where he was and how he

was getting along. The letter was lost; and the person that found it

gave it away. They sent me after him, and I’ve got the papers. I reckon

he’s one of your cocoanut men for certain.”

“You’ve got his picture, of course,” said Bridger. “It might be Reeves

or Morgan, but I’d hate to think it. They’re both as fine fellows as

you’d meet in an all-day auto ride.”

“No,” doubtfully answered Plunkett; “there wasn’t any picture of

Williams to be had. And I never saw him myself. I’ve been sheriff only

a year. But I’ve got a pretty accurate description of him. About 5 feet

11; dark-hair and eyes; nose inclined to be Roman; heavy about the

shoulders; strong, white teeth, with none missing; laughs a good deal,

talkative; drinks considerably but never to intoxication; looks you

square in the eye when talking; age thirty-five. Which one of your men

does that description fit?”

The consul grinned broadly.

“I’ll tell you what you do,” he said, laying down his rifle and

slipping on his dingy black alpaca coat. “You come along, Mr. Plunkett,

and I’ll take you up to see the boys. If you can tell which one of ’em

your description fits better than it does the other you have the

advantage of me.”

Bridger conducted the sheriff out and along the hard beach close to

which the tiny houses of the village were distributed. Immediately back

of the town rose sudden, small, thickly wooded hills. Up one of these,

by means of steps cut in the hard clay, the consul led Plunkett. On the

very verge of an eminence was perched a two-room wooden cottage with a

thatched roof. A Carib woman was washing clothes outside. The consul

ushered the sheriff to the door of the room that overlooked the

harbour.

Two men were in the room, about to sit down, in their shirt sleeves, to

a table spread for dinner. They bore little resemblance one to the

other in detail; but the general description given by Plunkett could

have been justly applied to either. In height, colour of hair, shape of

nose, build and manners each of them tallied with it. They were fair

types of jovial, ready-witted, broad-gauged Americans who had

gravitated together for companionship in an alien land.

“Hello, Bridger” they called in unison at sight Of the consul. “Come

and have dinner with us!” And then they noticed Plunkett at his heels,

and came forward with hospitable curiosity.

“Gentlemen,” said the consul, his voice taking on unaccustomed

formality, “this is Mr. Plunkett. Mr. Plunkett—Mr. Reeves and Mr.

Morgan.”

The cocoanut barons greeted the newcomer joyously. Reeves seemed about

an inch taller than Morgan, but his laugh was not quite as loud.

Morgan’s eyes were deep brown; Reeves’s were black. Reeves was the host

and busied himself with fetching other chairs and calling to the Carib

woman for supplemental table ware. It was explained that Morgan lived

in a bamboo shack to “loo’ard,” but that every day the two friends

dined together. Plunkett stood still during the preparations, looking

about mildly with his pale-blue eyes. Bridger looked apologetic and

uneasy.

At length two other covers were laid and the company was assigned to

places. Reeves and Morgan stood side by side across the table from the

visitors. Reeves nodded genially as a signal for all to seat

themselves. And then suddenly Plunkett raised his hand with a gesture

of authority. He was looking straight between Reeves and Morgan.

“Wade Williams,” he said quietly, “you are under arrest for murder.”

Reeves and Morgan instantly exchanged a quick, bright glance, the

quality of which was interrogation, with a seasoning of surprise. Then,

simultaneously they turned to the speaker with a puzzled and frank

deprecation in their gaze.

“Can’t say that we understand you, Mr. Plunkett,” said Morgan,

cheerfully. “Did you say ‘Williams’?”

“What’s the joke, Bridgy?” asked Reeves, turning, to the consul with a

smile.

Before Bridger could answer Plunkett spoke again.

“I’ll explain,” he said, quietly. “One of you don’t need any

explanation, but this is for the other one. One of you is Wade Williams

of Chatham County, Kentucky. You murdered your wife on May 5, two years

ago, after ill-treating and abusing her continually for five years. I

have the proper papers in my pocket for taking you back with me, and

you are going. We will return on the fruit steamer that comes back by

this island to-morrow to leave its inspectors. I acknowledge,

gentlemen, that I’m not quite sure which one of you is Williams. But

Wade Williams goes back to Chatham County to-morrow. I want you to

understand that.”

A great sound of merry laughter from Morgan and Reeves went out over

the still harbour. Two or three fishermen in the fleet of sloops

anchored there looked up at the house of the diablos Americanos on the

hill and wondered.

“My dear Mr. Plunkett,” cried Morgan, conquering his mirth, “the dinner

is getting, cold. Let us sit down and eat. I am anxious to get my spoon

into that shark-fin soup. Business afterward.”

“Sit down, gentlemen, if you please,” added Reeves, pleasantly. “I am

sure Mr. Plunkett will not object. Perhaps a little time may be of

advantage to him in identifying—the gentleman he wishes to arrest.”

“No objections, I’m sure,” said Plunkett, dropping into his chair

heavily. “I’m hungry myself. I didn’t want to accept the hospitality of

you folks without giving you notice; that’s all.”

Reeves set bottles and glasses on the table.

“There’s cognac,” he said, “and anisada, and Scotch ‘smoke,’ and rye.

Take your choice.”

Bridger chose rye, Reeves poured three fingers of Scotch for himself,

Morgan took the same. The sheriff, against much protestation, filled

his glass from the water bottle.

“Here’s to the appetite,” said Reeves, raising his glass, “of Mr.

Williams!” Morgan’s laugh and his drink encountering sent him into a

choking splutter. All began to pay attention to the dinner, which was

well cooked and palatable.

“Williams!” called Plunkett, suddenly and sharply.

All looked up wonderingly. Reeves found the sheriff’s mild eye resting

upon him. He flushed a little.

“See here,” he said, with some asperity, “my name’s Reeves, and I don’t

want you to—” But the comedy of the thing came to his rescue, and he

ended with a laugh.

“I suppose, Mr. Plunkett,” said Morgan, carefully seasoning an

alligator pear, “that you are aware of the fact that you will import a

good deal of trouble for yourself into Kentucky if you take back the

wrong man—that is, of course, if you take anybody back?”

“Thank you for the salt,” said the sheriff. “Oh, I’ll take somebody

back. It’ll be one of you two gentlemen. Yes, I know I’d get stuck for

damages if I make a mistake. But I’m going to try to get the right

man.”

“I’ll tell you what you do,” said Morgan, leaning forward with a jolly

twinkle in his eyes. “You take me. I’ll go without any trouble. The

cocoanut business hasn’t panned out well this year, and I’d like to

make some extra money out of your bondsmen.”

“That’s not fair,” chimed in Reeves. “I got only $16 a thousand for my

last shipment. Take me, Mr. Plunkett.”

“I’ll take Wade Williams,” said the sheriff, patiently, “or I’ll come

pretty close to it.”

“It’s like dining with a ghost,” remarked Morgan, with a pretended

shiver. “The ghost of a murderer, too! Will somebody pass the

toothpicks to the shade of the naughty Mr. Williams?”

Plunkett seemed as unconcerned as if he were dining at his own table in

Chatham County. He was a gallant trencherman, and the strange tropic

viands tickled his palate. Heavy, commonplace, almost slothful in his

movements, he appeared to be devoid of all the cunning and watchfulness

of the sleuth. He even ceased to observe, with any sharpness or

attempted discrimination, the two men, one of whom he had undertaken

with surprising self-confidence, to drag away upon the serious charge

of wife-murder. Here, indeed, was a problem set before him that if

wrongly solved would have amounted to his serious discomfiture, yet

there he sat puzzling his soul (to all appearances) over the novel

flavour of a broiled iguana cutlet.

The consul felt a decided discomfort. Reeves and Morgan were his

friends and pals; yet the sheriff from Kentucky had a certain right to

his official aid and moral support. So Bridger sat the silentest around

the board and tried to estimate the peculiar situation. His conclusion

was that both Reeves and Morgan, quickwitted, as he knew them to be,

had conceived at the moment of Plunkett’s disclosure of his mission—and

in the brief space of a lightning flash—the idea that the other might

be the guilty Williams; and that each of them had decided in that

moment loyally to protect his comrade against the doom that threatened

him. This was the consul’s theory and if he had been a bookmaker at a

race of wits for life and liberty he would have offered heavy odds

against the plodding sheriff from Chatham County, Kentucky.

When the meal was concluded the Carib woman came and removed the dishes

and cloth. Reeves strewed the table with excellent cigars, and

Plunkett, with the others, lighted one of these with evident

gratification.

