THE LETTER IN THE DESK
Shortly after Sunday morning breakfast, Hutch had a private talk in
his room with one of the two bell hops of the hotel, following which
he complacently strolled down to the veranda, where, lounging in a
comfortable chair, he presently saw Tom Locke come forth and depart
on his way to church. When the pitcher had vanished, the man rose and
returned to his room.
In less than fifteen minutes there came a light, nervous tap on the
door, and, at Hutchinson’s invitation to enter, the bell boy, looking a
trifle pale, glided in.
“Well, did you get the pass-key?” questioned the manager.
“Yes, sir,” answered the boy; “I slipped it off the hook when the clerk
wasn’t looking, but if I’m caught I’ll be in a peck of trouble. I
wouldn’t do this, only――”
“Only you need the tenner I offered. Here it is.”
He passed over a ten-dollar bill, which the boy took with a hand that
was a trifle unsteady.
“Now, go ahead down the corridor, and open the door when nobody’s
looking, but don’t act so sneaky that you’ll be suspected if some guest
should see you,” ordered Hutchinson. “Leave the door ajar a bit. The
chambermaid for this floor is working at the front of the house, isn’t
she?”
“Yep; she was in Number Eleven when I come up. If I’m caught――”
“Quit that, and get a move on. When I come out, I’ll close the door.
You can lock it afterward. Stir yourself now.”
A few minutes later, stepping almost as lightly as a cat, Hutchinson
left his own room, and moved down the corridor until, at the far end,
he saw the door of Number Twenty-two, which was Tom Locke’s room,
standing the least bit ajar. In a moment he had passed inside, closed
the door quietly, and shot the safety bolt.
The room had not been made up, but it was the maid’s rule to take care
of the front of the house first, and Hutch was not particularly fearful
of interruption. If she should come, she would find the door bolted,
and, unless she had seen him go out, doubtless she would think Locke
still there.
Hutchinson wasted no time. Testing the desk, he found it locked,
whereupon he produced a huge bunch of keys, muttering:
“If one of these won’t do it, I’ll have to break it open. I’m going
into it now, anyhow.”
Selecting the keys most likely to fit such a lock, he found that the
fourth one tried served his purpose. The bolt clicked, and he opened
the lid. Although he was moving swiftly, apparently he was still as
cool and unagitated as Locke might have been himself while opening the
desk with the proper key, which the pitcher carried in his pocket.
Immediately on lowering the lid of the desk, Hutchinson’s eyes
discovered something that gave him a feeling of satisfaction. It was an
unfinished letter, written on the paper of the hotel, pushed back and
left lying under the pigeonholes.
“This ought to tell me something,” muttered the man. “It’s a letter the
fellow hasn’t found time to finish, and, at least, it will furnish the
needed specimen of his handwriting.”
In the most informal way, without giving the full name and address
of the person for whom it was intended, the letter began: “My dear
Grandall;” and went on to give an account of the experiences of the
writer since his arrival in Kingsbridge.
The chirography was strong and manly, and extremely easy to read,
although not at all of the “copper-plate” variety.
Hutchinson, running through the letter swiftly in search of the proof
he desired, gave little heed to the quaintly humorous description
of the pulp-mill town, “baseball batty”; and he skimmed through the
somewhat graphic, self-chaffing account of the first game pitched by
the writer, in which, as he laughingly confessed, he began with “a
combination attack of stage fright and buck fever.” These paragraphs,
however, he perused without missing a word:
As I say, we have a good team, and I think it should be a
winning one if our manager is on the square and wants it to
win. For some reason I do not trust the man.
At our first meeting I was seized by a powerful instinctive
feeling of dislike and distrust. He is cold as a fish and
bloodless as a stone, with a voice as flat and monotonous as
the Desert of Sahara, and his frosty, unfeeling eye is not the
eye of an honest man.
He does not belong in Kingsbridge, but has been hired, like the
players on the team, and I should say that he is a person who
stands ready to sell himself at any time for a price.
If it should happen that, near the close of the season,
Kingsbridge stands between Bancroft and championship honors,
Bancroft will cop the pennant easily enough by dickering on the
“q. t.” with Mr. Robert Hutchinson――or I’m away off my trolley.
