Chapter 12

Griswold's pale face flushed and the blood sang liltingly in his veins. He wondered if she had been tempted to read the manuscript of the book while he was fighting his way back to consciousness and life. If they had been alone together, he would have asked her. The bare possibility set all the springs of the author's vanity upbubbling within him. There and then he promised himself that she should hear the rewriting of the book, chapter by chapter. But what he said was out of a deeper, and worthier, underthought.

"You have many missions, Miss Margery: some of them you choose, and some are chosen for you."

"No," she denied; "nobody has ever chosen for me."

"That may be true, without making me a false prophet. Sometimes when we think we are choosing for ourselves, chance chooses for us; oftener than not, I believe."

She turned on him quickly, and for a single swiftly passing instant the velvety eyes were deep wells of soberness with an indefinable underdepth of sorrow in them. Griswold had a sudden conviction that for the first time in his knowing of her he was looking into the soul of the real Margery Grierson.

"What you call 'chance' may possibly have a bigger and better name," she said, gravely. "Had you ever thought of that?"

"Give it any name you please, so long as you admit that it is something beyond our control," he conceded.

As had happened more than once before, she seemed to be able to read his inmost thought.

"You are thinking of the chain of incidents that brought you here? It is only the details that have 'happened.' You meant to come to Wahaska; you were carrying out a definite purpose of your own that night in St. Louis when you took your ticket. And coming here, sooner or later you would have found your way to this house--to a seat on these cushions. I could tell you more, but my prophetic soul warns me that Agatha Severance is protesting to Mr. Wamble that she can't _possibly_ play the particular song he is asking for without the music. I'm going to convince her that she can."

Some little time after this, Raymer, who had been one of the men introduced by Jasper Grierson, turned up again in the invalid's corner.

"Sit down, won't you?" said Griswold, making a move to share the cushions with the young ironmaster; and it was thus that the door to a friendship was opened. Farther on, when they had gotten safely beyond the commonplaces, Raymer suggested the smoking-room and a cigar, and Griswold went willingly.

"I was wondering if you were like me in that, Mr. Raymer," he said. "I never feel properly acquainted with a man until I have smoked with him."

"Or with a woman until she has made a cup of tea for you?" laughed the native. "That is Miss Margery's try-out. She has taught us the potentialities that lie in a cup of tea well brewed and skilfully sweetened."

From that on, the path to better acquaintance was the easiest of short-cuts, even as the mild cigar which Raymer found in his pocket-case paved the way for a return of the smoker's zest in the convalescent. Without calling himself a reformer, the young ironmaster proved to be a practical sociologist. Wherefore, when Griswold presently mounted his own sociological hobby, he was promptly invited to visit the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, to the end that he might have some of his theories of the universal oppression of wage-earners charitably modified.

"Of course, I don't deny that we're a long way from the Millennium, yet," was Raymer's summing up of the conditions in his own plant. "But I do claim that we are on a present-day, living footing. So far as the men understand loyalty, they are loyal; partly to my father's memory; partly, I hope, to me. We have never had a strike or an approach to one, or a disagreement that could not be adjusted amicably. Whether these conditions can be maintained after we double our capacity and get in a lot of new blood, I can't say. But I hope they can."

"You are enlarging?" said Griswold.

Raymer waited until the only other man in the smoking-den had gone back to the drawing-rooms before he said: "Yes; I caught the fever along with the rest of them a few weeks ago, and I'm already beginning to wish that I hadn't."

"You are afraid of the market?"

"N-no; times are good, and the market--our market, at least--is daily growing stronger. It is rather a matter of finances. I am an engineer, as my father was before me. When it comes to wrestling with the money devil, I'm outclassed from the start."

"There are a good many more of us in the same boat," said Griswold, leaving an opening for further confidences if Raymer chose to make them. But the young ironmaster was looking at his watch, and the confidences were postponed.

"I'm keeping you up, when I daresay you ought to be in bed," he protested; but Griswold held him long enough to ask for a suggestion in a small matter of his own.

