Chapter 9

"I don't," the brother contended, doggedly. "She may be a trifle new and fresh for Wahaska, but she is clever and bright, and honest enough to ignore a social code which makes a mock of sincerity and a virtue of hypocrisy. I like her all the better for the way she flared out at me. There isn't one young woman in a thousand who would have had the nerve and the courage to do it."

"Or the impudence," added Mrs. Raymer, when her son had left the room. Then: "I do hope Edward isn't going to let that girl come between him and Charlotte!"

The daughter laughed.

"I should say there is room for a regiment to march between them, as it is. Miss Gilman took particular pains to let him know what train they were leaving on, and I happen to know he never went near the station to tell them good-by."

XVI

GOOD SAMARITANS

Since she had undertaken to show Wahaska precisely how to deport itself in the conventional field, Miss Grierson took a maid and a chaperon with her when she went to Florida. But when she returned in April, the maid had been left behind to marry the gamekeeper of one of the millionaire estates on Lake Worth, and little Miss Matthews, the ex-seamstress chaperon, had been dropped off in Illinois to visit relatives.

This is how it chanced that Margery, unwilling to set the Wahaskans a bad example, had telegraphed her father to meet her in St. Louis. Also, it shall account as it may for the far-reaching stroke of fate which seated the Griersons at Griswold's table in the Hotel Chouteau café, and afterward made them his fellow travellers in the north-bound sleeping-car _Anita_.

When Jasper Grierson travelled alone he was democratic enough to be satisfied with a section in the body of the car. But when Margery's tastes were to be consulted, the drawing-room was none too good. Indeed, as it transpired on the journey northward from St. Louis, the _Anita's_ drawing-room proved to be not good enough.

"It is simply a crude insult, the way they wear out their old, broken-down cars on us up here!" she was protesting to her father, when they came back from the late dining-car breakfast. "You ought to do something about it." Miss Margery was at the moment fresh from "Florida Specials" and the solid-Pullman vestibuled luxuries of eastern winter travel.

Jasper Grierson's smile was a capitalistic acquirement, and some of his fellow-townsmen described it as "cast-iron." But for his daughter it was always indulgent.

"I don't own the railroad yet, Madgie; you'll have to give me a little more time," he pleaded, clipping the tip from a black cigar of heroic proportions and reaching for the box of safety matches.

"I'll begin now, if you are going to smoke that dreadful thing in this stuffy little den," was the unfilial retort; and the daughter found a magazine and exchanged the drawing-room with its threat of asphyxiation for a seat in the body of the car.

For a little while the magazine, or rather the pictures in it, sufficed for a time-killer. Farther along, the panorama of eastern Iowa unrolling itself beside the path of the train served as an alternative to the pictured pages. When both the book and the out-door prospect palled upon her, Miss Margery tried to interest herself in her immediate surroundings.

The material was not promising. Two old ladies dozing in the section diagonally across the aisle, four school-girls munching chocolates and restlessly shifting from seat to seat in the farther half of the car, and the conductor methodically making out his reports in the section opposite, summed up the human interest, or at least the visible part of it. Half-way down the car one of the sections was still curtained and bulkheaded; and when Miss Grierson curled up in her seat and closed her eyes she was wondering vaguely why the porter had left this one section undisturbed in the morning scene-shifting.

The northward-flying train was crossing a river, and the dining-car waiter was crying the luncheon summons, when Margery awoke to realize the comforting fact that she had successfully slept the forenoon away. With the eye-opening came a recurrence of the last-remembered waking thought--the wonder why the curtained section was still undisturbed. When she was leaving the _Anita_ with her father, the explanation suggested itself: of course, the occupant of the middle section must be ill.

Luncheon over, there was nothing to remind her of the probable invalid in Number Six until late in the afternoon when, looking through the open door of the drawing-room, she saw the porter carrying a glass of water to the invisible sufferer. Quite suddenly her interest became acute. Who was the sick one? and why was he, or she, travelling without an attendant?