“I may be dull,” said Morgan, with a grin and a wink at Bridger; “but I

want to know if I am. Now, I say this is all a joke of Mr. Plunkett’s,

concocted to frighten two babes-in-the-woods. Is this Williamson to be

taken seriously or not?”

“‘Williams,’” corrected Plunkett gravely. “I never got off any jokes in

my life. I know I wouldn’t travel 2,000 miles to get off a poor one as

this would be if I didn’t take Wade Williams back with me. Gentlemen!”

continued the sheriff, now letting his mild eyes travel impartially

from one of the company to another, “see if you can find any joke in

this case. Wade Williams is listening to the words I utter now; but out

of politeness, I will speak of him as a third person. For five years he

made his wife lead the life of a dog—No; I’ll take that back. No dog in

Kentucky was ever treated as she was. He spent the money that she

brought him—spent it at races, at the card table and on horses and

hunting. He was a good fellow to his friends, but a cold, sullen demon

at home. He wound up the five years of neglect by striking her with his

closed hand—a hand as hard as a stone—when she was ill and weak from

suffering. She died the next day; and he skipped. That’s all there is

to it. It’s enough. I never saw Williams; but I knew his wife. I’m not

a man to tell half. She and I were keeping company when she met him.

She went to Louisville on a visit and saw him there. I’ll admit that he

spoilt my chances in no time. I lived then on the edge of the

Cumberland mountains. I was elected sheriff of Chatham County a year

after Wade Williams killed his wife. My official duty sends me out here

after him; but I’ll admit that there’s personal feeling, too. And he’s

going back with me. Mr.—er—Reeves, will you pass me a match?

“Awfully imprudent of Williams,” said Morgan, putting his feet up

against the wall, “to strike a Kentucky lady. Seems to me I’ve heard

they were scrappers.”

“Bad, bad Williams,” said Reeves, pouring out more Scotch.

The two men spoke lightly, but the consul saw and felt the tension and

the carefulness in their actions and words. “Good old fellows,” he said

to himself; “they’re both all right. Each of ’em is standing by the

other like a little brick church.”

And then a dog walked into the room where they sat—a black-and-tan

hound, long-eared, lazy, confident of welcome.

Plunkett turned his head and looked at the animal, which halted,

confidently, within a few feet of his chair.

Suddenly the sheriff, with a deep-mouthed oath, left his seat and,

bestowed upon the dog a vicious and heavy kick, with his ponderous

shoe.

The hound, heartbroken, astonished, with flapping ears and incurved

tail, uttered a piercing yelp of pain and surprise.

Reeves and the consul remained in their chairs, saying nothing, but

astonished at the unexpected show of intolerance from the easy-going

man from Chatham county.

But Morgan, with a suddenly purpling face, leaped, to his feet and

raised a threatening arm above the guest.

“You—brute!” he shouted, passionately; “why did you do that?”

Quickly the amenities returned, Plunkett muttered some indistinct

apology and regained his seat. Morgan with a decided effort controlled

his indignation and also returned to his chair.

And then Plunkett with the spring of a tiger, leaped around the corner

of the table and snapped handcuffs on the paralyzed Morgan’s wrists.

“Hound-lover and woman-killer!” he cried; “get ready to meet your God.”

When Bridger had finished I asked him:

“Did he get the right man?”

“He did,” said the Consul.

“And how did he know?” I inquired, being in a kind of bewilderment.

“When he put Morgan in the dory,” answered Bridger, “the next day to

take him aboard the _Pajaro_, this man Plunkett stopped to shake hands

with me and I asked him the same question.”

“‘Mr. Bridger,’ said he, ‘I’m a Kentuckian, and I’ve seen a great deal

of both men and animals. And I never yet saw a man that was overfond of

horses and dogs but what was cruel to women.’”

III

THE HYPOTHESES OF FAILURE

Lawyer Gooch bestowed his undivided attention upon the engrossing arts

of his profession. But one flight of fancy did he allow his mind to

entertain. He was fond of likening his suite of office rooms to the

bottom of a ship. The rooms were three in number, with a door opening

from one to another. These doors could also be closed.

“Ships,” Lawyer Gooch would say, “are constructed for safety, with

separate, water-tight compartments in their bottoms. If one compartment

springs a leak it fills with water; but the good ship goes on unhurt.

Were it not for the separating bulkheads one leak would sink the

vessel. Now it often happens that while I am occupied with clients,

other clients with conflicting interests call. With the assistance of

Archibald—an office boy with a future—I cause the dangerous influx to

be diverted into separate compartments, while I sound with my legal

plummet the depth of each. If necessary, they may be baled into the

hallway and permitted to escape by way of the stairs, which we may term

the lee scuppers. Thus the good ship of business is kept afloat;

whereas if the element that supports her were allowed to mingle freely

in her hold we might be swamped—ha, ha, ha!”

The law is dry. Good jokes are few. Surely it might be permitted Lawyer

Gooch to mitigate the bore of briefs, the tedium of torts and the

prosiness of processes with even so light a levy upon the good property

of humour.

Lawyer Gooch’s practice leaned largely to the settlement of marital

infelicities. Did matrimony languish through complications, he

mediated, soothed and arbitrated. Did it suffer from implications, he

readjusted, defended and championed. Did it arrive at the extremity of

duplications, he always got light sentences for his clients.

But not always was Lawyer Gooch the keen, armed, wily belligerent,

ready with his two-edged sword to lop off the shackles of Hymen. He had

been known to build up instead of demolishing, to reunite instead of

severing, to lead erring and foolish ones back into the fold instead of

scattering the flock. Often had he by his eloquent and moving appeals

sent husband and wife, weeping, back into each other’s arms. Frequently

he had coached childhood so successfully that, at the psychological

moment (and at a given signal) the plaintive pipe of “Papa, won’t you

tum home adain to me and muvver?” had won the day and upheld the

pillars of a tottering home.

Unprejudiced persons admitted that Lawyer Gooch received as big fees

from these reyoked clients as would have been paid him had the cases

been contested in court. Prejudiced ones intimated that his fees were

doubled, because the penitent couples always came back later for the

divorce, anyhow.

There came a season in June when the legal ship of Lawyer Gooch (to

borrow his own figure) was nearly becalmed. The divorce mill grinds

slowly in June. It is the month of Cupid and Hymen.

Lawyer Gooch, then, sat idle in the middle room of his clientless

suite. A small anteroom connected—or rather separated—this apartment

from the hallway. Here was stationed Archibald, who wrested from

visitors their cards or oral nomenclature which he bore to his master

while they waited.

Suddenly, on this day, there came a great knocking at the outermost

door.

Archibald, opening it, was thrust aside as superfluous by the visitor,

who without due reverence at once penetrated to the office of Lawyer

Gooch and threw himself with good-natured insolence into a comfortable

chair facing that gentlemen.

“You are Phineas C. Gooch, attorney-at-law?” said the visitor, his tone

of voice and inflection making his words at once a question, an

assertion and an accusation.

Before committing himself by a reply, the lawyer estimated his possible

client in one of his brief but shrewd and calculating glances.

The man was of the emphatic type—large-sized, active, bold and debonair

in demeanour, vain beyond a doubt, slightly swaggering, ready and at

ease. He was well-clothed, but with a shade too much ornateness. He was

seeking a lawyer; but if that fact would seem to saddle him with

troubles they were not patent in his beaming eye and courageous air.

“My name is Gooch,” at length the lawyer admitted. Upon pressure he

would also have confessed to the Phineas C. But he did not consider it

good practice to volunteer information. “I did not receive your card,”

he continued, by way of rebuke, “so I—”

“I know you didn’t,” remarked the visitor, coolly; “And you won’t just

yet. Light up?” He threw a leg over an arm of his chair, and tossed a

handful of rich-hued cigars upon the table. Lawyer Gooch knew the

brand. He thawed just enough to accept the invitation to smoke.

“You are a divorce lawyer,” said the cardless visitor. This time there

was no interrogation in his voice. Nor did his words constitute a

simple assertion. They formed a charge—a denunciation—as one would say

to a dog: “You are a dog.” Lawyer Gooch was silent under the

imputation.

“You handle,” continued the visitor, “all the various ramifications of

busted-up connubiality. You are a surgeon, we might say, who extracts

Cupid’s darts when he shoots ’em into the wrong parties. You furnish

patent, incandescent lights for premises where the torch of Hymen has

burned so low you can’t light a cigar at it. Am I right, Mr. Gooch?”

