Part 6

This night in the poolroom a heavy-set, sort of countrified guy, a guy who didn't look at all as a detective should look, came in and flashed a badge and a warrant on him and called him Chaney--Herbert H. Chaney, that way, in full, to prove there was no mistake, and told him he was under arrest.

Chaney was never the one to start a jam; the stranger had shown the butt of an automatic when he was showing the badge. There was no trouble whatsoever. With an admirable docility he submitted to being pinched. His captor escorted him to a second-rate American-plan hotel and took him up to a room on the third floor. Here after Chaney had stripped to his undershirt and drawers, the other man handcuffed him by the left wrist to the iron side-rail of one of the twin beds that were in the room and Chaney lay down; then the officer took off his coat and vest and collar and took a chair and sat down to talk the thing over with him.

Almost the talk ran through a friendly groove; really across stretches of it you might call it downright friendly. The stranger was jubilant over his coup, having made the arrest so deftly with no mussiness or cutting up. It seemed that there had been a long stern chase leading up to this present culmination and he wanted a breathing space in which to get his wind back, so to speak, and congratulate himself.

For his part, Chaney was inclined to accept the inevitable without crabbing. Something the heavy-set man said now at the outset bent him strongly to that course. It stilled a sudden fear in him. What charge could these insurance people bring against him except breach of trust, or whichever fancy name it was they called it by when a fellow kept his mouth shut and let somebody else pay over coin that wasn't exactly owing?

Of course, having rounded him up this way, they would have to go through the forms of getting him extradited to Montana and getting him indicted and then bringing him to trial or something; but from what he knew about the law, he judged it would be more like a civil proceeding than a criminal one. It wasn't as though he had profited in a money way by his own duplicity. An innocent party to the transaction had the spending of that five thousand. All along Chaney had viewed his behavior under this head in more or less a heroic light--standing aside and not saying a word while a dependent woman came into a mighty snug little fortune.

And wife-desertion was no felony; he had looked that point up. Even if Mrs. Chaney were inclined to be spiteful, they couldn't stick you away for sliding out and leaving a woman. Thank heaven, a husband had a few rights left in this country. Chaney even abandoned a notion he had of denying that he was Chaney and fighting it out on that line. What would be the good? He settled on the hillocky mattress to hear what this hick-looking bull might have further to say about it all.

"I guess maybe you're wondering in your own mind how I come to get into the case to begin with," the latter had said a minute or two earlier. "Well, you might as well know it--I've been on the payroll of the Equity and Warranty Company from back when this thing first broke. Yes, sir, from the start back up there in Montana. It was them sent me out with orders to keep on goin' till I'd turned you up. When you monkey with those folks you're monkeyin' with a buzzsaw. They don't ever quit, not that outfit don't. That's why they paid up when your wife pushed her claim--to throw you off the track, case you heard about it. They'd rather see you nailed than have the money back. That's them!"

He lighted a cheap cigar and then as an afterthought offered Chaney its mate. But Chaney didn't want to smoke just then. All Chaney wanted to do was just to listen.

"Come to think about it, though, I guess the thing you're wonderin' about the most is how us insurance people come to figger out that you wasn't dead but 'live and kickin'," continued the smoker. "I know good and well that if I was in your fix that's what I would be interested in the most. That's right, ain't it?"

Chaney raised his head from the pillow and nodded, and was, as the saying is, all ears.

"Well, sir, I got to take the compliments for that part of it all by myself. You might not believe it, but if it hadn't been for me they or nobody else would probably never have suspicioned anything out of the way about you bein' squashed out nice and flat under that landslide. The way it come up was this way: I live at Kalispel, out in the Flathead valley, you know. I'm the resident agent there for the Equity and Warranty Company and on the side I'm a deputy sheriff for Flathead County, or the other way around, whichever way you want to put it. And it so happened I was the second human bein' to get into that Scalded Creek basin after the quake last year. But this boy Hurley's brother was the first.

"Just as soon as they felt the quake down on the river, this here brother, name Sherman Hurley, he took a notion into his head that something was wrong up in the mountains with his brother, the one that had hired out to guide you. It was almost like as if he'd got a message from his brother's spirit. So nothin' would do but what he must start right in and make sure, one way or the other. So he lit out and he traveled all that night, him knowin' all the trails and the lay of the land, and by movin' about as fast over them ridges as his pony could take him he made the trip in four or five hours less time than 'twould take doin' it the regular easy way.

"By daylight next mornin' he was there and he took one look around him and didn't see hide nor hair of you two nor of the horses, but he did see that slide where it had come down right square on top of the camp-ground along the creek, and he decided to himself, the same as anybody else with good sense would, that the whole outfit of you was under that mess of truck. He didn't waste no time foolin' around. If he went in there fast, he came out still faster. It wasn't noon yet when he got back to Polebridge with the news. His pony had went lame and he'd finished the trip, jumpin' and runnin'.

