Part 9

“That was blob, too. But ninety was forty-seven and a half; eighty-nine opened at forty-five and lifted a half. Ninety-three in New York was fifty-five and was a half higher in Philadelphia. Butter to Chicago retailers, best (ninety-two to ninety-four) tubs, fifty-three, prints one and a half more, cartons yet a half higher. Good tubs----”

He held up a hand. I’d looked up butter, he, figured; so he skipped down the column. “Eggs?” he asked me.

“Extras, first or miscellaneous?” I asked him. “Checks or dirties? Forty-eight to forty-nine, and down to twenty-five.”

I shook him; but that bulldog jaw was not for nothing. He still held on. “Cheese!” he dared me.

“Flats?” I came back at him. “Twins? Daisies? Double Daisies? Longhorns or square prints? And Chicago? Or Fond du Lac? New York or Philadelphia? Flats at Fond du Lac opened twenty-six and three quarters; twins----”

Never had I uttered anything more soothing; he had nothing whatever to say. And I’ll say this for him, he may have been stubborn and hard to convince, but once won over, he came all the way.

“Now exactly who are you?” I inquired, as he dropped the paper. “Private or government operative?”

He refrained from laying back his coat impressively to display a shining star. Apparently they do that only on the stage, or in the “sets” out in Los Angeles. Also he lacked the scintillating line of language I’d been led to expect by the Actors’ Equity. Somehow, since actually playing about with Jerry’s friends, I’ve lost my feeling for the crook drama.

“You may consider me government, if you prefer; and you may call me Dibley,” “Iron Age” confided indulgently and with complete trust. Hereafter, when any one questions me, I’ll remember the stupifying effect of cheese quotations. I never saw anything lull a mind so. The trouble was--or perhaps it was an advantage--“Iron Age” now considered me not only harmless but probably childish.

“Have you any idea who that fellow was who wedged the door in front of you?” he asked.

“Did he wedge the door?” I asked, innocently. I wasn’t growing any keener about “Iron Age” Dibley, but I saw no harm in gratifying him.

“Didn’t you realize that? Well, he’s Stanley Sydenham--St. James Stanley, he’s sometimes called--the title tapper.”

“What?” I really didn’t know that.

“Land swindler. He’s out of Colorado State penitentiary last April after serving five years in the long house on his last irrigated-land transaction. Has he talked to you?”

“A few words,” I said truthfully.

“Probably he’ll talk to you again,” Dibley suggested, in a tone which hinted that he believed that George, having made a start with the simplest person on the train, would probably continue imposing on a good thing. “Also meet, if you can, Miss Doris Wellington and her maid in compartment E of car No. 424. Then don’t let any of them see you and me talking together.”

“All right,” I agreed willingly. “But what particularly do you suspect?”

“Exclude nothing,” Dibley said and got up, the soothing effect of the double daisies and Fond du Lac twins still strong upon him.

I wandered forward to my seat when I discovered that, in my absence, I had acquired hand baggage; and I had sense enough not to question anybody about it or show surprise; I just accepted it; for there it was,--a neat, new, creditable-looking suit case under the forward seat in the position usually assigned to the baggage of the passenger of an upper berth; and it was, beyond any mistake of recognition, the neatest and newest of the suit cases which, at the Blackstone, had been the property of Doris Wellington.

I bent down, after loafing in the seat for a while, and I tried the locks in a careless sort of way, as though making sure I’d fastened my luggage. The bag was locked; and I shoved it farther under the seat and soon went forward.

I was willing to wager that “Iron Age” had no hint of that transfer of luggage to me; and this was no time to tell him about it. Besides, I already was under government orders which I ought to be obeying. So I stepped forward to car No. 424 and to the door labelled E and I tapped upon it.

Felice opened it, like the alert little maid she was. As I confronted her, I tried again to place her in the Flamingo Feather; but I couldn’t. She’d been one of the lighting plants, maybe.

Then I saw Cleopatra of the Flamingo Feather, Doris Wellington of Caldon’s and the Blackstone and Michigan Boulevard, the daughter of Janvier, engraver of plates and herself shover of the queer. She was alone with her maid in the compartment.

“Can I come in?” I said, as she gazed up at me from her seat.