“I have undertaken cases,” said the lawyer, guardedly, “in the line to

which your figurative speech seems to refer. Do you wish to consult me

professionally, Mr. ––––” The lawyer paused, with significance.

“Not yet,” said the other, with an arch wave of his cigar, “not just

yet. Let us approach the subject with the caution that should have been

used in the original act that makes this pow-wow necessary. There

exists a matrimonial jumble to be straightened out. But before I give

you names I want your honest—well, anyhow, your professional opinion on

the merits of the mix-up. I want you to size up the

catastrophe—abstractly—you understand? I’m Mr. Nobody; and I’ve got a

story to tell you. Then you say what’s what. Do you get my wireless?”

“You want to state a hypothetical case?” suggested Lawyer Gooch.

“That’s the word I was after. ‘Apothecary’ was the best shot I could

make at it in my mind. The hypothetical goes. I’ll state the case.

Suppose there’s a woman—a deuced fine-looking woman—who has run away

from her husband and home? She’s badly mashed on another man who went

to her town to work up some real estate business. Now, we may as well

call this woman’s husband Thomas R. Billings, for that’s his name. I’m

giving you straight tips on the cognomens. The Lothario chap is Henry

K. Jessup. The Billingses lived in a little town called Susanville—a

good many miles from here. Now, Jessup leaves Susanville two weeks ago.

The next day Mrs. Billings follows him. She’s dead gone on this man

Jessup; you can bet your law library on that.”

Lawyer Gooch’s client said this with such unctuous satisfaction that

even the callous lawyer experienced a slight ripple of repulsion. He

now saw clearly in his fatuous visitor the conceit of the lady-killer,

the egoistic complacency of the successful trifler.

“Now,” continued the visitor, “suppose this Mrs. Billings wasn’t happy

at home? We’ll say she and her husband didn’t gee worth a cent. They’ve

got incompatibility to burn. The things she likes, Billings wouldn’t

have as a gift with trading-stamps. It’s Tabby and Rover with them all

the time. She’s an educated woman in science and culture, and she reads

things out loud at meetings. Billings is not on. He don’t appreciate

progress and obelisks and ethics, and things of that sort. Old Billings

is simply a blink when it comes to such things. The lady is out and out

above his class. Now, lawyer, don’t it look like a fair equalization of

rights and wrongs that a woman like that should be allowed to throw

down Billings and take the man that can appreciate her?

“Incompatibility,” said Lawyer Gooch, “is undoubtedly the source of

much marital discord and unhappiness. Where it is positively proved,

divorce would seem to be the equitable remedy. Are you—excuse me—is

this man Jessup one to whom the lady may safely trust her future?”

“Oh, you can bet on Jessup,” said the client, with a confident wag of

his head. “Jessup’s all right. He’ll do the square thing. Why, he left

Susanville just to keep people from talking about Mrs. Billings. But

she followed him up, and now, of course, he’ll stick to her. When she

gets a divorce, all legal and proper, Jessup will do the proper thing.”

“And now,” said Lawyer Gooch, “continuing the hypothesis, if you

prefer, and supposing that my services should be desired in the case,

what—”

The client rose impulsively to his feet.

“Oh, dang the hypothetical business,” he exclaimed, impatiently. “Let’s

let her drop, and get down to straight talk. You ought to know who I am

by this time. I want that woman to have her divorce. I’ll pay for it.

The day you set Mrs. Billings free I’ll pay you five hundred dollars.”

Lawyer Gooch’s client banged his fist upon the table to punctuate his

generosity.

“If that is the case—” began the lawyer.

“Lady to see you, sir,” bawled Archibald, bouncing in from his

anteroom. He had orders to always announce immediately any client that

might come. There was no sense in turning business away.

Lawyer Gooch took client number one by the arm and led him suavely into

one of the adjoining rooms. “Favour me by remaining here a few minutes,

sir,” said he. “I will return and resume our consultation with the

least possible delay. I am rather expecting a visit from a very wealthy

old lady in connection with a will. I will not keep you waiting long.”

The breezy gentleman seated himself with obliging acquiescence, and

took up a magazine. The lawyer returned to the middle office, carefully

closing behind him the connecting door.

“Show the lady in, Archibald,” he said to the office boy, who was

awaiting the order.

A tall lady, of commanding presence and sternly handsome, entered the

room. She wore robes—robes; not clothes—ample and fluent. In her eye

could be perceived the lambent flame of genius and soul. In her hand

was a green bag of the capacity of a bushel, and an umbrella that also

seemed to wear a robe, ample and fluent. She accepted a chair.

“Are you Mr. Phineas C. Gooch, the lawyer?” she asked, in formal and

unconciliatory tones.

“I am,” answered Lawyer Gooch, without circumlocution. He never

circumlocuted when dealing with a woman. Women circumlocute. Time is

wasted when both sides in debate employ the same tactics.

“As a lawyer, sir,” began the lady, “you may have acquired some

knowledge of the human heart. Do you believe that the pusillanimous and

petty conventions of our artificial social life should stand as an

obstacle in the way of a noble and affectionate heart when it finds its

true mate among the miserable and worthless wretches in the world that

are called men?”

“Madam,” said Lawyer Gooch, in the tone that he used in curbing his

female clients, “this is an office for conducting the practice of law.

I am a lawyer, not a philosopher, nor the editor of an ‘Answers to the

Lovelorn’ column of a newspaper. I have other clients waiting. I will

ask you kindly to come to the point.”

“Well, you needn’t get so stiff around the gills about it,” said the

lady, with a snap of her luminous eyes and a startling gyration of her

umbrella. “Business is what I’ve come for. I want your opinion in the

matter of a suit for divorce, as the vulgar would call it, but which is

really only the readjustment of the false and ignoble conditions that

the short-sighted laws of man have interposed between a loving—”

“I beg your pardon, madam,” interrupted Lawyer Gooch, with some

impatience, “for reminding you again that this is a law office. Perhaps

Mrs. Wilcox—”

“Mrs. Wilcox is all right,” cut in the lady, with a hint of asperity.

“And so are Tolstoi, and Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, and Omar Khayyam, and

Mr. Edward Bok. I’ve read ’em all. I would like to discuss with you the

divine right of the soul as opposed to the freedom-destroying

restrictions of a bigoted and narrow-minded society. But I will proceed

to business. I would prefer to lay the matter before you in an

impersonal way until you pass upon its merits. That is to describe it

as a supposable instance, without—”

“You wish to state a hypothetical case?” said Lawyer Gooch.

“I was going to say that,” said the lady, sharply. “Now, suppose there

is a woman who is all soul and heart and aspirations for a complete

existence. This woman has a husband who is far below her in intellect,

in taste—in everything. Bah! he is a brute. He despises literature. He

sneers at the lofty thoughts of the world’s great thinkers. He thinks

only of real estate and such sordid things. He is no mate for a woman

with soul. We will say that this unfortunate wife one day meets with

her ideal—a man with brain and heart and force. She loves him. Although

this man feels the thrill of a new-found affinity he is too noble, too

honourable to declare himself. He flies from the presence of his

beloved. She flies after him, trampling, with superb indifference, upon

the fetters with which an unenlightened social system would bind her.

Now, what will a divorce cost? Eliza Ann Timmins, the poetess of

Sycamore Gap, got one for three hundred and forty dollars. Can I—I mean

can this lady I speak of get one that cheap?”

“Madam,” said Lawyer Gooch, “your last two or three sentences delight

me with their intelligence and clearness. Can we not now abandon the

hypothetical and come down to names and business?”

“I should say so,” exclaimed the lady, adopting the practical with

admirable readiness. “Thomas R. Billings is the name of the low brute

who stands between the happiness of his legal—his legal, but not his

spiritual—wife and Henry K. Jessup, the noble man whom nature intended

for her mate. I,” concluded the client, with an air of dramatic

revelation, “am Mrs. Billings!”

“Gentlemen to see you, sir,” shouted Archibald, invading the room

almost at a handspring. Lawyer Gooch arose from his chair.

“Mrs. Billings,” he said courteously, “allow me to conduct you into the

adjoining office apartment for a few minutes. I am expecting a very

wealthy old gentleman on business connected with a will. In a very

short while I will join you, and continue our consultation.”

With his accustomed chivalrous manner, Lawyer Gooch ushered his soulful

client into the remaining unoccupied room, and came out, closing the

door with circumspection.

The next visitor introduced by Archibald was a thin, nervous,

irritable-looking man of middle age, with a worried and apprehensive

expression of countenance. He carried in one hand a small satchel,

which he set down upon the floor beside the chair which the lawyer

placed for him. His clothing was of good quality, but it was worn

without regard to neatness or style, and appeared to be covered with

the dust of travel.

