_Gazette_, we know, wants to run you out of town in order to have a free hand in slaughtering Hare. Last night they supposed that my looking like Stanhope was the best card they had. This morning they will guess that there may be a still better one lying around somewhere. The _Daily_ tells them that I’m Varney, and, what is much more interesting, that I’m using Elbert Carstairs’s yacht. Mrs. Elbert Carstairs lives in Hunston. Putting two and two together, and adding the painted-out name and a dash of seeming furtiveness on my part, you have all the materials for a nice, yellow mystery. I haven’t the slightest doubt that when that telegraph editor in New York gets down to his office about one o’clock to-day, the very first thing he does, after hanging his coat on the nail, is to wire his correspondent to begin operating on me.”
Peter nailed the alternative. “If he doesn’t, the _Gazette_ will attend to the job, anyway.”
“Yes, the press is on our trail, in any case. The fact that this is the Carstairs yacht will mean more to the _Gazette_ than it could to the _Daily_. It will be a kind of connecting link for them. Of course, they’ll jump at it like wildfire. If they can make anything at all out of it, they’ll play it up to-morrow so that nobody in this town can possibly miss seeing it.”
“Pray heaven,” said Peter, referring to Mary Carstairs, “that she won’t see the _Daily_ this morning!”
“Yes. Her father’s name would naturally start her to thinking, which would make things awkward.”
“Larry, the _Gazette_ is going to print his name to-morrow morning as sure as Smith is a lying sneak.”
“We’ve still got to-day, haven’t we? By Jove, it’s nearly eleven already. A reporter may be down on us at almost any minute. We can’t stand being cross-examined. No searchlight of journalism playing about on the _Cypriani_ just now, thank you. My own idea is–“
“To grab him, to batter the face off him–“
“No, to elude him. Not to be here. In short, to run away.”
“_What?_ You can’t mean that you are going to let that dog drive you back to New York?”
“Well, hardly. But I do mean to make him think he has! I mean to run down the river a few miles and anchor where they can’t find us, simply to get out of the way. Then we’ll run back to-morrow in time for the luncheon. What do you think of that?”
Peter, his forehead rumpled like a corduroy road, stared at him fixedly and thought it over. “I think it’s the best thing in sight,” he said judicially. “An exceedingly neat little idea.”
“If we’re being watched, it may persuade them that we’ve gone. Anyway, it will give us time to decide what next,” said Varney. And he hurried off to confer with the sailing-master.
Presently the engine-room bell rang out a signal. Orders were given and repeated above and below. Men began moving about swiftly. The noise of coal scraped hurriedly out of bunkers smote the air. The _Cypriani’s_ hold throbbed with sudden life.
Varney, running hastily through the two newspaper stories again to make sure that they had missed nothing that might be important to them, was presently joined by Peter, who was looking at his watch every third minute and swearing softly every time he looked. Something had been discovered amiss with the machinery, it seemed. The captain was sure he would have the plaguy thing all right in another half-hour, but you never could tell. For his part he’d swear that a yacht was worse than an old-style motor car: you could absolutely count on her to be out of order at any moment when you positively had to have her.
To be delayed until somebody appeared to challenge their going was to lose half the battle. Varney went off to the sailing-master and spoke with him again, concisely. The sailing-master, a sensitive man to criticism, once more apologized, very technically, and redoubled his energies. He went below himself to superintend the repairs and to prod the laggards to their utmost endeavors. In less than three quarters of an hour, by Peter’s watch, he was up again, in a shower of falling perspiration, to announce that all was ready.
However, valuable moments had been lost. It was now nearly half-past twelve, or, in Peter’s indignant summary, “just an hour and a half too late.”
Varney glanced toward the bridge.
“All ready there?” he called.
“All ready, sir,” said the sailing-master, and sprang for the indicator.
“Hold on,” said Peter suddenly. “We’re getting visitors. There’s some one signaling us from the shore.”
Varney’s heart bounded. He turned with an exclamation; but in the next breath, he ordered: “Let her go, Ferguson.”
Upon the shore, at the spot where the _Cypriani’s_ boat ordinarily landed, stood a tallish, stocky young man, looking at them cheerfully and swabbing his brow with a large blue handkerchief. Catching Varney’s eye, he waved his hand with the handkerchief in it, and said, for the second time:
“Hello, aboard the _Cypriani!_”
Varney stepped to the rail, a faint smile on his lip. “Hello, there! What can we do for you?”
“Hot as merry hell, isn’t it?” said the young man pleasantly. “Send a boat over for me, will you? I’m Hammerton, of the _Gazette_ and the New York _Daily_, and I want to come aboard for a little talk.”
“Never in this world!” breathed Peter, _sotto voce_.
Varney smiled, grimly. “Sorry, Mr. Hammerton. You’re just too late. We are starting away from Hunston this very minute.”
The _Cypriani_ shuddered like a live thing and slid slowly forward.
CHAPTER XI
WHICH SHOWS THE HERO A FUGITIVE
Four miles downstream, the river’s banks grew a long mile apart, and the scenery was lonesome and a little wild. Here, as it chanced, there was flung across the water a thin, rocky island, well-wooded and of a respectable length. It lay nearest the western shore; and not a hamlet or even a house, it seemed, commanded it from either side.
They recognized it from afar as ideal anchorage for a yacht which wanted to be let alone. So they slowed down into the island’s curving shore and dropped anchor in the lee of it, out of sight of the Hunston side of the river and in little evidence from any point in midstream above or below.
Securely hidden from the probing eye of the press, they were now in something of a quandary as to what their next step should be. The hour set for the luncheon, upon which their mission hung, was only twenty-four hours away: and they had no idea whether the guest of honor intended to come or stay away. Varney was torn between the necessity of keeping clear of reporters, and the even more pressing necessity of calling upon Mary Carstairs. If to go to town was a risk, not to go to town was a much greater one.
They finally decided that Peter should go to Hunston first, at once and alone. He would walk in, lest the use of the _Cypriani_ boat should betray them; and there take charge of the situation and see what could be done.
“You sit tight,” Peter urged, “and give me a chance at it first. The _Gazette_ has got nothing on me, you know; they can camp on my shirt-tail till they get good and tired. Meantime, I’ll spread it around that you’ve gone away and that I’m hanging on a day or two longer to help Hare. You only came on a pleasure trip, and all these sensational lies spoiled your pleasure: so you pulled out. That’s plausible and reasonably true, you see. Then I’m going to find that fellow Hammerton and try to bluff him off.”
“How?”
“I’d much like to give him money, but it’s never safe to try that with reporters. Oh, I’ll hobnob with the fellow, hand him cigars, jolly him along about the neat way they got revenge on us for the meeting, and sort of take it for granted that the incident ended when they chased you away from town. If he seems dubious and acts as if he meant to work on the ‘secret mission’ idea just the same, I’ll go in and call on Coligny Smith. Oh, I’m not going to hit him. If I hadn’t known that would be the worst possible tactics, I’d have gone uptown at nine o’clock this morning and yanked him out of bed by his long, lying ears. I’m only going to talk to him in a kindly way. He told us himself that he was out for the hard money, you know.”
“All right,” said Varney.
Peter hesitated. “You’ve _got_ to go in, I suppose? It’s hard luck. Here we are working overtime to build up the popular idea that you’ve quit and gone back to New York. It’ll be deuced awkward if that reporter nabs you the minute you set foot in Hunston.”
“I’ve got to risk it. I’ll wait a while, though, and give them a chance to drop the trail. And when I do go in, I’m not going with a brass band.”
“There’s not the least hurry,” said Peter. “You’ve got all the rest of the day–to-morrow morning, too, for that matter. Wait here till you hear from me, will you? Maybe I can turn up something which will save you from having to go in at all.”
Varney grinned. “Remember yesterday, Peter?–when you were coming back at ten o’clock and came at four? No more unlimited contracts from me. It is twenty minutes past one now. You can get in by two thirty if you hustle. I must start in by half-past four. It wouldn’t be safe to wait any longer.”
“Give me a show, will you? Make it five, anyway.”
“Five, then. If you’re not back on the dot, in I start for my call. Till we meet again.”
Peter started down the stair, hesitated, turned and came back again. “Larry,” he said, with sudden gruffness, “of course, we ‘ve both been thinking that if it hadn’t been for me, none of this mess would have happened. I kick myself when I think–“
“Drop it, Peter. Nobody in the world could have foreseen–“
“Every ass in the United States,” said Maginnis, his ponderous foot on the ladder, “could have foreseen it but me. I just want you to know that politics is absolutely sidetracked now. Before I’ll let this deal of ours fall through, I’ll see Hare licked till they can’t scrape him together afterward with a fine-tooth comb.”
It was deadly quiet on the yacht after Peter left. At two o’clock Varney went down to a solitary luncheon. At quarter past, followed by the reproachful gaze of McTosh, he came out again. In the pit of his stomach reposed a great emptiness, but it was not hunger. He felt restless, high-strung, all made of nerves. He wanted to do something of a violent, physical sort, the more grueling the better; and his task was to loll in an easy-chair under a pretty awning and inspect the landscape.
The port side of the _Cypriani_ was jammed as close into the island as the science of navigation made possible. Varney went over to the other side and sat down to wait. In front of him, a hundred yards away, the western bank rose abruptly from the water’s edge, reaching here and there to loftiness. There were woods upon it, thick and silent, which looked as if the defiling hand of man had never entered there. At his back was the still, empty little island; at either side stretched the deserted river.
He thought it as lonely a spot as could have been found in a day’s journey, but a moment later he discovered his mistake. It was suddenly borne in upon him that the tall, thin object which nestled so closely among the trees a mile to the south that it was scarcely distinguishable from them, was in reality the spire of some church; and he knew that he was much closer to his kind than he had thought.
And then, in time, he noticed other things. Before a great while, he saw a boat with one person in it–a woman he thought–put out from the shore at about where the village must be and start across to the other bank. And later, as the afternoon wore on, he caught sight of a canoe, a few hundred yards upstream, rocking idly down with the current. An elderly-looking man sat in it, with a short brown beard and sun-goggles showing under his soft hat–for the water burned under a brilliant sky–stolidly fishing and reading a book. He looked like a rusticating college professor–of Greek, say–and this theory seemed to be supported by his obvious ignorance as to how to keep a canoe on the popular side of the water.