With Margery Grierson, to question was to ascertain; and the Pullman conductor, once more checking his diagrams in Section Eleven, offered the readiest means of enlightenment. A few minutes later Margery rejoined her father in the private compartment.

"Do you remember the nice-looking young man who sat at the table with us in the Chouteau last night?" she began abruptly.

The gray-wolf Jasper nodded. He had an excellent memory for faces.

"What did you think of him?" The query followed the nod like a nimble boxer's return blow.

"I thought he paid a whole lot more attention to you than he did to his supper. Why?"

"He is on this car; sick with a fever of some kind, and out of his head. He is going to Wahaska."

"How do you know it's the same one?"

"I made the conductor take me to see him. He talked to me in Italian and called me '_Carlotta mia_.'"

"Humph! he didn't look like a dago."

"He isn't; it's just because he is delirious."

There was a long pause, broken finally by a curt "Well?" from the father.

"I've been thinking," was the slow response. "Of course, there is a chance that he has friends in Wahaska, and that some one will be at the train to meet him. But it is only a chance."

"Why doesn't the conductor telegraph ahead and find out?"

"He doesn't know the man's name. I tried to get him to look for a card, or to break into the suit-cases under the berth, but he says the regulations won't let him."

"Well?" said the father again, this time with a more decided upward inflection. Then he added: "You've made up your mind what you're going to do: say it."

Margery's decision was announced crisply. "There is no hospital to send him to--which is Wahaska's shame. Maybe he will be met and taken care of by his friends: if he is, well and good; if he isn't, we'll put him in the carriage and take him home with us."

The cast-iron smile with the indulgent attachment wrinkled frostily upon Jasper Grierson's heavy face.

"The Good Samaritan act, eh? I've known you a long time, Madgie, but I never can tell when you're going to break out in a brand-new spot. Didn't lose any of your unexpectedness in Florida, did you?"

Miss Margery tossed her pretty head, and the dark eyes snapped.

"Somebody in the family has to think of something besides making money," she retorted. "Please lend me your pencil; I want to do some wiring."

All other gifts apart, Miss Grierson could boast of a degree of executive ability little inferior to her father's; did boast of it when the occasion offered; and by the time the whistle was sounding for Wahaska, all the arrangements had been made for the provisional rescue of the sick man in Lower Six.

At the station a single inquiry served to give the Good Samaritan intention the right of way. There were no friends to meet Lower Six; but the Grierson carriage was waiting, with the coachman and a Mereside gardener for bearers. From that to putting the sick man to bed in one of the guest-chambers of the lake-fronting mansion at the opposite end of the town was a mere bit of routine for one so capable as Miss Grierson; and twenty minutes after the successful transfer, she had Dr. Farnham at the nameless one's bedside, and was telephoning the college infirmary for a nurse.

Naturally, there were explanations to be made when the doctor came down. To her first anxious question the answer came gravely: "You have a very sick man on your hands, Miss Margery." Then the inevitable: "Who is he?"

She spread her hands in a pretty affectation of embarrassment.

"What will you think of me, Doctor Farnham, when I tell you that I haven't the littlest atom of an idea?"

Charlotte's father was a small man, with kindly eyes and the firm, straight-lined mouth of his Puritan forebears. "Tell me about it," he said concisely.

"There is almost nothing to tell. He was sick and out of his head, and his ticket read to Wahaska. No one on the train seemed to know anything about him; and he couldn't tell us anything himself. So when we found there was no one to meet him at the station, we put him into the carriage and brought him home. There didn't seem to be anything else to do."

A shrewd smile flickered for an instant in the kindly eyes of Wahaska's best-beloved physician.

"Almost any one else would have found plenty of other things to do--or not to do," was his comment. "Are you prepared to go on, Miss Margery?"

"Taking care of him until he is able to take care of himself?--certainly," was the quick reply.