Now that he was able to be about, he was most anxious to relieve Miss Grierson and her father of the charge and care of one whose obligation to them was already more than mountain-high: did Raymer happen to know of some quiet household where the obligated one could find lodging and a simple table?

Raymer, taking time to think of it, did know. Mrs. Holcomb, the widow of his father's bookkeeper, owned her own house in Shawnee Street. It was not a boarding-house. The widow rented rooms to two of Mr. Grierson's bank clerks, and she was looking for another desirable lodger. Quite possibly she would be willing to board the extra lodger. Raymer, himself, would go and see her about it.

"It is an exceedingly kind-hearted community this home town of yours, Mr. Raymer," was the convalescent's leave-taking, when he shook hands with the ironmaster at the foot of the stairs; and that was the thought which he took to bed with him after Raymer had gone to make his adieux to the small person who, in Griswold's reckoning, owned the kindest of the kind hearts.

XXI

BROFFIN'S EQUATION

Having Clerk Maurice's telegram to time the overtaking approach, Broffin found the _Belle Julie_ backing and filling for her berth at the Vicksburg landing when, after a hasty Vicksburg breakfast, he had himself driven to the river front.

Going aboard as soon as the swing stage was lowered, he found Maurice, with whom he had something more than a speaking acquaintance, just turning out of his bunk in the texas.

"I took it for granted you'd be along," was Maurice's greeting. "What bank robber are we running away with now?"

Broffin grinned.

"I'm still after the one you took on in the place of John Gavitt."

"Humph!" said the clerk, sleepily; "I thought that one _was_ John Gavitt."

"No; he merely took Gavitt's place and name. Tell me all you know about him."

"I don't know anything about him, except that he was fool enough to pull Buck M'Grath out of the river just after M'Grath had tried to bump him over the bows."

This was a new little side-light on the characteristics of the man who was wanted. Broffin pulled gently at the thread of narrative until he had all the particulars of the humane mutiny and the near-tragedy in which it had terminated.

"Stuck to him and kept him from drowning till you could pick 'em up, did he--what?" was his commentary on the story. "Then what happened?"

"Oh, nothing much--or nothing very different. Of course, Mac favored the fellow all he could, after that; gave him the light end of it when there was any light end. But he didn't get his chance to even up right until we got to St. Louis."

Here, apparently, was another overlooked item in the list of things to be considered, and Broffin grappled for it.

"How was that?" he asked.

"I don't know for a certainty. But I put it up that the fellow took Mac into his confidence--a little--and told him he wanted to make a run for it as soon as we hit the levee at St. Louis. He hadn't got his pay; we always hold the 'rousties'' money back till we're unloaded, if we can; so Mac advanced it, or claimed that he did."

It was Broffin's business to put two and two together, and at this conjuncture the process was sufficiently simple. With a hundred thousand dollars in his possession, the make-believe deck-hand would not be foolish enough to run even a hypothetical risk for the sake of saving the bit of wage-money. Broffin's next query seemed wholly irrelevant.

"Do you carry any nippers or handcuffs on the _Belle Julie_, Maurice?" he asked.

"Yes; I believe Mac has an odd pair or so in his dunnage; in fact, I know he has. I've seen him use 'em on an obstreperous nigger."

From the handcuffs Broffin went off at another tangent.

"Of course, so far as you know, nobody on the boat suspected that the fellow who called himself Gavitt was anything but the 'roustie' he was passing himself off for? You didn't know of his having any talk with any of the upper-deck people?"

"Only once," said the day-clerk, promptly.

"When was that?"

"It was one day just after the 'man-overboard' incident, a little while after dusk in the evening. I was up here in the texas, getting ready to go to supper. Gavitt--we may as well keep on calling him that till you've found another name for him--Gavitt had been cubbing for the pilot. I saw him go across the hurricane-deck and down the companion to the saloon-deck guards; and a minute later I heard him talking to somebody--a woman--on the guards below."

"You didn't hear what was said?"