"Well, they telephoned down to Kalispel and the sheriff sent me on up by automobile to sort of represent the county, and he sent word on ahead for the gang that was goin' in to wait till I got there. Well, I burnt up the road gettin' through. They had quite a posse organized when I pulled in--rangers and several kinfolks of the Hurleys and some neighbors and part of a road crew out of the Park. This young Sherm Hurley was practically all in from what he'd been through with and mighty near grieved to death besides--he took on worse than any of his family did--but he was still bent and determined on goin' back the second time. He just would go, takin' the lead, tired as he was.

"Somehow him and me was ahead of the rest when we hit the rim and purty soon after that I seen somethin' that set me to thinkin'. I always did have kind of a turn for the detectin' business; that was partly what induced me to be a deputy sheriff. Yes, sir, I seen something. Guess what it was I seen?"

Chaney shook his head.

"Tracks, that's what. But I seen something a heap more significant right shortly after that. But these first things were tracks. I didn't tell nobody what was sproutin' in my mind, but I motioned everybody to stay where they was for a minute and then I got down off the plug I was ridin' and made one or two rough measurements and sized up things. Then I holloed back to the others to come ahead and we went on down.

"So in a few minutes more we was all down there together in that basin. But while the crowd was prowlin' round, with young Hurley beggin' 'em to fix up some way of gettin' his brother's body out from under those jagged rocks and them all keepin' on tellin' him it looked to them like it was goin' to be an impossible job, I was doin' some prowlin' on my own hook. Inside of three minutes I'd run onto something else that set me to thinkin' harder than ever. Try guessin' what that was."

"Was it--was it the fishing rod?" asked Chaney. The question popped out of him of its own accord.

"Nope--you're gettin' warm though. It was something right close by. Say"--he raised his voice admiringly--"say, plantin' that busted bamboo pole there wasn't such a bad idea on your part. I've said that to myself often since then and I still say so. It showed you two had been there before the slide and it made it look like you'd been took by surprise when the big disturbance started. But the thing I'm speakin' about now wasn't anything you'd fixed up for a plant. It was something you must have overlooked in the excitement. Well, nobody could have blamed you much for that. It must have been pretty squally times down in that deep hole when the earth began to rock and the cliffs began to crumble. You bet!

"Try to think of something besides the pole," he prompted. "Go on and try!"

His prisoner, who was sitting up now, made a gesture to indicate that he still was entirely at a loss.

"I'll give you a hint to help tip you off. What was you doin' just before the hell-raisin' broke loose?"

"Well, my line got twisted in a sapling--"

"No, no, before that even."

"I--let's see? I--oh, by gosh!"

It all came back to Chaney; the answer to the riddle that had pestered him that afternoon on the rim-rock nearly a year before. The thing that had made him hesitate, half persuaded to return. The same thing which subconsciously had fretted him through his sleeping on that first night of flight. It came back vividly--how his duplicate false upper plate had fallen out of his shirt pocket on the wet shale; how, absently, he had wondered why the plate should be in his pocket when properly it belonged in the canvas carryall which fitted under a flap of his ground-cloth; how he had picked it up and balanced it momentarily on a flat stone, not restoring it to his pocket for fear of another fall; how then he noticed a sizable trout nosing in out of deep water to the shallows and how, hoping to land him, he cast. And then the gut leader snagging and he turning to free it and then--the first astounding quiver underfoot.

"Exactly," affirmed the deputy as though he read what rolled in Chaney's mind. "Your extry set of store teeth! There they was, settin' on a rock, smilin' at me as pleasant as you please and shinin' in the sunlight.

"I don't know why 'twas, but right then and there there popped into my head something that happened once up in Nevada when I was a kid livin' with my folks just outside of Carson City. A fellow in Carson that had a glass eye hired a lot of Piute Indians to clean up a piece of ground for him--get the rocks and stumps out, you know. Well, them Piutes would work along all right as long as he stood right over them, but the minute he'd go away they'd every last single one of 'em lay down and take a nap. So finally he got an idea. He took his glass eye out of the socket and set it on a stump facing down the field and he says to old Johnson Sides, the Peacemaker of the Piutes, who could speak English and acted as interpreter for the gang, he says to him:

"'You tell your bunch that I'm goin' away a little while, but I'm leavin' my eye behind me to watch and see that none of 'em don't loaf on the job.'

"And old Johnson translated it and he put off somewheres. Well, sir, it worked fine for several days. Every time he quit the job he left his eye behind him on the stump. And every time a buck felt like loafing he'd look around and see that glass eye glarin' his way, or anyhow seemin' to, and he'd duck his head and spit on his hands and go to it again.

