Part 10

She’d the prettiest hands I’d ever seen; and to have them doing things for me!

Occasionally, but with rapidly lessening frequency, I wondered about George,--why he didn’t show up for supper and to what I’d left him with Dib. I ventured to ask Doris about him.

“Oh, he’s not hungry,” she assured me.

As I remembered him, he hadn’t looked it; he’d only looked worried, whereas she didn’t at all. She had true nerve, you see.

That dinner was so delightful that I longed to forget that she was playing for her liberty for the next ten years. I didn’t want any other element in this but just her and me.

It ended with the check which she let me pay without silly argument; then we had to get up, and never more reluctant feet than mine moved from a dining car.

She went through the Pullmans in front of me; at each door, I came beside her, opened it; for a moment we were close. I hoped we were going to her compartment; but she surprised me in the vestibule of the third car rear from the diner.

No one was following just then; the doors on both sides were tightly shut.

She turned and looked up at me. “Which is it?” she asked, straight.

I knew what she meant; and at that second I suddenly decided. “I keep your suit case,” I said.

“And you’ll give it back to me?”

“Where will you want it?”

“New York. I’m off at Cleveland, as I said, but I’ll come to New York later.”

“I’ll take it there for you,” I said, and it was in the manner of an agreement, “if I possibly can; and I will give it to you under one condition.” I waited.

“Nobody’s listening,” she urged me.

I told her. “It’s this. I bring it to you, alone. I’ll be alone; you must be. You must give me a chance then to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Can’t you imagine?”

She gazed into my eyes without wavering. “I reckon! You’ll give it back and ask me to give it back again to you--to destroy! All right! That’s a go! I’ll run that chance with you!”

She held out her hand and I grasped it and she grasped mine, firmly and well. Somebody came through; just an ordinary passenger; but of course we dropped hands. When the doors were closed again, she went into her bag.

“Here’s the key to the suit case,” she offered it to me. “Sorry you won’t find more for you to use inside; but there’s a new toothbrush, anyway. Please have it!”

“You’ve another?” We were suddenly particular about little things with each other.

“There’re more in Cleveland,” she replied. “Where do you stop in New York?”

“The Belmont.”

“I’ll wire you my address.”

“Where we’ll meet?”

“That’s it. Can you remember this?” she asked. “Don’t put it down. Take five from the first number, three from the second; one from the third. That much for numbers. For words read from Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary--they’re everywhere--first five up, second three down, third one up, and so on. A street named after a number will be spelled in syllables, taking the first in a word. You can find any syllable in the dictionary. Now tell me that.”

I told it to her; and still we had an instant there alone.

“What do you know about happenings after the scatter from the Feather?” I said to her. “Did Vine get Christina?”

“No; she got away.”

“He’s in Chicago?”

“No; New York.”

“What else do you know about him?”

She shook her head and opened the door toward her car. “Don’t stay about now,” she asked me; and she went into her compartment.

I should have known that she wouldn’t talk over others’ affairs. She’d said a good deal, all things considered. So Christina had escaped Keeban and he was back in New York, whence he had come. Probably, therefore, Jerry was in New York, too.

I asked myself what Doris’s move to the east might have to do with them; how might she be mixed in?

Likely she was not mixed with them at all except when, more or less by chance, her group encountered one of their group in business. I could not possibly connect her with any scheme for murder. Christina, herself, had refused such a scheme; how much more surely would Doris have kept free from anything like that!

With her key in my hand, I stood in the vestibule of the next car, daydreaming about her. The train was bounding along too beautifully, rushing us right into Cleveland. I wanted to see Doris again but she’d dismissed me; I could only endanger her now by hanging around.

When we stopped at Cleveland, at eight-thirty, old “Iron Age” again was on the platform; and this time I tumbled off with him. I didn’t plan anything quite so subtle as the succeeding event; really, I wasn’t up to that at all. You see, what happened was this.

