CHAPTER VIII
THE DUMMY-CHUCKER
It was unquestionably a momentous night, that night I dischargedLatreille. I had felt the thing coming, for weeks. But I hadapparently been afraid to face it. I had temporized and dallied along,dreading the ordeal. Twice I had even bowed to tacit blackmail,suavely disguised as mere advances of salary. Almost daily, too, I hadbeen subjected to vague insolences which were all the more humiliatingbecause they remained inarticulate and incontestable. And I realizedthat the thing had to come to an end.
I saw that end when Benson reported to me that Latreille had none tooquietly entertained a friend of his in my study, during my absence. Icould have forgiven the loss of the cigars, and the disappearance ofthe _cognac_, but the foot-marks on my treasured old San Domingoanmahogany console-table and the overturning of my Ch'ien-lung lapisbottle were things which could not be overlooked.
I saw red, at that, and promptly and unquaveringly sent for Latreille.And I think I rather surprised that cool-eyed scoundrel, for I hadgrown to know life a little better, of late. I had learned to standless timorous before its darker sides and its rougher seams. I couldshow that designing chauffeur I was no longer in his power by showingthat I was no longer afraid of him. And this latter I sought todemonstrate by promptly and calmly and unequivocally announcing that hewas from that day and that hour discharged from my service.
"You can't do it!" he said, staring at me with surprised yet none theless insolent eyes.
"I have done it," I explained. "You're discharged, now. And thesooner you get out the better it will suit me."
"And you're ready to take that risk?" he demanded, studying me fromunder his lowered brows.
"Any risks I care to assume in this existence of mine," I coollyinformed him, "are matters which concern me alone. Turn your keys andservice-clothes and things in to Benson. And if there's one itemmissing, you'll pay for it."
"How?" he demanded, with a sneer.
"By being put where you belong," I told him.
"And where's that?"
"Behind bars."
He laughed at this. But he stopped short as he saw me go out to thedoor and fling it open. Then he turned and faced me.
"I'll make things interesting for you!" he announced, slowly andpregnantly, and with an ugly forward-thrust of his ugly pointed chin.
It was my turn to laugh.
"You _have_ made them interesting," I acknowledged. "But now they aregetting monotonous."
"They won't stay that way," he averred.
I met his eye, without a wince. I could feel my fighting blood gettinghotter and hotter.
"You understand English, don't you?" I told him. "You heard me say getout, didn't you?"
He stared at me, with that black scowl of his, for a full half minute.Then he turned on his heel and stalked out of the room.
I wasn't sorry to see him go, but I knew, as he went, that he wascarrying away with him something precious. He was carrying away withhim my peace of mind for that whole blessed night.
Sleep, I knew, was out of the question. It would be foolish even toattempt to court it. I felt the familiar neurasthenic call for openspaces, the necessity for physical freedom and fresh air. And it wasthat, I suppose, which took me wandering off toward the water-front,where I sat on a string-piece smoking my seventh cigarette and thinkingof Creegan and his singed cat as I watched the light-spangled Hudson.
I had squatted there for a full half-hour, I think, before I becameeven vaguely conscious of the other presence so near me. I had noclear-cut memory of that figure's advent. I had no impression of itsmovement about my immediate neighborhood, I feel sure, until myself-absorbed meditations were broken into by the discovery that thestranger on the same wharf where I loitered had quietly anddeliberately risen to an erect position. It startled me a little, infact, to find that he was standing at one end of the same string-piecewhere I sat.
Then something about the figure brought a slow perplexity into my mind,as I lounged there inhaling the musky harbor-odors, under a sky thatseemed Italian in its serenity, and a soft and silvery moon that madethe shuttling ferries into shadows scaled with Roman gold. Thisperplexity grew into bewilderment, for as I studied the lean figurewith its loose-fitting paddock-coat flapping in the wharf-end breeze Iwas reminded of something disturbing, of something awesome. The gauntform so voluminously draped, the cadaverous face with the startlinglysunken cheeks, the touch of tragedy in the entire attitude, broughtsharply and suddenly to my mind the thought of a shrouded andhollow-eyed symbol of Death, needing only the scythe of honoredtradition to translate it into the finished picture.
He stood there for some time, without moving, studying the water thatran like seamless black velvet under the wharf-end. Then he slowlytook off his coat, folded it and placed it on the string-piece, and ontop of this again placed his hat. Then he laughed audibly. I lookedaway, dreading that some spoken triviality might spoil a picture soappealingly mysterious. When I next peered up at him he seemed engagedin the absurd occupation of slowly turning inside out the quite emptypockets of his clothing. Then he once more looked down at the blackwater.