“You make a specialty of divorce cases,” he said, in, an agitated but

business-like tone.

“I may say,” began Lawyer Gooch, “that my practice has not altogether

avoided—”

“I know you do,” interrupted client number three. “You needn’t tell me.

I’ve heard all about you. I have a case to lay before you without

necessarily disclosing any connection that I might have with it—that

is—”

“You wish,” said Lawyer Gooch, “to state a hypothetical case.

“You may call it that. I am a plain man of business. I will be as brief

as possible. We will first take up hypothetical woman. We will say she

is married uncongenially. In many ways she is a superior woman.

Physically she is considered to be handsome. She is devoted to what she

calls literature—poetry and prose, and such stuff. Her husband is a

plain man in the business walks of life. Their home has not been happy,

although the husband has tried to make it so. Some time ago a man—a

stranger—came to the peaceful town in which they lived and engaged in

some real estate operations. This woman met him, and became

unaccountably infatuated with him. Her attentions became so open that

the man felt the community to be no safe place for him, so he left it.

She abandoned husband and home, and followed him. She forsook her home,

where she was provided with every comfort, to follow this man who had

inspired her with such a strange affection. Is there anything more to

be deplored,” concluded the client, in a trembling voice, “than the

wrecking of a home by a woman’s uncalculating folly?”

Lawyer Gooch delivered the cautious opinion that there was not.

“This man she has gone to join,” resumed the visitor, “is not the man

to make her happy. It is a wild and foolish self-deception that makes

her think he will. Her husband, in spite of their many disagreements,

is the only one capable of dealing with her sensitive and peculiar

nature. But this she does not realize now.”

“Would you consider a divorce the logical cure in the case you

present?” asked Lawyer Gooch, who felt that the conversation was

wandering too far from the field of business.

“A divorce!” exclaimed the client, feelingly—almost tearfully. “No,

no—not that. I have read, Mr. Gooch, of many instances where your

sympathy and kindly interest led you to act as a mediator between

estranged husband and wife, and brought them together again. Let us

drop the hypothetical case—I need conceal no longer that it is I who am

the sufferer in this sad affair—the names you shall have—Thomas R.

Billings and wife—and Henry K. Jessup, the man with whom she is

infatuated.”

Client number three laid his hand upon Mr. Gooch’s arm. Deep emotion

was written upon his careworn face. “For Heaven’s sake”, he said

fervently, “help me in this hour of trouble. Seek out Mrs. Billings,

and persuade her to abandon this distressing pursuit of her lamentable

folly. Tell her, Mr. Gooch, that her husband is willing to receive her

back to his heart and home—promise her anything that will induce her to

return. I have heard of your success in these matters. Mrs. Billings

cannot be very far away. I am worn out with travel and weariness. Twice

during the pursuit I saw her, but various circumstances prevented our

having an interview. Will you undertake this mission for me, Mr. Gooch,

and earn my everlasting gratitude?”

“It is true,” said Lawyer Gooch, frowning slightly at the other’s last

words, but immediately calling up an expression of virtuous

benevolence, “that on a number of occasions I have been successful in

persuading couples who sought the severing of their matrimonial bonds

to think better of their rash intentions and return to their homes

reconciled. But I assure you that the work is often exceedingly

difficult. The amount of argument, perseverance, and, if I may be

allowed to say it, eloquence that it requires would astonish you. But

this is a case in which my sympathies would be wholly enlisted. I feel

deeply for you sir, and I would be most happy to see husband and wife

reunited. But my time,” concluded the lawyer, looking at his watch as

if suddenly reminded of the fact, “is valuable.”

“I am aware of that,” said the client, “and if you will take the case

and persuade Mrs. Billings to return home and leave the man alone that

she is following—on that day I will pay you the sum of one thousand

dollars. I have made a little money in real estate during the recent

boom in Susanville, and I will not begrudge that amount.”

“Retain your seat for a few moments, please,” said Lawyer Gooch,

arising, and again consulting his watch. “I have another client waiting

in an adjoining room whom I had very nearly forgotten. I will return in

the briefest possible space.”

The situation was now one that fully satisfied Lawyer Gooch’s love of

intricacy and complication. He revelled in cases that presented such

subtle problems and possibilities. It pleased him to think that he was

master of the happiness and fate of the three individuals who sat,

unconscious of one another’s presence, within his reach. His old figure

of the ship glided into his mind. But now the figure failed, for to

have filled every compartment of an actual vessel would have been to

endanger her safety; with his compartments full, his ship of affairs

could but sail on to the advantageous port of a fine, fat fee. The

thing for him to do, of course, was to wring the best bargain he could

from some one of his anxious cargo.

First he called to the office boy: “Lock the outer door, Archibald, and

admit no one.” Then he moved, with long, silent strides into the room

in which client number one waited. That gentleman sat, patiently

scanning the pictures in the magazine, with a cigar in his mouth and

his feet upon a table.

“Well,” he remarked, cheerfully, as the lawyer entered, “have you made

up your mind? Does five hundred dollars go for getting the fair lady a

divorce?”

“You mean that as a retainer?” asked Lawyer Gooch, softly

interrogative.

“Hey? No; for the whole job. It’s enough, ain’t it?”

“My fee,” said Lawyer Gooch, “would be one thousand five hundred

dollars. Five hundred dollars down, and the remainder upon issuance of

the divorce.”

A loud whistle came from client number one. His feet descended to the

floor.

“Guess we can’t close the deal,” he said, arising, “I cleaned up five

hundred dollars in a little real estate dicker down in Susanville. I’d

do anything I could to free the lady, but it out-sizes my pile.”

“Could you stand one thousand two hundred dollars?” asked the lawyer,

insinuatingly.

“Five hundred is my limit, I tell you. Guess I’ll have to hunt up a

cheaper lawyer.” The client put on his hat.

“Out this way, please,” said Lawyer Gooch, opening the door that led

into the hallway.

As the gentleman flowed out of the compartment and down the stairs,

Lawyer Gooch smiled to himself. “Exit Mr. Jessup,” he murmured, as he

fingered the Henry Clay tuft of hair at his ear. “And now for the

forsaken husband.” He returned to the middle office, and assumed a

businesslike manner.

“I understand,” he said to client number three, “that you agree to pay

one thousand dollars if I bring about, or am instrumental in bringing

about, the return of Mrs. Billings to her home, and her abandonment of

her infatuated pursuit of the man for whom she has conceived such a

violent fancy. Also that the case is now unreservedly in my hands on

that basis. Is that correct?”

“Entirely”, said the other, eagerly. “And I can produce the cash any

time at two hours’ notice.”

Lawyer Gooch stood up at his full height. His thin figure seemed to

expand. His thumbs sought the arm-holes of his vest. Upon his face was

a look of sympathetic benignity that he always wore during such

undertakings.

“Then, sir,” he said, in kindly tones, “I think I can promise you an

early relief from your troubles. I have that much confidence in my

powers of argument and persuasion, in the natural impulses of the human

heart toward good, and in the strong influence of a husband’s

unfaltering love. Mrs. Billings, sir, is here—in that room—” the

lawyer’s long arm pointed to the door. “I will call her in at once; and

our united pleadings—”

Lawyer Gooch paused, for client number three had leaped from his chair

as if propelled by steel springs, and clutched his satchel.

“What the devil,” he exclaimed, harshly, “do you mean? That woman in

there! I thought I shook her off forty miles back.”

He ran to the open window, looked out below, and threw one leg over the

sill.

“Stop!” cried Lawyer Gooch, in amazement. “What would you do? Come, Mr.

Billings, and face your erring but innocent wife. Our combined

entreaties cannot fail to—”

“Billings!” shouted the now thoroughly moved client. “I’ll Billings

you, you old idiot!”

Turning, he hurled his satchel with fury at the lawyer’s head. It

struck that astounded peacemaker between the eyes, causing him to

stagger backward a pace or two. When Lawyer Gooch recovered his wits he

saw that his client had disappeared. Rushing to the window, he leaned

out, and saw the recreant gathering himself up from the top of a shed

upon which he had dropped from the second-story window. Without

stopping to collect his hat he then plunged downward the remaining ten

feet to the alley, up which he flew with prodigious celerity until the

surrounding building swallowed him up from view.

Lawyer Gooch passed his hand tremblingly across his brow. It was a

habitual act with him, serving to clear his thoughts. Perhaps also it

now seemed to soothe the spot where a very hard alligator-hide satchel

had struck.

