Chapter 25

NORA TALKS AND SCANLON LISTENS

As Bat Scanlon stepped out of the street car which took him to Nora Cavanaugh's house, he looked at his watch. It was almost midnight.

"She'll have had time to get home," he said to himself, "but maybe it'll be too late to see her."

But he set his jaw at this thought, and shook his head with a bull-like motion. He sprang up the steps and pulled at the bell viciously. To his surprise the door opened at once, and he saw Nora in her coat and furs, a veil over her face, standing in the hall.

"Bat!" she said, and stood staring at him.

"Just come in?" he asked.

"No," was the answer. "I--I----"

"Just going out, then. I see."

There was something in his manner and tone which caused her to look at him steadily. Then with a little gesture she said:

"Will you come in?"

He entered and she closed the door; as he stood there turning his hat about in his hands, he looked very big and stubborn--and, if you understood him very well, as Nora did--very much afraid.

"It is late," she said. "Is anything wrong?"

"There will be," said Bat "There will be unless something is done to head it off."

Without a word she led the way into a room at one side; and after they had sat down, she asked:

"And now, what is it?"

"I've just been with Ashton-Kirk to see a man of the name of Quigley--a sort of pawnbroker." His eyes were upon her, but she continued to regard him steadily without any change of expression. "A necklace had been taken to him to-day by a woman--a diamond necklace." Her eyes wavered at this, and an expression of fear came into her face. There was a pause, and then Bat leaned forward and said in a lowered voice: "What made you say that you had put your jewels away in a vault?"

She arose and went to his side.

"Bat," she said, "I felt sure your friend Mr. Ashton-Kirk would find me out. I knew from the first that I was not cunning enough to conceal anything from him."

"Nora," said Scanlon, as he, too, arose, "why did you try?" Again there was a pause, and again the big athlete broke the silence. "As I have told you more than once," said he, "I believe in you; nothing can shake me from that. There are a great many things you have said and done that I do not understand; others of them I see through, though you did not intend that I should. Why was all this? Why didn't you tell me the facts as they stood?"

"Bat," she said, "I didn't dare; I was afraid."

"Afraid? Of what?" He looked down at her; her face was pale; her gloved hands were clasped, tremblingly. "That night when Tom Burton came here, he struck you. We saw the mark, but you said it was caused by something else. He also stole your jewels, but you said nothing. Nora, was there any good reason why you should have misled us like that?"

She reached out and touched his arm.

"I can see," she said, "that it will be useless to carry the thing any further. I did think I could manage it myself, but I see now that it was hopeless from the start. Will you sit down?" There was a certain sweet humbleness in her voice which turned the big man's heart to water. "I'll tell you everything now, and so you may judge me for yourself."

Once more they sat down; Nora drew the veil still further from her face and began to speak in a low voice, but steadily, and with no hesitation.

"Tom Burton did strike me that night, and I would not tell the truth about it, Bat, because I was ashamed. I could not bring myself to admit that the man I had chosen for my husband would do such a thing. Other misdoings of his I could speak of--but that one I felt I must always keep to myself. His taking of my jewels I would not have held from you if I had not been afraid--afraid as I never was before."

"Of what?" asked Scanlon.

"Tom Burton was killed in his son's house; I knew that son; I knew what he had suffered all his life because of his father. I had heard the story in all its pitiful details. As a child he had been affronted and mishandled--as a boy--as a young man. He could never forget what his mother had been forced to endure; in his mind was always the fact that his sister was an invalid, perhaps for life, owing to the poverty brought on them by their father's neglect. With all this before me, can you wonder that I was afraid--afraid that the boy, in a moment of madness, had struck his father down?"

Bat drew in a long breath; in it there was a vast relief and a certain wonder.

"No," said he. "No; did you think that?"

"The idea was agonizing, and I made up my mind to do all I could to save him; that is why I appealed to you to get me all the intimate details. Then he was arrested; the body had been examined by the coroner, but no word was said of my jewels. It was then that a second thought came to me; suppose the murder had not been done, after all, in a sudden mounting of fury? Suppose the boy had seen the diamonds and had been tempted? Suppose he had killed Tom Burton in order to get possession of them? I was appalled at the notion, which with each moment became more and more a conviction. But I still held to the resolve to help him. What if he had done the thing? Was it altogether his fault? Was it not a part of an inheritance from a tainted father?

"So I said nothing of my loss of the jewels; the dread was in me that if the facts concerning them were known, suspicion would fall upon him--they might discover the stolen things on him and so he would lose his life, as well as his life's happiness, because of that man. I felt that no part of the truth must come out, that I must not even tell of my husband's visit to me that night; and when, in talking with you at your office, I permitted the fact to slip, I was startled."

"I remember that you were," said Bat. "And I wondered what it meant." He sat for a space and looked at her; and then, as she said nothing more, he went on: "You do not know it, but for days things fell in such combinations that more than once it looked as though _you_ would be accused."

"Bat!" She cried out his name, frightened, and her wide brown eyes opened to their fullest extent.

"Even an hour ago I saw and heard some things which seemed to point to you. Maybe if my nerves weren't keyed up as they are I wouldn't have thought so. But, anyway, I did, and that's what brought me here."

"But surely," and her voice was broken by the shortness of her breathing, "surely you never thought this of me?"

But Bat did not deny it.

"What else was I to do when things piled up as they did? Some of them I don't understand at this minute, and maybe I'll never understand them. But there are others," and he looked at her with frank inquiry in his face, "that you can explain; and, Nora, I'm looking to you to do it."

And with that he told her of the things he had heard from Big Slim and of those he had seen at Bohlmier's hotel. She listened with many little gasps and surprised gestures.

