Chapter 17

"You mistake me," she interposed. "I don't mean the physical penalties; though as to these the old saying that murder will out must have some foundation in fact. Let that go: we'll suppose him clever enough to make his escape and to outwit or outfight his enemies. I don't say he couldn't do it successfully; but I do say that, with the hazards confronting him at every turn, he will find the real criminal in him growing and possessing him, making him think things and do things of the utter depravity of which he has never had any doubt."

While she was speaking Griswold could feel the change she was describing stealing over him like a nightmare, and when she stopped he passed his hand over his eyes as one awaking from a vaguely terrifying dream.

"You mean that there is a real criminal in every man?" he questioned, and the question seemed to say itself of its own volition.

"In every man and in every woman: how can you be a writer and not know that? Ask yourself. You admit the existence of the good and the bad, and ordinarily you choose the good and shudder at the bad: tell me--haven't there been times when the most horrible crimes were possible to you?--times when, with the littlest tipping of the balance, you could have killed somebody? You needn't answer: I know you have looked over that brink, because I have looked over it myself, more than once. And, sooner or later, _Fleming_ will find himself looking over it--with all the horrors of the penalties pushing and shoving at him to tumble him into the gulf."

Griswold did not reply. He was gathering up the scattered pages of his manuscript and replacing them in order. When he spoke again it was of a matter entirely irrelevant.

"I had an odd experience the other evening," he said. "I had been dining with the Raymers and was walking back to Shawnee Street. A little newsboy named Johnnie Fergus turned up from somewhere at one of the street crossings and tried to sell me a paper--at eleven o'clock at night! I bought one and joked him about being out so late; and from that on I couldn't get rid of him. He went all the way home with me, talking a blue streak and acting as if he were afraid of something or somebody. I remembered afterward that he is the boy who takes care of your boat. Is there anything wrong with him?"

Miss Grierson had left her chair and had gone to stand at one of the windows.

"Nothing that I know of," she said. "He is a bright boy--too bright for his own good, I'm afraid. But I can explain--a little. Johnnie has taken a violent fancy to you for some reason, and he has fallen into the boyish habit of weaving all sorts of romances around you. I think he reads too many exciting stories and tries to make you the hero of them. He told me the other day that he was sure somebody was 'spotting' you."

Griswold looked up quickly. Miss Grierson was still facing the window, and he was glad that she had not seen his nervous start.

"'Spotting' me?" he laughed. "Where did he get that idea?"

"How should I know? But he had made himself believe it; he even went so far as to describe the man. Oh, I can assure you Johnnie has an imagination; I've tested it in other ways."

"I should think so!" said the man who also had an imagination, and shortly afterward he took his leave.

An hour later the same afternoon, Broffin, from his post of observation on the Winnebago porch, saw the writing-man cross the street and enter a hardware shop. Having nothing better to do, he, too, crossed the street and, in passing, looked into the open door of Simmons & Kleifurt's. What he saw brought him back at the end of a reflective stroll around the public square. When he entered the shop the clerk was putting a formidable array of weapons back into their show-case niches. Broffin lounged up and began to handle the pistols.

"If I knew enough about guns to be able to tell 'em apart, I might buy one," he said half-humorously. And then: "You must've been having a mighty particular customer--to get so many of 'em out."

"It was Mr. Griswold, Mr. Ed. Raymer's new partner," said the clerk. "And he _was_ pretty particular; wouldn't have anything but these new-fashioned automatics. Said he wanted something that would be quick and sure, and I guess he's got it--I sold him two of 'em."

Broffin played with the stock long enough to convince the clerk that he was only a counter lounger with no intention of buying. "Took two of 'em, did he?--for fear one might make him sick, I reckon," he said, with the half-humorous grin still lurking under the drooping mustaches. "Automatic thirty-twos, eh? Well, _I_ ain't goin' to try to hold your Mr.--Griscom, did you call him?--up none after this. He might git me."