The satchel lay upon the floor, wide open, with its contents spilled

about. Mechanically, Lawyer Gooch stooped to gather up the articles.

The first was a collar; and the omniscient eye of the man of law

perceived, wonderingly, the initials H. K. J. marked upon it. Then came

a comb, a brush, a folded map, and a piece of soap. Lastly, a handful

of old business letters, addressed—every one of them—to “Henry K.

Jessup, Esq.”

Lawyer Gooch closed the satchel, and set it upon the table. He

hesitated for a moment, and then put on his hat and walked into the

office boy’s anteroom.

“Archibald,” he said mildly, as he opened the hall door, “I am going

around to the Supreme Court rooms. In five minutes you may step into

the inner office, and inform the lady who is waiting there that”—here

Lawyer Gooch made use of the vernacular—“that there’s nothing doing.”

IV

CALLOWAY’S CODE

The New York _Enterprise_ sent H. B. Calloway as special correspondent

to the Russo-Japanese-Portsmouth war.

For two months Calloway hung about Yokohama and Tokio, shaking dice

with the other correspondents for drinks of ‘rickshaws—oh, no, that’s

something to ride in; anyhow, he wasn’t earning the salary that his

paper was paying him. But that was not Calloway’s fault. The little

brown men who held the strings of Fate between their fingers were not

ready for the readers of the _Enterprise_ to season their breakfast

bacon and eggs with the battles of the descendants of the gods.

But soon the column of correspondents that were to go out with the

First Army tightened their field-glass belts and went down to the Yalu

with Kuroki. Calloway was one of these.

Now, this is no history of the battle of the Yalu River. That has been

told in detail by the correspondents who gazed at the shrapnel smoke

rings from a distance of three miles. But, for justice’s sake, let it

be understood that the Japanese commander prohibited a nearer view.

Calloway’s feat was accomplished before the battle. What he did was to

furnish the _Enterprise_ with the biggest beat of the war. That paper

published exclusively and in detail the news of the attack on the lines

of the Russian General on the same day that it was made. No other paper

printed a word about it for two days afterward, except a London paper,

whose account was absolutely incorrect and untrue.

Calloway did this in face of the fact that General Kuroki was making

his moves and laying his plans with the profoundest secrecy as far as

the world outside his camps was concerned. The correspondents were

forbidden to send out any news whatever of his plans; and every message

that was allowed on the wires was censored with rigid severity.

The correspondent for the London paper handed in a cablegram describing

Kuroki’s plans; but as it was wrong from beginning to end the censor

grinned and let it go through.

So, there they were—Kuroki on one side of the Yalu with forty-two

thousand infantry, five thousand cavalry, and one hundred and

twenty-four guns. On the other side, Zassulitch waited for him with

only twenty-three thousand men, and with a long stretch of river to

guard. And Calloway had got hold of some important inside information

that he knew would bring the _Enterprise_ staff around a cablegram as

thick as flies around a Park Row lemonade stand. If he could only get

that message past the censor—the new censor who had arrived and taken

his post that day!

Calloway did the obviously proper thing. He lit his pipe and sat down

on a gun carriage to think it over. And there we must leave him; for

the rest of the story belongs to Vesey, a sixteen-dollar-a-week

reporter on the _Enterprise_.

Calloway’s cablegram was handed to the managing editor at four o’clock

in the afternoon. He read it three times; and then drew a pocket mirror

from a pigeon-hole in his desk, and looked at his reflection carefully.

Then he went over to the desk of Boyd, his assistant (he usually called

Boyd when he wanted him), and laid the cablegram before him.

“It’s from Calloway,” he said. “See what you make of it.”

The message was dated at Wi-ju, and these were the words of it:

Foregone preconcerted rash witching goes muffled rumour mine dark

silent unfortunate richmond existing great hotly brute select mooted

parlous beggars ye angel incontrovertible.

Boyd read it twice.

“It’s either a cipher or a sunstroke,” said he.

“Ever hear of anything like a code in the office—a secret code?” asked

the m. e., who had held his desk for only two years. Managing editors

come and go.

“None except the vernacular that the lady specials write in,” said

Boyd. “Couldn’t be an acrostic, could it?”

“I thought of that,” said the m. e., “but the beginning letters contain

only four vowels. It must be a code of some sort.”

“Try em in groups,” suggested Boyd. “Let’s see—‘Rash witching goes’—not

with me it doesn’t. ‘Muffled rumour mine’—must have an underground

wire. ‘Dark silent unfortunate richmond’—no reason why he should knock

that town so hard. ‘Existing great hotly’—no it doesn’t pan out. I’ll

call Scott.”

The city editor came in a hurry, and tried his luck. A city editor must

know something about everything; so Scott knew a little about

cipher-writing.

“It may be what is called an inverted alphabet cipher,” said he. “I’ll

try that. ‘R’ seems to be the oftenest used initial letter, with the

exception of ‘m.’ Assuming ‘r’ to mean ‘e’, the most frequently used

vowel, we transpose the letters—so.”

Scott worked rapidly with his pencil for two minutes; and then showed

the first word according to his reading—the word “Scejtzez.”

“Great!” cried Boyd. “It’s a charade. My first is a Russian general. Go

on, Scott.”

“No, that won’t work,” said the city editor. “It’s undoubtedly a code.

It’s impossible to read it without the key. Has the office ever used a

cipher code?”

“Just what I was asking,” said the m.e. “Hustle everybody up that ought

to know. We must get at it some way. Calloway has evidently got hold of

something big, and the censor has put the screws on, or he wouldn’t

have cabled in a lot of chop suey like this.”

Throughout the office of the _Enterprise_ a dragnet was sent, hauling

in such members of the staff as would be likely to know of a code, past

or present, by reason of their wisdom, information, natural

intelligence, or length of servitude. They got together in a group in

the city room, with the m. e. in the centre. No one had heard of a

code. All began to explain to the head investigator that newspapers

never use a code, anyhow—that is, a cipher code. Of course the

Associated Press stuff is a sort of code—an abbreviation, rather—but—

The m. e. knew all that, and said so. He asked each man how long he had

worked on the paper. Not one of them had drawn pay from an _Enterprise_

envelope for longer than six years. Calloway had been on the paper

twelve years.

“Try old Heffelbauer,” said the m. e. “He was here when Park Row was a

potato patch.”

Heffelbauer was an institution. He was half janitor, half handy-man

about the office, and half watchman—thus becoming the peer of thirteen

and one-half tailors. Sent for, he came, radiating his nationality.

“Heffelbauer,” said the m. e., “did you ever hear of a code belonging

to the office a long time ago—a private code? You know what a code is,

don’t you?”

“Yah,” said Heffelbauer. “Sure I know vat a code is. Yah, apout dwelf

or fifteen year ago der office had a code. Der reborters in der

city-room haf it here.”

“Ah!” said the m. e. “We’re getting on the trail now. Where was it

kept, Heffelbauer? What do you know about it?”

“Somedimes,” said the retainer, “dey keep it in der little room behind

der library room.”

“Can you find it?” asked the m. e. eagerly. “Do you know where it is?”

“Mein Gott!” said Heffelbauer. “How long you dink a code live? Der

reborters call him a maskeet. But von day he butt mit his head der

editor, und—”

“Oh, he’s talking about a goat,” said Boyd. “Get out, Heffelbauer.”

Again discomfited, the concerted wit and resource of the _Enterprise_

huddled around Calloway’s puzzle, considering its mysterious words in

vain.

Then Vesey came in.

Vesey was the youngest reporter. He had a thirty-two-inch chest and

wore a number fourteen collar; but his bright Scotch plaid suit gave

him presence and conferred no obscurity upon his whereabouts. He wore

his hat in such a position that people followed him about to see him

take it off, convinced that it must be hung upon a peg driven into the

back of his head. He was never without an immense, knotted, hard-wood

cane with a German-silver tip on its crooked handle. Vesey was the best

photograph hustler in the office. Scott said it was because no living

human being could resist the personal triumph it was to hand his

picture over to Vesey. Vesey always wrote his own news stories, except

the big ones, which were sent to the rewrite men. Add to this fact that

among all the inhabitants, temples, and groves of the earth nothing

existed that could abash Vesey, and his dim sketch is concluded.

Vesey butted into the circle of cipher readers very much as

Heffelbauer’s “code” would have done, and asked what was up. Some one

explained, with the touch of half-familiar condescension that they

always used toward him. Vesey reached out and took the cablegram from

the m. e.’s hand. Under the protection of some special Providence, he

was always doing appalling things like that, and coming, off unscathed.