“Why, certainly; come right in,” she said immediately, for all the world as though she was doing nothing there but waiting for me.

XIV

I TAKE GOVERNMENT ORDERS.

She nodded to Felice who admitted me and went out. Felice closed the door and, as I remained standing, Doris invited me to sit down.

“You remember me?” I asked her.

“Erasmus?” she said. “The thriller of Holbein? Certainly.”

I dropped upon the seat opposite her and, as I gazed at her, she gazed at me and continued, “Also we were both at Caldon’s, as well as at the Blackstone, weren’t we, Mr. Fanneal?”

“You not only remember me but you know me, then.”

“Certainly. Don’t you know me? Or what were you doing at the bank?”

“How’d you know I went to the bank?”

She smiled pleasantly--pleasantly as the Dickens. “Don’t you also know me?” she repeated.

“You’re Janvier’s daughter!” I blurted.

“Excellent!” she approved me and I felt like a boy in school.

She had been leaning slightly forward, not exactly tense, not at ease, either. Poised was the word for it; she’d been poised ever since I entered. Now she sat back more comfortably, being no longer in suspense about how much I knew.

“George was your friend Magellan?” I asked.

“That’s what you named him.”

“Felice also was present at the Feather?”

“She was the one who led you into the shed.”

“I’m indebted,” I acknowledged; and conversation languished.

For a second more I stared at her, as gay and piquant a little thing as ever a twenty-hour-train boasted; then, decidedly stumped as to my next step, I stared a while out the window.

Pleasant, Indiana winter scenery was skipping past us. There was clean, light snow on the fields through which stuck brown cornstalks, in those great, even patterns which so intriguingly alter as you dash past. There were frozen brooks with ice-encased willows bent over them; there were lots of agreeable looking farmhouses and farm people Fording to and from little crossroads towns which looked idyllic, rather, whatever the facts may be.

“Has Sinclair Lewis spoiled this sort of landscape for you?” Doris asked me suddenly, as though reading my mind.

“I’m damned if he has for me!” I said sincerely.

She brought her small hands together. “Good! Nor has he for me. Poor fellow, if he really feels as he writes, what a world he lives in! I imagine him riding through lovely country like this with shades drawn or else emitting low, melancholy moans as each habitation heaves in sight. Now I like to think of Willa Cather’s people when we’re whistling through tank towns.”

“So do I,” I said, agreeing again. “They’re there; they’re hearing the whistle. You meet ’em. You ever been in a tank town?”

“When I was a child, I lived in one,” she told me; “when father was serving his second term in the ‘long house’ at Leavenworth.”

She might have said his second term in the House of Congress, from the way she spoke. No shame in it at all. Yet it brought me back to business. For a minute she had been just a girl, mighty pretty and bright and pleasant and with tastes and distastes, both, which I liked.

She’d known about Erasmus and Holbein when we talked at the ball, you remember; now she knew about the same books I’d been reading. Likely she’d dipped into “This Freedom” too, in order to help herself decide whether, after marriage, she should drop business for the sake of the children or should keep right on to help husband.

Probably, in Chicago, she’d seen “Lightnin’” and “The Hairy Ape” and heard Galli-Curci and Chaliapin. Of course she had. A crook can’t be crooking all the time; she’s at the normal round most of it. But I’d never realized that till I took a little leisure to think it over. Now when you say a person’s a counterfeiter, for instance, naturally you think of him or her, or both of them, crouching somewhere covertly together, printing off their money and then slipping out, with many glances around, to convert it into groceries and some of our ordinary authorized currency. But actually, very little of their time may be spent so. Most of it goes into just living,--maybe looking at movies, at dance halls or driving around; or at the Art Institute, a good play or two, the opera, and maybe a lecture also, according to taste. I’ve heard of a gerver, lately, who even made it a habit to attend Sunday-evening club talks; and he was crazy over Burton Holmes.

So here was a girl like any other I knew, only quite some little quicker and pleasanter and better looking, with nothing really strange about her except her proclivity for passing out the bank notes father gave her. She knew it was wrong, of course, so very wrong that, for it, she ought to be shut in the “long house” at Leavenworth herself, serving her own long term.