And later still a row-boat came swinging briskly up the quiet channel where the yacht lay and passed her at fifty yards. A man and a woman sat in it, presumably bound for Hunston, and they stared at the hidden, detected _Cypriani_ with a degree of frank interest which suggested that they would not fail to mention the strange sight to every acquaintance they met in town.
“That’s the beauty about a yacht,” thought Varney, annoyed. “You might as well try to hide an elephant in a hall room.”
But his mind soon strayed from the pair of bumpkins and went off to other and more pressing matters. He had now, not one great difficulty to meet and overcome, but two. One of them was to make Uncle Elbert’s daughter keep her engagement with him. The other was to prevent the _Gazette_ from linking the name of the _Cypriani_ with the name of Carstairs to-morrow morning. About the first of these he allowed himself no doubts. If the worst came to the worst, he would turn to Mrs. Carstairs. Brutal it might be to compel the mother to introduce the kidnapper to his quarry, her daughter; but that was no fault of his. He would do his duty by Mrs. Carstairs’s husband, no matter who got hurt. Miss Carstairs should come to the _Cypriani_ to-morrow as she had promised. In heaven or earth, on land or sea, there was no power which should keep him from having his will there.
But then there was the _Gazette_. Smith, the clever, would doubt that the _Cypriani_ had really gone back to New York. Suppose, since he could not find her, he would venture a few shrewd guesses in his paper to-morrow morning connecting that “secret mission” the _Daily_ had mentioned with Mrs. Elbert Carstairs. Miss Carstairs would see what the _Gazette_ said; and what questions would she have to ask him before she would come as his guest to the yacht?…
A ripple of water fell across the young man’s thought, and he glanced up. The college professor, whom the current had washed much nearer now, fancying, it appeared, that he had got a bite, had suddenly thrown himself far over the edge of his canoe, stretching his rod to the farthest reach. The slender birch-bark tipped so violently that even he noticed it; and the next instant, he sprang back again, rocking at a great rate.
“Simpleton!” thought Varney. “He will go over in a minute….”
Now her face rose before him as he had seen it first last night at Stanhope’s cottage, radiant as a dream come true–looking at him and saying: “I’d like it very much if you could just trust _me!_” And he saw her again when she had looked at him, eye to eye over the many heads before the theatre, with only blank unrecognition in her glance, or had there been, after all, a sort of latent sorrowfulness there? And then he saw her once more, as she stood in the little box-office, her cheeks suddenly stained red, when she begged him, please, not to ask her to discuss it any more….
A sudden sharp thought came to him, putting all his imaginings to flight, a thought so vital and so obvious that it was incredible that it had not once crossed his mind before. If the _Gazette_ doubted that he had returned to New York, if it was still on his trail and still wanted to embarrass him, _it would send a man straight to Mrs. Carstairs_.
How could he possibly have overlooked that? With the secret of the _Cypriani’s_ ownership out, of course that would be the first thing Smith would think of: to ask Mrs. Carstairs what had brought her husband’s yacht to Hunston. And when the reporter went, who could say what damaging admission he might surprise out of the poor lady, or at the least what inklings to hang diabolical guesses upon? Worst of all, he might see Miss Carstairs herself–awaken no one knew what suspicions in her already perplexed mind.
He sprang up and glanced at his watch. It was twenty minutes past four. Every minute had become precious now, and waiting for Peter was of course not to be thought of. While he loitered ineffectually here, Coligny Smith, four miles away, might be doing his plans the irremediable injury. And he started for the cabin swiftly to get his hat.
But there came an interruption which stopped him short. A quick loud splashing and sudden cries arose from the water near at hand; and he divined instantly what had happened. The college professor, like the ass he was, had upset his canoe.
Varney halted, strode back to the rail. The professor came up spluttering, blowing quarts of water from his mouth and nose, making feeble strokes with his ineffective, collegiate arms.
“Help!” he called in a thin watery voice. “Help! I can’t swim.” Whereon, he immediately bobbed under again.
Of course, there was nothing to do but accede to that request.
“Lay hold of the canoe,” called Varney impatiently, when the poor fellow reappeared. “I’ll send a boat down for you.”
There had been no chance of his drowning: for the overturned canoe was staunch, and floated, a splendid life-belt, not a foot away from him. At Varney’s word, he seized hold of it feebly, with both hands. The crew were quick. One or two of them had been watching the madman’s antics for some time, it appeared; and they had a boat down and over to him in no time.
Sopping with water, dripping it from his clothes and his hair and his brown academic beard, a dazed and pitiable-looking object, he came up the ladder not without nimbleness, and stepped through the gangway upon the deck.
Varney took it that his own duties in the matter were now at an end. “Hold your places,” he called to the boat crew. “I shall need you myself at once.”
Then he turned hurriedly to the man he had rescued, who stood silently on the deck, wringing cups of water from the skirts of his black cutaway coat.
“I’ll have them bring you dry clothes,” he said swiftly, “and anything else you need. You’ll excuse me? I am compelled to–“
But at that he stopped dead; for the brown beard of the college professor suddenly loosened and fell upon the deck. The professor, not at all discomposed by the extraordinary accident, kicked it carelessly to one side, and pitching his large hat and goggles after it, faced Varney with a jovial smile.
“You don’t happen to have a thimble-full of redeye about, do you, Mr. Varney?” he asked chattily. “I’m Hammerton, of the _Gazette_ and the _Daily_, you know, and that river down there is _wet_.”
CHAPTER XII
A YELLOW JOURNALIST SECURES A SCOOP BUT FAILS TO GET AWAY WITH IT
Garbed in a suit of Varney’s clothes, warmed beneath his belt by a libation from the _Cypriani’s_ choicest stock, eased as to his person by a pillow beneath his head and a comfortable rest for his feet, Charlie Hammerton threw back his head and laughed.
“I’m not crazy about those grand-stand plays as a rule,” he said. “Because in the first place they’re yellow, and in the second place they’re a darned lot of bother. But I just _had_ to see you–I guess you know why–and I couldn’t think of anything else that struck me as really sure. How’d I do it? Fair imitashe, hey? And I only told one lie, which is pretty good for a proposition of this sort. I _can_ swim, Mr. Varney. Like a blooming duck.”
Varney laughed. “You’re half an hour too late in telling me that, you know! But tell me how you managed all this: it was so clever! And do try one of these cigars.”
They sat at ease on the awninged after-deck, a wicker table between them convivial with decanters and their recognized appurtenances, like two old friends met for a happy reunion. The _Gazette’s_ star reporter was as different from one’s conception of a dangerous adversary as it is possible for a man to be. He seemed only a pleasant-faced, friendly boy of twenty-three or four, with an honest eye and a singularly infectious laugh.
“Don’t mind if I do–thanks!” said Hammerton, to the proffer of cigars. “Well, it wasn’t so very hard. After you steamed off, and left me gazing nervously out to sea like a deserted fisher’s wife, I–“
“No, you don’t!” laughed Varney. “Begin way back at the beginning. I’m as ignorant as a baby about all this, you know.”
Hammerton rather liked the idea of lolling on a luxurious yacht and explaining to the outwitted owner just how he had done it.
“Well,” he said, “it’s like this. When you fellows jumped in and kidnapped Ryan and banged the administration in the eye and slapped the _Gazette_ some stinging ones on the wrist, of course, we couldn’t just sit still and go quietly on with our knitting. Nay, nay! So we played up that gossip about you as strong as we could, sort of guessing that it might hurt your feelings a little. I’m going to be frank with you, you see! And then another idea came to us that wasn’t half bad. You said you were Mr. Laurence Varney of New York. Well, whether that was true or not–begging your pardon, of course!–that gave it a New York interest, don’t you see? So Mr. Smith, more by way of a feeler than anything else, wired it off to the _Daily_–“
“Why,” interrupted Varney, “I thought you were the correspondent of the _Daily_?”
“So I am. But this time it was only nominal. He’s pretty fond of doing it himself, Smith is. Well, as soon as I got down this morning, he called me in and showed me the _Daily_. You’ve seen it, I suppose? Of course, we were struck with the way our story had caught on, and particularly with the postscript about Elbert Carstairs and the mystery idea. Smith said: ‘There appears to be more in this than meets the eye, Charles. Hustle you down to the _Cypriani_, or ever the birds be flown.’ So I hustled. But then I did a fool thing that nearly gummed the game entirely. Just at the edge of the woods, I met a boy coming up the hill.
“Maybe you remember that kid, Mr. Varney–the telegraph boy? He was just on his way back from the yacht when I ran into him.”
“Come to think of it, I believe I did see that boy hanging around here.”
“As hard a little nut,” said Hammerton, “as you ever saw in your life. When he saw me, he stopped short and asked where I was going. I told him to the yacht. ”T ain’t no use,’ he said–I won’t try to give his lingo–‘they’ve gone.’ And the little devil actually went on to tell me how he had overheard the two gentlemen talking–guys he called you–and how you had decided to return to New York at once, and how he had looked back from the shore and seen the yacht already steaming away.”
Thus Varney learned that he had one friend in Hunston who was true to him, according to his poor little lights; and he felt that that kindly lie of Tommy Orrick’s, if it was ever set down against him anywhere, must be the kind that is blotted out again in tears.
“Why, I’ve been good to that kid,” said Hammerton, “giving him cigar-ends nearly every time I see him and that sort of thing. I never thought he had so much pure _malice_ in him. Well, like a fool, I turned right around and went back. I felt so pleased about it–for of course that was just what the _Gazette_ wanted–that I dropped in at the Ottoman for an eye-opener, and by Jove! it was nearly an hour before I got back to the office.”
He laughed, at first ruefully, then merrily–for had not everything turned out in the most satisfactory way in the world?
“Smith’s a beaut,” he said, shaking his head reminiscently. “I don’t believe anything ever got away from him since he was big enough to sit in front of a desk. When I told him that you fellows had gone back to New York, he never batted an eye. He just pulled a telescope out of the bottom drawer of his desk and went up to the roof. In two minutes he was down again. ‘Charles,’ he said in that quiet biting way of his, ‘God may have put bigger fools than you into this world, but in his great mercy he has not sent them to retard the work of the _Gazette_. The yacht lies precisely where she has lain for these two days. Will it be quite convenient for you to drop down there and have a talk, or do you design to wait until the gentlemen call at your desk and beg the privilege of telling you all?'”
He laughed again, this time without a trace of resentment; and so merry and spontaneous was this laugh that Varney could not help joining in.