"I didn't pay any attention. Passengers, women passengers especially, often do that--pull up a 'roustie' and pry into him to see what sort of wheels he has. But I noticed that they talked for quite a little while; because, when I finished dressing and went below, he was just leaving her."

Broffin rose up from the bunk on which he had been sitting and laid a heavy hand on Maurice's shoulder. "You ain't going to tell me that you didn't find out who the woman was, Clarence--what?" he said anxiously.

"That's just what I've got to tell you, Matt," returned the clerk reluctantly. "I was due at the second table, and I didn't go as far forward as the stanchion she was holding on to. All I can tell you is that she was one of the half-dozen or so younger women we had on board; I could guess at that much."

Broffin's oath was not of anger; it was a mere upbubbling of disappointment.

"Maurice, I've got to find that young woman if I have to chase her half-way round the globe, and it's tough luck to figure out that if you hadn't been in such a blazing hell of a hurry to get your supper that night, I might be able to catch up with her in the next forty-eight hours or so. But what's done is done, and can't be helped. Chase out and get your passenger list for that trip. We'll take the women as they come, and when you've helped me cull out the names of the ones you're sure it wasn't, I'll screw my nut and quit buzzing at you."

The clerk went below and returned almost immediately with the list. Together they went over it carefully, and by dint of much memory-wringing Maurice was able to give the detective leave to cancel ten of the seventeen names in the women's list, the remaining seven including all the might-have-beens who could possibly be fitted into the clerk's recollection of the woman he had seen clinging to the saloon-deck stanchion after her interview with the deck-hand.

To these seven names were appended the addresses given in the steamer's registry record, though as to these Maurice admitted that the patrons of the boats were not always careful to comply with the regulation which required the giving of the home address.

"About as often as not they write down the name of the last place they stopped at," he asserted; and Broffin swore again.

"Which means that I may have to pound my ear eight or ten thousand miles on the varnished cars for nothing," he growled. "Well, there ain't any rest for the wicked, I reckon. Now tell me where I can find this man Buck M'Grath, and I'll fade away."

M'Grath was on duty, superintending the loading and unloading of the Vicksburg freight quotas; but when Broffin tapped him on the shoulder and showed his badge, the second mate was called in and M'Grath stood aside with his unwelcome interrupter.

There were difficulties from the outset. A man-driver himself, the chief mate shared with the sheerest outcast in his crew a hearty hatred for the man-catchers all and singular; and in the present instance his sympathies were with the fugitive from justice, on general principles first, and for good and sufficient personal reasons afterward. Then, too, Broffin was hardly at his best. At the thought of what this man M'Grath could tell him, and was gruffly refusing to tell him, he lost his temper.

"You're edgin' up pretty close to the law, yourself, by what you're keeping back," he told the mate finally. "Sooner or later, I'm going to run this gentleman-roustie of yours down, anyhow, and it'll be healthier for you to help than to hinder. Do you know what he's wanted for?"

M'Grath did not know, and his enlargement upon the simple negative was explosively profane.

"Then I'll tell you. He was the 'strong-arm' man that held up the president of the Bayou State Security and made his get-away with a hundred thousand. Now will you come across?"

"No!" rasped the Irishman--and again there were embellishments.

"All right. When I catch up with him, you'll fall in for your share in the proceeds as an accessory after the fact. My men nabbed him on the levee at St. Louis, and when he euchred them he carried away a pair of handcuffs that somebody had to help him get shut of. He came back to the boat, and you are the man who took the handcuffs off!"

"'Tis a scrimshankin' lie, and ye can't prove ut!" said M'Grath.

"Maybe not; but there's one thing I can prove. This side-partner of yours didn't get his pay before he went ashore with the spring-line; _but you drew it for him afterwards!_"

M'Grath was cruelly cornered, but he still had the courage of his gratitude.

"Well, then, I did be taking the bracelets off av 'm. Now make the most av ut, and be damned to you! Did I know what he'd been doing? I did not. Do I know where he wint? I do not. Have I seen the naygur that skipped with him, from that day to this? I have not; nor would I be knowing 'm if I did see 'm. Anything else yez'd like to know? If there is, ye'll be taking ut on the tip av my fisht!" And he went back to his work, oozing profanity at every pore.