But I had not the smallest impulse to put her there; quite on the contrary. In fact, I imagined, at that moment, that I heard somebody trying to listen at the door; and, thinking it was old “Iron Age,” I felt myself going definitely to her side. Nobody was going to shut this girl up in prison for ten years. I was going to do something about her; but not that. I had no idea of shifting responsibility. Not at all; I was going to see to this business myself.

I got up and opened the door, while she watched me. Nobody was there and I sat down again.

“I’ve called on you by orders, I think you ought to know,” I told her.

“Government orders?” she said.

“That’s it.”

She feigned a shudder, prettily. “My soul!” she said. “What I’ve told you! Now you’ll arrest us all, I suppose!”

I laughed, for I felt mighty good. There was no denying it; I felt as happy as ever I had in my life; happier on some counts; on others, of course, there was my knowledge of her character and the chances she was running. But the chances only made it more exciting for me to like her.

Obviously, I’d let her see she’d hooked me; she could feel me on the line. Yet she hadn’t me in the net--not quite.

“I’d gladly arrest George,” I said. “And lock him up for life.”

“Why?”

“Because you care about him.”

“Oh, do I?”

And then, for no more reason than that--but you’d have understood it, had you heard her voice--I felt better yet. I switched the subject back to business.

“I’ve accumulated some hand baggage,” I mentioned.

“Yes. Don’t you want it?”

“That part’s all right,” I said. “But what to do with it? It’s not a gift, I take it.”

“No.”

“I see. You expect a search. Meanwhile I’m to have the bag and then give it back to you.”

She nodded; and there she proved she knew I was not in the net; for instead of asking anything final, one way or the other, she merely suggested, “Think it over a while, won’t you?”

I promised and got up; for she’d put in that a hint of dismissal. Then I remembered Dibley. After being in her compartment all this time, I had to bring to him something more tellable than our talk so far.

“George is in on this game with you?” I asked.

“Why do you want to know?”

“I want to,” I said; and she told me, “No; we’re just going on together.”

“He has a lay of his own, then?”

She avoided direct answer to that. “Well, he’s still a young man,” she said. “He hasn’t retired; so naturally you’d suppose so, wouldn’t you?”

“All right. Now as well as I can guess, old “Iron Age”--you know who I mean?”

She nodded.

I went on. “He’s aboard because George is. He knows him; but he doesn’t know you. I’m here to find out about you. What shall I tell him?”

“That we’re getting off at Cleveland, please.”

“What?” I said. “Are you?”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to tell him that?”

“If you’ll be so good.”

I waited with my hand on the knob. “I’ll see you again.”

“Oh, please do!” she invited; and, feeling flushed and mighty good, I stepped into the corridor and drifted to the rear.

My new baggage was still under my seat in my Pullman but George was lost to sight. I wouldn’t have put it past Dibley to have locked him up somewhere but that didn’t seem to be the case when I encountered old “Iron Age” in the door of the smoking room of one of the last Pullmans. Rather, he encountered me, reaching out and dragging me in behind the curtains.

“Now what have you found out?” he went after me with his delightful tact.

“She’s a charming girl,” I assured him. “I called at her compartment, as you suggested, and pretended we had mutual acquaintances and got away with it.”

“You probably did not,” said Dibley, to take me down from the hang-over of satisfaction which he detected on me.

“She let you in because you look easy. What did she tell you?”

“She’s a low opinion of Sin Lewis.”

“Who?” said Dibley.

“But she’s keen on Miss Cather.”

“Who?”

Sin Lewis, so put to him, seemed to suggest somebody, possibly one of similar name who was on Dib’s list for rum-running or using the mails to defraud; but Cather wasn’t on his cards at all.

“They write books,” I explained. “We started talking about books.” I thought it just as well to use the truth as long as possible.

“Books!” he jeered me.

I remained polite. “How would you have started?” I asked courteously. “Something like this? ‘Good afternoon, Miss Wellington or whatever your real name is. I suspect you’re a crook but for the moment don’t place you. Now if you’ll just tell me----’”

“Drop it,” said Dib, not agreeably.

I obliged.

“Now forget the start,” he told me. “What did you get to?”