“It’s a code,” said Vesey. “Anybody got the key?”

“The office has no code,” said Boyd, reaching for the message. Vesey

held to it.

“Then old Calloway expects us to read it, anyhow,” said he. “He’s up a

tree, or something, and he’s made this up so as to get it by the

censor. It’s up to us. Gee! I wish they had sent me, too. Say—we can’t

afford to fall down on our end of it. ‘Foregone, preconcerted rash,

witching’—h’m.”

Vesey sat down on a table corner and began to whistle softly, frowning

at the cablegram.

“Let’s have it, please,” said the m. e. “We’ve got to get to work on

it.”

“I believe I’ve got a line on it,” said Vesey. “Give me ten minutes.”

He walked to his desk, threw his hat into a waste-basket, spread out

flat on his chest like a gorgeous lizard, and started his pencil going.

The wit and wisdom of the _Enterprise_ remained in a loose group, and

smiled at one another, nodding their heads toward Vesey. Then they

began to exchange their theories about the cipher.

It took Vesey exactly fifteen minutes. He brought to the m. e. a pad

with the code-key written on it.

“I felt the swing of it as soon as I saw it,” said Vesey. “Hurrah for

old Calloway! He’s done the Japs and every paper in town that prints

literature instead of news. Take a look at that.”

Thus had Vesey set forth the reading of the code:

Foregone—conclusion

Preconcerted—arrangement

Rash—act

Witching—hour of midnight

Goes—without saying

Muffled—report

Rumour—hath it

Mine—host

Dark—horse

Silent—majority

Unfortunate—pedestrians*

Richmond—in the field

Existing—conditions

Great—White Way

Hotly—contested

Brute—force

Select—few

Mooted—question

Parlous—times

Beggars—description

Ye—correspondent

Angel—unawares

Incontrovertible—fact

* Mr. Vesey afterward explained that the logical journalistic

complement of the word “unfortunate” was once the word “victim.” But,

since the automobile became so popular, the correct following word is

now “pedestrians”. Of course, in Calloway’s code it meant infantry.

“It’s simply newspaper English,” explained Vesey. “I’ve been reporting

on the _Enterprise_ long enough to know it by heart. Old Calloway gives

us the cue word, and we use the word that naturally follows it just as

we use ’em in the paper. Read it over, and you’ll see how pat they drop

into their places. Now, here’s the message he intended us to get.”

Vesey handed out another sheet of paper.

Concluded arrangement to act at hour of midnight without saying. Report

hath it that a large body of cavalry and an overwhelming force of

infantry will be thrown into the field. Conditions white. Way contested

by only a small force. Question the _Times_ description. Its

correspondent is unaware of the facts.

“Great stuff!” cried Boyd excitedly. “Kuroki crosses the Yalu to-night

and attacks. Oh, we won’t do a thing to the sheets that make up with

Addison’s essays, real estate transfers, and bowling scores!”

“Mr. Vesey,” said the m. e., with his

jollying-which-you-should-regard-as-a-favour manner, “you have cast a

serious reflection upon the literary standards of the paper that

employs you. You have also assisted materially in giving us the biggest

‘beat’ of the year. I will let you know in a day or two whether you are

to be discharged or retained at a larger salary. Somebody send Ames to

me.”

Ames was the king-pin, the snowy-petalled Marguerite, the star-bright

looloo of the rewrite men. He saw attempted murder in the pains of

green-apple colic, cyclones in the summer zephyr, lost children in

every top-spinning urchin, an uprising of the down-trodden masses in

every hurling of a derelict potato at a passing automobile. When not

rewriting, Ames sat on the porch of his Brooklyn villa playing checkers

with his ten-year-old son.

Ames and the “war editor” shut themselves in a room. There was a map in

there stuck full of little pins that represented armies and divisions.

Their fingers had been itching for days to move those pins along the

crooked line of the Yalu. They did so now; and in words of fire Ames

translated Calloway’s brief message into a front page masterpiece that

set the world talking. He told of the secret councils of the Japanese

officers; gave Kuroki’s flaming speeches in full; counted the cavalry

and infantry to a man and a horse; described the quick and silent

building of the bridge at Suikauchen, across which the Mikado’s

legions were hurled upon the surprised Zassulitch, whose troops were

widely scattered along the river. And the battle!—well, you know what

Ames can do with a battle if you give him just one smell of smoke for a

foundation. And in the same story, with seemingly supernatural

knowledge, he gleefully scored the most profound and ponderous paper in

England for the false and misleading account of the intended movements

of the Japanese First Army printed in its issue of _the same date_.

Only one error was made; and that was the fault of the cable operator

at Wi-ju. Calloway pointed it out after he came back. The word “great”

in his code should have been “gage,” and its complemental words “of

battle.” But it went to Ames “conditions white,” and of course he took

that to mean snow. His description of the Japanese army struggling

through the snowstorm, blinded by the whirling flakes, was thrillingly

vivid. The artists turned out some effective illustrations that made a

hit as pictures of the artillery dragging their guns through the

drifts. But, as the attack was made on the first day of May,

“conditions white” excited some amusement. But it in made no difference

to the _Enterprise_, anyway.

It was wonderful. And Calloway was wonderful in having made the new

censor believe that his jargon of words meant no more than a complaint

of the dearth of news and a petition for more expense money. And Vesey

was wonderful. And most wonderful of all are words, and how they make

friends one with another, being oft associated, until not even obituary

notices them do part.

On the second day following, the city editor halted at Vesey’s desk

where the reporter was writing the story of a man who had broken his

leg by falling into a coal-hole—Ames having failed to find a murder

motive in it.

“The old man says your salary is to be raised to twenty a week,” said

Scott.

“All right,” said Vesey. “Every little helps. Say—Mr. Scott, which

would you say—‘We can state without fear of successful contradiction,’

or, ‘On the whole it can be safely asserted’?”

V

A MATTER OF MEAN ELEVATION

One winter the Alcazar Opera Company of New Orleans made a speculative

trip along the Mexican, Central American and South American coasts. The

venture proved a most successful one. The music-loving, impressionable

Spanish-Americans deluged the company with dollars and “vivas.” The

manager waxed plump and amiable. But for the prohibitive climate he

would have put forth the distinctive flower of his prosperity—the

overcoat of fur, braided, frogged and opulent. Almost was he persuaded

to raise the salaries of his company. But with a mighty effort he

conquered the impulse toward such an unprofitable effervescence of joy.

At Macuto, on the coast of Venezuela, the company scored its greatest

success. Imagine Coney Island translated into Spanish and you will

comprehend Macuto. The fashionable season is from November to March.

Down from La Guayra and Caracas and Valencia and other interior towns

flock the people for their holiday season. There are bathing and

fiestas and bull fights and scandal. And then the people have a passion

for music that the bands in the plaza and on the sea beach stir but do

not satisfy. The coming of the Alcazar Opera Company aroused the utmost

ardour and zeal among the pleasure seekers.

The illustrious Guzman Blanco, President and Dictator of Venezuela,

sojourned in Macuto with his court for the season. That potent

ruler—who himself paid a subsidy of 40,000 pesos each year to grand

opera in Caracas—ordered one of the Government warehouses to be cleared

for a temporary theatre. A stage was quickly constructed and rough

wooden benches made for the audience. Private boxes were added for the

use of the President and the notables of the army and Government.

The company remained in Macuto for two weeks. Each performance filled

the house as closely as it could be packed. Then the music-mad people

fought for room in the open doors and windows, and crowded about,

hundreds deep, on the outside. Those audiences formed a brilliantly

diversified patch of colour. The hue of their faces ranged from the

clear olive of the pure-blood Spaniards down through the yellow and

brown shades of the Mestizos to the coal-black Carib and the Jamaica

Negro. Scattered among them were little groups of Indians with faces

like stone idols, wrapped in gaudy fibre-woven blankets—Indians down

from the mountain states of Zamora and Los Andes and Miranda to trade

their gold dust in the coast towns.

The spell cast upon these denizens of the interior fastnesses was

remarkable. They sat in petrified ecstasy, conspicuous among the

excitable Macutians, who wildly strove with tongue and hand to give

evidence of their delight. Only once did the sombre rapture of these

aboriginals find expression. During the rendition of “Faust,” Guzman

Blanco, extravagantly pleased by the “Jewel Song,” cast upon the stage

a purse of gold pieces. Other distinguished citizens followed his lead

to the extent of whatever loose coin they had convenient, while some of

the fair and fashionable señoras were moved, in imitation, to fling a

jewel or a ring or two at the feet of the Marguerite—who was, according

to the bills, Mlle. Nina Giraud. Then, from different parts of the

house rose sundry of the stolid hillmen and cast upon the stage little

brown and dun bags that fell with soft “thumps” and did not rebound. It

was, no doubt, pleasure at the tribute to her art that caused Mlle.

