Part 3

“I’d cracked the glass across the lower right corner, shooting my air rifle in the room, disobeying mother. She never would have it mended.”

“What was opposite?”

“The charge up San Juan hill. Anything else?”

“No; that’s enough. You’re--Jerry. How do you know about that other meeting?”

“I don’t; that’s why I’m asking you. But I’ve been waiting for it and I got the hunch he’d reached you to-day.”

“Keeban?”

“He goes by the name of Vine just now; Harry Vine. There was somebody with him?”

“A girl,” I admitted.

“Light haired?”

“As light,” I said slowly and deliberately, “as Dorothy Crewe’s.”

He had to draw breath deep after that. “Steve, how _is_ Dot?”

“Don’t you see the papers?”

“Of course.”

“Well, they’ve told the truth about her condition.”

Again he drew deep breath; then he struck his hands together. “I’ll cure her, Steve, by the only way. I’ll show her Keeban! But we’ve got to be careful--awfully, awfully careful, don’t you see? I’ve got to catch him, not scare him away. Suppose he goes off forever; suppose he’s drowned, body lost; suppose he’s burnt; suppose a dozen wrong things, Steve, and I can never show him. Then I’ve got to be Keeban forever; nobody but you will ever believe! Will they?”

“Nobody,” I agreed.

“Come, then; to-morrow’s our chance. No word to the ‘bulls’ or he’ll hear it and not show up. We have to handle this ourselves and close. Who was with him? Christina?”

“That’s what he called her.”

“She talked for him?”

“Come to think of it, Jerry, she did, mostly.”

“That’s why he had her; my voice gives him most trouble. Sometimes he gets it perfectly; then he goes off into things I’d never say. He knows it but doesn’t know what to say. He’s so near perfect for me that he fooled you, you see; no wonder he fooled Dot.”

“No.”

“What did he ask of you?”

“Money.”

“How much?”

“He left that to me but suggested--Christina did--ten thousand dollars.”

“Um,” said Jerry and set to thinking.

I did some myself. “What did he want with ten thousand dollars if he has Dorothy’s diamonds?” I demanded.

Jerry gazed at me and smiled; I could see the glisten of his teeth. “Don’t you and the pater keep going down to business, Steve? Pater could buy ten strings like Dot’s, if he’d a mind to, of course; but I never saw him refuse a chance to pick up a few thousand more. What’re you going to do, Steve?”

“That’s what I was down here for, thinking it out.”

“Get the money, Steve. Draw it yourself from the bank. He’ll have you watched so he’ll know whether you have. Then have it; and tell nobody else but go to meet him.”

“Alone?”

“I’ll be there. Now, don’t you see?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then you’ll do it?”

“Yes.”

“Great! Your hand on it, Steve!”

I gave it and he grabbed me. “Now I’ve got to go. Hamlet’s father’s ghost has nothing whatever on me! For a certain term, I can walk the night; then, ‘fare thee well!’ One minute; suppose you meet my friend before I do, don’t forget; don’t bother him with the battles of the War of 1812 or San Juan Hill or test him on Hamlet. Just try to interest him, till I arrive.”

He stepped from me. “Don’t follow,” he asked, and I let him go; and once more, when he was gone, I wondered what I knew. Two of them there were, he said; but I had not yet seen two.

Why could not both be Jerry--clever, quick-seeing Jerry? Suppose he had known, after he’d met me in the room beside the river, that I was bound to doubt and waver; and so he’d come with this scheme, this clever scheme, to lead me on and make me give my word. Anyway, here I was with my word given and my hand on it.

IV

I SIT IN ON FATE.

I got the money next day; I took it myself from the bank. Also I got my revolver and spent the evening in the city. About half an hour before ten, I went to our offices and roused the watchman to let me in. I pretended to work for a while and then let myself out the river door and started down the black, narrow walk above the water.

No one was anywhere about at that hour; not a window in the walls on either side was alight. Ships slid in and out; one minute deckhands, sailors and mates on watch would glide by within ten feet of me; the next I was alone with black, locked doors on one side, the water on the other.

I heard my name whispered in Jerry’s voice. “You’ve got it?” the voice said; and some one was beside me.

This was Jerry of the Mackinaw coat, of the basement room and of the companionship of Christina. If he were Keeban, I must hold him; I must not question nor show doubt. If he were Jerry, I had nothing to do.