“Oh,” I said. “I found one thing out you want to know. They’re getting off at Cleveland.”

“What makes you think so?”

“She told me so.”

Old “Iron Age” gazed fixedly out of the window with the thought in his head (if his expression meant anything) of pulling the cord to stop the train if we happened to be passing an institution for the feeble-minded; but all was farm scenery, so I was safe.

“Thank you so much,” he said to me feelingly. “It was always possible that they would try to escape at Cleveland; so it is of some advantage to know they’re going on.”

He released me after a few more words and I went to my section. I had his permission to continue my acquaintance with Miss Wellington; but it was plain that he wasn’t depending much on me. He was taking to telegrams, scratching off any number of yellow sheets to go from the next stop.

It reminded me that, in my preoccupation at keeping Doris in sight after I found she was leaving the city, I hadn’t ’phoned my office. I had thought I’d wire; but now I decided not to.

I didn’t want Dibley to have any chance to oversee the fact that this trip was a last inspiration of mine. I immersed myself, ostensibly, in cost estimates of our new can and bottling plant which I happened to have in my pocket, while I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into this game I’d entered with Cleopatra Doris Janvier.

XV

IN WHICH I ASSIST A GET-AWAY.

She came into my car, blithe and smiling; at least she smiled at me. Every one looked up and every one, seeing that smile for me, put me down as lucky, I know. When she was past and out of the car, I could feel them gazing at me and wondering what I’d done to deserve such a smile.

She was a gay, delightful maid. Suppose that, not having had the advantage of acquaintance at the Flamingo Feather, I had met her in an ordinary way. I’d have been mad over that girl. Heaven salvage my soul, I was anyway.

She had a trick of playing up to me, which probably she used with everybody, but I never really saw it except with me. Anyway, she did it with me; and nobody else ever did. It was her trick of looking up quickly, when I was about to say something, and smiling in that pleasant way of hers (pleasant doesn’t half do it; but it has to go at that) as if she was always sure of something good every time I talked and as if she liked my line and me. When you’re decidedly slow and ordinary, that makes quite a hit.

I sat figuring out her life. Put her down as twenty-two; then she was born during the year Janvier was out after his first term in the “long house” and while he was busy engraving the plates which sent him in again. Some one--she hadn’t said who--took her into the country for ten years. Maybe she had a mother then; maybe not; her mother had dropped out somewhere. She was about twelve, then, when her father got out again and began his famous “living Cleveland” series of engravings.

Twelve, they say, is the child’s most impressionable age; the parent or guardian molds the future then.

Now I knew nothing about the guardian, when the parent was in the “long house,” but I had considerable information about father; and I could imagine him emerging from the pen all filled with eagerness to be back at his game of showing up the government engravers and of getting away with what he’d tried twice.

Wally Bailey had given me a graphic glimpse of Janvier and his aim which, from one point of view, was actually a pursuit of perfection. What Wally suggested was that Janvier wanted, more than anything else, the satisfaction of doing the thing which had stumped him. That was what he wanted his sight back for,--to have a go at it again. And here he had it.

His daughter was helping him, naturally. She’d been born and bred to his business and surely had caught something of the spirit of her father who wouldn’t give in, in spite of three terms, till he’d shown up the government.

I thought of what Jerry had told me of the Socratic genius of gervers and housemen; undoubtedly counterfeiters had their talent for dialectics too.

It might go something like this: the printing of a little extra money would not directly injure any individual. In fact, there was quite an argument whether it damaged people in general at all.

Many highly approved people were openly in favor of a freer issue of currency without bothering whether a gold or silver dollar was behind every bank note. Mr. Ford and Mr. Edison themselves had spoken for a scheme which, while not similar to Janvier’s system, yet had sent the good bankers into frightful attacks of financial hydrophobia.

Mightn’t Janvier show plenty of authority to suggest that he wasn’t in a bad business at all?

And suppose he compared it with other businesses; mine, for choice. What was the harm in shoving out a little informal currency compared with the damage in passing out drugged and adulterated food, which many a first family has done?

