Morgan's car was making the most rapid progress through the downtown
traffic that the law allowed, and his electric energies were fretting
for greater speed. The days were all too short for him with their
present demands, and he forced himself with the merciless rigour of a
man who is both overseer and slave. Now he was allowing himself just
forty-five minutes for luncheon at the club, and back at the office men
and matters were waiting.
He found gratification in the deference with which policemen saluted,
and in the glances that turned toward him as his chauffeur slowed down
at the corners. He knew that his fellow townsmen were saying, "That's
Morgan Wallifarro!" It was enough to say that, for the name bore its own
significance. It meant, "That is the man who has just carried a
Democratic town for a Republican mayor, and who had much to do with
carrying a Democratic State for a Republican governor. Even in national
councils his voice begins to bear weight."
These things were incense in the nostrils of the hurrying young lawyer,
but suddenly his attention was arrested from them, and he rapped on the
glass front of the closed car. He had seen Anne on the sidewalk, and at
his signal the machine swung in to the curb and halted.
"I'm on my way home," she told him, "and you're far too rushed to
cavalier me during business hours," but he waved aside her remonstrances
and helped her in.
"I'm so busy," he declared, "that I can't waste a moment--and every
possible moment lost from you is wasted."
The November sun was clear and sparkling, and the girl settled back with
an amused smile as she looked into the self-confident, audacious eyes
of the man at her side.
"It gives me a feeling of exaggerated importance to ride in your
machine, Morgan," she teased. "It's a triumphal progress through the
bowing multitude."
Her companion grinned. "When are you going to make my car your car and
my homage your homage, Anne?" he brazenly demanded.
The girl's laugh rippled out, and in her violet eyes the twinkle
sparkled. She liked him best when he was content to clothe his words in
the easy garb of jest, so she countered in paraphrase.
"When are you going to let my answer be your answer, and my decision
your decision?"
"It's no trouble to ask," he impudently assured her. "You remember the
man who
"Proposed forty thousand and ninety-six times,
--And each time, but the last, she said, 'No.'
You see the whole virtue of that man lay in his pertinacity."
After a moment's silence he added, in a voice out of which had gone all
facetiousness even while it lingered in the words themselves, "There are
a thousand reasons, Anne, why I can't give you up. I've forgotten nine
hundred and ninety-nine of them but I remember one. I love you utterly."
Her eyes met his with direct gravity.
"But why, Morgan?" she demanded with a candid directness. "I'm the
opposite in type of every one else you cultivate or care for. I'm really
not your sort of person at all, you know."
"Perhaps," he said, "it's because you are the most thoroughbred woman I
know, and I want to be proud of my wife. Perhaps it's merely that you're
you."
"Thank you," she said simply. "It's a pity, Morgan dear, that I can love
you in every way except the one way. I wish you'd pick out a girl really
suited to you."
"By the 'every way except the one way,'" he interposed, "you mean
platonically?"
Anne nodded, and the man said, "Of course I know the reason. It's
Boone."
"Yes." The admission was disarmingly frank. "It's Boone. I've just had a
letter from him. He won his race for the legislature and now he's laying
down his lines of campaign for the bigger prize of the congressional
race next time."
Morgan's smile was innocent of grudge-bearing. "I know. I wired
congratulations this morning. Of course his race was really won when he
came out of the primaries victorious."
Anne reflected that in the old days Morgan would have spoken
differently, and in a less generous spirit. To him a contest for a
legislative seat from a rough hill district must appear almost trivial,
and for the victor his personal rancour might have left no room for
congratulation. He himself had, in a larger battle, just won more
conspicuous prizes of reputation and power, and yet the heartiness of
his tone as he spoke of Boone's little success was sincere and in no
sense marred by any taint of the perfunctory.
"It was rather handsome of Boone to go back there and throw his hat into
the ring," he continued gravely. "He might have harvested quicker and
showier results here, but he wanted to be identified with his own
people. God knows they need a Progressive, in that benighted
hinterland."