“I suppose old Smith can tell you to go-to-hell more politely, yet more thoroughly, than any man that ever lived. I _ran_–and I was just in time at that, hey? Well, when you fellows steamed off, I kind of suspected that you weren’t going very far. So I got a boy and had him trail you down the old River road on a wheel. By the time he got back and told me that I had sized it up about right, I had my plans arranged and my make-up all ready. That make-up was rather neat, I thought, what? Meantime, a long wire had come in from the _Daily_ office, which made me keener than ever to see you. So I hired another wheel, ran on down, borrowed a canoe from a man I know here, and I guess you know the rest.”
“I should say I did,” said Varney. “Ha, ha! I should rather say I did.”
One reason why it was so advantageous to make the boy talk was that it gave one a chance to think. All the time that he had listened so pleasantly to this garrulous chatter, Varney had been swiftly planning. Now he had the situation pretty well analyzed and saw all the ways that there were.
He might send the reporter away convinced that there was nothing in this new theory, after all, that the _Gazette’s_ trump card in fighting Maginnis and Reform was still his own unhappy resemblance to the outlawed author. Or he might send him off with enough of a new theory to make him think it unnecessary to go to Mrs. Carstairs or her daughter–the fatal possibility. Or, if both of these proved impracticable as they almost certainly would, there was only one course left: he would not let Hammerton go away at all.
“But have another little drop or two, won’t you? Those dips with your clothes on aren’t a bit good for the health.”
“Well, just a little tickler,” said Charlie Hammerton. But he permitted himself to be helped quite liberally, with no protesting “when.” “My regards, Mr. Varney! Also my compliments and thanks for accepting the situation like such a genuine game one.”
Varney nodded. “The fortunes of war, Mr. Hammerton. But do go on. You have no idea how interesting the newspaper game is to an outsider, particularly–ha, ha!–when it walks right across his own quiet career. As I understand it, you’re on the regular staff of the _Gazette_, and then are a special correspondent of the _Daily_, besides?”
Hammerton, cocksure of his game and pleasantly cheered by the potent draught, thought that he had never interviewed so agreeable a man.
“That’s it exactly. Then, besides, we run a little news-bureau at the _Gazette_, you know–sell special stuff, whenever there’s anything doing, to papers all over the country. The bureau didn’t touch this story last night–why, I thought it was too ‘it-is-understood’ and ‘rumor-has-it’ and all that, to go even with the _Daily_–in your old own town. It’ll be different to-night, all right. We’ll query our whole string on it now–unless,” he added with frank despondency, “the darned old Associated Press decides to pinch it.”
“Query them, Mr. Hammerton?”
“Yes, wire them a brief, kind of piquant outline of the story, you know, and ask them if they don’t want it. And I sort of guess they’ll all want it, all right!”
“We’ll see about that in a minute,” laughed Varney. “There’s lots of time. Tell me about that brilliant young editor of yours, Mr. Smith. The men in the office all like him and sympathize with his policies, I suppose?”
Hammerton laughed, doubtfully. “Well, they all look up to him and respect him as one of the cleverest newspaper men in the country. Personally, I like old Smith fine, though nobody ever gets close to him a bit. He’s mighty good to me–lets me write little editorials two or three times a week, and says I’m not so awful at it. As for sympathizing with his policies–well, you know I’m not sure Smith sympathizes with ’em much himself. I have a kind of private hunch that he’s gotten sore on his job and would sell out if somebody–well, suppose we say our friend Ryan–would offer him his price. No, I’m not so keen for these indirect methods, Mr. Varney. At the same time, it’s part of the game, I suppose, and I always believe in playing a game right out to the end, for everything there is in it.”
At the unmistakable significance in his tone, Varney looked up and found the reporter’s eyes fixed upon him in an odd gaze which made him look all at once ten years older and infinitely difficult to baffle: a gaze which made it plain, in fact, that the wearer of it was not to be put off with anything short of the whole truth. The next second that look broke into an easy laugh, and Hammerton was a chattering boy again.
But Varney’s mood rose instantly to meet the antagonism of the reporter’s look, and hung there. He pulled a silver case from his pocket, selected a cigarette with care and lit it with deliberation. He had learned everything that he wanted to know; the conversation was beginning to grow tiresome; and he found the boy’s careless self-confidence increasingly exasperating.
“But as for undercutting Hare,” laughed Hammerton, “I don’t like it a–“
“Tell me this,” Varney interrupted coolly. “When the _Gazette_ prepared its story about me last night, did it believe for one moment that I was this man Stanhope?”
“Why, I’m not the _Gazette_, of course,” said Hammerton, a little taken aback by the cool change of both topic and manner, “but my private suspicion is that it entertained a few doubts on the subject. What do we think now? Look here, Mr. Varney,” the boy said amiably, “you’ve been white about this business, and I do really want to show that I appreciate it.”
He fumbled in the side-pocket of his wet coat, which hung on a near-by chair, produced a damp paper of the familiar yellow, smoothed it out and handed it across the table.
“I guess I won’t keep any secrets from you, Mr. Varney.”
Varney, taking the telegram with a nod, read the following:
_Gazette_, HUNSTON:
Varney-Stanhope story good stuff, but lacking details, vague and inaccurate. Stanhope located in Adirondacks, though not reached. See _Daily_ to-day. Man on yacht Varney. Apparent secrecy surrounding departure from here. Interview him sure and secure full statement as to business which brought him to Hunston. Also interview Mrs. Elbert Carstairs in Hunston. She separated from husband years ago. His yacht there with name erased suggests mystery. Rush fullest details day-rate if necessary. Pictures made. Expect complete story and interviews early to-night sure.
S. P. STOKES.
“Now,” said Charlie Hammerton, when Varney looked up, “you see why I went to such a lot of trouble to get hold of you.”
“Yes,” said Varney, slowly, his eye upon him, “I see.”
He folded the telegram, laid it at Hammerton’s elbow, got up and stood with his hands on the back of his chair, looking down. At the thought that he had ever hoped to call the reporter off, to stop this deadly machinery of journalism, once it had been started, he could have laughed. The _Daily_ telegram showed how impossible that had always been. Now it was suddenly and overwhelmingly plain that to force a fight on Hammerton, which had been his favorite purpose from the beginning, even to seize and lock him up, would be of no avail whatever. Other reporters in endless procession, waited behind him, ready to step into his place; and the pitiless machinery, in which he, Varney, happened to be caught at the moment, would go steadily grinding on till it had crushed out the heart of the hidden truth.
He saw no way out at all. His mind revolved at fever heat, while he said calmly: “Go back to your employers, Mr. Hammerton, and report that you have no story to sell them. Say further that since they knowingly printed a lying slander about me this morning, you, as an honorable man, insist upon their making full retractions and apologies to-morrow.”
Hammerton, who had taken his interview as a foregone conclusion, looked momentarily astounded; but on top of that his manner changed again, to meet Varney’s changed one, in the wink of an eye.
“You can’t mean,” he said briskly, ignoring Varney’s last remark entirely, “that you decline to make a statement for our readers?”
“Why should I encourage your readers to stick their infernal noses into my business?”
“For your own sake, Mr. Varney–because everybody has started asking questions. To refuse to answer them, from your point of view, is the worst thing you could do. As you know, newspapers always have other sources of information, and also ways of making intelligent guesses. While these guesses are usually surprisingly accurate, it sometimes happens that we work out a theory that is a whole lot worse than the truth.”
“Of course,” said Varney, with sudden absentness. “That’s the way you sell your dirty papers, is n’t it?”
“Mr. Varney, why did you come–?” began Hammerton, but stopped short, perceiving that the other no longer listened, and quite content to leave him to a little reflection.
For Varney, struck by a thought so new that it was overwhelming, had unexpectedly turned away. He leaned upon the rail and looked out over the blue, sunny water. A brilliant plan had flashed into his mind–a big daring plan which, far more than anything else he had thought of, might be effective and final. Instead of making an enemy of Hammerton, which could accomplish nothing, it would turn him into a champion, which meant victory.
It was a desperate solution, but it was a solution.
After all, what else remained? To dismiss the boy with nothing would be to send him straight to the Carstairs house with no one knew what results. To manhandle him would be simply to start another sleuth on the trail. But this plan, if it worked, would avoid that, and every other, risk of trouble. And if it failed, he would be no worse off than he was now; for in that case he would not allow Hammerton to go back to the _Gazette_ at all that day.
He dropped his cigarette over the side, turned and found the eye of the press firmly fastened upon him.
“Mr. Varney,” said Hammerton, with swift acuteness, “maybe I’m not as bad a fellow as you think. Why can’t you trust me with this story–of what brought you to Hunston, and what made you run away this morning and hide? If it’s really something that newspapers haven’t got anything to do with, I’ll go straight back to the office and make them leave you alone. Oh, I have enough influence to do it, all right! And if it’s something different and–well, a little unusual, I’ll promise to put you in the best light possible. Why don’t you trust me with it?”
“Well,” said Varney with a stormy smile, “suppose I do, then!”
“Good!” cried Hammerton cordially, observing him, however, with some intentness. “Honestly, it’s the very best thing you could do.”
Varney rested upon the back of his chair again and stood staring down at the reporter for some time in silence.
“Mr. Hammerton,” he began presently, “I know that the great majority of newspaper men are fair and honorable and absolutely trustworthy. I know that it is a part of their capital to be able to keep a secret as well as to print one. For this reason, I have upon reflection decided to confide–certain facts to you, feeling sure that they will never go any further–“
“Of course, Mr. Varney,” the reporter interrupted, “you understand that I can’t make any promises in advance.”
“Let the risk be mine,” said Varney. “I am certain that when you have heard what I have to tell you, you will report to your papers that my ‘mysterious errand’ turns out to be simply a matter of personal and private business, with which the public has no concern, and whose publication at this time would hopelessly ruin it. Mr. Hammerton, I came to Hunston to see Miss Mary Carstairs.”
A gleam came into Hammerton’s eye. Varney, watching that observant feature, knew that no detail of his story, or of his manner in telling it, would escape a most critical scrutiny.