Whereupon, having found out what he wanted to know, he lounged out again and went back to the hotel to smoke another of the reflective cigars in the porch chair which had come to be his by right of frequent and long-continued occupancy.

XXVII

IN THE SHADOWS

Not counting the vague and rather pointless disturbment which had culminated in the purchase of a pair of pistols, Griswold had left the Mereside library considerably shaken, not in his convictions, to be sure, but in his confidence in his own powers of imaginative analysis. For this cause it required a longer after-dinner stay at the Farnhams' than he had been allowing himself, to re-establish the norm of self-assurance.

This was coming to be the net result of a better acquaintance with Charlotte Farnham; a growth in the grace of self-containment, and in a just appreciation of the mighty power that lies in propinquity--the propinquity of an inspiring ideal. Miss Farnham was never enthusiastic; that, perhaps, would be asking too much of an ideal; but what she lacked in warmth was made up in cool sanity, backed by a moral sense that seemed never to waver. Unerringly she placed her finger upon the human weaknesses in his book-people, and unfalteringly she bade him reform them.

For his _Fidelia_, as he described her, she exhibited a gentle affection, tempered by a compassionate pity for her weaknesses and waverings; an attitude, he fatuously told himself, forced upon her because her own standards were so much higher than any he could delineate or conceive. For _Joan_ there was also compassion, but it was mildly contemptuous.

"If I did not know that you are incapable of doing such a thing, I might wonder if you are not drawing your _Joan_ from the life, Mr. Griswold," she said, a little coldly, on this same evening of rehabilitations. "Since such characters are to be found in real life, I suppose they may have a place in a book. But you must not commit the unpardonable sin of making your readers condone the evil in her for the sake of the good."

"May we not sometimes condone a little evil for the sake of a great good?" he pleaded in extenuation.

Her answer was rather disconcerting.

"Life is full of just such temptations; the temptation to bargain with expediency. We can only pray blindly to be delivered in the hour of trial."

They were sitting together on the vine-sheltered porch, and the street electrics with the lamplight from the sitting-room windows served merely to temper the velvety gloom of the summer night. He would have given much to be able to see her face, but the darkness came between.

"That opens the door to the larger question which is always asking for its answer," he said, letting the thought that was uppermost slip into speech. "At its very best, life is a compromise, not necessarily between good and evil, but between the thing possible and the thing impossible. It is not until we are strong enough to break the shacklings of the traditions that we are free to drive the best obtainable bargain with destiny."

As at other times, he was once more yielding to the impulse which was always prompting him to apply the acid test to the pure gold of the ideal. Heretofore the test had revealed no trace of earthly alloy; but now the result filled him with vague dismay.

"So you have said many times before," she rejoined, and her voice was as the voice of one groping in the dark. "I--I have a confession to make, Mr. Griswold: I have held out against you, knowing all the time that you were right; that life is full of these bitter compromises which we are forced to accept. Please forget what I have said about your _Fidelia_ and--and your _Joan_. You are trying to make them human, and that is as it should be."

Griswold could scarcely believe the evidence of his senses. He told himself fiercely that he would never believe, without the convincement of fact, that the ideal could step down from its pedestal.

"You are meaning to be kind to me now, at the expense of your convictions, Miss Charlotte," he protested warmly.

"No," she denied gravely. "Listen, and you shall judge. Once, only a short time ago, I was brought face to face with one of these terrible compromises. In a single instant, and by no fault of my own, the dreadful shears of fate were thrust into my hands, and conscience--what I have been taught to call the Christian conscience--told me that with them I must snip the thread of a man's life. Are you listening?"

His lips were dry and he had to moisten them before he could say: "Yes, go on; I am listening."

"The man was a criminal and he was a fugitive from justice. Conscience--_my_ conscience--insisted that it was my plain duty to raise the hue and cry. For a long time I couldn't do it; and then----"

He waited until the silence had grown unbearable before he prompted her. "And then?"