"Then I'll tell you that it is likely to be a long siege, and probably a pretty serious one. I can't tell positively without the microscope, but I'm calling it malaria, with complications. There seems to be a general break-down, as if he had been overworking or starving himself. You'll need help."

"I know; I've just been 'phoning the college, but they can't spare anybody out of the infirmary. Find me some one, doctor."

Dr. Farnham took time to think.

"Let me see: you'll need a good, strong fellow who can be patient and kind and inflexible and even brutal, by turns. I wonder if we couldn't get Sven Oleson? The Raymers had him when Edward was down with typhoid, and he was a treasure when we could make him understand what was wanted."

There were fine little lines coming and going between Miss Margery's straight black brows. "We needn't do it by halves, doctor," she said decisively. "If it would be better to wire St. Paul or Minneapolis and get a trained nurse----"

"--You'd stand the extra expense, of course," laughed the doctor. "You are all the world's good angel when you set out to be, Miss Margery. But it won't be necessary; Oleson will do, if I can get him. And I'll send him or somebody else before bedtime. Meanwhile, there's nothing to do but to keep your patient quiet; and he'll do that for himself for a few hours. I gave him a bit of an anodyne before I came down."

Margery went to the outer door with her kindly counsellor, playing the part of the gracious hostess as one who is, or who means to be, precisely letter-perfect.

"It will soon be time for your daughter and Miss Gilman to come home, won't it, doctor?" she asked.

"Yes. I had a letter from Charlotte to-day. They are coming by boat to Winona, and they should have left St. Louis this morning." Then, to match the neighborly interest: "You are looking extremely well, Miss Margery. Your few weeks in Florida were pleasant ones, I know."

"Yes; they were pleasant. But I'm always well. Has poppa been working himself to death while I've been away?"

There was the faintest glimmer of an amused smile in the doctor's eyes when he said: "No, not quite, I guess. He has been out here with the masons and carpenters who are building the stables, every fine day, I think, and that was by way of being a recreation for him."

Margery nodded brightly. "I thought perhaps he would do that if I went away. But I mustn't keep you. Be sure and telephone me about Sven. I'll send the cart after him if you tell me to."

The doctor promised; and after he was gone, she went slowly up-stairs and let herself softly into the room of shaded lights. The sick man was resting quietly, and he did not stir when she crossed to the bed and laid a cool palm on his forehead.

"You poor castaway!" she murmured. "I wonder who you are, and to whom you belong? I suppose somebody has got to be mean and sneaky and find out. Would you rather it would be I than some one else who might care even less than I do?"

The sleeping man opened unseeing eyes and closed them again heavily. "I found the money, _Carlotta mia_; you didn't know that, did you?" he muttered; and then the narcotic seized and held him again.

His clothes were on a chair, and when she had carried them to a light that could be shaded completely from the bed and its occupant, she searched the pockets one by one. It was a little surprising to find all but two of them quite empty; no cards, no letters, no pen, pencil, pocket-knife, or purse; nothing but a handkerchief, and in one pocket of the waistcoat a small roll of paper money, a few coins and two small keys.

She held the coat up to the electric and examined it closely; the workmanship, the trimmings. It was not tailor-made, she decided, and by all the little signs and tokens it was quite new. And the same was true of the other garments. But there was no tag or trade-mark on any of them to show where they came from.

Failing to find the necessary clew to the castaway's identity in this preliminary search, she went on resolutely, dragging the two suit-cases over to the lighted corner and unlocking them with the keys taken from the pocket of the waistcoat.

The first yielded nothing but clothing, all new and evidently unworn. The second held more clothing, a man's toilet appliances, also new and unused, but apparently no scrap of writing or hint of a name. With a little sigh of bafflement she took the last tightly rolled bundle of clothing from the suit-case. While she was lifting it a pistol fell out.

In times past, Jasper Grierson's daughter had known weapons and their faults and excellences. "That places him--a little," she mused, putting the pistol aside after she had glanced at it: "He's from the East; he doesn't know a gun from a piece of common hardware."