Giraud’s eyes to shine so brightly when she opened these little

deerskin bags in her dressing room and found them to contain pure gold

dust. If so, the pleasure was rightly hers, for her voice in song,

pure, strong and thrilling with the feeling of the emotional artist,

deserved the tribute that it earned.

But the triumph of the Alcazar Opera Company is not the theme—it but

leans upon and colours it. There happened in Macuto a tragic thing, an

unsolvable mystery, that sobered for a time the gaiety of the happy

season.

One evening between the short twilight and the time when she should

have whirled upon the stage in the red and black of the ardent Carmen,

Mlle. Nina Giraud disappeared from the sight and ken of 6,000 pairs of

eyes and as many minds in Macuto. There was the usual turmoil and

hurrying to seek her. Messengers flew to the little French-kept hotel

where she stayed; others of the company hastened here or there where

she might be lingering in some tienda or unduly prolonging her bath

upon the beach. All search was fruitless. Mademoiselle had vanished.

Half an hour passed and she did not appear. The dictator, unused to the

caprices of prime donne, became impatient. He sent an aide from his box

to say to the manager that if the curtain did not at once rise he would

immediately hale the entire company to the calabosa, though it would

desolate his heart, indeed, to be compelled to such an act. Birds in

Macuto could be made to sing.

The manager abandoned hope for the time of Mlle. Giraud. A member of

the chorus, who had dreamed hopelessly for years of the blessed

opportunity, quickly Carmenized herself and the opera went on.

Afterward, when the lost cantatrice appeared not, the aid of the

authorities was invoked. The President at once set the army, the police

and all citizens to the search. Not one clue to Mlle. Giraud’s

disappearance was found. The Alcazar left to fill engagements farther

down the coast.

On the way back the steamer stopped at Macuto and the manager made

anxious inquiry. Not a trace of the lady had been discovered. The

Alcazar could do no more. The personal belongings of the missing lady

were stored in the hotel against her possible later reappearance and

the opera company continued upon its homeward voyage to New Orleans.

On the _camino real_ along the beach the two saddle mules and the four

pack mules of Don Señor Johnny Armstrong stood, patiently awaiting the

crack of the whip of the _arriero_, Luis. That would be the signal for

the start on another long journey into the mountains. The pack mules

were loaded with a varied assortment of hardware and cutlery. These

articles Don Johnny traded to the interior Indians for the gold dust

that they washed from the Andean streams and stored in quills and bags

against his coming. It was a profitable business, and Señor Armstrong

expected soon to be able to purchase the coffee plantation that he

coveted.

Armstrong stood on the narrow sidewalk, exchanging garbled Spanish with

old Peralto, the rich native merchant who had just charged him four

prices for half a gross of pot-metal hatchets, and abridged English

with Rucker, the little German who was Consul for the United States.

“Take with you, señor,” said Peralto, “the blessings of the saints upon

your journey.”

“Better try quinine,” growled Rucker through his pipe. “Take two grains

every night. And don’t make your trip too long, Johnny, because we haf

needs of you. It is ein villainous game dot Melville play of whist, and

dere is no oder substitute. _Auf wiedersehen_, und keep your eyes dot

mule’s ears between when you on der edge of der brecipices ride.”

The bells of Luis’s mule jingled and the pack train filed after the

warning note. Armstrong, waved a good-bye and took his place at the

tail of the procession. Up the narrow street they turned, and passed

the two-story wooden Hotel Ingles, where Ives and Dawson and Richards

and the rest of the chaps were dawdling on the broad piazza, reading

week-old newspapers. They crowded to the railing and shouted many

friendly and wise and foolish farewells after him. Across the plaza

they trotted slowly past the bronze statue of Guzman Blanco, within its

fence of bayoneted rifles captured from revolutionists, and out of the

town between the rows of thatched huts swarming with the unclothed

youth of Macuto. They plunged into the damp coolness of banana groves

at length to emerge upon a bright stream, where brown women in scant

raiment laundered clothes destructively upon the rocks. Then the pack

train, fording the stream, attacked the sudden ascent, and bade adieu

to such civilization as the coast afforded.

For weeks Armstrong, guided by Luis, followed his regular route among

the mountains. After he had collected an arroba of the precious metal,

winning a profit of nearly $5,000, the heads of the lightened mules

were turned down-trail again. Where the head of the Guarico River

springs from a great gash in the mountain-side, Luis halted the train.

“Half a day’s journey from here, Señor,” said he, “is the village of

Tacuzama, which we have never visited. I think many ounces of gold may

be procured there. It is worth the trial.”

Armstrong concurred, and they turned again upward toward Tacuzama. The

trail was abrupt and precipitous, mounting through a dense forest. As

night fell, dark and gloomy, Luis once more halted. Before them was a

black chasm, bisecting the path as far as they could see.

Luis dismounted. “There should be a bridge,” he called, and ran along

the cleft a distance. “It is here,” he cried, and remounting, led the

way. In a few moments Armstrong, heard a sound as though a thunderous

drum were beating somewhere in the dark. It was the falling of the

mules’ hoofs upon the bridge made of strong hides lashed to poles and

stretched across the chasm. Half a mile further was Tacuzama. The

village was a congregation of rock and mud huts set in the profundity

of an obscure wood. As they rode in a sound inconsistent with that

brooding solitude met their ears. From a long, low mud hut that they

were nearing rose the glorious voice of a woman in song. The words were

English, the air familiar to Armstrong’s memory, but not to his musical

knowledge.

He slipped from his mule and stole to a narrow window in one end of the

house. Peering cautiously inside, he saw, within three feet of him, a

woman of marvellous, imposing beauty, clothed in a splendid loose robe

of leopard skins. The hut was packed close to the small space in which

she stood with the squatting figures of Indians.

The woman finished her song and seated herself close to the little

window, as if grateful for the unpolluted air that entered it. When she

had ceased several of the audience rose and cast little softly-falling

bags at her feet. A harsh murmur—no doubt a barbarous kind of applause

and comment—went through the grim assembly.

Armstrong, was used to seizing opportunities promptly. Taking advantage

of the noise he called to the woman in a low but distinct voice: “Do

not turn your head this way, but listen. I am an American. If you need

assistance tell me how I can render it. Answer as briefly as you can.”

The woman was worthy of his boldness. Only by a sudden flush of her

pale cheek did she acknowledge understanding of his words. Then she

spoke, scarcely moving her lips.

“I am held a prisoner by these Indians. God knows I need help. In two

hours come to the little hut twenty yards toward the Mountainside.

There will be a light and a red curtain in the window. There is always

a guard at the door, whom you will have to overcome. For the love of

heaven, do not fail to come.”

The story seems to shrink from adventure and rescue and mystery. The

theme is one too gentle for those brave and quickening tones. And yet

it reaches as far back as time itself. It has been named “environment,”

which is as weak a word as any to express the unnameable kinship of man

to nature, that queer fraternity that causes stones and trees and salt

water and clouds to play upon our emotions. Why are we made serious and

solemn and sublime by mountain heights, grave and contemplative by an

abundance of overhanging trees, reduced to inconstancy and monkey

capers by the ripples on a sandy beach? Did the protoplasm—but enough.

The chemists are looking into the matter, and before long they will

have all life in the table of the symbols.

Briefly, then, in order to confine the story within scientific bounds,

John Armstrong, went to the hut, choked the Indian guard and carried

away Mlle. Giraud. With her was also conveyed a number of pounds of

gold dust she had collected during her six months’ forced engagement in

Tacuzama. The Carabobo Indians are easily the most enthusiastic lovers

of music between the equator and the French Opera House in New Orleans.

They are also strong believers that the advice of Emerson was good when

he said: “The thing thou wantest, O discontented man —take it, and pay

the price.” A number of them had attended the performance of the

Alcazar Opera Company in Macuto, and found Mlle. Giraud’s style and

technique satisfactory. They wanted her, so they took her one evening

suddenly and without any fuss. They treated her with much

consideration, exacting only one song recital each day. She was quite

pleased at being rescued by Mr. Armstrong. So much for mystery and

adventure. Now to resume the theory of the protoplasm.