"But one day the boss came back and every blamed Indian in sight was stretched out on the ground snorin' to beat thunder. One smart one had slipped up behind the glass eye and slipped an empty tomato can down over it so it couldn't spy on 'em. And so when I seen your false teeth I thought of that Carson City feller's false eye, only his was covered up with an old tin can and yours was settin' out in the open, tellin' me things.

"For one thing they was tellin' me I maybe might be right on the suspicions I'd had about them tracks up above. First, though, I asked some questions without lettin' on to anybody what I had in my mind. A detective on a case don't go round blabbin' his business to everybody in sight, you know. I found out Hurley never had a bad tooth in his head. So this plate must belong to the fellow that was with him, which was you. That was point number one.

"I found out what size foot Hurley had and what kind of a boot he was wearin.' Point number two: them fake tracks up above couldn't have been made by him. They must have been made by you. Question then was, why should you want to sneak out of that basin and duck your nut without spreadin' the word? Says I to myself, 'That's for me to find out.' So havin' quietly confisticated that plate for evidence, I climbed up to the sandy stretch of the trail without bein' noticed particular by any of the party and I made certain I hadn't been wrong in the first place about them tracks."

"You keep harping on that," said Chaney with irritation. "What was wrong with those tracks? Mind you, I'm not admitting anything nor confessing anything, but I'm asking you what was wrong there?"

The under-sheriff grinned in appreciation of his own shrewdness.

"Nothin' much was wrong with them, only this," he explained. "There was one set too many, that's all. When you backed across that sand you done a first-rate job, but you plumb forgot to brush out the prints you'd already made comin' in. You'd got down out of the saddle and was walking your horse when you started down that day. I'm right, ain't I? You needn't answer--I know I am. Well, that was your mistake, brother--not wipin' out the first set. So there they was as plain as the nose on your face--two sets of prints, about a yard and a half apart and both pointin' in the same direction!

"They say a feller that's fixin' to commit a cold-blooded murder always leaves something behind him to convict him, and I judge it's the same way with a feller that takes it in his head all of a sudden to try to work a fraud on an insurance company or somebody. Lawsy me, that double set of tracks showin' there to give you away, and no doubt you sayin to yourself how smart you was all the time you was makin' 'em! Why, say, listen, the only way it could 'a' been possible for you to make 'em honest would for you to be twins.

"Well, later on when I found out more about you, I wouldn't been much surprised to hear you was twins and carried the other twin hid on your person somewheres and trotted him out when you wanted to use him. Because by all accounts you certainly are a great one, Chaney, for havin' an extry supply of everything in your war bags. Well, maybe that is good medicine--I won't say; but it certainly turned out bad for you this one time.

"Well, anyhow, I kept my mouth shut, not takin' nobody in my confidence, on the trip back to Polebridge. As soon as I could get a minute to myself I called up Kalispel--and say, talk about your coincidences! The news of you and young Hurley bein' missin' had been given out the day before by the sheriff and it was telegraphed all over the country to the newspapers, and the home office of our company in New Haven, Connecticut, had seen the dispatch and wired to the district agency at Helena sayin' you carried a policy with us and for them to start an inquiry into the circumstances and get confirmation and all; and the district agency had wired to me sayin' the same thing.

"Maybe them home-office folks wasn't astonished when the word came right back to 'em that their local representative was already on the job and smellin' a rat. Just to show you, they thought so well of me on account of what I'd already nosed out they didn't send no special investigator out from headquarters to handle the matter. They turned it over to me, with an expense account and a drawin' account and all; just told me to drop everything else and stick to this case till I found you. So I got a leave of absence from the sheriff's office, and, buddy, I've been on your trail ever since, and that's goin' on eleven months.

"Sometimes I'd think I was right close up behind you and then again there'd be times when I'd lose the scent altogether and have to scout round on the loose till I crossed it again. There's been gaps and breaks to your movements where I just had to take a chance and bridge over the jump and bulge ahead. Why, I'd lose sign of you and your probable whereabouts for weeks and months hand-runnin'. But I didn't quit you, not for a single minute, never, at no time."

Having achieved the somewhat difficult feat of incorporating four separate negatives into one positive sentence, the pleased man-hunter contemplated his legs outstretched before him with a gloating, reminiscent smile.

"Well, that's about all of the yarn," he added after a short pause. "No, it ain't quite all, neither. There was the way I first came to come to get you spotted definite. Startin' off, I says to myself: 'He wouldn't go east or south; if he did, he'd run into one of the Park hotels or a bunch of dude tourists on one of the main trails. He couldn't come back out at the west side because that's where people who saw him when he went into the mountains would be sure to meet him and remember him. So, if he's got any gumption at all, he's went north.' That's what I says, dopin' things out.

