Pape, the while, had grown most anxious to know the exact whereabouts of
the young woman in the case. He found it nervous work, this expecting
her appearance every minute--this playing the detective when she, with
one glance, could detect him. Would she or would she not expose him? The
full imperativeness of the question was in the gaze he bent upon the
matron.
"Miss Lauderdale will soon be down, I am sure. She went to her room to
change her gown."
"And why, pray, should she bother changing her gown at a time like this?
The one she had on was very--I mean to say, wasn't the one she had on
becoming?"
This demand Mrs. Sturgis met with an increase of dignity. "We thought it
might be necessary for her to go to Police Headquarters or whatever it
is you call the place where one swears to complaints. I'll send her word
to hurry if you wish."
Pape did wish. However, the sending of word to that effect proved
unnecessary. Even as Mrs. Sturgis was crossing the room to ring for
Jasper, Jane entered, dressed in a black and white checked skirt and
loose white silk blouse. At sight of the caller she stopped short.
"Well, I'll be ----"
"Oh no, you won't, Miss Lauderdale--I believe?" Pape's advance had
interrupted her ejaculation. "You're too much of a lady for that and far
too good a sport to--to be in despair over your loss. The game is young
yet and I am here to win it."
Although his tone was pompous, the eyes he fixed on her outraged
expression were urgent, imploring.
Yet at the moment she did not look much as though she had dropped the
note as summons No. 2. Twice her lips opened in angry hesitation. But
her aunt interrupted before she actually spoke.
"I was just about to send Jasper up for you, my dear," she said. "Mind
your nerves, now. This is an operative who has come over from The
Arsenal to solve our mystery. Mr. Pope, Miss Lauderdale."
"Pape, you mean," Jane corrected, then bit her lip.
"Of course, I mean Pape. I am _so_ bad at names, Mr. Pape. Here I've
been calling you Pope. But, Jane dear, how could you know?"
The ensuing slight pause was shattered by the soundless insistence of a
pair of gray eyes addressing a pair of tropic blue: "Play my game. It's
a good game. Why not--_why not_ play my game?"
"Jasper told me."
Her compliance was brief and cold--but still compliance. With his wide
smile Pape thanked and thanked her, triumphed over her, caressed her.
Jane refused to smile back. But she did blush--slowly, deliciously,
revealingly blushed. At that moment she looked, after all, as though she
_had_ meant to drop the note. He wanted to accuse her of it and be sure.
But there was Mrs. Sturgis to be considered. Readjusting his expression
into lines professional, he returned to the case.
"Suppose, madame, we take a look at that safe."
Mrs. Sturgis led the way into the room from which she had appeared on
his arrival. It was a library, its far end one huge window of many
colored panes and its walls lined with book-shelves except where family
portraits in oils were hung or where the fireplace and its mantel
interfered. An antique writing desk in the window, a magazine-covered
table off center, a pillow-piled couch and a scattering of several
comfortable-looking, upholstered chairs comprised the furnishings, the
rich old mahogany of which was brought out by the glow from a
companionable fire of cannel coal.
To a corner of this room repaired Mrs. Sturgis and there pressed her
palm against an autumnal colored leaf in the wall-paper design. A shelf,
laden with books moved out, one volume, by chance, falling to the floor.
Another touch--exactly what or where Pape did not see--caused a panel to
slide back, disclosing the nickeled face of a wall safe. With assured
fingers she began to turn the dial--to the right, to the left, then a
complete turn to the right again. Every movement added evidence of her
boast of precision. Seizing the knob, she pulled upon it hard and
harder. The door of the safe, however, did not yield.
"Peculiar!" she ejaculated, all the well-bred softness whittled off her
voice. "Never before have I made a mistake on that combination. I know
it like my own initials."
"Mind _your_ nerve now, Aunt Helene," advised Jane from just behind, her
tone, too, rather sharp.
For such a sweet-looking girl, she certainly could sound
sour--malicious! Not another word or glance had she spared to him, the
double-barreled interloper. She was playing his game--yes. But was it
because he had asked her or for reasons of her own? This dame he had
self-selected would seem to be an intricate creature.
So Pape reflected as he picked up and held in his hands the book which
had fallen. But he, at least, was simple enough; with his very
simplicity in the past had solved more than one intricate problem. He
would, if she permitted, try to solve her.
Again Mrs. Sturgis turned and twirled; again tugged at the knob, but
with no more effect than before; again faced about with consternation,
even superstition on her face.
"There must be something wrong here," she half-whispered.
"That we already know," Jane agreed, "else why the detective in our
midst?"