It was characteristic of the man reading the letter that he did not
show his rage by flushing. His nose, however, became a livid, sickly
white, and his thin lips were pressed somewhat more closely together,
causing his mouth to resemble a straight, colorless scar. His face was
that of a most dangerous man who would strike at an enemy’s back in the
dark.
There were other paragraphs that Hutchinson read without skipping a
line:
Oh, by the way, old fellow, I have met the most charming girl
it has ever been my good luck to run across. I’m not going to
try to describe her, because I simply lack command of language
to do so, and by this confession alone you can see that she has
me going some.
Her name is Janet Harting, and she is the daughter of a
hard-shell parson whose pet aversion is baseball――a man who,
according to report, believes all baseball players must be
either children, fools, or ruffians.
Janet, however, has attended boarding school, and she’s a
thoroughbred fan, though her father raises such a rumpus about
it that she doesn’t get out to many games.
Benton King, son of the man who has metamorphosed Kingsbridge
from a four-corners settlement into a hustling, rip-roaring
young city-to-be, is mightily interested in Miss Janet. Judging
by appearances, she is not exactly averse to his attentions,
which, considering his prospects and the fact that he seems to
have anything around here in the eligible-young-man line left
at the post, is no source for wonderment.
Sometimes I think I’d like to see if I couldn’t give him a
run for his money, but――well, you know how I’m situated,
and――what’s the use!
“Not a bit of use, young man――not a bit,” muttered Bob Hutchinson.
“When I get through with you, it isn’t likely you’ll have a reputation
that’ll make you particularly attractive to a discriminating young
lady.”
Hutchinson was much disappointed when he came to the abrupt breaking
off of the unfinished letter in the middle of the last page, and failed
to find anything in it that would prove that Locke and Hazelton of
Princeton were one and the same.
He decided at once to purloin the final page, leaving the others as
he had found them. He would relock the desk when he departed from the
room, and Locke, missing the final sheet, might fancy that somehow
it had slipped from the others and been tossed into the near-by
wastebasket, to be carried off by the maid.
In one of the pigeonholes were two letters. Both were addressed on the
envelopes to “Mr. Tom Locke.” The first one opened contained only the
post-card picture of a strikingly pretty young girl, who was laughingly
exhibiting some fetching dimples. Across the bottom of the picture was
written: “To ‘Big Bub,’ with love, from ‘Tid.’”
A look of understanding drifted across Hutchinson’s face as he gazed at
the picture, and, returning it to the envelope, he observed:
“So that’s how you’re ‘situated,’ Mr. Tom Locke; that’s the reason why
you are refraining from trying to give King a run for his money with
the parson’s daughter. If you were going to hang around this town long
enough, I’ll guarantee you would forget about ‘Tid’ and make an effort
to get into the running, just the same. It may be lucky for King that
you’ll be going away very soon.”
He returned the picture to the pigeonhole, and investigated the
contents of the other letter, consisting of a single sheet of paper, on
which a brief note had apparently been scrawled with much haste.
The handwriting was masculine, and there was no date line to tell
from whence it had come, but the first two words were enough to give
Hutchinson considerable satisfaction. They were: “Dear Hazelton.” With
some trouble, the manager deciphered what followed:
Don’t worry any more about the Kernell case. Wyloft &
Pettengall have informed me that it will surely be settled out
of court. I’ll have further information from them in a few
days, but I’m sure there’ll be no necessity for you to come
back here until you get through with your baseball job.
Hope you make good up there in the bush, though you were afraid
when you left that your arm had lost some of its cunning. Let
me know what success you are having.
Ever yours,
GRANDALL.
“Ah!” breathed Bob Hutchinson. “As proof, I think this should satisfy
Riley. The envelope is addressed to ‘Tom Locke,’ but the writer
calls him Hazelton in the message. That settles it. I don’t need the
envelope, but I think I’ll keep its contents for Riley’s eyes. Now, we
can go ahead without hesitation, and sink the harpoon to the hilt.”