“The fewer particulars the better,” he said grimly. “I shall tell the substance because that seems now, after all, the best way to protect the interests of those concerned. Mr. Hammerton, as the _Daily_ told you, Mr. Carstairs and his wife have separated, though they are still on friendly terms with each other. Their only child remains with the mother. Mr. Carstairs is getting old. He is naturally an affectionate man, and he is very lonely. In short, he has become most anxious to have his daughter spend part of her time with him. Mrs. Carstairs entirely approves of this. The daughter, however, absolutely refuses to leave her mother, feeling, it appears, that nothing is due her father from her. Arguments are useless. Well, what is to be done? Mr. Carstairs, because his great need of his daughter grows upon him, conceives an unusual plan. He will send an ambassador to Hunston–unaccredited, of course, a man, young, not married, who–don’t think me a coxcomb–but who might be able to arouse the daughter’s interest. This ambassador is to go on Mr. Carstairs’s own yacht, the name, of course, being erased, so that the daughter may not recognize it. He is to meet the young lady, cultivate her, make friends with her–all without letting her dream that he comes from her father, for that would ruin everything. And, then–“
He broke off, paused, considered. In Hammerton’s eye he saw a light which meant sympathy, kindly consideration, human interest. He knew that the battle was half won. He had only to say: “And then talk to her about her poor old father, who loves her, and who is growing old in a big house all by himself; and tell her how he needs her so sorely that old grudges ought to be forgotten; and ask her, in the name of common kindness, to come down and pay him a visit before it is too late.” He had only to say that, and he knew, for he read it in Hammerton’s whole softened expression, that the boy would go away with his lips locked.
But he couldn’t say that, the reason being that it was not true.
“And then,” he said, with a truthfulness so bold that he was sure the reporter would not follow it, “and then–don’t you see? he is to try to _make_ her go down to New York and pay a visit to that lonely old father who needs her so badly. Since she is so obstinate about it, he must find some way to _make_ her go before it is too late. _Now_ do you understand, Mr. Hammerton? _Now_ do you perceive why the thought of having all this pitiful story scareheaded in a penny paper is insufferable to me?”
He towered above Hammerton, crisp words falling like leaden bullets, stern, insistent, determined to be believed. But he saw a look dawn on the younger man’s face which made him instantly fear that he had told too much.
And then suddenly Hammerton sprang to his feet, keen eyes shot with light, ruddy cheek paled a little with excitement, fronting Varney in startled triumph over the drinks they had shared.
“Make her!” he blurted in a high shrill voice. “Mr. Varney, _you came up here to kidnap her!_”
The two men stared at each other in a moment of horrified silence. Something in the reporter’s air of victory, in the kind of thrilling joy with which he pounced upon the carefully guarded little secret and dragged it out into the light, made him all at once loathsome in Varney’s eyes, a creature unspeakably repellent.
Suddenly he leaned across the little table and struck Hammerton lightly across the mouth with the back of his hand.
“You cad,” he said whitely.
But Hammerton, never to be stopped by details now, ignored both the insult and the blow. He was on the rail like a cat, ready to swim for it, hot to take his great scoop to Mrs. Carstairs, to Coligny Smith, to readers of newspapers all over the land.
The table was between them, and it went over with a crash. Quick as he was, Varney was barely in time. His hand fell upon the reporter’s coat when another fraction of a second would have been too late. Then he flung backward with a wrench, and Hammerton came toppling heavily to the deck.
Smarting with the pain of the fall, hot with anger at last, the reporter was up in an instant, spitting blood, and they clenched with the swiftness of lightning. Then they broke away, violently, and went at it in grim earnest.
It was the fight of a lifetime for each of them and they were splendidly matched. Hammerton was two inches the shorter, but he had twenty pounds of solid weight to offset that; and in close work, especially, his execution was polished. They had it up and down the deck, hammer and tongs, swinging, landing, rushing, sidestepping. At the first crash of broken glass on the deck, the crew had begun to appear, unobtrusively from all directions. Now cabin-hatch, galley-hatch, deck-house, every coign of vantage along the battlefield held its silent cluster of wondering figures. But McTosh, familiar old family retainer, slipped nearer at the first opportunity and whispered, in just that eager tone with which he pressed a side-dish upon one’s notice:
“Can’t I give you a little help, sir?”
“Keep away, steward,” said Varney, between clenched teeth, “or you’ll get hurt.”
Saying which, he received a savage blow on the point of the chin and struck the deck with a thud.
“Oh, my Gawd, sir!” breathed McTosh.
But his young master was on his feet like a tiger, in a whirl of crazy passion. He had resolved all along that Hammerton would have to kill him before he should get away with that secret. Now it came to him like a divine revelation that the way to avoid this was to kill Hammerton. To that pleasant end, he goaded his adversary with a light blow, side-stepped his rush, uppercutted and the reporter went down, almost head first, and cruelly hard.
He came up dazed, game but very wild, and Varney got another chance promptly, which was just as well. Hammerton went down again, head on once more, and this time he did not come up at all.
The crew, unable to repress themselves, let out a cheer, and came crowding on the deck. But Varney, standing over Hammerton’s limp body, waved them back impatiently.
“Hold your noise!” he ordered. “And stand back! I’m attending to this job!”
He picked Hammerton up in his arms, staggered with him to his own stateroom, and laid him down on the bunk. The boy did not stir, gave no visible sign of life. But when Varney put his hand over the other’s heart, he found it beating away quite firmly. His breathing and pulse were regular–everything was quite as it should be. He would come round in half an hour, and be as good a man as ever. And he would have a long, idle time to rest, and look after his bruises and get back his strength again.
Varney took the key from the door, put it in outside, turned it and came on deck again. The crew had vanished to their several haunts. Two deck-hands in blouses and red caps had just completed the rehabilitation of the deck, and at sight of him discreetly vanished forward.
“Ferguson,” called Varney, “a word with you, please.”
The grizzled sailing-master came quickly, obviously curious for an explanation of these strange matters.
Rapidly Varney explained to him that the incarcerated man was a reporter who thought that he had got hold of a scandalous story about Mr. Carstairs, and was most anxious to get ashore so that he could publish this scandal all over the country.
“I am obliged to go to town immediately,” he continued. “Rumors of this ugly story have already been started, and I must do everything I can to nail them. I am going to trust the responsibility here to you. As soon as I leave the yacht, I want you to start her down the river. That is to get the gentleman and the yacht out of the way. Go straight ahead for two or three hours and then come back. Make your calculations so that you’ll get back here at–say ten o’clock to-night–here, mind you, not the old anchorage. I’ll be ready to come aboard by that time. Have two men guard that stateroom constantly every minute. Give the gentleman every possible attention, but don’t let him make any noise, and don’t let him get out. No matter what he says or does, _don’t let him get out_. Do you follow me?”
“I do, sir. To the menootest detail.”
“If you carry the matter through, you may rely upon Mr. Carstairs’s gratitude. If, on the other hand, you fail–“
“Oh, I’ll not fail, sir. Have no fear of that.”
“I am speaking to you man to man, Ferguson, when I say, for God’s sake don’t.”
He walked away to arrange himself a little for the town, seeing clearly that there was but one possible way out of all this for him now. The sailing-master stared after him with a very curious expression upon his weather-beaten face.
At about the same moment, in a tiny room four miles away, an elderly, melancholy man sat bowed over a telegraph board and drowsily plied his keys. He was the _Gazette’s_ special operator, and, having his orders from Mr. Parker, who looked after the news bureau when Hammerton was away, he was methodically going through his list like this:
_Tribune_, PITTSBURG:
Ferris Stanhope or Laurence Varney? Baffling mystery surrounding prominent men, one of whom now hiding here. Probable scandal, one thousand words.
_Press_, CINCINNATI:
Ferris Stanhope or Laurence Varney? Baffling mystery–
CHAPTER XIII
VARNEY MEETS HIS ENEMY AND IS DISARMED
Varney crossed the square in the gathering dusk and went slowly up Main Street, looking about him as he walked. He had wrenched his ankle slightly in one of his falls upon the _Cypriani’s_ deck, and the four-mile walk over the ruts of the River road to the town had done it no good. Worse yet, it had made the trip down from the yacht laboriously slow, and he was harried with the fear that the irreparable damage might already have been done.
If it had not, if no reporter had yet gone to the Carstairs house, his one possible hope of escape stood before him like a palm-tree in a plain. Stiffened and strengthened by all his difficulties, his resolve to win throbbed and mounted within him; but he faced the knowledge that the odds now were heavily against him. On the long chance, he had played a desperate game, had come within an ace of winning, and had lost. His great secret which, beyond any other purpose, he had meant to guard to the end, was glaringly out. Now it was the iron heart of his will that it should go no further. Talkative young Hammerton had given him the hint how that might be accomplished; and if the method was extreme, it would be sure. Whatever the cost, it would be a small price to pay for keeping his name, and Uncle Elbert’s, out of ruinous headlines in to-morrow’s papers.
Two blocks further on he came opposite a neat, three-story brick building, across the width of which was a black and gold signboard, lettered THE GAZETTE. Below it was the large plate-glass window of a counting-room, now dark. On the left was a lighted doorway, leading upstairs.
Varney crossed, climbed the stairs, found himself in a narrow upstairs hall, rapped upon a closed ground-glass door bearing the legend “Editorial.” From within, a voice of unenthusiasm bade him enter, and he went in, closing the door behind him.
In a swivel-chair by an open roller-top desk, a young man sat, idly smoking a cigarette, his back to the door, his languorous feet hung out of the window. There were electric lights in the room, but they were not lit. All the illumination that there was came from a single dingy gas-fixture stuck in the wall near the desk, but that was enough.
Varney came closer. “Smith,” said he.
“Well,” said Smith.
“I have come to see you.”
“Well–look away,” said Smith.
There was not a trace of the “Hast thou found me?” in the editor’s voice or his manner. If he expected assassination, he did not appear to mind. He sat on without turning, staring apathetically out of the window, just as he had done when he watched Varney cross and come in at his door.
“I have come,” said Varney, “because I understand that you are the sole owner, as well as the editor, of this paper. Am I right?”
Smith lit a fresh cigarette, flipped the old one out of the window and paused to watch the boys outside fight for it. Half-smoked stubs came frequently out of that window when Mr. Smith sat there and many boys in Hunston knew it.
“Assuming that you are?” queried he.
“Assuming that,” said Varney, “I’ll say that I have come to buy this paper. And to discharge you from the editorship.”
Smith drew in his feet, and swung slowly around. The two men measured each other in an interval of intelligent silence. On the whole, upon this close view, Varney found it harder to think of Smith as a contemptible cur who circulated lying slanders for profit than as the young man who wrote the famous editorials.