John Armstrong and Mlle. Giraud rode among the Andean peaks, enveloped

in their greatness and sublimity. The mightiest cousins, furthest

removed, in nature’s great family become conscious of the tie. Among

those huge piles of primordial upheaval, amid those gigantic silences

and elongated fields of distance the littlenesses of men are

precipitated as one chemical throws down a sediment from another. They

moved reverently, as in a temple. Their souls were uplifted in unison

with the stately heights. They travelled in a zone of majesty and

peace.

To Armstrong the woman seemed almost a holy thing. Yet bathed in the

white, still dignity of her martyrdom that purified her earthly beauty

and gave out, it seemed, an aura of transcendent loveliness, in those

first hours of companionship she drew from him an adoration that was

half human love, half the worship of a descended goddess.

Never yet since her rescue had she smiled. Over her dress she still

wore the robe of leopard skins, for the mountain air was cold. She

looked to be some splendid princess belonging to those wild and awesome

altitudes. The spirit of the region chimed with hers. Her eyes were

always turned upon the sombre cliffs, the blue gorges and the snow-clad

turrets, looking a sublime melancholy equal to their own. At times on

the journey she sang thrilling te deums and misereres that struck the

true note of the hills, and made their route seem like a solemn march

down a cathedral aisle. The rescued one spoke but seldom, her mood

partaking of the hush of nature that surrounded them. Armstrong looked

upon her as an angel. He could not bring himself to the sacrilege of

attempting to woo her as other women may be wooed.

On the third day they had descended as far as the _tierra templada_,

the zona of the table lands and foot hills. The mountains were receding

in their rear, but still towered, exhibiting yet impressively their

formidable heads. Here they met signs of man. They saw the white houses

of coffee plantations gleam across the clearings. They struck into a

road where they met travellers and pack-mules. Cattle were grazing on

the slopes. They passed a little village where the round-eyed _niños_

shrieked and called at sight of them.

Mlle. Giraud laid aside her leopard-skin robe. It seemed to be a trifle

incongruous now. In the mountains it had appeared fitting and natural.

And if Armstrong was not mistaken she laid aside with it something of

the high dignity of her demeanour. As the country became more populous

and significant of comfortable life he saw, with a feeling of joy, that

the exalted princess and priestess of the Andean peaks was changing to

a woman—an earth woman, but no less enticing. A little colour crept to

the surface of her marble cheek. She arranged the conventional dress

that the removal of the robe now disclosed with the solicitous touch of

one who is conscious of the eyes of others. She smoothed the careless

sweep of her hair. A mundane interest, long latent in the chilling

atmosphere of the ascetic peaks, showed in her eyes.

This thaw in his divinity sent Armstrong’s heart going faster. So might

an Arctic explorer thrill at his first ken of green fields and

liquescent waters. They were on a lower plane of earth and life and

were succumbing to its peculiar, subtle influence. The austerity of the

hills no longer thinned the air they breathed. About them was the

breath of fruit and corn and builded homes, the comfortable smell of

smoke and warm earth and the consolations man has placed between

himself and the dust of his brother earth from which he sprung. While

traversing those awful mountains, Mlle. Giraud had seemed to be wrapped

in their spirit of reverent reserve. Was this that same woman—now

palpitating, warm, eager, throbbing with conscious life and charm,

feminine to her finger-tips? Pondering over this, Armstrong felt

certain misgivings intrude upon his thoughts. He wished he could stop

there with this changing creature, descending no farther. Here was the

elevation and environment to which her nature seemed to respond with

its best. He feared to go down upon the man-dominated levels. Would her

spirit not yield still further in that artificial zone to which they

were descending?

Now from a little plateau they saw the sea flash at the edge of the

green lowlands. Mlle. Giraud gave a little, catching sigh.

“Oh! look, Mr. Armstrong, there is the sea! Isn’t it lovely? I’m so

tired of mountains.” She heaved a pretty shoulder in a gesture of

repugnance. “Those horrid Indians! Just think of what I suffered!

Although I suppose I attained my ambition of becoming a stellar

attraction, I wouldn’t care to repeat the engagement. It was very nice

of you to bring me away. Tell me, Mr. Armstrong—honestly, now —do I

look such an awful, awful fright? I haven’t looked into a mirror, you

know, for months.”

Armstrong made answer according to his changed moods. Also he laid his

hand upon hers as it rested upon the horn of her saddle. Luis was at

the head of the pack train and could not see. She allowed it to remain

there, and her eyes smiled frankly into his.

Then at sundown they dropped upon the coast level under the palms and

lemons among the vivid greens and scarlets and ochres of the _tierra

caliente_. They rode into Macuto, and saw the line of volatile bathers

frolicking in the surf. The mountains were very far away.

Mlle. Giraud’s eyes were shining with a joy that could not have existed

under the chaperonage of the mountain-tops. There were other spirits

calling to her—nymphs of the orange groves, pixies from the chattering

surf, imps, born of the music, the perfumes, colours and the

insinuating presence of humanity. She laughed aloud, musically, at a

sudden thought.

“Won’t there be a sensation?” she called to Armstrong. “Don’t I wish I

had an engagement just now, though! What a picnic the press agent would

have! ‘Held a prisoner by a band of savage Indians subdued by the spell

of her wonderful voice’—wouldn’t that make great stuff? But I guess I

quit the game winner, anyhow—there ought to be a couple of thousand

dollars in that sack of gold dust I collected as encores, don’t you

think?”

He left her at the door of the little Hotel de Buen Descansar, where

she had stopped before. Two hours later he returned to the hotel. He

glanced in at the open door of the little combined reception room and

café.

Half a dozen of Macuto’s representative social and official

_caballeros_ were distributed about the room. Señor Villablanca, the

wealthy rubber concessionist, reposed his fat figure on two chairs,

with an emollient smile beaming upon his chocolate-coloured face.

Guilbert, the French mining engineer, leered through his polished

nose-glasses. Colonel Mendez, of the regular army, in gold-laced

uniform and fatuous grin, was busily extracting corks from champagne

bottles. Other patterns of Macutian gallantry and fashion pranced and

posed. The air was hazy with cigarette smoke. Wine dripped upon the

floor.

Perched upon a table in the centre of the room in an attitude of easy

preëminence was Mlle. Giraud. A chic costume of white lawn and cherry

ribbons supplanted her travelling garb. There was a suggestion of lace,

and a frill or two, with a discreet, small implication of

hand-embroidered pink hosiery. Upon her lap rested a guitar. In her

face was the light of resurrection, the peace of elysium attained

through fire and suffering. She was singing to a lively accompaniment a

little song:

“When you see de big round moon

Comin’ up like a balloon,

Dis nigger skips fur to kiss de lips

Ob his stylish, black-faced coon.”

The singer caught sight of Armstrong.

“Hi! there, Johnny,” she called; “I’ve been expecting you for an hour.

What kept you? Gee! but these smoked guys are the slowest you ever saw.

They ain’t on, at all. Come along in, and I’ll make this

coffee-coloured old sport with the gold epaulettes open one for you

right off the ice.”

“Thank you,” said Armstrong; “not just now, I believe. I’ve several

things to attend to.”

He walked out and down the street, and met Rucker coming up from the

Consulate.

“Play you a game of billiards,” said Armstrong. “I want something to

take the taste of the sea level out of my mouth.”

VI

“GIRL”

In gilt letters on the ground glass of the door of room No. 962 were

the words: “Robbins & Hartley, Brokers.” The clerks had gone. It was

past five, and with the solid tramp of a drove of prize Percherons,

scrub-women were invading the cloud-capped twenty-story office

building. A puff of red-hot air flavoured with lemon peelings,

soft-coal smoke and train oil came in through the half-open windows.

Robbins, fifty, something of an overweight beau, and addicted to first

nights and hotel palm-rooms, pretended to be envious of his partner’s

commuter’s joys.

“Going to be something doing in the humidity line to-night,” he said.

“You out-of-town chaps will be the people, with your katydids and

moonlight and long drinks and things out on the front porch.”

Hartley, twenty-nine, serious, thin, good-looking, nervous, sighed and

frowned a little.

“Yes,” said he, “we always have cool nights in Floralhurst, especially

in the winter.”

A man with an air of mystery came in the door and went up to Hartley.

“I’ve found where she lives,” he announced in the portentous

half-whisper that makes the detective at work a marked being to his

fellow men.

Hartley scowled him into a state of dramatic silence and quietude. But

by that time Robbins had got his cane and set his tie pin to his

liking, and with a debonair nod went out to his metropolitan

amusements.