“Here I am, Jerry,” I said.

“Give it to me.”

I kept him walking beside me until the faint light, which trickled down over the bridge at the end of the block, showed me his face, Jerry’s face; but, for all of that, also Keeban’s.

“Satisfied now?” he asked me, laughing. “Come, Steve!” And he put his hand on my wrist. I drew back, thinking that, if he were Keeban, he’d murder me for ten thousand dollars if, for her necklace, he attacked Dorothy Crewe. I had my hand on my revolver, yet he had the advantage of me, for he could strike without warning and I must wait to see what he meant to do.

Down the river, a steamer blew for bridges; and, “Come now!” he said again to me.

Then some one else was there; some one else of his sort and burly in a Mackinaw coat; and my wrist was my own; no one had hold of me.

They were grappled together and together went down.

“Stay out of this, Steve!” Jerry’s voice said to me; and some one choked; some one gasped for breath. I bent over them and in that trickle of light from the bridge, I saw a face--one face, Jerry’s. I could not see the other. Then they turned; the one on top was on the bottom but they were over again before I could see. There was Jerry’s face once more.

“Stay out, Steve!”

They were throttling each other as they rolled; they came to the edge of the water and I pulled them back, hauling on one and dragging the two.

A light was coming; soon I would see; for the boat, which had been blowing for the bridges, was slipping up. I looked about to it; and something happened; a splash below me. One of the two was gone; the other, gasping, stood on the edge of the timbers, staring down and moving along this way and that while he watched.

I had my gun out now and shoved it against him.

“Steve, you old fool,” he cried. “He broke my hold; he’s in the water! Watch; where is he?”

“You tell me this,” I came back at him. “What was the book we kept first in the case at the edge of your bed? What were you always reading? Damn you, tell me quick!”

He laughed, sucking for breath. “‘Westward Ho,’ Steve, you old fool!”

“And the next one? You hardly knew which was better.”

“‘Kidnapped!’”

“Jerry!”

“Here’s the boat!” Jerry cried. “Damn him, he’ll get away!” For the big hull, with her lights, her sprays of steam, her splash of screws, was beside us. “He’s swum under water to the other side; he’s come up there. He’s got away,” Jerry finished.

Of course we waited till the ship was past and waited and searched long after but found no one for our trouble.

“Where’s the money?” Jerry asked me then. “You didn’t give it to him?”

“He’s the one that met me first?” I said.

“Yes; of course. Did you give it to him?”

“No; I didn’t have it. I’m not the complete fool, Jerry. I got it from the bank and left it in our office.”

“Let’s go there.”

We entered our building by the river door and went up the back way to my office. Jerry knew those stairs; he knew where to turn in the dark; he found the light switch by feel and without fumbling. There was not the slightest doubt, when the light came on, that I was with my brother Jerry. My trouble was simply had I been with any one else?

Of course I had seen some one else in a Mackinaw coat who had fought with Jerry; but all I saw was his size and his coat; I never saw, together, two faces which were Jerry’s. I could not help thinking this as we sat down; I could not help wondering if all that business down there beside the river was a set stage play of Jerry’s to fool me.

He opened the drawer where I kept cigarettes and took one and lighted it. “How’re sales?” he asked me.

“Oh, fair.”

“Tell me, did Smetsheen, in Minneapolis, pay his account?”

“In full, yesterday. You keep on thinking about the office, Jerry?”

“To tell the truth, not once till just now.”

“Where have you been keeping yourself?”

He smiled. “Moving mostly.” He walked to the door of the room which had been his office and looked in. “Who’s there now?”

“Nobody.”

“Not waiting for me?”

“I am,” I said.

He shut the door, running his finger over the space where they’d dissolved the gold letters of his name. “They’re right,” he commented. “I’ll never be back--to stay; that is unless I’m caught before I catch Keeban. He had a good idea for me on that money, Steve; I can use it. Got it here?”

I nodded.

“Want to give it to me?”

“There’s a squeal set against you which you’ve got to square?” I asked.

“Who told you that?”

“Christina.”

“Haven’t you got us mixed now?” He looked at me.

“Maybe,” I said, boldly.