I’d reported to him, on parting from Doris after dinner, that I was sure they were leaving the train at Cleveland because she’d mentioned the matter, quite definitely, again. Of course Dibley only regarded me more in sorrow than otherwise; he was certain they were only playing me. So when I was on the platform with him, for my benefit he was a bit over-ostentatious in acting out his conviction that they were staying on the train. He had a new sheaf of messages to clutter up the telegraph office and Western Union had a boy burdened down with replies for him; so Doris and George, with Felice, were off and started away almost before “Iron Age” guessed it.

They were all without baggage, of course. After he saw them, Dibley got into action quickly. He yelled for guards to close in; he had out his gun. But they were down the stairs and I didn’t need to grab that gun; so I didn’t. Shots sounded below, however. I couldn’t tell who fired them. I went down the stairs with Dibley and the rest of the drift from the platform; but my three friends had doubled, dodged and were away.

I waited as long as I dared; then I climbed and caught the train. Dibley didn’t; but his orders overtook us. At Ashtabula, an hour or so east, they stopped us and officers came aboard to take off all baggage from compartment E, car No. 424, and also to capture George’s large, piggy portmanteau. A special engine was about to start with all that for Cleveland.

During the stop, I rather expected a word or two might be said to me; but it became plain that Dibley’s opinion of me continued true to form. Nobody bothered me; the train went on; my berth was made and I took that new suit case of Doris Janvier’s behind the curtains.

XVI

I WALK INTO A PARLOR.

Naturally I debated about opening the bag. She’d given me the key; she had told me to use it, “please!” to find her new toothbrush. But I didn’t open it for that. She had meant, I thought, that I should see what I was carrying. So at last I unlocked it and in the light of the little berth lamp I came upon her own intimate attire--a kimono, slippers and silk pajamas, ridiculous little lovely things; stockings, some more gossamer silk which probably was what Field’s advertise as an “envelope”, a mirror, a brush, a manicure set. There was the new toothbrush and “This Freedom”, and below the book, tied together, a pair of steel plates. After looking so far, I felt no harm in gazing further, especially at these.

One was engraved to print ten-dollar National Bank Notes; the other was good--or bad--for the denomination of a hundred. I’m no judge of engraving on steel but they looked like excellent plates to me.

I rewrapped them and brigaded them with “This Freedom” and shoved them back in the suit case, which I locked. I went to use the toothbrush and also to think about those plates. “Well, wasn’t that what you expected when you gave her your word?” I said to myself. The answer was that then I hadn’t the plates in my hand and I was talking to Doris.

Going to bed, I lay awake, mulling over all manner of doubts having to do with Doris and Jerry and Keeban, Christina, and with me. I did some practical speculating, too; I wondered whether old “Iron Age”, when he rendezvoused Doris’s luggage returned from Ashtabula, was going to note the omission of kimono, slippers, silk pajamas, envelope, mirror, brush and “This Freedom” from the normal equipment of a young lady of the day; I wondered if, missing them, he might feel strange suspicions of me, which even the memory of my cheese quotations would not allay. But evidently he did not.

I got to sleep; when I awoke, Doris’s suit case and those plates remained as they were. Nobody had disturbed them or me.

Breakfasting beside the Hudson, I propped before me the _New York Times_. It was innocent of knowledge of minor doings in the west, such as a sudden getaway with shooting near the Lake Shore station at Cleveland, but it played a special from Chicago on the front page.

Janvier, the counterfeiter, had been taken with two of his new plates. The _Times_ correspondent was feeling decidedly high up because of it. Trust New York to respond to word that the financial structure is just a bit more safe. Old Wally Bailey was gloriously bucked over the business too; he had himself interviewed in two places; first he certified that the plates, which had been captured, were the source of the highly deceptive and dangerous twenty and fifty-dollar false Federal Reserve notes recently put in circulation in great quantities; second he sounded the alarm that Janvier had completed, also, a couple of other plates, one for printing ten-dollar bills and one for striking off notes of one-hundred dollar denomination. The police had evidence that these plates existed but they had failed to find them.

For the best of reasons! I had them tied up with “This Freedom” underneath Doris’s lingerie.