Further search in the tightly rolled bundle was rewarded by the discovery of a typewritten book manuscript, unsigned, and with it an oblong packet wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. She slipped the string and removed the wrapping. The brick-shaped packet proved to be a thick block of bank-notes held together by heavy rubber bands snapped over the ends.

While the little ormolu clock on the dressing-case was whirring softly and chiming the hour she stared at the money-block as if the sight of it had fascinated her. Then she sprang up and flew to the door, not to escape, but to turn the key noiselessly in the lock. Secure against interruption, she pulled the rubber bands from the packet. The block was built up in layers, each layer banded with a paper slip on which was printed in red the name of the certifying bank and the amount. "Bayou State Security, $5,000." There were twenty of these layers in all, nineteen of them unbroken. But through the printed figures on the twentieth a pen-stroke had been drawn, and underneath was written "$4,000."

Quite coolly and methodically Margery Grierson verified the bank's count as indicated by the paper bands. There were one hundred thousand dollars, lacking the one thousand taken from the broken packet. The counting completed, she replaced the rubber bands and the brown-paper wrapping. Then she repacked the suit-cases, arranging the contents as nearly as might be just as she had found them, locking the cases and returning the keys to the waistcoat pocket from which she had taken them.

When all was done, she tiptoed across to the bed, with the brown-paper packet under her arm. The sick man stirred uneasily and began to mutter again. She bent to catch the words, and when she heard, the light of understanding leaped swiftly into the dark eyes. For the mumbled words were the echo of a fierce threat: "Sign it: sign it _now_, or, by God, I'll shoot to kill!"

XVII

GROPINGS

The robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank was already an old story when Mr. Matthew Broffin, chief of the New Orleans branch of a notable detective agency, returned from Guatemala with the forger Mortsen as his travelling companion.

Broffin was a successful man in his calling. Beginning as a deputy marshal in the "moonshining" districts of Kentucky and Tennessee, he had shifted first to the Secret Service, and later to the more highly specialized ranks of the private agencies. With nothing very spectacular to his credit, he had earned repute as a follower of long trails, and as an acute unraveller of tangled clews. Hence, his docket was never empty.

It was not altogether for the sake of the reward that he took over the case of the bank robbery a few days after his return from Central America. As a matter of fact, there was an express-company case waiting which promised more money. But emulation counts for something, even in the thief-catching field; and since two members of his own staff had fired and missed their mark in St. Louis, there was a blunder to be retrieved.

Reasoning logically upon the new problem, Broffin did not at once try to take up the chase at the point to which it had been carried by the two who had failed. Since the man had disappeared, the first necessity was the establishing of his true identity, and for a week Broffin devoted himself to the task of disentangling the two personalities: that of the decently dressed, parlor-anarchist bank-raider, and that of the man who figured in the anonymous letter as Gavitt, the deck-hand.

At the end of the week two facts were sufficiently apparent. The first was that there had been a real John Gavitt, a consumptive roustabout on the New Orleans river-front; a person easily traceable up to the time of his disappearance on or about the day of the robbery, and whose description, gathered from those who had known him well, tallied not at all with the best obtainable word-picture of the bank-robber. Fact the second was a corollary of the first: by some means the robber had contrived to change places with Gavitt; to take his place in the _Belle Julie's_ crew and to assume his name.

Broffin called this step in the outworking of his problem an incident closed when he had wired the post-master of the little Iowa river town from which the true Gavitt had migrated, and had received the expected reply. John Wesley Gavitt had reached home two days after the date of the bank robbery, had died within the week, and had been buried beside his wife.

The next step was purely constructive; an attempt to build, upon the description given by President Galbraith and the teller Johnson, a likeness which would fit some notorious "strong-arm man" known to the criminal records and the rogues' galleries. Broffin was not greatly disappointed when the effort failed.