He got up. “Keep your damn money. By God, you, Steve----”

I got up and pushed him down into his chair. “I don’t deserve that. You know it.”

He laughed. “You sure don’t. Old Top, I had a hundred on me that night at the station; it’s spent. Problem; how to live? Bigger problem; how to entertain? I might blow a peter, work a second story, stick up a store, scratch some paper; but non-felonious endeavor, old Bean, is absolutely closed to me. I’ll come to some of the big-time stuff; I’ll have to, if I keep my place; but I can’t help a certain prejudice in favor of postponing it as long as possible. Meantime, I’ve simply got to entertain. I’m supposed to have rocks worth a quarter million, you see.”

“You mean, in the underworld, of course you’re Keeban.”

He laughed. “Underworld’s good, Steve. Marvellous how the human race laps up that ‘up’ and ‘down’ rot. We simply have to have it, heaven and hell, above and below. Who believes in either as a place? Think it out a second, Steve; where, exactly, d’you suppose is the underworld?”

“Why,” I said. “South State Street, partly; and part of the west side. Down in New York along the Bowery, in spots, and near the east end docks.”

Jerry shook his head, still smiling.

“Where is it, then?” I retorted.

“Where’s hell, Steve, these days?”

“Why,” I said, “within one.”

“That’s it; there’s where’s the underworld, too. Among those who carry the underworld within their breasts, I’m Keeban; and therefore needing, more or less immediately,” his tone trailed off practically, “as much of ten thousand dollars as you’ve got in that peter behind you and which you feel inclined to give. It’ll go to good use, Steve; great use! No sense trying to tell you now. Take Christina, for an example. You saw her last night.”

“Of course.”

“Recognize her?”

“No,” I said, but I wondered; and at his hint, something stirred in my memory.

“Think red hair, not yellow.”

I couldn’t, to any use; yet now I was sure I had seen her. More than that, I’d known her, and I groped for her name and her right association, in my memory.

“Who is she, Jerry?”

He shook his head. “Not now.”

“Where’d I meet her before?”

He smiled again. “In the underworld, one time you went there.”

“You mean that time you and I went down South State Street to----”

“There you go, thinking up a place again, whereas, old Top, the place was most proper; polite, in fact, and almost in our highest circles. The only underworld about was the bit she packed with her; but it was quite a bit, believe me. And it’s growing.”

“That means,” I guessed, “something’s going to happen where she is?”

Jerry looked away and thought and looked again at me. “That’s one place something’s fairly sure to happen soon; of course, there are several others. It’s funny, Steve, to see ourselves now.”

“From where you are, you mean?”

“That’s it. Take me, for instance, as I was. Down there, in the east end of New York, was my particular friend, Keeban. I knew nothing of him; he knew nothing of me, probably, till a bunch from Princeton ran onto him and took him for somebody they knew. They sure must have puzzled him, but they started something in his head which he half tried out by ‘touching’ another Princeton bunch for a hundred and getting it from Davis. About that time--as long as eight years ago--Keeban ‘marked up’ me.”

“‘Marked up?’” I repeated.

“Marked up my name on his board as good game for attention when he could get around to me. What made him put it off so long, I don’t know; probably he’d a lot of prospects chalked on his board ahead of me; probably he felt he’d wait until he could put in the time to make proper preparation to appear as me. He guessed he had a great chance for a big haul; and--he made it.”

Jerry went pale and looked down. “There’s many more marked up on Keeban’s board and on others’. I know some of the names marked up and something about what’s going to occur to them. It’s a little like sitting in on fate, Steve,” he said, color coming back to his face, “to see this man’s number and that creeping up to the top of the board; to a limited extent, one knows what’s behind to-morrow, what’s going to happen. Here’s a man you know and I know and, to all appearances, he’s sitting secure; but on Harry Vine’s board, we’ll say, his number is up toward the top. He doesn’t guess it and you can’t nor anybody else in the city; but at a certain time, and at a certain place and exactly in one way, he’s going to die; and that’s all there is to it.”

“Who’re you talking about, Jerry?” I demanded.

He changed swiftly. “Nobody; just talk. What was I up here for, anyway?”

“I left the money up here,” I reminded. “We came up to get it.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

I turned to the safe and spun the combination. When I touched the banknotes, I thought to compromise with myself, give him some but not all. Like Jerry, he guessed it.