I carried her suit case myself across to the Belmont where I took it to my room and then, after locking myself in, I gathered Janvier’s plates from it and carried them, in my pocket, up to our bank where I had a safe deposit box and I put them away there. Much happier in my head, I wired Fanneal and Company, Chicago, not to expect me at the desk that morning and dropped into our New York branch and pretended that business had brought me on.

Beans and butter never struck me so dull as upon this morning; and the only thrill I could squeeze from Philadelphia double daisies and Fond du Lac twins was the second-hand memory of yesterday. I kept ’phoning the Belmont inquiring for telegrams; but nothing came in for me.

What was happening in Cleveland? I wondered. Was Doris going back to Chicago, now that her father was taken; or would she stick to her plan to come on?

Vine--Keeban--was here, she said; Christina was here. So, if Jerry was anywhere, probably he also was here; and, if any of his old habits clung to him, he’d know I’d arrived, too. There is a column printed every day, you know, giving the news of arrivals of out-of-town buyers in every line of trade. My name, with New York address, was in the papers that afternoon. Jerry used to glance over the arrivals in our line.

I felt lonely as Crusoe that day, particularly when dinner time approached. I imagined I’d make myself better by drifting over to dine with some friends I’d met on Fifth. There was a daughter, there, about Doris’s age and size; a popular girl,--a deb of a couple of years’ standing. Sitting and smoking, I mean, rather.

I bored the poor dear. I always had, so why not now? She never flicked a stir in me. Not that she tried; she didn’t. That was it. “Well, old Steve, we’ll struggle through with the meal somehow!” Such was the sensation underlying the ennui; so, naturally, she made it mutual with me.

Thank God, she didn’t try to mix salad dressing at the table; so I kept my memory clear.

That night, when I returned to the hotel, I had a wire filed at Buffalo; three words, no signature: “Seediness yonder thus.”

You may suppose I had my Webster handy, and, counting my words up and down, made out “See you Thursday.”

That was to-morrow; so I had to figure out, during the night, what I was to say. You see, I had to bring her those plates and give them to her; but she had to give me a chance to argue her out of using them.

Lying in bed, many a good way of putting my point of view came to me. I got up several times and jotted them down; some I just talked over with myself. I made rather a night of it; never was more earnest over anything in my life. I looked to my talk with that girl as a sort of turning point in her life, and for me, if I could simply make her see matters straight. I was crazy over her; you’ve gathered that; and trusted her, too, or would trust her with anything but a counterfeit steel plate which her father had engraved. I figured I could make it so I could trust her with that, too.

About mid-morning, I got another wire; from Jersey City this: “Seven three chess omnivorus noose.”

No signature again; but the system, which Doris taught me in that vestibule, gave me the place and the time. Up five from seven made twelve; down three from three, zero. Up five from chess, first syllable “cher” down three from omnivorous, “on”; up one from noose, “noon.”

The telegram: “120 Cheron (Street) Noon.”

Cheron proved to be one of those streets, turned at several angles, down by Brooklyn Bridge.

I rehearsed all my talk, went to the vault and withdrew that pair of plates. I decided to make this meeting on foot, not in taxi, so I took the subway from Grand Central to the Bridge and emerged in that intriguing maze which radiates under the ramp of that old roadway suspended above East River.

Cheron Street showed itself on a corner full fifteen minutes before noon. It was a sunny bit of city that clear, winter day; it was one of those houses-and-stores streets with red-brick fronts, tall narrow windows and iron stairs and railings. Children romped about; hucksters were making sales to sets of the wisest buyers I ever saw. Price quotations floated to me and I wondered how they could work so close to cost.

I was trying to make the time pass more swiftly by turning attention to such trifles while I waited. For I would not call at No. 120 till noon.

Of course I’d located the number and looked it over several times. It was on one of the regular red brick fronts which owned windows cleaner than most of its neighbors. Nice, old-fashioned curtains, stiffly starched, showed their white patterns. It seemed a precise and prim abode, not over-populated.