“And still they come,” said Smith, enigmatically. “Three of them in one day–well, well!” And he added musingly: “So I have stung you as hard as that, have I?”
“Let us say rather,” said Varney, whose present tack was diplomacy, “that I have some loose money which I want to stow away in a paying little enterprise.”
“I am the last man in the world to boast of a kindness,” continued Smith, in his faintly mocking manner, “but I gave you fair warning to leave town.”
“Instead I stayed. And an exceedingly interesting town I have found it. Something doing every minute. But, as I just remarked, I have looked in to buy your paper.”
“If I were like some I know,” meditated Smith, “I’d be thinking: ‘The Lord has delivered him into my hand, aye, delivered dear old Beany.’ I’d embarrass you with questions, make you blush with catechisms. But I am a merciful man, and observe that I ask you nothing. You want to buy the _Gazette_ for an investment. Let it stand at that. So you’re the money-grubbing sort that supposes that everything on God’s hassock has its price?”
“I believe it’s street knowledge that the _Gazette_ has its. But I called really not so much to discuss ethics, as to ascertain your figure.”
Smith gave a sigh which was not without its trace of mockery. “‘Fortunately, I am hardened to insults. Editors are expected to stand anything. Times are dull–nothing much to do–drop around and kick the editor. You’ve no idea what we have to put up with from spring poets alone. Rejoice, B—-, that is, Mr.–er–Blank, that the _Gazette_ is never to be yours.”
“You can’t mean that you decline to sell?”
“When I implied to you just now that I was sole owner of the _Gazette_, I was, of course, speaking rather reminiscently than in the strict light of present facts.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“That I sold the _Gazette_ at four o’clock this afternoon.”
For an instant the room whirled and Varney saw nothing in it but the odd eyes of Coligny Smith steadily fixing him. By the shock of that blow, he realized that, after all, he had wholly counted upon succeeding in this. From the moment when he had turned his stateroom key on unconscious Charlie Hammerton, he had recognized it as his one chance. And now he was too late. Clever Ryan, who missed nothing, doubtless suspecting that the faithless editor who had sold out once to him might now be planning to do it again to a higher bidder, had outstripped him. And the _Gazette_ to-morrow would damn him utterly.
But Varney’s face, as these thoughts came to him, wore a faint, non-committal smile. “That is final, I suppose?”
“As death, so far as I am concerned. I leave Hunston permanently to-morrow morning.”
“Who was the buyer?”
“There is really no reason why I should divulge his confidence that I know of; but, curses on me, I’ll do it if you’ll tell me this: Where is Charles Hammerton?”
Varney laid his hat and stick on the table, to rid his hands of them, and faced Mr. Smith, leaning lightly against it.
“I came here, Smith, to ask questions, not to answer them. On second thoughts, I withdraw my last one, for I can guess the answer. But before we proceed further, I want you to tell me this: what made you sell?”
The editor pitched another cigarette-end out of the window. Again a shout from the street indicated that it had become a bone of bitter contest among the town’s smokers of the _sub-rosa_ class.
“Suppose I were to tell you,” said Smith slowly, “that I anticipate a shakeup here which will cut the backbone out of my profits? What would you say to that?”
“I suppose I should say that it was ever the custom of rats to desert a sinking ship. So that was your mainspring, was it?”
“On the contrary,” said Smith. “I am taking what is technically known as a small rise out of you. You ask why I sold. It was a man with the price. Money,” began Mr. Smith, “screams. The cash on my desk was this man’s way of doing business, and a good deal it was. However, it’ll net him six per cent year in and out, at that–a good rate in these lean times. I, of course, did better. I got–shall we say?–pickings. The past tense already, heigho! Well, it’s been a most instructive life. My father taught me to write. He was esteemed a good editor, and he was, but at eighteen I was correcting his leaders for him. Hand Greeley a soft pencil and a pass at the encyclopedia, so he used to say, and he could prove anything under the sun. I am like that, except that–well, I don’t believe I need the encyclopedia. It wasn’t Greeley who made the remark, of course. It’s a rule on the press to pin all journalistic anecdotes on Greeley. You sign the pledge when you go in. To be accounted strictly moral,” continued Smith, “an editor must be blind in one eye and astigmatic in the other. Then he rings the bull’s-eye of Virtue ten times out of ten, and the clergy bleats with delight. You can’t find spiritual candor anywhere with a telescope, except in the criminal classes. There are no Pharisees there, God be praised! For my part, I see both sides of every question that was ever asked, and usually–don’t you think?–both of them are right. I first adopt my point of view and subsequently prove it. Obviously, this is where the pickings come in. My grandfather started this paper on two hundred and fifty dollars, fifty dollars of which, I have heard, was his own. I could knock off for life as an idle member of the predatory classes, I suppose, but after all, I was made for an editor. In years past, I have, of course, had my offers from New York. Two of them were left open forever, and a little while ago, I telegraphed down and took the best. A grateful wire came in five minutes ahead of you. And that,” he concluded wearily, in the flattest tones of a curiously flat voice, “is the life story of C. Smith, editor, up to the hour of going to press.”
Varney, who had never once been tempted to interrupt this strange apologia, struggled with an impulse to feel desperately sorry for Mr. Smith, and almost overcame it.
“Smith,” he said, in a moment, “why don’t you tell me why you sold?”
The editor got up and stared out of the window. Presently he turned, an odd faint flush tingeing his ordinarily colorless cheek. His air of smooth cynicism was gone, for once; and Varney saw then, as he had somehow suspected before, that the editor of the _Gazette_ wore polished bravado as a cloak and that underneath it he carried a rather troubled soul.
“You are right,” said Smith, “I–was twigging you again. Let us say,” he added, looking at Varney with a kind of shamefaced defiance, “that a man gets tired of living on pickings after a while.”
If he had been ten times a liar, ten times a slanderer and assassin of character, a man would have known that the young editor spoke the truth then. That knowledge disarmed Varney. To have sold the _Gazette_ to one who would prostitute it still further was hardly a noble act; but for Smith it meant unmistakably that he wanted to cut loose from the old evil walks where he had done ill by his honor and battened exceedingly.
“All along,” said Varney slowly, “I have had a kind of sneaking feeling that there was a spark left in you yet.”
He picked up his hat and stick again, and faced the pale young editor.
“Smith, you have done me a devilish wrong. You have knowingly printed a vile slander about me, aware that the natural result of your falsehood was that some poor drunken fool would shoot me down from behind. When I walked in here five minutes ago, I had two purposes in mind. One was to buy your paper. The other was to throw you down the front stairs. I am leaving now without doing either. I abandoned the first because I had to; I abandon the second, voluntarily, because–I don’t quite know why–but I think it is because it seems inappropriate to hit a man when he is down and something is just driving him to try to scramble up.”
He put on his hat and started to go; but Smith stopped him with a gesture. He let his eye, from which all sign of emotion had faded, run slowly over Varney’s slender figure.
“I wasn’t such a slouch in my younger days,” he said. “Football at my prep school, football and crew at my college. Boxed some at odd moments; was counted fair to middling. Some offhand practice since with people I’ve roasted–agents, actors, and the like. As to that throwing downstairs proposition now, if you’d care to try it on–“
Varney shook his head. “I don’t know that I can explain it–and no one regrets it more than I–but all the wish to _smash_ you, Smith, has gone away somewhere. The bottom has dropped out of it. Good-bye.”
“You are going? So am I,” said Smith, with a fair imitation of his usual lightness. “Going away for good. I hope you will come through this all right. I’ll never see you again. Shake hands, will you? You couldn’t know it, of course, but–it–is possible that I owe something to–you two fellows.”
He stood motionless, half turned away, thin hands hanging loosely at his sides.
Varney, who had colored slightly, took a last look at him. “No,” he said, suddenly much embarrassed, “I–I’m afraid I couldn’t do it in the way you mean, and so there wouldn’t be any point in it. But I–I do wish you luck with all my heart.”
He shut the door, and started down the stairway; and he straightway forgot Smith in the returning tide of his own difficulties. He saw clearly that there was no longer any hope; his plans were wrecked past mending. Persuading Miss Carstairs to keep her engagement to-morrow, his one great problem this morning, had become an unimportant detail now. Charlie Hammerton, with his merciless knowledge, filled the whole horizon like a menacing mirage.
It would not be enough to close the boy’s month till after the luncheon and then let it open to babble. For Elbert Carstairs had flatly drawn the line at a yellow aftermath of sensation. He would count a tall-typed scandal the day after to-morrow, when his daughter was with him, fully as bad as the same affliction now. And, the newspaper finally lost to them, there was no conceivable way in which that scandal could be averted now.
But about the moment when his foot hit the bottom of the worn stairs, the door at the head of them burst open, and a curiously stirred voice, which he had some difficulty in recognizing as Smith’s, called his name.
“Varney! oh, Varney! I–really meant to tell you–and then I forgot.”
He turned and saw the editor’s pale face hanging over the banisters.
“It was Maginnis I sold the _Gazette_ to, you know–Peter Maginnis. I wouldn’t have sold it to anybody else. You’ll find him at the hotel eating supper.”
Varney, looking at him, knew then what it was that Smith thought he owed to him and Maginnis.
He went back up the stairs and the two men shook hands in rather an agitated silence.
CHAPTER XIV
CONFERENCE BETWEEN MR. HACKLEY, THE DOG MAN, AND MR. RYAN, THE BOSS
At half past six o’clock, or thereabouts, James Hackley dragged slowly up Main Street. He was garbed in his working suit of denim blue, trimmed with monkey wrench and chisel, and he wore, further, an air of exaggerated fatigue. A rounded protuberance upon his cheek indicated that the exhilaration of the quid was not wanting to his inner man, but the solace he drew from it appeared pitifully trifling. Now and then he would pause, rest his person against a lamp-post, or the front of some emporium, and shake his head despondently, like one most fearful of the consequences of certain matters.
Since four o’clock that afternoon, in fact, Mr. Hackley had been out upon a reluctant stint of lawn-mowing, reluctant because he hated all work with a Titanic hatred and sedulously cultivated the conviction that his was a delicate health. In view of the magnificent windfall in connection with the killing of his dog, it had not been his design to accept any more retainers for a long time to come. That occurrence had lifted him, as by the ears, from the proletariat into the capitalistic leisure class; and the map of the world had become but the portrait of his oyster.