Thrown back upon the one remaining expedient, Broffin went ashore and became a student of railroad time-tables. Passing the incidents of the stubborn chase in review after many days, he wondered that it had not occurred to him to question Captain Mayfield. But that the captain would know anything at all about any particular bit of human driftwood in the ever-changing deck crew seemed easily incredible; and there was no good angel of clairvoyance to tell him that the captain had once been made the half-confidant of a distressed young woman who was anxious to be both just and merciful.

It was while he was waiting for the departure of the first northbound train that he planned the search for the young woman, arranging the names of the seven might-have-beens in the order of accessibility as indicated by the addresses given in the _Belle Julie's_ register. In this arrangement Miss Charlotte Farnham's name stood as Number Three; the two names outranking hers being assigned respectively to Terre Haute, Indiana, and Baldwin, Kansas.

In his after-rememberings, Broffin swore softly under the drooping mustaches when he recalled how, in that morning waiting at Vicksburg, he had hesitated and changed his mind many times before deciding upon the first three zigzags of the search. Terre Haute, Baldwin, and Wahaska lay roughly at the three extremities of a great triangle whose sides, measured in hours of railroad travel, were nearly equal. Failing at Terre Haute, the nearest point, he could reach either of the two remaining vertices of the triangle with fairly equal facility; and it was surely an ironical fate that led him to decide finally upon the Kansas town as the second choice.

Some twenty-odd hours after leaving Vicksburg, Broffin the tireless found himself in Terre Haute. Here failure had at least the comfort of finality. The Miss Heffelfinger of his list, whom he found and interviewed within an hour of his arrival, was a teacher of German whose difficulties with the English language immediately eliminated her from the diminishing equation. Broffin got away from the voluble little Berliner as expeditiously as possible and hastened back to the railway station. Kansas came next in his itinerary, and a westbound train was due to leave in a few minutes.

It was here again that fate mocked him. Arriving at the station, he found that the westbound train was an hour late; also, that within the hour there would be a fast train to the north, with good connections for Wahaska. Once more he stumbled and fell into the valley of indecision. A dozen times during the forty-five minutes of grace he was on the point of changing his route; nay, more; at the last minute, when the caller had announced the northern train, he took a gambler's chance and spun a coin--heads for the north and tails for the west. The twirling half-dollar slipped from his fingers and rolled under one of the stationary seats in the waiting-room. Broffin got down on his hands and knees to grope for it, and while he was groping the chance to take the northbound "Limited" was lost. Moreover, when he finally found the coin it was standing upright in a crack in the floor.

Having now no alternative to distract him, he held to his original plan and was soon speeding westward toward the Kansan experiment-station. For two full days of twenty-four hours each he fought as only a determined man and a good traveller could fight to cover a distance which should have been traversed in something less than half of the time. Washouts, blocked tracks, missed connections, all these got in the way; and it was not until late in the afternoon of the third day out from Terre Haute that he was set down at the small station which serves the needs of the Kansas university town.

Having had himself conveyed quickly to the university, which was given as the address of the Miss Sanborn whose name stood second in his list, he learned how shrewd a blow his implacable ill-luck had dealt him in making him the victim of so many delays. Miss Sanborn, it appeared, had been fitting herself at the denominational school to go out as a missionary. And some twelve hours before his arrival she had started on her long journey to the antipodes, going by way of San Francisco and the Pacific Mail.

Another man might have taken the more easily reached addresses in the list, leaving the appalling world-tour for the last. But the doggedness which had hitherto been Broffin's best bid for genius in his profession asserted itself as a ruling passion. Twenty minutes after having been given his body-blow by the dean of the theological school he had examined some specimens of Miss Sanborn's handwriting, had compared them with the unsigned letter, and was back at the little railroad station burning the wires to Kansas City in an attempt to find out the exact sailing date of the missionary's steamer from San Francisco.