Those oily velvet eddies, apparently, were too much for him. I saw himcover his face with his hands and sway back with a tragically helplessmutter of "I can't do it!" And both the gesture and the words made mymind go back to the man from Medicine Hat.
A thousand crawling little tendrils of curiosity over-ran resentment atbeing thus disturbed in my quest for solitude. I continued my overtwatch of the incredibly thin stranger who was still peering down at theslip-water. I was startled, a minute or two later, to hear him emit athroat-chuckle that was as defiant as it was disagreeable. Then withan oddly nervous gesture of repudiation he caught up his hat and coat,turned on his heel, and passed like a shadow down the quietness of thedeserted wharf.
I turned and followed him. The tragedy recorded on that pallid facewas above all pretense. He could never be taken for a "dummy-chucker";the thing was genuine. Any man who could squeeze life so dry that hethought of tossing it away like an orange-skin was worth following. Heseemed a contradiction to everything in the city that surrounded us, inthat mad city where every mortal appeared so intent on living, wherethe forlornest wrecks clung so feverishly to life, and where lifeitself, on that murmurous and moonlit night, seemed so full ofwhispered promises.
I followed him back to the city, speculating, as idle minds will, onwho and what he was and by what mischance he had been cast into thislowest pit of indifferency. More things than his mere apparel assuredme he was not a "crust-thrower." I kept close at his heels until wecame to Broadway, startling myself with the sudden wonder if he, too,were a victim of those relentless hounds of wakefulness that turn nightinto a never-ending inquisition.
Then all speculation suddenly ended, for I saw that he had come to astop and was gazing perplexedly up and down the light-strewn channel ofBroadway. I noticed his eye waver on a passing figure or two, whom heseemed about to accost. Then, as though from that passing throng hebeheld something kindred and common in my face, he touched me lightlyon the arm.
I came to a stop, looking him full in the face. There seemed almost atouch of the supernatural in that encounter, as though two wonderingghosts stood gazing at each other on the loneliest edges of a No-man'sLand.
He did not speak, as I was afraid he might, and send a mallet ofbanality crashing down on that crystal of wonderment. He merely wavedone thin hand toward the facade of a mirrored and pillared caravansarywherein, I knew, it was the wont of the homeless New Yorker to purchasea three-hour lease on three feet of damask and thereby dream he wasprobing the innermost depths of life. His gesture, I saw, was aninvitation. It was also a challenge.
And both the invitation and the challenge I accepted, in silence, yetby a gesture which could not be mistaken. It was in silence, too, thatI followed him in through the wide doorway and seated myself oppositehim at one of the rose-shaded parallelograms
of white linen that layabout us in lines as thick and straight as tombstones in an abbey-floor.
I did not look at him, for a moment or two, dreading as I did theapproaching return to actuality. I let my gaze wander about theriotous-colored room into which the flood-tide of the after-theatercrowds was now eddying. It held nothing either new or appealing to me.It was not the first time I had witnessed the stars of stagelandsitting in perigean torpor through their seven-coursed suppers, just asit was not the first time I had meekly endured the assaultingvulgarities of onyx pillars and pornographic art for the sake of what Ihad found to be the most matchless cooking in America.
It seemed an equally old story to my new friend across the table, foras I turned away from the surrounding flurry of bare shoulders, aswhite and soft as a flurry of gull-wings, I saw that he had alreadyordered a meal that was as mysteriously sumptuous as it was startlinglyexpensive. He, too, was apparently no stranger to Lobster Square.
I still saw no necessity for breaking the silence, although he hadbegun to drink his wine with a febrile recklessness rather amazing tome. Yet I felt that with each breath of time the bubble of mystery wasgrowing bigger and bigger. The whole thing was something more than thedare-devil adventure of a man at the end of his tether. It was morethan the extravagance of sheer hopelessness. It was something whichmade me turn for the second time and study his face.