"And then chance threw us together. A new world was opened to me in those few moments. I had thought that there could be no possible question between simple right and wrong, but almost in his first word the man convinced me that, whatever I might think or the world might say, _his_ conscience had fully and freely acquitted him. And he proved it; proved it so that I can never doubt it as long as I live. He made me do what _my_ conscience had been telling me I ought to do--just as your _Fleming_ makes _Fidelia_ do."

"You denounced him?" he said, and he strove desperately to make the saying completely colorless.

"Yes."

"And he was taken?"

"He was; but he made his escape again, almost at once. He is still a free man."

Instantly the primitive instinct of self-preservation, the instinct of the hunted fugitive, sprang alert in the listener.

"How can you be sure of that?" he asked, and in his own ears his voice sounded like the clang of an alarm bell.

Again a silence fell, surcharged, this one, with all the old frightful possibilities. Once more the loathsome fever quickened the pulses of the man at bay, and the curious needle-like prickling of the skin came to signal the return of the homicidal fear-frenzy. The reaction to the normal racked him like the passing of a mortal sickness when his accusing angel said in her most matter-of-fact tone:

"I know he is free; I have it on the best possible authority. The detectives who are searching for him have been here to see me--or, at least, one of them has."

The hunted one laid hold of the partial reprieve with a mighty grip and drew himself out of the reactionary whirlpool.

"To see you? Why should they trouble you?"

"On general man-hunting principles, I suppose," was the calm reply. "Since I gave the necessary information once, they seem to think I can give it again. It is very annoying."

"It is an outrage!" declared the listener warmly. And afterward, with only the proper friendly emphasis: "I hope it is an annoyance past."

His companion leaned forward in her chair and cautiously parted the leafy vine screen.

"Look across the street--under those trees at the water's edge: do you see him?"

Griswold looked and was reasonably sure that he could make out the shadowy figure of a man leaning against one of the trees.

"That is my shadow," she said, lowering her voice; "Mr. Matthew Broffin, of the Colburne Detective Agency, in New Orleans. He has a foolish idea that I am in communication with the man he is searching for, and he was brutal enough to tell me so. What he expects to accomplish by keeping an absurd watch upon our house and dogging everybody who comes and goes, I can't imagine."

"You have told your father?" said Griswold, anxious to learn how far this new alarm fire had spread.

"Certainly; and he has made his protest. But it doesn't do any good; the man keeps on spying, as you see. But we have wandered a long way from your book. I've been trying to prove to you that I am not fit to criticise it."

"No; you mustn't mistake me. I haven't been coming to you for criticism," was Griswold's rather incoherent reply; and when the talk threatened to lapse into the commonplaces, he took his leave. Oddly enough, as he thought, when he was unlatching the gate and had shifted one of the newly purchased automatic pistols from his hip pocket to an outside pocket of the light top-coat he was wearing, the shadowy figure under the lake-shading trees had disappeared.

It was only a few minutes after the lingering dinner guest had gone when the doctor came out on the porch, bringing his long-stemmed pipe for a bedtime whiff in the open air.

"You are losing your beauty sleep, little girl," he said, dropping into the chair lately occupied by the guest. "Did you find out anything more to-night?"

The daughter did not reply at once, and when she did there was a note of freshly summoned hardihood in her voice.

"We were both mistaken," she affirmed. "Coincidences are always likely to be misleading. I am sorry I told you about them. He has certainly been a present help in time of need to Edward."

"How did you reach your conclusion?" inquired the pipe smoker, upon whom the coincidences were still actively exerting their influence.

"It came out in the talk this evening. He has been rather ridiculously putting me upon a pedestal, trying to make me fit an ideal character in his book, I think. To prove to him that I am only human, I told him the story of what happened on the _Belle Julie_. And, to cap the climax, I pointed out our friend Mr. Broffin, who was on guard again--as usual--and told him who the house watcher was and what he wanted. It didn't affect him any more than it would any friend of the family. He was interested in the story as a story, and--and in its bearing upon me as a--as a life-experience. But that was all."