During the minutes I watched, men, women and children went in and out of the doors on each side,--practical looking men, who might be mechanics engaged in car repairs at a garage around the corner; in ways which I’ve mentioned, the women proved they were frugal housewives; the play of the children added to the decent domesticity of the street.

There was absolutely nothing sinister in sight and nothing and nobody menacing like the dyke-keeper in Klangenberg’s delicatessen.

No one went in or out of Number 120; and I imagined it the abode of some aging, female relative of Doris; an aunt possibly, who might have been her guardian in some country town during Doris’s childhood and who now had moved to the city and who probably took support from the proceeds of Janvier’s plates but had nothing more to do with them.

When noon came, and Doris had not appeared, I realized that she must be waiting me within; and I went up and rang the bell.

An old woman admitted me, a nice-appearing, wrinkled and gray-haired thing.

“Come in,” she said to me immediately, before I could ask for anyone. Plainly I had been expected; and she motioned me into the prim, red-plush parlor with an ancient piano and crayon enlargements on the wall; and also faded, plush hangings in the door.

These were particularly important furnishings; for it was when I was stepping between them that I was hit on the head; and not by that old woman nor by any infirm or failing person. The hit was wholly vigorous and expert; and right at the base of the back of my head.

Of course, I realized all this afterwards; at the time, I knew nothing. I was walking into that prim, red-plush parlor quite strong and happy; I passed the portières and instantaneously I was “out.” I was also down but didn’t know it; I went “out” while still on my feet; but naturally, when I found myself again, I was on the floor.

XVII

CHIEFLY DEVOTED TO A GAS CALLED KX.

A good many persons of both sexes have put into writing the mental confusion usually concomitant to the process of “coming to.” The descriptions which I’ve happened to read were done by good writers, certainly; but the writers don’t impress me now as people who’d been personally hit on the head. At least, they lacked treatment under the hand of a pluperfect, postgraduate performer upon the _medulla oblongata_.

The trouble with those descriptions is that they are too advanced and intricate. The subject generally is seized with some figurative image, which is quite all right from my experience; but whereas others seem to have come to consciousness through flights of fancy similar to stanzas in “Spoon River Anthology” or Carl Sandberg’s best, I woke up repeating to myself the simplest of verse. In fact:

“Will you walk into my parlor? Said the spider to the fly; It’s the prettiest little parlor, That ever you did spy.”

The psycho-analyst says that the subconscious, which is always with us, working, never is actually foolish; it is interpretive, if you have the insight to understand it. Well, this was my subconscious expression. It was interpretive, true enough.

Now the spider, in my complex, was not that old woman; Doris was doing the spider in my dream.

Upon becoming aware that, though I lay on the edge of a red-plush parlor, I was not physically a fly, I felt over myself to find what was missing.

There should be something hard and heavy and extremely important under my coat in my right inside pocket. That region was soft and pliable now. Plates were lacking; that was it,--nice, new, counterfeit plates which I’d procured from under Doris Janvier’s lingerie in that Pullman on the Century and which I’d put in my pocket to return to her here at Number 120 Cheron Street with an idea of evangelizing her out of using them.

Phrases and periods from that talk I’d prepared for her came into my mind and mixed into the parade of other ideas which followed the spider-and-fly act. They gave me a laugh, anyway.

I lay, looked and listened. After a few minutes, I sat up. Apparently I had the house to myself. Also I had my watch and other personal possessions, everything except those plates.

I took a chance on rising; and still nobody disturbed me. Possibly I might have poked all over that house but I felt no overmastering impulse. The door and that street, on the other side of the pane with these nice, prim, old-fashioned curtains, looked very good to me. I got out and shut the door behind me. Over by the bridge I found a patrolman and asked him to take me to the nearest police station.

That was the place where I sketched to interested ears the essentials of what I’d done since leaving Chicago. I gave them all,--how I’d suspected her before she took the train, how I helped her get away at Cleveland; how I’d carried on the plates and went to return them, trusting to the patent leather platitudes I’d prepared to turn her to the paths of rectitude.