“All or none, Steve,” he said.

I gave him all.

“That’ll be useful.”

“Wait!” I held him.

“Want it back?”

“No. You’re sitting in on fate, you said,” I went at him. “You know what crimes are going to be committed; then why don’t you stop them?”

He laughed. “After I’d stopped the first, wouldn’t I soon cease to know? Old Top, a man in my position has rather to pick and choose. He can stop one, perhaps; then let it be a good one! Besides, that’s not my business now; I’m getting Keeban. Yet, if certain names get to the top of the board, I’ll call you--perhaps. On your own wire. Now Hamlet’s father’s ghost again. G’night, Steve.” He left me.

Sometimes, when I thought it over, I believed Jerry and Keeban, separate people, had met me that night; sometimes I was sure that Jerry had worked ten thousand dollars out of me. I would analyze his talk and realize how he led me along, shifting from direct discussion of the money to his hints about Christina and the numbers coming “up” and then, after making me interested in this, how he got the money from me.

But one thing was true and undeniable; I did know Christina. Many times during the following days I tried to place her, but never did until that call reached me about the next “number up.”

V

THE UNDERWORLD INTRUDES.

It came completely out of the blue. Ten minutes to twelve, noon, was the time; and no doings could have been more dull and drab than mine the minute before the buzzer under my desk rattled my “personal” call. This meant my private wire, which did not run through the office switchboard and which had no published number in the telephone book; so, when my buzzer jerked, Miss Severns always left the call to me and quietly rose and vanished from my room.

She always acted as though I owned some enormous, private intrigue into which her ear must not pry, whereas the truth was that line never carried any conversation more bizarre than my mother’s voice reminding me to meet Aunt Charlotte on the Lake Shore Limited; or perhaps mother wanted to be sure I had my rubbers; or else Jim Townsend might be after me for a round of golf at Indian Hill. Consequently I liked the compliment of Miss Severns’s silent disappearance; but I bet she knew the truth. Anyway, now she got out and so I was there alone.

I had nothing at all on my mind; I had been just finishing a letter to Red Wing about those five carloads of Minnesota potatoes which we had found somewhat nipped by frost and I’d begun the phrasing, in my head, of a crisp, businesslike note to Baraboo, Wisconsin, about a shipment of presumably dried lima beans which must have been caught in the rain somewhere. From which you may gather that Austin Fanneal and Company are wholesalers, packers, canners and jobbers of food; a sound profitable business and socially absolutely all right in Chicago, but still it’s not the most enthralling pursuit here. I must admit it had its dull spots, even for me; but I was up to my eyes in it; for, as I’ve mentioned, I was the only child; father was over sixty; and I knew that some day I must carry on. So there I was cheerily concentrating on the most polite yet effective phrase for telling the Baraboo commission house that their beans had got wet; and the world was to me a wan expanse of farmers dragging bean vines, Wisconsin warehouses, city grocery stores and delicatessens and flat buildings full of clamorous families shrieking for food. Then that buzz; Miss Severns on her feet and out of the office; the door shut and, as I spoke, I heard Jerry’s voice:

“Steve!”

“Old fellow, hello! Where are you?”

That was a foolish question, I knew before I got it out. He disregarded it entirely.

“Put your mind on Winton Scofield, Steve. Don’t let him ride home in his own car to-night; make him take a taxi.”

“Why?” I cut in before taking time to think. Of course, Jerry could not tell me. It was perfectly plain from his voice that, wherever he was, he had only a few seconds in which to speak to me; and if anything was plainer, it was that his situation precluded explanations.

“Make him!” Jerry repeated quickly. “And don’t let him know he’s being made. Don’t say a word of this to any one, whatever happens!”

And the wire at the other end went dead; but I continued to hold the receiver until central’s voice briskly inquired, “Number, please?”

So I hung up and sat staring down on the pile of correspondence about potatoes and beans and canned cherries; but my world was no waste of brown bean stalks and pickley delicatessen shops; nor was my world the usual dreary array of my own social sort,--those who have big homes on the Lake Shore Drive and on Astor Street and in Winnetka and Lake Forest; who have coveys of servants, of course, and put up a parade of cars and clubs and country places and everything else that looks impressive from outside but inside is duller than Deuteronomy.