Anne's eyes mirrored her gratification, but before she could give it
expression the car stopped.
"What!" exclaimed Morgan; "are we here already?" He opened the door and
helped her out, but as he stood on the sidewalk with his hat raised he
added in a note of unalterable resolve:
"I don't want to persecute and pursue you, Anne, but the day will
come--perhaps the forty thousand and ninety-sixth time of asking--when
you'll say 'Yes.' Meanwhile I can wait--since I must. One thing I
cannot and will not do; give you up."
"Good-bye," she smiled. "And thank you for the lift."
Morgan turned to the car again and said crisply to the driver: "Straight
to the office. I sha'n't stop for lunch now."
* * * * *
Colonel Wallifarro stepped from the train at Marlin Town and turned up
the collar of his heavy coat, while an edged and searching wind carried
its chill through clothing and flesh and seemed to strike at the marrow
of a man's bones.
The Colonel felt the dismal and bleak oppressiveness of a picture
blotted from visual record by the reeking blackness of a winter dawn. A
railway schedule apparently devised for purposes of human torture had
deposited him in a sleeping town gloomed down on by sleeping mountains
at the hour when mortal spirits are at their zero of vitality, and the
train that had marooned him there wailed on its way like a strident
banshee.
In his pocket was the telegram that had brought him. It had come from
Larry Masters and had succeeded only in bewildering and alarming its
recipient with words that explained nothing except that the sender stood
in some desperate need of instant help. The words had startled Tom
Wallifarro like a scream heard in a dark street.
He had responded in person and at once. Now Larry was not even at the
station to meet him, so the Colonel turned and trudged forebodingly
through the viscid slop of unpaved streets, churned by yesterday's feet
of men and mules and oxen, toward that edge of the town where the mine
superintendent had his bungalow.
Through the windows of the house when he drew near he caught the pallid
glimmer of lamplight, but to his first rapping on the door there was no
response. A vigorous repetition, which started echoes up and down the
empty dark, brought at length a dull voice of summons, "Come in," and
on turning the knob the visitor looked upon a man who sat at the centre
of his room in apathetic collapse.
A kerosene lamp, guttering now to the inanition of spent fuel and wick,
revealed a face of pasty pallor and eyes deep sunk in dark sockets. It
was cold in the room, for on the hearth, where the fire had been long
unmended, only a few expiring embers glinted in the gray of the ash bed.
Colonel Wallifarro's first impression was that the man who had called on
him for help had turned meantime to the more immediate solace of
alcohol, and that now he was whiskey sodden, but a second glance
dispelled that conjecture. This torpidity was not born of drunkenness
but despair.
"I'm here, Larry," said Colonel Wallifarro, as he fumbled with chilled
fingers into a breast pocket and fished out a telegraph envelope. "I
took it the case was urgent."
Aroused a little out of his stupefaction by the matter-of-fact
steadiness of the voice, Masters came wearily to his feet. Through an
open door which gave upon the sleeping-room, Colonel Wallifarro caught a
glimpse of an untouched bed and knew that the other must have spent the
night sitting here, wakeful yet forgetful of the hearth-fire that had
sputtered to its death.
"I'm ruined, Tom," announced Larry Masters in an intonation which ran
level and unmodulated, as though even the voice of the man had lost all
flexibility, and having made that startling assertion the speaker sank
again into his chair and his former inertness of posture.
To press with questions at the moment seemed useless, so the lawyer
threw off his overcoat and knelt down to rekindle and replenish the
fire.
When at last it was again blazing he found and poured whiskey, and at
the end of ten minutes he prompted again, "I've come in answer to your
summons, Larry. Hadn't you better try to tell me about it?"
The man nodded, and with an effort pulled himself somewhat together.
"This time it's not only ruin but disgrace--prison, I expect."
"What have you done?"
"The fund. All of it. It's gone."