But at noon as he lolled upon his rear veranda, chatting kindly with his wife as she hung the linen of quality upon her drying lines, a lady had knocked upon his door, beautiful and insistent, to wheedle his will from him. It was only a tiny bit of a lawn, she had reiterated imploringly, hardly a constitutional to cut, and there was not one tall fellow in all Hunston whom she would permit to touch it but Hackley. Dead to all flattery as he was, his backbone ran to water at the clinging beauty of her smile, and so incredibly betrayed him into yielding. And now, at hard upon half after six o’clock, post-meridian, the dangerous dews of night already beginning to fall, he leaned against a lamp-post, a physical wreck, with a long block and a half still separating him from the comforts of home.
At the next corner but one above rose the red brick Ottoman, its inviting side stretching for many yards down the street towards him. Windows cut it here and there along its length, and over their green silk half-curtains, poured forth a golden light which was hospitality made visible. Yet, so strange are the ways of life, the proprietor of all these luxuries, who stood at the furthest window, beyond Hackley’s range, did not look happy in their possession. His eyes gleamed fiercely; his heavy chin protruded savagely, as though deliberately insulting Main Street and the northward universe. Even his small derby, which he seldom doffed save at the hour for taps, contrived to bespeak a certain ferocity.
The Ottoman bar was bare of customers, all Hunston now verging towards its evening meal. Ryan rested his elbow upon its polished surface, and glared into the twilight. He was, as luck had it, in a terrible ill-humor. For he knew himself to-day for a man who had been physically flouted, a boss whose supremacy had been violently assailed, a king who felt his throne careen sickeningly beneath him.
Last night, when four men whom he had never seen before, three of them masked, had borne him off on a long wild drive, and dropped him at ten o’clock in a lonely bit of country eight miles from the Academy Theatre, there had at least been action to give point to his choler. All but out of his mind with passion, he had besought them all, singly or quadruply, to descend from their carriage and meet him in combat, thirsting sorely to kill or be killed. But they had only laughed at him, silently, and galloped away, leaving him screaming out futile curses on the empty night air.
Two hours later, when he had got back to Hunston, after an interminable nightmare of running over rough ground with unaccustomed limbs, and stumbling heavily to earth, and rising up to struggle again, he had learned to what uses his enemies had put that absence. Smith had related the story in the fastness of his office, and in wholly different guise from that which it wore next morning in the columns of his newspaper. And Ryan, listening, had slowly calmed, calmed to the still fury of implacable hate.
But he and Smith had quarreled violently. He was for publishing the story of his taking off in type as black as the dastardly act. Smith had a difficult time in holding him down, however much he pointed out that Ryan had no shadow of proof against his new adversary on the yacht, and that public sympathy in an affair of this sort was always with the successful. In the end Smith had carried his point, because he was, of those two men, both the more wise and the more resolute. But this morning they had conferred again and quarreled even more bitterly.
Yet Ryan, plotting in the window of his splendid gin-palace, his eye always sweeping the evening street as though a-search, was not thinking of the young editor now. Two other policies for the days to come monopolized his attention. One of these was crushing victory at the polls. The other was revenge. Probably in thinking of these, he put them at the moment in reverse order.
“Damn him!” he suddenly exploded: and it was not little Hare that he cursed. “Damn his soul!”
In the next breath, the boss suddenly ducked, and disappeared from the half-curtained window altogether. A moment later, he appeared outside his swinging door, yawning and stretching himself, as one who, wearied with the tedium of life indoors, would see what beguilement might await him abroad.
The boss looked first up the street and permitted his beady eye to range casually over the view. Then his gaze came slowly down and rested in time upon the person of James Hackley, now almost directly opposite. The boss’s countenance lit up with a smile of pleased surprise.
“Why, hello, Jim!” he called out. “Where you been hidin’ yourself lately? Ain’t seen you for a week o’ Sundays. Come across and pass the time of day!”
Mr. Hackley, who had been debating whether or not he should pause for inspiration at the Ottoman, and had just virtuously declared for the negative, shambled over.
Ryan eyed him sympathetically. “You look kind o’ played out, Jim. What you been doin’ with yourself? Come in and take a drop of somethin’ to hearten you up some. On the house.”
“Well,” said Mr. Hackley, unable to resist the novel fascination of liquoring gratis, “just a weeny mite for to cut the dust out o’ my windpipe.”
Ryan went behind the bar and served them himself, selecting with care a bottle which he described as the primest stuff in the house. From this he poured Hackley a remarkably stiff potation, slightly wetting the bottom of his own glass the while. The bottle he left standing ready on the bar.
“Here’s how, friend Jim!”
Whatever Mr. Hackley’s foibles, he was a man at his cups. His platform was the straight article uncontaminated by ice or flabby sparkling-water; and chasers and the like of those he left to schoolboys.
“Ain’t took a drink for days,” he said, holding up his glass to the electric light and squinting through it. “Cut it out religious, I have. Been settin’ around the house, an’ settin’, under physic’an’s orders, tryin’ fer to get my health back so’s I could go to moldin’ agin. But Lordamussy, what’s the use of torkin’! I ain’t no more fitten fer work than a noo-born baby. Well, here’s luck, Ryan!”
He set his glass down and involuntarily smacked his lips. The fiery liquid percolated through him down to his very toes. He felt better at once, more ambitious, less conscious of his constitution. And simultaneously, he lost something of that indolent good-nature which was the badge of all his sober hours.
Ryan regarded him with friendly anxiety. “You gotter be more careful with yourself, honest! Here–strengthen your holt a little. One little swallow ain’t no help to a man as beat out as you are.”
“As yer like, Dennis,” said Mr. Hackley, listlessly. “What I reely need is a good long rest, like in a ‘orspittle.”
Kindly Mr. Ryan filled the small glass almost to the brim; and Hackley, though he had modestly stipulated for “on’y a drap” tossed it all off thirstily at a single practised toss.
“That’ll fix you up nice. But ain’t I glad,” said his host with a sly chuckle, “that nobody sees you taking these drinks on the quiet, which _we_ know you need bad for your health.”
Mr. Hackley set down his glass again, this time with something of a bang. “How’s that?” he demanded suspiciously.
Ryan laughed deprecatingly. While doing so, he manipulated the tall dark bottle again.
“Shuh!” said he. “It’s only the boys’ fun, of course. Don’t you mind _them_, Jim.”
“What’re you drivin’ at?” asked Hackley, bristling a bit. “If you got anything worth sayin’ to me, spit it out plain, I say.”
“Well,” laughed Ryan, “if some of the boys was to see you in here putting away a harmless drink or so, o’ course they’d say that you was gettin’ up your Dutch courage. He, he!”
“Dutch courage!” cried Mr. Hackley, indignantly. “An’ wot the hell fer?”
“Sh! Not so loud, Jim. Why, it’s only their little joke, o’ course. They’d say you was gettin’ up your nerve to meet them two friends of yours from New York! Hey? He, he!”
“Wot friends?” asked Hackley again, hotly.
Ryan observed the mounting color on the other’s cheek and brow, and his eye, which was like a small, glossy shoe-button, gleamed.
“Why, that ‘un that killed that dog o’ yours, and put you to sleep before the crowd, and that ‘un that sent Mamie Orrick to Gawd knows where. But shucks! Drop it, Jim. I wouldn’t have allooded to it, on’y I thought you’d see the fun of the thing.”
It takes a philosopher to perceive humor in taunts at his own personal courage, and Mr. Hackley, with three drinks of the Ottoman’s choicest beneath his tattered waistcoat, was not that kind of man at all.
He leaned forward against the bar with a belligerence suggesting that he wished to push it over, pinning his pleasant-spoken host to the wall, and pounded the top of it till the glasses tingled.
“Fill her up with the same!” he ordered loudly, looking suddenly, and for the first time, very much like the rough-looking customer who had tackled Peter Maginnis in defense of his dog. “An’ I’ll have you know, _Mister_ Ryan–I’ll have you know, my fine, big, bouncin’ buck, that Jim Hackley ain’t afeared of anythink that walks.”
Ryan filled her up again, though this time more conservatively. He was a keen man and an excellent judge of what was enough.
“Shuh! Don’t _I_ know that, Jim! Why, after that big bloke licked the stuffin’ out of you the other night, the boys said: ‘Well, that’s the last o’ that little differculty! Jim Hackley’ll never foller that up none,’ they says. And what’d I say?”
“Well, what’d you say?”
“I says, ‘Hell!’ I says. ‘You boys don’t _know_ Jim Hackley!'”
“I’ll interdooce myself to ’em!” said Hackley savagely. “And whoever says that Maginnis licked me’s a liar. You hear me? Tripped my toe on a rock, I did, and banged all the sense outen my head–“
“I understand, Jim,” interrupted Ryan suavely. “Just what I told the boys. O’ course, just between you an me, I have been kinder took by surprise that you’ve waited so long to get your evens. Why, this morning when the piece came out in the _Gazette_, tellin’ the whole town that the feller’s side-partner was that yellow cur-dog Stanhope, I says to the boys, first thing: ‘Boys, we gotter watch Jim Hackley mighty careful to-day,’ says I. ‘I’m afeard there’ll be gun-play before sunset.’ ‘Gun-play!’ says they. ‘F’om Hackley! Hell,’ says they. ‘You boys,’ says I, ‘don’t know old Jim like I do!’ And then o’ course,–he, he!–as the whole day slipped by and nothin’ doin’ at all–why, o’ course, I won’t deny that they ain’t been jollyin’ me some.”
Hackley leaned far over the bar, and shook his fist in the boss’s face. “I ain’t a man,” he shouted, “to be pushed an’ a-nagged at in a deal like this. I takes my time, I makes my plans, I decides on the ways I’ll do it. Do yer pipe to that? An’ now I’ve got ever’think fixed and I’m ready. Do yer see!”
The boss, who had retreated a step before that menacing fist, glanced out of the window and instantly started, this time with an amazement that was genuine.
“Why, blast my eyes,” he cried, raising a pudgy arm, “if there ain’t that dog Stanhope now!”
Hackley, following the pointing finger, peered over the green silk curtain out into the darkening street. A young man, tall and rather thin, in a blue suit and wide gray-felt hat, was walking slowly and with a slight limp up the cross street, evidently heading for the Palace Hotel.
The two men watched him intently, in a moment of perfect silence. Then the boss, who was not without a certain dramatic sense, said slowly:
“_Mamie Orrick’s old friend_!”