"You may be right; you probably are right," was the father's comment after a thoughtful whiff or two had intervened. "Just the same, I've looked up the dates in my case book: if your Gavitt man, escaping from the officers in St. Louis, had taken the first train for Wahaska, he would have reached here at precisely the same moment that the sick Mr. Griswold did. Also, he would have been careful to remove all the little tags and telltales from his brand-new clothes--which was what Mr. Griswold very evidently had done. Also, again, the amount of money which Mr. Griswold has put into the Raymer capital stock tallies to within ten thousand dollars of the amount your Gavitt fellow walked away with in New Orleans. Also, number three, Mr. Griswold acted very much like a man who had lost all he had in the world when I told him that Miss Grierson and I had found no money in his suit-cases; and----"

"That is the weak link in your chain, isn't it?" objected the daughter. "You remember he told me on the boat that he had lost the money?"

Again the father took counsel of the long-stemmed pipe.

"It might be," he said, after a reflective pause. "It would be, if Miss Grierson could be safely eliminated from the equation. Unhappily, she can't be."

"I don't care!" came from the depths of the porch rocking-chair. "If this miserable detective arrests him and appeals to me, I shall simply refuse to know anything about it! I wish you'd tell this man Broffin so when you meet him again."

As before, the good little doctor had recourse to his pipe, and it was not until his daughter got up to go in that he said gently: "One other word, Charlie, girl: are you altogether sure that the wish isn't father to the thought--about Griswold?"

"Don't be absurd, papa!" she said scornfully, passing swiftly behind his chair to reach the door; and with that answer he was obliged to be content.

XXVIII

BROKEN LINKS

It was on the second day after the pistol-buying incident in Simmons & Kleifurt's that Broffin, wishful for solitude and a chance to think in perspective, took to the woods.

In the moment of lost temper, when he had threatened angrily to play an indefinite waiting game, prolonging it until his man should walk into the trap, nothing had really been farther from his intentions. As a matter of fact, there were the best of business reasons why he should not waste another day in following, or attempting to follow, the cold trail. Other cases were pressing, and his daily mail from the New Orleans head-quarters brought urgings impatient and importunate; and on the third day following the sleeveless interview with the doctor's daughter he had paid his bill at the Winnebago House and had packed his grip for the southward flight by the afternoon train.

Twenty minutes before train-time a telegram from the New Orleans office had reopened the closed and crossed-off account of the Bayou State Security robbery. It was a bare line in answer to his own wire advising the office that he was about to return, but its significance was out of all proportion to its length. "B. S. S. man is in your town. Important letter to-day's mail," was all it said, but that was sufficient. Broffin had promptly told the clerk of the Winnebago that he had changed his mind, and forty-eight hours afterward he had the letter.

Like the telegram, the mail communication was significant but inconclusive. One Patrick Sheehan, a St. Louis cab driver, dying, had made confession to his priest. For a bribe of two hundred dollars he had aided and abetted the escape of a criminal on a day and date corresponding to the mid-April arrival of the steamer _Belle Julie_ at St. Louis. Afterward he had driven the man to an up-town hotel (name not given) and had obtained from the clerk the man's name and destination. In his letter enclosing the confession the priest went on to say that the penitent had evidently had a severe struggle with his conscience. A mistaken sense of gratitude to the man who had bribed him had led him to tear off and destroy the upper half of the card given him by the up-town hotel clerk, and with the reminder gone he could not recall the man's name. But the destination address, "Wahaska, Minnesota," had been preserved, and the torn portion of the card bearing it was submitted with the confession.