When the answer came he found that his margin of time was something of the narrowest, but it was still a margin. By taking the first overland train which could be reached and boarded, he might, barring more of the ill-luck, arrive at San Francisco in time to overtake the young woman whose handwriting was so like, and yet in some respects quite strikingly unlike, that of the writer of the letter to Mr. Galbraith.

Under such conditions the long journey to the Pacific Coast was begun, continued, and, in due course of time, ended. As if it had exhausted itself in the middle passage, ill-luck held aloof, and Broffin's overland train was promptly on time when it rolled into its terminal at Oakland. An hour later he had crossed the bay and was in communication with the steamship people. Though it was within a few hours of the China steamer's sailing date, Miss Sanborn had not yet made her appearance, and once more, though the subject this time was wholly innocent, Broffin swore fluently.

Notwithstanding, after all these intermediate buffetings, it was only the ultimate disappointment which was reserved for the man who had come two thousand miles out of his way for a five-minute talk with a young woman. Almost at the last moment he found her, and in the same moment was made to realize that the similarity in handwriting was only a similarity. Miss Sanborn had been a passenger on the _Belle Julie_, boarding the steamboat at New Orleans and debarking at St. Louis. But she had known nothing of the Bayou State Security robbery until she had read of it in the newspapers; and one glance into the steadfast blue eyes that met his without flinching convinced Broffin that once more he had fired and missed.

Number Two in the list of seven being thus laboriously eliminated, Broffin, to be utterly consistent, should have boarded the first train for Minnesota. But inasmuch as three of the remaining five addresses were west of the Missouri River, he sacrificed consistency to common-sense, halting at a little town in the Colorado mountains, again at Pueblo, and a third time at Hastings, Nebraska only to find at each stopping-place that the ultimate disappointment had preceded and was waiting for him.

With his list cancelled down to two names, he resumed the eastward flight from the Nebraska town and was again beset by the devil of indecision. The two place-names remaining were Wahaska and a small coal-mining town in southern Iowa. Measuring again by railroad hours, he found that the Iowa town was the nearer; but, on the other hand, there were good connections from Omaha to Wahaska, and a rather poor one to the coal mines. Once more Broffin took the gambler's chance, spinning the coin in his hat, heads for Iowa and tails for Minnesota. It came heads; and the following day recorded the sixth in the string of failures.

Leaving What Cheer in the caboose of a coal train, with only the train's crew for company, and a hard bench for a bed, the man-hunter was already thrilling to the exultant view-halloo in the chase. By the light of the flickering caboose lamp he drew his pencil through the Iowa failure. The one uncancelled name was now something more than a chance; it was a certainty.

"I've got you for fair, girlie, this time!" he triumphed, and since he did it audibly, the coal-train conductor laughed and wanted to be told the color of her eyes and hair.

"Got 'em pretty bad, ain't you, pardner?" he commented, when Broffin, loose-tongued in his elation, confessed that he was chasing a woman whom he had never seen. "I know how it goes: seen a picture of one once on a bill-board, and I'd 'a' gone plum to Californy after her if I hadn't been too danged busy to take a lay-off."

Landing in Wahaska the next evening, Broffin's first request at the hotel counter was for the directory. Running an eager finger down the "F's" he came to the name. It was the only Farnham in the list, and after it he read: "Dr. Herbert C., office 8 to 10, 2 to 4, 201 Main St., res. 16 Lake Boulevard."

Broffin had a traveller's appetite, and the café doors were invitingly open. Yet he denied himself until the clerk, busy at the moment with other guests, should be at liberty.

"I see there's a Doctor Farnham here," he said, when his time came. "I was wondering if he was the man I met up with down in New Orleans last winter."

The clerk shook his head.

"I guess not. Doctor Bertie hasn't taken a vacation since the oldest inhabitant can remember."

"H'm; that's funny," mused the detective, as one nonplussed. "The name's just as familiar as an old song. Is your Doctor Farnham a sort of oldish man?"