Then compare it with the coal brokerage business, from which many of my firmest friends are fat. What did they do for their profits, during a late, lamented shortage, but hold a few carloads of coal back from the market and away from people freezing for it so they could whoop the price a little more? Wouldn’t everybody be a bit ahead if these people, who haven’t the slightest fear of any “long house,” had stayed out of the coal business and simply printed their own money for their profits and shoved it into circulation without harming anybody?

You see, as I thought it over, it didn’t seem strange to me that Doris Wellington could smile and smile at me and not feel herself a villainess at all.

I wondered, from time to time, exactly what was in that nice, new suit case under my feet. A few hundred thousand in neat, new bills, I thought; or possibly plates. Maybe both.

That suit case kept bothering my bean-business conscience. It was decidedly one matter to like Doris Wellington and wish her to stay out of the clutches of old “Iron Age”; but it was something quite up another street to take charge of that handbag full of cash and plates and deliver them at destination for her. Obviously, this was what she meant me to do.

The day was waning; and all lights were on as we drew into Toledo, where old “Iron Age” sent his sheaf of telegrams over to Western Union. He received a couple of yellow envelopes too. I saw him strolling on the platform, reading enclosures and watching the doors of the train. He was developing a more menacing look.

Neither Doris nor George got off; Felice did, flirting expertly with one of the clothing merchants. “All aboard.” We were going again. Cleveland, the next stop.

In the observation car, I found “Iron Age” ponderously on duty beside Doris who was reading _Harper’s_. A good touch that, I thought; there’s something so disarming about _Harper’s_. But it wasn’t _Harper’s_ alone which made the effect. There was George a couple of seats away and he was reading the _Atlantic Monthly_, with Galsworthy’s “Forsythe Saga” ready beside him for good measure, yet he didn’t appear half so innocuous.

This was probably because he wasn’t. The more I looked at George, the more I questioned his general character; but the more I gazed at Doris, the surer I was that--in all but one of the essential senses--she was a “good” girl. Looseness of living simply wasn’t in her make-up.

You couldn’t associate her with anything personally depraved or disagreeable. She’d no more steal a diamond ring, left in the ladies’ wash room, than my mother, I felt certain. No; I was confident that her dereliction was highly specialized to the subject represented in that suit case of hers under my seat.

I wanted to talk to her about that and about other topics; but old “Iron Age” was asserting a priority claim just now.

He looked up at me and cut me dead, signifying of course that just now he and I weren’t to know each other. Doris nodded to me and I to her and I found a chair opposite.

Watching Dibley, I perceived that he was in the throes of opening a casual conversation. Of course Doris perceived it, too, and about a minute after I sat down, she dropped her _Harper’s_.

Old “Iron Age” dove for it and restored it to her, pompously. She thanked him.

He said, “You’re entirely welcome. You’re going to New York?”

“Oh, no,” Doris told him. “We’re off at Cleveland.”

“Iron Age” gave a glance at me, which eloquently said, “You see, you believed that. Now watch me.”

I watched them both and George, too.

Evidently she’d told Dibley what she wished and she was at her _Harper’s_ again, as though she enjoyed it. George was at his _Atlantic_ but he was poised; oh, decidedly poised.

“Iron Age” had two options, either to stay silent or start something crude like an arrest. But I doubted whether, in spite of his telegrams, he had enough evidence yet. So that was as far as he got in the light talk; and he’d jeered at me!

A waiter from the dining car appeared with the usual word for six o’clock; and Doris got up.

“We’re going in early,” she volunteered to me, “since we’re off at Cleveland.”

This gave Dib another cue to rehearse his superior glance at me.

George followed her out of the car and Dibley beckoned me over to him.

“Get her talking again,” he told me. “Leave him to me.”

When I found her seated alone at a table for two in the dining car, I interpreted Dib’s orders liberally. She smiled at me and, when I asked, “How about my sitting here?” she said, “Oh, I’d like it!” So there I was across the table from her, ordering her supper and mine together.

There’s something about that--the breaking of bread together, you know--which rather does more than you’d ever suspect unless you’ve tried it under conditions like mine. We not only broke bread; we broke a full portion of broiled white fish between us, another of cauliflower au gratin. I served those while she poured our two cups of orange pekoe from the same little pot and, for both of us, she mixed salad dressing of her own in a bowl. The best dressing, by the way, I’d ever tasted.