With this new clue for an incentive, Broffin had immediately put his nose to the cold trail again. All other things apart, the torn card conclusively proved the correctness of the obstinately maintained hypothesis. If the robber had really chosen Wahaska for his hiding-place, he had done so merely because it was Miss Farnham's home. The boldness of the thing appealed instantly to a like quality in the detective, and he was not entirely unprepared for the eye-opening shock which came when he began to suspect that Griswold, the writing-man, was the man he was looking for.

The premonitory symptoms of the shock had manifested themselves when he began to note the regularity of Griswold's visits to the house in Lake Boulevard. Then came the pistol-buying episode, closely following an investment of money possible only to a capitalist--or a robber. Broffin worked quickly after this, tracing Griswold's record back to its Wahaskan beginnings and shadowing his man so faithfully that at any hour of the day or night he could have clapped the arresting hand upon his shoulder. Still he hesitated. Once, in his Secret Service days, he had arrested the wrong man, and the smart of the prosecution for false imprisonment would rankle as long as he lived.

This was why he took to the woods on the afternoon of the second day following Griswold's pistol purchase. He felt himself growing short-sighted from the very nearness of things. The single necessity now was for absolute and unshakable identification. To establish this, three witnesses, and three only, could be called upon. Of the three, two had failed signally--Miss Farnham because she had her own reasons for blocking the game, and President Galbraith.... That was another chapter in the book of failure. Broffin had learned that the president was stopping at the De Soto Inn, and he had manoeuvred to bring Mr. Galbraith face to face with Griswold in the Grierson bank on the day after the pistol-buying. To his astonishment and disgust the president had shaken his head irritably, adding a rebuke. "Na, na, man; your trade makes ye over-suspeecious. That's Mr. Griswold, the writer-man and a friend of the Griersons. Miss Madgie was telling me about him last week. He's no more like the robber than you are. Haven't I told ye the man was bearded like a tyke?"

With two of the three eye-witnesses refusing to testify, there remained only Johnson, the paying teller of the Bayou State Security. Broffin was considering the advisability of wiring for Johnson when he passed the last of the houses on the lakeside drive and struck into the country road which led by cool and shaded forest windings to the resort hotel at the head of the southern bay. If Johnson should fail--and in view of the fact that President Galbraith had failed it was a possibility to be reckoned with--there remained only two doubtful expedients. With Patrick Sheehan's confession to point the way it might be possible to trace the transformed deck-hand from his final interview with McGrath on the _Belle Julie_ step by step to his appearance, sick and delirious, in Wahaska twenty-four hours later. This was one of the expedients. The other was to take the long chance by clapping the handcuffs upon Griswold in some moment of unpreparedness. It was a well-worn trick, and it did not always succeed in surprising the admission of guilt necessary to make it hold good. And if it should not hold good, there might be consequences. As we have noted, Broffin had once clapped the handcuffs on the wrong man.

Chewing an extinct cigar and ruminating thoughtfully over his problem, Broffin had followed the windings of the country road well into the lake-enclosing forest when he heard the rattle of wheels and the hoof-beats of a horse. Presently the vehicle overtook and passed him. It was Miss Grierson's trap, drawn by the big English trap-horse, with Miss Grierson herself holding the reins and Raymer lounging comfortably in the spare seat.

The sight of the pair moved Broffin to speech apostrophic--when the two were out of earshot. "You're the little lady I'd like to back into a corner," he muttered. "What you know about this business--and wouldn't tell, not if you was gettin' the third degree for it--would tie up all the broken strings in a hurry. How do I know you didn't help him to get out of St. Louis? How do I know that the whole blame sick play wasn't a plant from start to finish?" He stopped and struck viciously at a roadside weed with the switch he had cut. It was a new idea, an idea with promise; and when he went on, the reflective excursion had become a journey with a purpose. Chance had been good to him now and then in his hard-working career: perhaps it would be good to him again. Having let one woman put a stumbling-block in his way, perhaps it was going to even things up by making another woman remove it.