It was a remarkable enough face, remarkable for its thinness, for itsnone too appealing pallor, and for a certain tragic furtiveness whichshowed its owner to be not altogether at peace with his own soul.About his figure I had already detected a certain note of distinction,of nervous briskness, which at once lifted him above the place of theanemic street-adventurer. There was something almost Heraclitean inthe thin-lipped and satyric mouth. The skin on the sunken cheeksseemed as tight as the vellum across a snare-drum. From the corner ofhis eyes, which were shadowed by a smooth and pallid frontal-bone,radiated a network of minutely small wrinkles. His hands, I could see,were almost femininely white, as womanish in their fragility as theywere disquieting in their never-ending restless movements. In actualyears, I concluded, he might have been anywhere between twenty-five andthirty-five. He was at least younger than I first thought him. Then Ilooked once more about the crowded room, for I had no wish to make myinspection seem inquisitorial. He, too, let his eyes follow mine intheir orbit of exploration. Then, for the first time, he spoke.
"They'll suffer for this some day!" he suddenly declared, with thevehemence of a Socialist confronted by the voluptuosities of aGomorrah. "They'll suffer for it!"
"For what particular reason?" I inquired, following his gaze about thatquite unapprehensive roomful of decorous revelers.
"Because one-half of them," he avowed, "are harpies, and the other halfare thieves!"
"Are you a New Yorker?" I mildly asked him. I had been wondering if,under the circumstances, even a voluminous paddock-coat would bereckoned as adequate payment for a repast so princely. The man hadalready proved to me that his pockets were empty.
"No, I'm not," he retorted. "I'm from God's country."
That doubtlessly irreproachable yet vaguely denominated territory leftme so much in doubt that I had to ask for the second time the place ofhis origin.
"I come from Virginia," he answered, "and if I'd stayed there Iwouldn't be where I am to-night."
As this was an axiom which seemed to transcend criticism I merelyturned back to him and asked: "And where are you to-night?"
He lifted his glass and emptied it. Then he leaned forward across thetable, staring me in the eyes as he spoke. "Do you know the town ofHanover, down in Virginia?"
I had to confess that I did not. As he sat looking at me, with ashadow of disappointment on his lean face, I again asked him toparticularize his present whereabouts.
"I'm on the last inch of the last rope-end," was his answer.
"It seems to have its ameliorating condition," I remarked, glancingabout the table.
He emitted a sharp cackle of a laugh.
"You'll have to leave me before I order the liqueur. This," with ahand-sweep about the cluster of dishes, "is some music I'll have toface alone. But what's that, when you're on the last inch of the lastrope-end?"
"Your position," I ventured, "sounds almost like a desperate one."
"Desperate!" he echoed. "It's more than that. It's hopeless!"
"You have doubtless been visiting Wall Street or possibly buyingmining-stock?" was my flippant suggestion. His manner of speech, I wasbeginning to feel, was not markedly southern.
"No," he cried with quick solemnity. "I've been _selling_ it."
"But such activities, I assumed, were far removed from the avenues ofremorse."
He stared at me, absently, for a moment or two. Then he movedrestlessly in his chair.
"Did you ever hear of a wire-tapper?" he demanded.
"Quite often," I answered.
"Did you ever fall for one of their yarns? Did you ever walk into oneof their nice, gold-plated traps and have them shake you down foreverything you owned--and even for things you didn't own?"
Here was a misfortune, I had to confess, which had not yet knocked atmy door.
"I came up to this town with thirty thousand dollars, and not quite athird of it my own. Twenty of it was for a marble quarry we were goingto open up on the Potomac. They sent me north to put through the deal.It was new to me, all right. I wasn't used to a town where they haveto chain the door-mats down and you daren't speak to your neighborwithout a police-permit. And when a prosperous-looking traveler at myhotel got talking about horses and races and the string that Keene sentsouth last winter, he struck something that was pretty close to me, forthat's what we go in for down home--horse-breeding and stock-farming.Then he told me how the assistant superintendent of the Western Union,the man who managed their racing department, was an old friend of his.He also allowed this friend of his was ready to phone him some earlytrack-returns, for what he called a big rakeoff. He even took me downto the Western Union Building, on the corner of Dey and Broadway, andintroduced me to a man he called the assistant superintendent. We methim in one of the halls--he was in his shirt-sleeves, and looked like apretty busy man. He was to hold back the returns until our bets couldbe laid. He explained that he himself couldn't figure in the thing,but that his sister-in-law might possibly handle the returns over herown private wire."
"That sounds very familiar," I sadly commented.
"He seemed to lose interest when he found I had only a few thousanddollars of my own. He said the killing would be a quarter of amillion, and the risk for holding up the company's despatches would betoo great for him to bother with small bets. But he said he'd try outthe plan that afternoon. So my traveler friend took me up to apool-room with racing-sheets and blackboards and half a dozen telegraphkeys and twice as many telephones. It looked like the real thing tome. When the returns started to come in and we got our flash, ourprivate tip from the Western Union office, I tried fifty dollars on athree-to-one shot."