"To think of that man being so near to me that night," she said, when he had done, "and watching me with such an intent. And now, poor Bat," with a little sound in her voice which was part a sob and part a laugh, "because he saw so much and understood so little, and told it all to you, I will have to speak of something I never expected to make known to any one. You know how I have always dreaded and detested divorce; how the thought of it almost sickened me? Well, Bat, two years ago I felt I could endure Tom Burton no longer, and had all the preliminary papers for a proceeding made out."

"What!" said Scanlon. "You, Nora!"

"I did. But then all my old feeling against the thing overtook me, and I laid the papers away in a little silver box which I kept in a drawer in my room. When Tom Burton struck and robbed me that night, I was in a perfect whirl of feeling. I resolved to be free of him forever. And I'd do it at once. What I was seen to take from the drawer, Bat, was the little silver box holding those papers; I rushed from the house meaning to go to my lawyer. And I was a half dozen blocks away when I came out of the state I was in, realized the hour and the impossibility of the whole situation, and returned home."

"That's it," said Bat, with the sigh of a man relieved of a heavy burden. "That's it. I might have known that it would be something of that sort. Then you did not go to Stanwick at all that night?"

"I never dreamed of such a thing. And when I first heard of this man you call Big Slim," went on Nora, "it was in a letter he wrote me after the murder, and of which he spoke guardedly. I felt that this was a clue that if followed I might be able to show poor Frank Burton to be innocent after all. So I did what I otherwise would never have done; I went to the place mentioned, which was the hotel kept by that fiendish old man Bohlmier."

"What did they want?"

"It was blackmail. They, too, fancied I was at Stanwick that night. They knew about the diamonds, though I did not then know how they came by the information. They thought to frighten me into paying a sum of money. The tall man's threat was of the police whom he said would be sure to connect me with the crime. But I laughed at him, and dared him to do anything he had in mind. The old man, I think, would have threatened my life. I had heard some of his talk in the next room; that is why I took up the revolver from the table; and when I listened at the wall it was to hear what more he might say."

"They keep your house under watch," said Scanlon.

"I know; I see them loitering in the street almost constantly. And they write me threatening letters. But I've never been afraid of them until last night. After you had gone--oh, please, Bat, forgive me for keeping it from you, when you were so worried for my sake and so good to me--but I went to Stanwick; I felt that I had to--there was something I must know.

"These men followed me, Bat; I did not know it until I had left the house after my visit. Then the old man came up to me in the dark. He drew out a knife; I saw it quite plainly somehow; and then some one seized him, and----" She stopped and looked at the big athlete intently; the expression upon his face was one not to be mistaken. "It was you," she said. "Bat, it was you."

He told her how he came to be there and also of what he saw afterward--of how Mary Burton went so strangely through the house, and of the words of the old man who scouted the idea of the girl being ill, and who had protested he had seen her leave the house more than once since the crime in a sort of disguise. As Nora listened to this, her face grew rigid with apprehension.

"When you returned from your first visit to Stanwick," she said, after he had finished, "and told me of the way young Frank Burton acted and spoke while being examined by the police, an idea came into my mind which I at once put away from me. I knew Mary Burton, because of her illness, had moments in which she was not quite herself. Suppose it were not Frank after all who did the thing I so feared--suppose it were she?"

"Ah!" said Scanlon. "_You_ got that, too, did you?"

"But I refused to consider it. The idea of Frank was bad enough, but that of Mary was so much worse that I could not bear it. But when the papers came out saying that a woman was suspected I could bear it no longer; I got permission to see Frank and told him of what was being said. He denied it furiously, and it was then I knew he, too, though neither of us mentioned her name, believed his sister guilty. He had taken suspicion and imprisonment to attract the attention of the police from her; and now he was ready to confess the crime if his other sacrifices failed."

Bat Scanlon looked at her and marveled how he had ever permitted the real truth behind this situation to escape him as it had; and as he looked, little incidents, fragments of conversations came to him, and he realized that his state of mind had not been so extraordinary after all.

"Tell me," said he, the talk between Ashton-Kirk and Burgess strong in his mind--a conversation which seemed to point so directly toward Nora, "has Mary Burton ever traveled much? Has she ever held positions of any kind in other cities?"

"There have been periods when she has been almost well," said Nora. "And she has been in other cities at these times and perhaps has had employment."

"By George!" said Bat, with a sigh, "things do work out queerly. I was almost sure that you were----" But he stopped there. The scene in Quigley's office, an hour before, suddenly flared up in his mind, vividly. "I guess," he went on, "it's all up with that poor thing, in spite of her brother and everything else. Ashton-Kirk's hard to fool, and he must have had an eye on her and been tracing her doings from the first. He knows she's been selling the diamonds, and he has a witness who says he saw her strike the blow that did for her father. And just before I left I heard him planning for a little journey somewhere; at first I thought it was here, and so I came to warn you. But I see it was Stanwick he had in view. He'll take the police, maybe, and arrest Mary Burton."

"Oh, no, no!" Nora was standing wide-eyed before him. "Oh, no! If I had reason to try and protect the brother, I have a double reason for protecting her, for she has suffered even more and is much more helpless." She stood looking at him for an instant and then went on: "Bat, you came here, in spite of your friendship for Ashton-Kirk, to warn me of what you thought a danger; will you go with me to warn Mary Burton of what you _know_ is one?"

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, slowly:

"I haven't the same reason in her case, Nora; but if you ask me to do it, why, I will."

"I was about to go to her as you rang the bell," she said. "I don't know why, but just felt that I had to. I ask you to come with me," and held out her hand.

He grasped this eagerly, and then without another word they were upon the street and hurrying away through the night.