I gave them, with that last particularly, the laugh of their lives. They wanted to know if I actually expected she would meet me alone in a parlor to talk ethics with me.

They might have at least arrested me; but they didn’t even do that. They did detail an officer to accompany me; but he felt himself distinctly as one charged to keep me from further harm. They rushed a squad over to Number 120 Cheron Street, of course, and surrounded the house properly before closing in. But nobody, not even the old woman, was there. The house was empty and so eminently proper to all appearances that, for a while, a theory prevailed that I had invented my whole story.

Then they began hearing from Dibley and confirmed the first part; about two days later, there was plenty of proof of the rest. The prints from those missing Janvier plates began making their début at the banks all over New York; Philadelphia reported a few; soon Boston was heard from.

They were so good that some of the experts at the banks wired Washington for a check on serial numbers before throwing Janvier’s work out. Naturally, all this made me popular.

I didn’t care about returning home; I didn’t drop into our New York office. I stayed in my room, mostly, where old “Iron Age” Dibley, among others, visited me.

He informed me that Doris and George and Felice all completed their get-away at Cleveland; and he didn’t feel himself in the least to blame for that. No; he’d shifted any chagrin, which he might have felt, right on to me. Doris undoubtedly had come on afterwards, counting upon my chronic fatuity to respond to feeding by her telegrams; undoubtedly--to Dibley’s mind--she personally arranged the _medulla oblongata_ performance for me.

Of course, I’d felt that; but when old “Iron Age” got gloating over it, he cheered me into a question or two. Had she? Was I sure?

Well, I’d certainly indicated to the police that I was; and no one developed any further ideas upon the subject. Number 120 Cheron Street was deserted of Doris and her crowd as the Flamingo Feather after the ball. The issue of those new Janvier tens and hundreds seemed to shift to the south; Atlanta reported rather more than its share; Nashville and Memphis broke into the column of complaints and New Orleans was not overlooked.

I was about convinced that my friends of the Flamingo and Cheron Street had shifted base again when I received, through the mails at the hotel, a note in Jerry’s handwriting.

“Steve: Here’s your chance,” I read. “Get to T. M. Teverson at once and talk to him; or Sencort. Prevent any meeting in Sencort Directors’ room. Make this absolutely sure. Examine pipe, particularly. J.”

Jerry’s writing and his manner with me, beyond doubt. He was still alive then and, if that postmark meant anything, he was in New York City at ten o’clock last night.

Of course, I’d never seen Keeban’s writing. It might be identical with Jerry’s; Keeban might try this with me for some scheme of his own. But I didn’t think it. In the first place, this started with such an understanding of me.

“Steve: Here’s your chance!”

Now Jerry, alive and looking on at me from somewhere in New York, naturally would start with that thought for me. He’d be feeling, from the first moment I’d stuck with him after he was accused and when I continued to stick through that affair of the Scofields’, how I’d had a steady run of results against me. He’d have heard how, out of that Flamingo Feather ball, I’d gone deeper into disrepute; and he’d been thinking just that for me: “Here’s your chance, Steve.” He meant, of course, my chance to rehabilitate my reputation somewhat.

“Get to T. M. Teverson at once!” That meant to get to the big man of the moment in New York. Officially, he was first vice-president of the Sencort Trust; but unofficially he was a sort of financial vice-regent of Europe for the time being. You see, that was the instant of the particular crisis in international affairs when the Sencort Trust took the load, and “carried” two of the major powers, along with seven or eight of the minors, for the sake of the peace of the world and to postpone, for a while anyway, the rush of the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse over the rest of Europe.

Teverson personally was packing tremendous responsibilities; and naturally every one, whose impulse in difficulty is to slip out from under and loot and destroy, was keen to take a pot shot at him.

Jerry’s note must mean that he’d run on the trail of an especially capable plot which involved the employment of pipes running into the directors’ room at the Sencort Trust. Suggestive, that mention of pipes; and he had emphasized the need to see Teverson at once.