They’ve pretty sets of silver and gold things about, naturally; and they’ve a good deal of platinum, too, with diamonds and rubies and sapphires and those green stones--oh, emeralds--stuck in. They’ve big bank accounts and a lot of other venal environment too tiresome to give you a thrill until you hear, all of a sudden, it has unduly tempted a gentleman from a stratum quite different but yet extremely adjacent to your own and the gentleman is likely to use some exceedingly direct, not to say personal, methods of getting your environment--and you.

For that was what Jerry’s call meant. Win Scofield’s name had crept to the top of somebody’s board in the free society of the gentlemen--and their lady friends--of the “gat” and the “soup job,” the “Hunk” and the “bump off”; in that region, where Jerry had gone, Winton Scofield’s number was “up”; he had been chalked for a “croaking.” And as I sat there staring and wondering why and how, suddenly I ceased to have difficulty in thinking red hair, instead of yellow, upon Christina, the riverside companion of Keeban. I “placed” her and knew her name and her association and where I had met her; for she was Winton Scofield’s wife. Of course she was; that was it! What an extension of the underworld into the polite world of my own!

Of course I realized that, as Jerry had said, I was thinking like a child; for the underworld’s not a compact, separate region; its territory is wherever its citizens set foot; and this may be at your office door? At the threshold of your servant’s hall? On the step of your town car? Who knows? For obviously it’s not a place at all but a contact, an association, a habit of conduct, an attitude toward life and, more than incidentally, toward death. Why should I be surprised that a citizeness had staked out a claim in the Scofield mansion?

I tried not to be. “Old Win Scofield!” I thought. He was sitting secure, if any one was, you’d say. But somewhere else Jerry was sitting in on fate; he’d seen Win Scofield’s number come up to the top of the rack at Keeban’s club; and his ’phoning me meant that an unusual job was up. For Jerry had told me he would pick and choose and not try to stop a job, unless it was a good one.

“Say not a word to any one,” he’d told me; I took that to mean not to say he’d warned me. It couldn’t mean that I wasn’t to get information. So I took up my ’phone and called Fred, who was my particular friend in the Scofield family.

Winton, the old man, was his father; of course Christina, of the alterable hair, wasn’t Fred’s mother; she was his father’s fourth, or fifth wife.

There was rather a lot of unpaid publicity about him when he got her; and it turned on him, rather than on her, because he’d fallen for that rejuvenation operation and, of course, he tried to have it secret.

Naturally the newspapers learned and, as a result, Win Scofield fled the town as soon as the hospital let him out. As secretly as possible--that is, with only a few friends besides newspapermen and film news service photographers present--he’d married Shirley Fendon, a girl he’d met at a cabaret. Of course, being sixty-seven or so and she twenty-two, he took her to Paris; but recently he’d slunk back to his home city.

Now it had never occurred to me until this moment that, in the general excitement over Winton’s rejuvenation, nobody asked much about Shirley. The spotlight simply wasn’t swung her way.

There she was where several wives--three or four, I couldn’t remember--had been before her and where, if rejuvenation really meant a return to old Win’s youth, several more would stand again.

The sons--they were Kenyon and Fred, about my own age and both by the original Mrs. Winton Scofield--astutely realized this and did a little deal in self-defense. They took over the grain business, when the old man was honeymooning, retiring father on an income, leaving him no vote or interest in the firm which a wife, past or present or future, could attach.

Perhaps this had something to do with his floating back to Chicago; perhaps his present wife worked that for purposes about to become plainer.

I arranged for Fred to lunch with me and, as tactfully as possible, I brought up the subject of father.

When you’ve a pater who’s been flattered with the spread of news print that had been lavished on Winton Scofield, he’s a bit difficult to mention; but I managed to drift in a remark about him and I certainly detonated something. Fred had been storing too much inside of him concerning father and had required only the gentlest tap on the fuse to cause him to explode.

“Isn’t he absolutely ludicrous!” Fred shot at me. “Age, damn it, Steve, age is no disgrace. It ought to be the noblest, most dignified stage of a man’s development. What does Shakespeare say about age, ‘His silver hairs will purchase good opinion!’ And Byron----”

I let him rave on as it seemed to relieve him; I knew he wasn’t talking to me so much as he was rehearsing father.