A baleful light leaped into Hackley’s eyes. He broke away from the bar with a movement that was like a wrench, and started for the door.
“I’ll fix him,” he muttered dourly. “Fix him _good_.”
But Ryan, who wanted something much better than that, sprang around the bar like lightning, and caught Hackley roughly by the shoulder, at the door.
“What, here in the square!” he hissed sharply. “With the po-lice in sight a’most! Why, you fool, it’ll mean the pen for you as sure as your name’s Jim Hackley!”
Hackley paused, his resolution unsettled by the other’s superior knowledge of the law.
“No, no, Jim–it won’t do,” went on Ryan with bland decisiveness. “What you want is the two of them together, hey?–on a nice dark stretch o’ road, and old Orrick and a few good fellows along to help. You ain’t the only one that’s got it in for Stanhope, are you? An’ you want Maginnis too, I guess? Come on in the orfice and talk about it over a seegar.”
CHAPTER XV
IN WHICH VARNEY DOES NOT PAY A VISIT, BUT RECEIVES ONE
Coligny Smith had told the truth. Peter Maginnis had bought the _Gazette_, and the _Cyprianl’s_ troubles, from this source at any rate, were at an end.
Varney found the new proprietor at the hotel, completing a hurried supper, and Peter hailed him with astonishment and delight. All afternoon he had been bursting with his great news, eager to get word of it to Varney on the yacht. But there had been no trustworthy messenger to send; his own time had been rilled to overflowing, with contracts, bills of sale and deeds; and, besides, his certain knowledge that everything was all right made it seem a minor matter that Varney should know it too.
“But what the deuce,” he exclaimed at once, “brings you at this hour to the Palace Hotel and Restaurant?”
“I, too,” quoted Varney, “have not been idle.”
As they walked back to the _Gazette_ building, where Peter had still various details to attend to, he gave a terse epitome of his afternoon’s experiences. At the news that he, too, had sought to buy the paper which was so determinedly on their trail, Peter chuckled and started to speak; but when he learned in the next sentence that Hammerton had their secret at his mercy, his face grew suddenly grave.
“The rub is,” he summed up meditatively, “he may take his walking-papers rather than let go of such a scoop as that. Of course, he knows that the New York papers would trample each other to death trying to snatch it away from him. However, we can fix it somehow. We’ve got to–that’s all.”
“He’ll listen to reason, I dare say,” said Varney briefly. “What put it into your head to try to buy the paper, Peter?”
They sat in the business manager’s little office at the rear of the long counting-room downstairs, where Peter had thoughtfully paused and snapped on all the lights. At this question an annoyed look settled instantly on the new owner’s open countenance.
“No brains of mine,” he said shortly. “It’s a queer thing.”
He paused to light his battered pipe, which he produced ready-filled from his pocket, and then said abruptly:
“Remember that old sneak named Higginson I mentioned to you yesterday? Well, I bagged the idea from him. When I hit town this afternoon the first thing I heard was that Higginson was going to buy the _Gazette_–had bought it, some said.”
“_Higginson!_” Varney stared. “What the mischief did he want with the _Gazette?_”
“Echo answers. No good to us, you can bet,” said Peter grimly. “Gave it out, I believe, that he was acting for a syndicate of New Yorkers who expected flush times with the change of administration, and were rushing to get in on the ground floor. You can believe that if you want to. To me it sounds too fishy to do even a beginner credit. You could wake me up in the middle of the night and I could put over a better one than that. However,” he continued, frowning, “to get back to my story. When I heard what Higginson was up to, it naturally flashed into my mind that it would be a mighty convenient thing if I owned the _Gazette_ myself, instead of him. I raced off to Smith on the chance, shot an offer at him from the door and to my surprise he accepted it–right off the bat, cool as though the deal were for half a dozen copies of yesterday’s issue–“
“You got in ahead of Higginson, then?”
“On the contrary,” said Peter. “And that’s another queer thing–about Smith, I mean. Higginson had been in and made him an offer an hour ahead of me, and the fellow had turned him down flat. Yet I happen to know that the price I offered was under Higginson’s by a pretty good year’s income. Now what d’ you think of that?”
Varney was silent a moment. “Smith wants a new deal all around, I imagine,” he said slowly. “He knew that you would make the _Gazette_ an honest paper; he didn’t know anything of the sort about the other man. Probably he knew just the contrary. Bully for Smith, I say! But what do you make of this chap Higginson?”
“Search me,” said Peter, rather impatiently. “He’s clearly imported by Ryan for some definite purpose, but just what his game is beats me. There’ll be more developments, of course. After I’d signed up with Smith I spent half an hour of valuable time looking for the rascal, but couldn’t find a footprint anywhere. He seems to have a special gift for appearing and disappearing. If he decides to stay with us, though, he’ll explain himself to me to-morrow, or I’ll know the reason why.”
“Well, you’ve already pulled his teeth, haven’t you? This little purchase of yours knocks the wind out of his sails in any event.”
“I wish I could be sure of that.”
“And, by the way, that reminds me. Of course I’m in on this, you understand–on what you paid for the _Gazette_.”
“Not on my account,” said Peter frankly. “When this town starts booming, as it will in eight days from date–Higginson had that part of it right, anyway–the _Gazette’s_ going to be the prettiest little property you ever saw in your life. I saw it first and you will kindly back away off the grass. By the bye,” he went on, “the lunch to-morrow. Hare and his sister both accepted–two o’clock. You ought to have seen Hare’s face when I told him we owned this little old _Gazette_. Worth the price of admission alone–he’d been hot as a stove all day about that story this morning. I asked Mrs. Marne whether Miss Carstairs had happened to say anything about coming, but she hadn’t seen her to-day at all. I guess there won’t be any trouble in that quarter, though, when she gets through reading the paper’s apologies to-morrow.”
“I don’t know,” said Varney. “I am going to her house to-night to find out.”
“Why?” said Peter, surprised. “What do you think we bought this paper for, anyway?”
“The great trouble is that she may not believe the paper. This is important, you see. The whole thing hinges on whether or not she is coming to lunch with us. The only way I can be certain that she is coming is to have her tell me so.”
Peter jingled his keys. “Of course, we don’t want to take chances, but–“
“Another thing,” said Varney. “She promised to lunch with Stanhope–the celebrity–not me, you know.”
“H’m,” said Peter cogitatively, and added: “I guess you’re right. I’m sure everything’s all serene, but it’ll do no harm to press a call. Well! I must fly upstairs for a while and see how things are going.”
“What about the _Daily?_”
“That’s what I’ve got to do right now–settle the _Daily_ and dictate a strong _Gazette_ story for to-morrow’s issue, stripping the socks off the Stanhope lie and all that. I’ve got to show the boys upstairs exactly how we want the whole thing, handled.”
“Fire away, old top.”
“It’s all sketched out in my mind,” continued Peter, rising. “Did it at the hotel over my chuck-steak. I won’t be long. You wait here for me, will you? I’ve chartered an automobile for a week and I’ll run you up to the Carstairs house and wait outside till you’re ready to go back to the yacht.”
“Why these civilities, my son?”
“The fact is,” said Peter, a little reluctantly, “that story this morning seems to have pulled open a lot of old sores, just as it was meant to. Hare’s picked up some loose odds and ends of talk about town to-day. I noticed two men hanging around here as we came in just now who didn’t look right to me. I can’t get it out of my head that there’s something in the wind to-night, and Higginson’s back of it. Anyway, there’s no use of running needless risks, now that we’ve practically got a strangle-hold on the whole proposition.”
Varney glanced at his watch. “Right for you. It’s too early to call yet, anyway. I’ll wait.”
“Correct,” said Peter at the door. “One last item of news. Stanhope himself, the real one, is coming to-morrow.”
“Here–to stay?”
Peter nodded. “The caretaker of his cottage told Hare–told him not to tell a soul. But I don’t believe he’ll stay long. The fellow’s clearly a fool as well as a dog.”
“We ought to warn him how things stand here,” said Varney, “no matter what kind of person he is. You and I know that we ‘ve made matters a good deal worse for him.”
“He’s made them a good deal worse for us, also. But I’ll see that he’s promptly advised to leave while the leaving’s good. Back in an hour at the farthest.”
Peter tramped off down the passageway, banging the front door behind him; and Varney was left alone in the little office to attend his return. At once it came to him that this was exactly what he had been doing ever since he had been in Hunston,–waiting for Peter.
“I am the greatest waiter that the human race has yet produced,” he thought, despondently, and dropping down into a chair, stared long at the shut door.
What a day it had been!–beginning with cut-and-dried little plans that seemed sure, running off in the middle into black depths of hopeless complications, blossoming suddenly into unlooked-for triumph. Yes, complete triumph at last. The visit that he meant to pay a little later was merely an added precaution; he felt no doubts as to how matters would turn out now. To-morrow, the _Gazette_, Peter’s paper, would set him square before all Hunston, and Mary Carstairs, sorry for the wrong she had done him, would come to the yacht as she had engaged to do. With the clairvoyance born of his swift revulsion of feeling, he knew that his victory was already won. Yet he did not feel now as a conqueror feels. In the loneliness of the tight-shut little office, he confronted the knowledge that he did not think of Uncle Elbert’s daughter as his enemy, and that it mattered to him that she was to hate him and worse….
Suddenly in the entire stillness, he heard a sound close by, and straightened up sharply. Some one was gently trying the front door. He felt quite sure of it. He got up quickly and quietly, and hurried down the passageway to the front; but there was nothing to be seen.
Outside, the street, from the brilliantly-lighted room, looked inky black. He stood a moment listening intently. He thought he heard footsteps not far away, swiftly receding, but he could not be sure. Then he remembered the men that Peter had seen in the street a little while before, and understood.
Somebody was watching him, apparently waiting for a chance. Those whom Stanhope had wronged had been spurred to square the old account, and the _Gazette’s_ canard had not been undone yet. He yearned to dash after those retreating footsteps and find out who was the prudent proprietor of them. But even to stand here was hardly fair to Elbert Carstairs.
“How can I go sailing to-morrow,” he said aloud, musingly, “if I’m laid up in a hospital, or laid out in the morgue?”