In Pape's hands, suppose we say by accident, the volume he had rescued
from the floor opened upon one of O. Henry's _immortelles_--"Alias
Jimmie Valentine." To him the work of the lamented Mr. Porter ever had
been fraught with suggestion for more than the "kick" that, unlike
home-brew, is always to be found at the bottom of his bottle--at the
_finis_ of his tale.
The latest in amateur detectives, thus opportunely reminded, decided
that he must rise to the occasion. And he had reason to hope that he
could, once upon a time having been shown some tricks of the tumbler
profession by a professional.
"Why else should I be in your midst," he offered cheerfully, "if not to
open your safe for you?"
Mrs. Sturgis at once gave him the benefit of doubt; made way for him;
took a stand beside her skeptical-looking niece. But Jane's contempt
over his essay was frank--really, made her look downright disagreeable.
Pape made up his mind to disappoint her evident expectations if within
his powers so to do. He knelt down; wedged his head into the vacancy
left by the swinging shelf; pressed his ear close to the lock; began to
finger the dial. There was more than hope in his touch; there was also
practice. In his ranch-house out Hellroaring way he long ago had
installed a wall safe of his own in which to deposit the pay-roll and
other cash on hand. And one day it had disobligingly gone on strike; but
not so disobligingly that a certain derelict whom he had fed-up on
he-man advice as well as food--one who had followed the delicate
profession of "listener"--was beyond reach.
This turned-straight cracksman, without admitting his former avocation,
had solved a pay-day dilemma by conquering the refractory dial and later
had given his benefactor a series of lessons in the most-gentle "art,"
that the emergency might not recur. Pape, miles and miles from the
nearest town which might afford an expert, had been convinced by the
experience that a safe is unsafe which cannot be opened at the owner's
will.
In the course of present manipulations, the "under-graduate" considered
what he could say or do to the contemptuous half of his audience should
he fail, but reached no satisfactory conclusion. Indeed, he felt that
the only real way of venting his chagrin would be to wring her graceful,
long, white neck for doubting him before he failed, a proceeding quite
beyond consideration of any man from Montana. So he must not fail. Yet
how succeed?
Just as he was reminding himself for the seventh time--seventh
turn--that "slow and careful" was also the watchword for this sort of
acquaintanceship, an electrifying response to his light-fingering
sounded from within ---- a click. Turning the knob, he pulled out the
door. The yielding hinges completed an electric circuit and an
incandescent bulb lighted in the roof.
Pape sprang to his feet and back, as much amazed over his feat as the
dazed-looking Miss Lauderdale. Then, at once, he got control of himself;
straightened his cuffs, as his teacher always had done after turning the
trick; remarked most calmly:
"The thief must have been changing the combination in the hope of
delaying the discovery of his crime and been frightened into such a
panic that he didn't take time to close the door."
Mrs. Sturgis again bent to the safe. She had reached well into it when,
with a poignant cry, she put both hands to her eyes and started back.
"It's there again! This is getting too much for my nerves. Was I mad
before or am I going mad now? Jane--Mr. Pape--_it isn't gone_--_at
all_!"
The girl next applied to the cavity in the wall. Her face set in an
apparent effort to "mind" her nerves. She reached in and drew out an
oblong box of gold beautifully carved and set with small rubies in a
design of peacocks. From her expression--no longer disagreeable, but
beautiful from an ecstasy of relief--Pape judged this to be the "stolen"
heirloom upon which she was said to set such store.
That her aunt might be absolutely reassured, Jane Lauderdale handed her
the _tabatiere_ so recently accounted missing. That good lady, however,
looked weak, as if about to drop the jeweled box. Pape relieved her of
it; led her to a chair.
"I--I don't understand."
Like a child utterly dependent on grown-ups for explanation, she glanced
from one to the other of the younger pair.
"Except for that famous precision of yours, it would seem easy enough,"
Jane offered with more clarity than respect. "You must have pushed the
box aside when you took out the pieces Irene wanted to wear. Your hands
were full and you neglected to close the safe. When you came down again
for your black pearl set and found the door open you thought at once of
my snuffbox and jumped at the conclusion, since it wasn't in the place
you remembered putting it, that it wasn't there at all. Cheer up. You
wouldn't be the dearest auntie in the world if you weren't human."
Pape seconded her. "The most precise of us are liable to figments of the
imagination, madam. All's well that ends that way. A snuffbox in hand is
worth two in the ----"
But Aunt Helene wasn't so sure. She interrupted in a complaining voice,
as if offended at their effort to cheer her.