"And of course you won," was my sympathetic rejoinder, as I satlistening to the old, sad tale. "You always do."
"Then I met the woman I spoke about, the woman who called herself thesister-in-law of the racing-wire manager."
"And what was _she_ like?" I inquired.
"She looked a good deal like any of these women around here," he saidwith an eye-sweep over the flurry of gull-wing backs and the garden offinery that surrounded us. "_She looked good enough to get my thirtythousand and put me down and out_."
At which he laughed his mirthless and mummy-like laugh.
"You see, I had sense enough to get cold feet, overnight. But when Italked it over with her next day, and I saw her calling up a few of herWall Street friends, I kind of forgot my scruples. She got me thinkingcrooked again. And that's all. That's where the story ends."
His docility, as I sat thinking of that odious and flamboyant type ofshe-harpy, began to irritate
me.
"But why should it end here?" I demanded.
"Because I put twenty thousand dollars of other people's money into aphony game, and lost it."
"Well, what of it?"
"Do you suppose I could go home with that hanging over me?"
"Supposing you can't. Is that any reason why you should lie down atthis stage of the game?"
"But I've lost," he averred. "Everything's gone!"
"'All is not lost,'" I quoted, feeling very much like Francis the Firstafter the Battle of Pavia, "'till honor's self is gone!'"
"But even _that's_ gone," was his listless retort. He looked up,almost angrily, at my movement of impatience. "Well, what would _you_do about it?" he challenged.
"I'd get that money back or I'd get that gang behind the bars," was theanswer I flung out at him. "I'd fight them to a finish."
"But there's nothing to fight. There's nobody to get hold of. ThatWestern Union man was only a capper, a come-on. Their poolroom's oneof those dirigible kind that move on when the police appear. Thenthey'd claim I was as bad as they were, trying to trick an honestbookmaker out of his money. And besides, there's nothing left to showI ever handed them over anything."
"Then I'd keep at it until I found something," I declared. "How aboutthe woman?'
"She'd be too clever to get caught. And I don't suppose she'd know mefrom a piece of cheese."
"Do you suppose you could in any way get me in touch with her?" I asked.
"But she's got police protection. I tried to have her arrested myself.The officer told me to be on my way, or he'd run me in."
"Then you know where she lives?" I quickly inquired.
He hesitated for a moment, as though my question had caught himunawares. Then he mentioned one of the smaller apartment-hotels ofupper Broadway.
"And what's her name?"
Again he hesitated before answering.
"Oh, she's got a dozen, I suppose. The only one I know is Brunelle,Vinnie Brunelle. That's the name she answered to up there. But lookhere--you're not going to try to see her, are you?"
"That I can't tell until to-morrow."
"I don't think there'll be any to-morrow, for me," he rejoined, as hisearlier listless look returned to his face. He even peered up a littlestartled, as I rose to my feet.
"That's nonsense," was my answer. "We're going to meet here to-morrownight to talk things over."
"But why?" he protested.
"Because it strikes me you've got a duty to perform, a very seriousduty. And if I can be of any service to you it will be a very greatpleasure to me. And in the meantime, I might add that I am paying forthis little supper."
There is no activity more explosive than that of the chronic idler.Once out on Broadway, accordingly, I did not let the grass grow undermy feet. Two minutes at the telephone and ten more in a taxicabbrought me in touch with my old friend Doyle who was "working" amulatto shooting case in lower Seventh Avenue as quietly as a gardenerworking his cabbage-patch.
"What do you know about a woman named Vinnie Brunelle?" I demanded.
He studied the pavement. Then he shook his head. The name clearlymeant nothing to him.
"Give me something more to work on!"
"She's a young woman who lives by her wits. She keeps up a very goodfront, and now and then does a variety of the wire-tapping game."
"I wonder if that wouldn't be the Cassal woman Andrus used as a come-onfor his Mexican mine game? But _she_ claimed Andrus had fooled her."
"And what else?" I inquired.
Doyle stood silent, wrapt in thought for a moment or two.
"Oh, that's about all. I've heard she's an uncommonly clever woman,about the cleverest woman in the world. But what are you after?"
"I want her record--all of it."
"That sort of woman never has a record. That's what cleverness is, myboy, maintaining your reputation at the expense of your character."
"You've given birth to an epigram," I complained, "but you haven'thelped me out of my dilemma." Whereupon he asked me for a card.