"So I goes north my own self. About all I had to go on for a spell was a photograph of you that the home-office people dug up--that and a pretty complete schedule of your ways and your habits. I banked on them more'n I did on the picture--a fellow can change the way he looks, but he ain't so apt to change the way he does. As it turned out, I was right. Because when I'd worked along as far as Vancouver and made a canvass of all the dentists in the telephone directory, and run across one dentist over on a back street that had only just lately finished makin' an extra upper plate for a feller answering to your general plans and specification--a feller, by gee, that already had a perfectly good plate in his top jaw--why, then I knowed I was on the right track.

"When you come right down to it, old-timer, that was what finally fixed your clock for you. Say, you certainly are a great hand, ain't you, for havin' two of everything? Yes, sir, you bet, two of everything!"

Seeming to like the phrase, he repeated it again and once again. All at once then it flashed to Chaney's brain that in the drawled and deliberate repetition was a special emphasis, the hint and the menace of a special meaning. What was this guy driving at, anyhow? What revelation as yet unmentioned was impending? Then, with the next words from his captor it came--the realization.

"I gotta hand it to you there, yes, sir. Two of everything for you, includin' aliases--_and wives_. Whoa! Stiddy, boy! Stand hitched!"

For the bigamist, with a vision of state's prison before his eyes, had jerked so hard in his scrambling leap that he almost dislocated his shackled wrist and did rack the frail bed down.

WE OF THE OLD SOUTH

[Decoration]

Just as he was, Captain Ransom Teal might have stepped right out of the pages of some story book. He looked like a refugee from a list of illustrations. Still, and with all that, there was on his part no conscious striving for effect. He looked that way because that was the way he looked. And his general walk and conversation matched in. He moved in the gentle prismatic shimmer of his own local color. He was the genuine article, absolutely.

On the other hand, Miss Blossom Lamar Clayton was what you might call self-assembled.

Hers was a synthetic blend, the name being borrowed in these quarters, the accent in those. As for the spare parts, such as mannerisms and tricks of gesture and the fashion of dressing the hair, they had been picked up here, there and elsewhere, as the lady went along. Almost the only honest thing about her was the original background of an inconsequential little personality. She was so persistent a cadger, though, that only once in a while did the primary tints show through those pilfered, piled-on coats of overglazing.

She was living proof of what petty larceny will do for a practitioner who keeps it up long enough and gets away with it most of the time. She was guilty on twenty counts but the trouble was you couldn't convict her. Not with the evidence on hand, anyhow.

They met--the escaped frontispiece and the human loan collection--in Hollywood, hard by one of the larger moving-picture plants. It was a first-rate site for such a meeting between two such specimens to take place, and highly suitable, because out there so many of the fictions are dressed up as facts and nearly every fact has a foundation of fiction which lies under it and lies and lies and lies. Almost anything can happen in Hollywood. And almost everything does, if you believe what you read in the Sunday supplements.

To be exact, the trails of these two first crossed in the dining-room of Mrs. H. Spicer. They crossed there and shortly thereafter became more or less interwoven.

Miss Clayton had been a guest at Mrs. H. Spicer's for some weeks past now, long enough to be able to describe beforehand what would be served for dinner on any given day. In the matter of her menus Mrs. H. Spicer was very High-church; she followed after ritual. This saved mental fag, which is a thing to be avoided when one is conducting a high-grade boarding-house mainly patronized by temperamental ladies and gentlemen who either are connected with, or who hope ultimately to be connected with, what used to be the largest single amusement industry in the United States before bootlegging crowded it back down into second place.

A tapeworm would have some advantage over a surviving sojourner beneath Mrs. H. Spicer's roof because the tapeworm never can tell in advance what it is going to have for its chief meal for the day, whereas if you were hardy and lasted through the second week at Spicer's, you knew that Monday's dinner would be based on the solid buttresses of corned beef and cabbage, and Tuesday's on lamb stew with cole-slaw on the side, and Wednesday's on liver and bacon, and so on through to Sunday's crowning feast, which was signalized by chicken fricassee accompanied by a very durable variety of flour dumpling with fig ice-cream for dessert; then repeat again in serial order, as named.

It was Mrs. Spicer's brag that she ran a homelike establishment. She said it really was more like one big happy family than a mere boarding house; to make it such was her constant aim, she said. But Tobe Daly said--behind her back, of course--that if this was home he knew now why so many girls left it. Tobe was always pulling some comical line.

This, being a Friday, was fish day with rice pudding to follow. Miss Clayton, having finished her rice pudding, was in the act of rising from her chair to go out and join this same Mr. Tobe Daly on the porch when Mrs. H. Spicer brought in a strange old gentleman. With the air which she always wore when presenting a fresh recruit to the other members of her constantly changing family groups--a kind of soothing yet a fluttering air--the landlady piloted him to the small table for four over in the far corner and presented him to the pair who still lingered at it--Miss Clayton and a Mrs. Scofield--and assigned him to the one vacant place there and told Katie, the second dining-room girl, to bring him some dinner.