"It's just about as I've been putting it up, all along," he mused, lighting his pipe and filling with a fragrant cloud the cramped little office in which he did his research work. "The fellow ain't a crook; he's an amateur, and this is his first break. That being the lay-out, he's liable to do all the things, the different kinds of things, that a sure-enough 'strong-arm man' wouldn't do."

It was to Bainbridge, sitting at the desk's end and turning the leaves of a rogues'-gallery reprint, that the musing conclusion was directed. The reporter was freshly returned from his jaunt to the banana coast, and he had climbed Broffin's stair to get the story of the Mortsen capture.

"He did one of the different things when he worked his way out of here in a deck crew," suggested Bainbridge. "The real thug wouldn't have done anything so honestly toilsome as that."

"Hardly," Broffin acquiesced. "There was about one chance in a thousand, and on that chance I've been looking for a picture that would fit him. There ain't any."

The reporter was glancing over his notes of the Mortsen story, and he got up to go.

"Well, I'm glad it's your job and not mine," he said, by way of leave-taking. "If your guess is right, it's like looking for the traditional needle in the haystack."

"Ump," said Broffin; and for a good hour after the reporter had gone he sat slowly swinging in the creaking office chair, smoking pipe after pipe and thinking.

At the end of the reflective revery he closed his desk, locked his office, and went once more to the bank. It was the hour of the noon lull, and Johnson, the paying teller, was free to talk.

"I hope I'll get through bothering you, some day, Mr. Johnson," Broffin began. "But when I get stuck, I have to come to you. What Mr. Galbraith don't remember would crowd a dictionary."

The teller made good-natured apologies for his chief. "Mr. Galbraith was a good bit upset, naturally. It was a pretty bad wrench for a man of his age."

"Sure, it was; and he's feeling it yet. That's why I'm letting him alone when I can. Just go once more carefully over the part of it that you saw, won't you?"

Johnson retold the story of the cashing of the president's check, circumstantially, and with the exactness of a man trained in a school of business accuracy.

"You'd make a good witness, Mr. Johnson," was Broffin's comment. "You can tell the same story twice, hand-running, which is more than most folks can do. Would you know the young woman if you'd see her again?"

"Hardly, I think."

"You say she was cashing a draft: how was she identified?"

"She had credentials from her home bank, with her signature attested."

"Of course, she didn't surrender her letter of identification?"

"No; we don't require it when the letter is a general one and not a credit letter."

Broffin pulled thoughtfully at his drooping mustaches. He was rearranging the pieces on the mental chess-board. He had not yet asked either of the questions he had come to ask. Without knowing the science even by name, he was still enough of a psychologist to prepare the way by leading the mind of the witness cleverly over the details of its own memory picture.

"You say the hold-up made way for the lady here at the window: you saw him do it?"

"Yes."

"Did any sign of recognition pass between them--anything to make you think that they might be acquainted with each other?"

This was one of the two critical questions, and the teller took time to consider.

"It's pretty hard to tag that with a definite 'yes' or 'no,'" he said, when the memory-searching moment had passed. "He spoke to her; of that I am quite sure, though I didn't hear what he said. She nodded and smiled. She had a beautiful face, and I remember how it lighted up when he spoke and stepped back."

"Then they might have been acquainted, you think?" Broffin said, adding quickly: "Don't let the fact that she afterward tried to set the dogs on him twist your judgment any. She might have known the man, and still be unwilling, afterward, to shield the criminal."

Again Johnson took time to be accurate.

"I'll admit that my impression at the time was that they were acquainted," he averred, at the end of the ends. "Of course you can't bank much on that. He might have said to a perfect stranger, 'After you,' or whatever it was that he did say; and she would acknowledge the courtesy with the nod and the smile--any well-bred woman would. But you can take it for what it is worth; my thought at the moment was that they had met before; casually, perhaps, as people meet on trains or in hotels; that there was at least recognition on both sides."

Broffin was nodding slowly. It was not often that he made a confidant of a witness, even in the smaller details of a case, but he evidently considered the helpful teller an exception.