"I'm going to give you a line to Sherman--Camera-Eye Sherman we used tocall him down at Headquarters. He's with the Bankers' Association now,but he was with our Identification Bureau so long he knows 'em all likehis own family."
And on the bottom of my card I saw Doyle write: "Please tell him whatyou can of Vinnie Brunelle."
"Of course I couldn't see him to-night?"
Doyle looked at his watch.
"Yes, you can. You'll get him up at his apartment on Riverside. AndI'll give you odds you'll find the old night-owl playing bezique withhis sister-in-law!"
That, in fact, was precisely what I found the man with the camera-eyedoing. He sat there dealing out the cards, at one o'clock in themorning, with a face as mild and bland as a Venetian cardinal feedinghis pigeons.
My host looked at the card in his fingers, looked at me, and thenlooked at the card again.
"She got you in trouble?" was his laconic query.
"I have never met the lady. But a friend of mine has, I'm sorry tosay. And I want to do what I can to help him out."
"How much did he lose?"
"About thirty thousand dollars, he claims."
"What was the game?"
"It appears to have been one of those so-called wire-tapping coups."
"Funny how that always gets 'em!" ruminated that verger of long-immuredfaces. "Well, here's what I know about Vinnie. Seven or eight yearsago she was an artist's model. Then a sculptor called Delisle took herover to Paris--she was still in her teens then. But she was too brainyto stick to the studio-rat arrangement. She soon came to the end ofher rope there. Then she came home--I've an idea she tried the stageand couldn't make it go. Then she was a pearl-agent in London. Thenshe played a variation of the 'lost-heir' game in what was called theSoutham case, working under an English confidence-man called Adams.Then she got disgusted with Adams and came back to America. She had totake what she could get, and for a few weeks was a capper for ahigh-grade woman's bucket-shop. When Headquarters closed up the shopshe went south and was in some way involved in the Parra uprising inthe eastern end of Cuba."
My apathetic chronicler paused for a moment or two, studying hislacerated cigar-end.
"Then she married a Haytian half-cast Jew in the Brazilian coffeebusiness who'd bought a Spanish title. Then she threw the title andthe coffee-man over and came back to Washington, where she worked theropes as a lobbyist for a winter or two. Then she took to going toEurope every month or so. I won't say she was a steamship gambler. Idon't think she was. But she made friends--and she could play a gameof bridge that'd bring your back hair up on end. Then she worked witha mining share manipulator named Andrus. She was wise enough to slipfrom under before he was sent up the river. And since then they tellme, she's been doing a more or less respectable game or two with CokeWhelan, the wire-tapper. And that, I guess, is about all."
"Has she ever been arrested that you know of? Would they have herpicture, for instance, down at Headquarters?"
The man who had grown old in the study of crime smiled a little.
"You can't arrest a woman until you get evidence against her."
"Yet you're positive she was involved in a number of crookedenterprises?"
"I never called her a crook," protested my host, with an impersonalitythat suddenly became as Olympian as it was exasperating. "No one everproved to me she was a crook."
"Well, I'm going to prove it. And I rather imagine I'm going to haveher arrested. Why," I demanded, nettled by his satiric smile, "youdon't mean to say that a woman like that's immune?"
"No, I wouldn't say she was immune, exactly. On the other hand, Iguess she's helped our people in a case or two, when it paid her."
"You mean she's really an informer, what they call a welcher?"
"By no means. She's just clever, that's all. The only time she everturned on her own people was when they threw her down, threw her fl
at.Then she did a bit of secret service work for Wilkie's office inWashington that gave her more pull than all your Tammany 'polities'east of Broadway."
"Am I to understand that what you call politics and pull, then, willlet a woman rob a man of thirty thousand dollars and go scot free?"
"My dear fellow, that type of woman never _robs_ a man. She doesn'tneed to. They just blink and hand it over. Then they think of homeand mother, about ten hours after."
"But that doesn't sound quite reasonable," I contended.
The older man looked solemnly at his cigar-end before asking his nextquestion.
"Have you seen her yet?"
"No, I haven't," I replied as I rose to go. "But I intend to."
He moved his heavy shoulder in a quick half-circular forward thrust.It might have meant anything. But I did not linger to find out. I wastoo impressed with the need of prompt and personal action on my part tocare much for the advice of outsiders.
But as each wakeful hour went by I found myself possessed of an everwidening curiosity to see this odd and interesting woman who, as Doyleexpressed it, had retained reputation at the expense of character.