He went back to his office, shut himself in again; and with the closing of the door he shut out all thought of the enemies of Ferris Stanhope. Soon his mind broke away from him, and went galloping off to the morrow. Great vividness marked the pictures that danced before the eye of his thought. Now the luncheon, the planned and fought for, was over. They were there, strung out gayly along deck,–Mrs. Marne, Hare, Peter, Mary Carstairs, and he. Then, by some deft stratagem, the others were gone and he was sitting alone by Mary at the rail. The _Cypriani_ was slowly moving, as though for a ten-minute spin down the river. And then, as she gathered headway, he turned suddenly to Mary and told her everything: how he had deceived and tricked her, and how she would not go back to Hunston that afternoon….
It might have been ten minutes that he sat like this. It might have been half an hour. But after a time he heard, suddenly and distinctly, that noise at the door again.
There was the less doubt about it this time, in that the shutting of the door was now clearly audible, and there followed the distinct sound of some one moving in the main office. Then the door in the passageway swung open and footsteps pattered, coming nearer. The light firm steps drew nearer, halted; and there came a small rap upon his door.
“Come in,” he called loudly, encouragingly. “I’m here, all right. Come in.”
The door opened, a little slowly, as though not quite certain whether it was going to open or not, and Mary Carstairs stood upon the threshold, silhouetted in the sudden frame.
CHAPTER XVI
WHEREIN SEVERAL LARGE DIFFICULTIES ARE SMOOTHED AWAY
He had sat upright, his hands over his chair-arms, his mind and muscle tense; but at that unbelievable sight, he fell back in his chair relaxed, staring and dazed like one who sees a goddess in a vision.
“Good evening,” said this goddess, looking decidedly embarrassed and remarkably pretty. “I–I am so glad that we’ve found you.”
“You were looking for _me_?” he said incredulous, utterly mystified; and the instinct of long training, working on with no guidance from him, impelled him to rise with a stiff and somewhat belated bow.
“Yes. And there are two men with me who are anxious to help….”
Her fragrant presence seemed to fill and transform the dingy office; and he was at once aware that her manner had lost that cool remoteness which at their last meeting had set him so far away.
He pulled himself sharply together, entirely missing the implication in her speech, and struck abruptly to the one point that mattered.
“Some one has convinced you since last night that I am not that man.”
“Yes,” she answered, looking away from him with faintly heightened color. “I–I must ask you to forgive me for–last night.”
He bowed stiffly from behind the table.
“But who–if I may know–persuaded you, where I appeared so–“
“My mother,” she said, simply. “She caught a glimpse of you on the street yesterday. I did not know of it till to-day–never dreamed that she knew you. I’m glad,” she added hurriedly, resolutely contrite, “of the chance to–to say this–“
“It is extraordinarily kind,” said Varney. He looked at her steadily, as far from understanding the mystery of her coming as ever.
“But I came,” she went on at once, as though reading the question in his eyes, “for quite another reason. We happened to stop just now at poor Jim Hackley’s.”
The name riveted his attention. A quality in her voice had already told him that something troubled her.
“At Hackley’s?”
She stood just behind Peter’s deserted chair and rested her ungloved right hand upon it. He noticed, as though it were a matter which was going to be vital to him later on, that she wore no rings, and that there was a tiny white spot on the nail of her thumb.
“Some men are waiting on this dark street somewhere, Mr. Varney,” she began hurriedly, “waiting, I’m afraid, for you to come out–four or five–I don’t know how many. You know–what that means. But oh, it isn’t their fault!–they don’t know any better, you see!–“
The sudden anxiety in her voice cleared his wits and braced him like a tonic: and so he came front to front with the fact that it was to help him–to help _him_–that Uncle Elbert’s daughter had come to the _Gazette_ office that night.
“I appreciate that perfectly, of course. But–the rest is not so clear. I don’t quite understand–how did you happen to learn of this?”
“I? Oh, my learning about it was the purest chance. It was told me two minutes ago by a visitor here, a Mr. Higginson, whom I met last night. He is outside in the car now, and–“
“Mr. Higginson!” echoed Varney, astounded.
“You know him, perhaps?”
“I? Oh, no–no. But I interrupted you. Do go on and tell me–“
She began to speak rapidly and earnestly:
“This afternoon I went motoring, I and a friend of mine–Mr. John Richards. We took a wrong turn coming back, and of course were horribly late. But at the edge of the square we stopped a minute to inquire about Mrs. Hackley, who was taken quite ill yesterday afternoon. Just as I was getting back into the car, up ran this Mr. Higginson, very much flustered and excited. You see, he had just found out about all this–this plot–even to knowing where you were; he had seen poor Jim Hackley, it seems, not at all himself, and overheard him talking. Of course, we saw that you must be warned at once, so we took him in the car, and all three of us ran back here.”
She paused a moment, and he prompted her with a close-clipped: “Yes?”
“I wanted him to–come in and tell you about it,” she said hesitatingly–“but he wouldn’t do it. He is a most agreeable old man, but, I imagine–of a very nervous temperament. So,” she added with a hurried little laugh, “as I was the only one who–knew you, I said that I would come in and tell you myself.”
“It was most kind–most kind of you all.”
He turned away sharply to hide his sudden rush of indignation and resentment. Turbulently he longed to get his hands upon the sly Higginson, who had had the effrontery to dispatch a woman to protect him, and this woman of all others that lived in Hunston…. Protect him? Hardly. That an attack had been planned against his person was, indeed, likely enough, but not that any hireling of Ryan’s should rush forward hysterically to pluck him from his peril. What move in that mysterious game, what strange plot within a plot was here?…
“Did Mr. Higginson happen to explain why he took such a generous, and I fear very troublesome, interest in my welfare?”
Genuinely anxious for light, he tried to iron all suggestion of a sneer out of his voice, but evidently he did not quite succeed.
“Oh, I don’t think you ought to speak that way! Surely he has done only what anybody would do for any stranger who was in danger and didn’t know it.”
“And you?”
She looked at him rather shyly out of her somewhat spectacular eyes.
“That explains me, too–if you wish.”
“Maginnis and I,” said Varney immediately, “are not going out for some time yet. Oh, a long, long time! These poor fellows you speak of will tire of waiting long before that. And when we do go–“
“You must not go together.”
“I don’t think I understand you.”
“Don’t you see,” she said, speaking very earnestly, “that that is exactly what they are hoping for? This ambuscade didn’t just happen–it is manufactured–it is politics. Men like these haven’t the initiative, or whatever you call it, to get up a thing of this sort. Some one has done it for them. Don’t you know why? _They want to get rid of Mr. Maginnis_. But they can’t hurt him _alone_–without having it brought right home to them–to the politicians. With you–it is–different–“
“Yes, yes–I see. But forgive my asking–did Mr. Higginson explain the situation to you in just this way?”
“Mr. Higginson?” she said, plainly surprised at his harking back to that. “It was not necessary. I understood the situation very well, from what Mr. Hare has told me. Mr. Higginson simply gave us the facts about these men hiding out there–there was no time for anything more.”
He was staring at her with unconscious steadiness, and now his face took on a slow faint smile, which she was very far from understanding. Blurry as it all still was, light was beginning to break through upon him. Of course, that was all that Mr. Higginson had told her. Of course. The last thing desired by that clever rogue, who used petticoats for stalking-horses and was not above hiding behind them for the safety of his own skin, was for the engineered “attack” to go off prematurely, landing only Varney and failing to “get” Maginnis. Warnings that the two should _not_ go out together from Higginson? Hardly.
“I understand perfectly. Maginnis is quite safe without me, but not at all safe with me. You may count upon me absolutely. I’ll give him the slip and leave here alone.”
“You mustn’t do anything of the kind,” said Mary sharply.
She looked at him, unsmiling, eye to eye like a man; but she looked from under a fantastic and exceedingly becoming little hat, swathed all about with a wholly fascinating gray veil. Her skin was of an exquisite freshness, which threw into sharp relief the vivid coloring of her lips; the modeling of her cheek and throat was consummate, beyond improvement; and her eyes–he told himself that they could have no match anywhere.
Varney laughed shortly. “I am not to go out with Maginnis. I am not to go out without him. May I ask if I am expected to spend thnight prudently curled up under the office table here?”
The situation was odious to him; he knew that his manner betrayed it; but if she was aware of this she gave no sign. On the contrary her face all at once became miraculously sweet.
“You aren’t thinking that there’s any question of courage mixed up in this, Mr. Varney? Indeed, indeed, there is not. They would fight in the dark; they would fight from behind. The very _bravest_ men would have no chance, and very brave men don’t take foolish risks, do they? I know by Mr. Hare. Mr. Varney, I have a little plan.”
“Indeed? Do tell me.”
“Our car is at the door, you know–Mr. Richards’s car. We’d both like it very much if you would come with us.”
“Where?”
“Well–I thought that perhaps you’d come to my house. Only to get rid of these men and not to–get them into any trouble. Of course, no one in Hunston would annoy you when you were with me.”
If he had hated the thought of accepting protection from Mary Carstairs less intensely, he might have laughed aloud. As Higginson’s catspaw, she was certainly the most screaming failure that the whole world could have yielded. What, oh what, would the old gum-shoe have said if he could have heard that invitation?
“Thank you, but that is quite impossible.”
“I am awfully sorry.”
There was a faint stiffening in her manner. She began to draw on her right glove, slowly tucking out of sight the thumb with the tiny white spot on the nail.
“I hoped that perhaps you might come to dinner with us. I haven’t had any yet. May I–suggest another way out of all this, then? There is a back gate to this place, leading into a kind of alley, you know. I am sure that they–these poor men–haven’t thought of that. Couldn’t you please go out–“
“Certainly,” said Varney. “Certainly. Yes, indeed. I’ll do anything–anything in the wide world to avoid getting thumped on the head with Mr. Hackley’s walking-stick.”
Her face told him that she found his tone and manner somewhat disconcerting, but she took no notice of it otherwise.
“I hope it won’t be necessary to do anything more than that. But if it should be, I hope you’ll do it. I’m afraid I’ve failed to make you see that this is really serious. Good-night.”
But Varney, having a question to ask her, could not let her go yet.
“But–but,” he said, hastily, “you must allow me to thank you–you and Mr. Higginson–“
“The thanks are all Mr. Higginson’s. I’m only a messenger–and besides, you aren’t grateful at all, you know! You think we’ve all been _extremely_ intrusive!” She smiled brightly, bowed, and then was suddenly checked by a new thought. “Oh–I wonder if you would tell me something before I go?”
“By all means,” said Varney, having no idea whether he would or not.
But the loud jangling whir of a telephone bell from the adjoining room