"I never jump at conclusions--_never_. If I was startled into jumping at
the one you mention, Jane, it seems strange that I selected these black
pearls so accurately. _Doesn't_ it? And I'd almost take oath that the
box wasn't pushed to one side--that it stood, when I found it just now,
exactly on the spot where I first placed it. And then, Mr. Pape, the
trouble with the combination----"
"Don't worry any more about it, poor dear," Jane begged with a suddenly
sweet, soothing air, the while laying a sympathetic palm against her
relative's puckered brow. "I've noticed that you haven't seemed just
yourself for days. Perhaps these headaches you've complained of mean
that you need eyeglasses. It's only natural that a strain on the optic
nerves should confuse your mind, which usually _is_ so precise about
all----"
"Nothing of the sort, Jane. You can't mental-suggest me into old age!"
snapped the recalcitrant patient. "My eyes are just as good as yours.
And I feel positive that I am quite myself."
"Then why, Aunt Helene, didn't you go with us to hear Farrar to-night?
You aren't usually so squeamish about----"
"Of course not. It was indigestion, if you must know. Certainly it had
nothing to do with my optic nerves. You shouldn't accuse me of jumping
at conclusions, Jane, with all your irritating, positive ideas about
other people's----"
"It is my opinion--" the unofficial investigator thought advisable at
this point to remind them that an outsider was present--"that your
remembrance of the combination figures and the various turns was
absolutely correct--ab-so-lutely. But you may have jolted the delicate
mechanism of the lock when you shut the door. You _may_ have slammed
it."
He received two glances for his pains to maintain peace, a quick,
resentful one from the niece and a long, grateful one from her aunt.
"A beauty, isn't it?" he continued buoyantly, looking at Jane, but
referring to the snuffbox in his hands, lowered for closer inspection
into the light of the electric lamp. "I don't wonder that the thought of
losing it distressed you, my dear Miss Lauderdale."
"Associations, my dear Mr. Pape."
Her brevity, cut even shorter by her accent, evidently was calculated to
inform him that, although she had played, she didn't care much for his
game. For a young person who could warm one up so one minute, she
certainly could make one feel like an ice-crusher the next! Since that's
what he was up against, however, he proceeded with all his surplus
enthusiasm to crush ice.
"The sight of this heirloom takes one right back to the days of old,
doesn't it, when ladies fair and gallants bold----"
"You wax poetic from hearsay, Mr. Pape? You don't look exactly old or
wise enough to have lived in those good old days."
"Miss Lauderdale, no. I don't claim to have staked any 'Fountain of
Youth.' In fact, I ain't much older or wiser than I look and act. But
I've read a bit in my day--and night. The courtly Colonial gent, if I
remember aright, first placed the left hand on the heart--so." Then he
bent gracefully, not to say carefully, so that the seams of his satin
straight-jackets should not give--thus. With his right hand he next
snapped open his jeweled box and passed it around the circle of
snufflers of _the_ sex, who would likely have swooned at the thought of
a cigarette as at the sight of a mouse--in this wise.
"Oh don't--don't you _dare_ open it!"
Pape, who duly had pressed his heart, bowed with care, if not grace, and
was in the act of pressing the catch, felt the box snatched from his
grasp. In his fumbling, however, his thumb had succeeded. As Jane seized
her treasure the lid sprang back. One look she gave into it, then swayed
in the patch of lamplight very like the limp ladies he had been
mentioning. A face of the pure pallor of hers scarcely could be said to
turn pale, but a ghastly light spread over it. Her eyes distended and
darkened with horror. A shudder took her. She looked about to fall.
"It is--empty! See, _it is empty_," she moaned.
Pape was in time to steady her into a chair. Aunt Helene hovered over
her anxiously.
"What's gone wrong with you, childie? You're the one that's in a
run-down state. Here's your box, Jane dear. Look, it isn't stolen at
all. Pinch yourself. Waken up. Everything's all right."
But Jane did not return her relative's smile; clutched both fat arms of
the chair with both slim hands; stared ahead fixedly, as if trying to
think.
"It is," she repeated under her breath, "_empty_."
From his urgent desire to relieve and help her, Pape intruded into her
painful abstraction.
"Then it wasn't the box you valued, so much as its contents," he stated
to her. "From the shock you have shown on finding it empty, I gather
that the safe has been robbed after all. Will you tell me of what?"
Her lips moved. He had to lean low to hear her sporadic utterances.
"I have failed--in a trust. It meant more to me than--it will kill
him--simply kill him. He trusted me. I can't understand--who----"
A sudden glance of virile suspicion she flung up into the young
Westerner's eyes.
"Who and what are you?" she demanded. "Answer me!"