"The fund--gone? I don't understand." Colonel Wallifarro spoke with a
forehead corrugated in bewilderment. "Begin at the start of the story.
You forget that I haven't the remotest idea of what this is all about."
"The fund, I tell you," reiterated Masters stupidly. "Gone!"
"Gather yourself together, man. Drink that whiskey."
For once the glass had stood unregarded at the Englishman's elbow. Now
he lifted it abstractedly to his lips, but this time he only sipped it
and set it down. Then with an effort he rose and went to the hearth,
where he stood with trembling hands outspread and limbs shivering before
the rekindled blaze.
"I met Cantwell in Lexington.... We talked the matter over as to the
final details.... The rest had been arranged, you see.... Finally he
gave me the money ... in cash ... $20,000 it was."
"Twenty thousand--gone? Whose money?"
"The company's."
Colonel Wallifarro braced himself as he had braced himself against many
other shocks. Patiently his legal capacity for bringing coherence out of
obscurity led his dazed companion through the mazes of his torpor.
Direct questioning found a trail of broken narrative and followed it
with a hound's pertinacity, until the story rounded into some sort of
shape.
Larry the visionary, with the plunger's mirage always teasing him
through the arid conditions of a low salaried exile, had, it seemed,
caught at the fringes of success--and slipped into disaster. Through
years he had hoarded small savings out of his frugal income with the
gambler's eagerness to have a "stake" against the swift passing of the
golden opportunity. Finally he had thought that it had not all been in
vain. His eye had appraised other fields where the coal ran out in
sparse and attenuated veins but where the "sand blossom" spoke of oil.
His hoardings had gone straightway into options, at prices based on
farming valuations where farms were cheap.
It had remained then to enlist the interest of capital in taking up
these many options and securing others, and that required a large sort
of sum. Larry had gone to the directors of the company that employed
him. He had haunted their offices and they had endured his obdurate
besieging only because he was an efficient man cheaply employed, and, as
such, entitled to one hare-brained eccentricity.
Columbus striving to raise money from a world convinced of the earth's
flatness, with which to sail round a sphere, encountered a scepticism no
more stolid, and yet in the end Masters had convinced them. The
persuasion was accomplished only when other adventurers were beginning
to clip coupons from just such enterprises in adjacent fields. When, to
the monied men, "Masters' folly" became "Masters' discovery," the native
landowners were growing as wary as ducks that have been decoyed, and
dealing with them at a tempting profit required subterfuge. Besides the
options already held there were more to be secured before the
proposition was rounded into unity. Masters had therefore lined up, as
his purchasing agents, men of native blood and apparently of no
organized unity. Employing cash instead of checks bearing tell-tale
signatures, they could still acquire at a song, and a poor song, too,
large oil-bearing tracts virgin to the drill.
So, with his plan patiently built, like a house of cards that had often
tumbled but which at last seemed steady, Masters had turned away from
the Lexington interview with a black bag containing treasure enough to
awaken all the old, long-prostrate dreams. A life tarnished with
futility seemed on the bright verge of redemption. A share in the
Eldorado would be his own, and after years of eating the bread of
discontent his crushed pride could rise and stand erect, fuller
nourished.
These grandiose prospects of the altered future called for celebration,
very moderate, of course, because now above all other times he needed a
dependable and clear brain. With the tingling of the alcohol in his
arteries his dreams expanded--and he drank more.
Then he had been robbed.
"But how in God's name could it happen?" demanded the Colonel. "You were
stopping overnight at the Phoenix. Didn't you put your money in the
safe?"
Masters raised a pair of nerveless hands in a deprecatory gesture.
"I was drinking. I had certain memoranda in the same bag and I took it
up to my room to run over some details--then he came and knocked at the
door."
"Who came?"
"I don't know. He called me by name and seemed to be a man of means and
cultivation. We drank and chatted together. It was in my bedroom in a
city hotel, mind you. I didn't drink much.... The bag was locked ... the
key was on the table by my hand.... Of course in some fashion he had
learned of the money being turned over to me. How?"
The response was dry.
"I don't know. What happened?"
"God knows. I suppose it was some variation of the old device of
knock-out drops or some sort of drug. I awoke sitting in my chair--very
sick at my stomach--and had just time to make my train by rushing off
without breakfast. I had been there all night. I glanced in the bag and
seeing the packet there with the rubber bands around it right as rain, I
failed to suspect. It was when I got here that I found it had been
rifled."
"And the man?"
"I talked with the hotel by long distance. No one by the name he gave
me had been registered there. The description meant nothing to them."
"Why," inquired the Colonel presently, "didn't you tell me of this plan
of yours in advance--this enterprise?"
Masters shook his head. "You'd only have laughed at me like the rest. I
was getting fed up on being laughed at. It gets on a man's nerves in
time. For just once in my life I wanted to be the one who could say 'I
told you so!'"
"What steps have you taken--toward catching the thief?"
The victim groaned. "Don't you see that I couldn't take any? To report
to the police would be an admission to the company. The whole thing was
trusted to my hands after much reluctance. Can't you see that my story
would seem a bit thin?"
Masters' words ended with a gulp, and in his eyes was the stark terror
of panic reacting after the comatose silence of lethargy.
Colonel Wallifarro's face, too, had become drawn and distrait. For a
time he paced the floor up and down without a word, his hands tight held
at his back and his head bowed low on his breast. As he walked, Masters,
from his chair by the table, followed his movements with eyes that held
no light except that of fear and wretchedness.
Finally the lawyer halted before the chair. His brow was drawn, but in
face and attitude was the pronouncement of a decision reached. Tom
Wallifarro had been wrestling with complex and intermingled elements of
the problem as he walked. When he halted, the shifting perplexities had
resolved and settled into determination.
"I've got to see you through this, Larry, and it's going to be a hard
scratch. I suppose you think of me as wealthy. Most people do, but it's
necessary to be frank with you. I have a very handsome practice, and I
have for many years lived well up to that income--at times I've
overstepped the boundary. I have my farm in Woodford and my house in
town. I have a considerable insurance, and that about sums up my
resources. I draw from the running channel of my law fees and it's a
generous flow, but one I've never dammed providently into a reservoir of
surplus. If I have to raise twenty thousand dollars off-hand, I shall
have to borrow. Thank God my credit will stand it."
"But, Tom"--Masters broke chokingly off.
"Please don't try to thank me."
"Not perhaps for myself, but I happen to know that your means have
supported not only your own family but my family as well."
"Larry,"--Colonel Wallifarro spoke in a harder tone than was customary
with him--"your folly has been almost criminal ... but if it meant
stripping myself to beggary I couldn't see Anne's father accused of a
breach of trust. Even if I cared nothing for you, my boy, it would come
to the same thing. I fancy I shall sell the farm."
"My God!" groaned Masters. "It's the apple of your eye, Tom."
Colonel Wallifarro fumbled for a cigar and lighted it, saying nothing
for a time. When he spoke it was with an irrelevant change of topic.
"Not quite, Larry. The apple of my eye is a dream. If, before I die, I
can trot a grandchild on my knee--a child with Morgan's will and Anne's
fine-fibred sweetness--" he paused a moment and then gave a short
laugh--"then I could contentedly strike my tent for the beyond."
"I'm afraid her heart--"
Colonel Wallifarro raised a hand in interruption.
"I know, Larry. Don't misunderstand me. It would have to be along the
way of her happiness or not at all. I feel almost a paternal interest in
Boone Wellver. But I've always believed that they'd grow apart with the
years and she and Morgan would grow together. Anyhow it's my dream, and
for a time yet I sha'n't let go my hold upon it." His tone changed and
again he spoke as a lawyer weighing the inelastic force of facts. "But
time is vital to you. These options must be taken up. There must be no
suspicious delay. I'll catch the next train back to town and arrange to
get money in your hands at once."