It was extremely early the next morning that I presented myself atVinnie Brunelle's apartment-hotel. I had not only slept badly; I hadalso dreamed of myself as a flagellant monk sent across scorching sandsto beg a barbaric and green-eyed Thais to desist from tappingtelegraph-wires leading into the camp of Alexander the Great.
The absurdity of that opianic nightmare seemed to project itself intomy actual movements of the morning. The exacting white light of daywithered the last tendril of romance from my quixotic crusade. It wasonly by assuring myself, not so much that I was espousing the cause ofthe fallen, but that I was about to meet a type of woman quite new tomy experience, that I was able to face Miss Brunelle's unbetrayinglysober door.
This door was duly answered by a maid, by a surprisingly decorous maidin white cap and apron. I was conscious of her veiled yetinquisitorial eye resting on my abashed person for the smallestfraction of a second. I almost suspected that in that eye might bedetected a trace of something strangely like contempt. But, a littleto my astonishment, I was admitted quite without question.
"Miss Brunelle is just back from her morning ride in the park," thismaid explained.
I entered what was plainly a dining-room, a small but well-lightedchamber. Striped awnings still kept the tempered autumn sun from theopened windows, where a double row of scarlet geranium-tops stoodnodding in the breeze. At one end of the table in the center of theroom sat a woman, eating her breakfast.
She was younger looking, much younger looking, than I had thought shewould be. Had she not sat there already inundated by the corrodingacids of an earlier prejudice, I would even have admitted that she wasan extremely beautiful woman.
She was in a rose-colored dressing-gown which showed a satin-likesmoothness of skin at the throat and arms. Her eyes, I could see, weresomething between a hazel and a green, set wide apart under a PallasAthena brow, that might have been called serene, but for some spirit ofrebellion vaguely refracted from the lower part of the face. Thevividness of her color, which even the flaming sweep of her gown couldnot altogether discount, made me think of material buoyancies, ofliving flesh and blood and a body freshly bathed.
Her gaze was direct, disconcertingly direct. It even made me questionwhether or not she was reading my thought as I noted that her handswere large and white, that her mouth, for all its brooding discontent,was not without humor, and, strangely enough, that her fingers, ears,and throat were without a touch of that jewelry which I had thoughtpeculiar to her kind.
That she possessed some vague yet menacing gift of intimacy I couldonly too plainly feel, not so much from the undisturbed ease of herpose and the negligently open throat and arms as from the direct gazeof those searching and limpid eyes, which proclaimed that few of thepoppied illusions of life could flower in their neighborhood. Thisdiscomforting sense of mental clarity, in fact, forced me into theconsciousness not so much of being in the presence of a soft andluxurious body as of standing face to face with a spirit that in itsincongruous way was as austere as it was alert.
"You wish to see me?" she said, over her coffee-cup. My second glanceshowed me that she was eating a breakfast of iced grape-fruit and chopsand scrambled eggs and buttered toast.
"Very much," I answered.
"About what?" she inquired, breaking a square of toast.
"About the unfortunate position of a young gentleman who has justparted company with thirty thousand dollars!"
She bent her head, with its loose and heavy coils of dark hair, andglanced at my card before she spoke again.
"And what could I possibly do for him?"
There was something neither soothing nor encouraging in her unruffledcalmness. But I did not intend to be disarmed by any theatrical paradeof tranquillity.
"You might," I suggested, "return the thirty thousand."
There was more languor than active challenge in her glance as sheturned and looked at me.
"And I don't think I even know who you are," she murmured.
"But I happen to know just who you are," was my prompt and none toogentle rejoinder.
She pushed back her hair--it seemed very thick and heavy--and laughed alittle.
"Who am I?" she asked, licking the toast-crumbs from her whitefinger-tips.
"I'll tell you who you are," I retorted with some heat. "You're afigure-model that a sculptor named Delisle took to Paris. You're theold running-mate of Adams in the Southam heir case. You're the wife ofa Haytian half-caste Jew with a Spanish title. You're the woman whoworked with Andrus, the wildcat mine-swindler who is now doing time inSing Sing. And just at present you're the accomplice of a gang headedby a certain Coke Whelan, a wire-tapper well known to the police."
Her face showed no anger and no resentment as I unburdened myself ofthis unsavory pedigree. Her studious eyes, in fact, became almostcontemplative.
"And supposing that's all true?" she finally asked. "What of it?"
She sat and looked at me, as cool as a cucumber. I could no longerdeny that as a type she interested me. Her untamed audacities weresomething new to my experience. She seemed still in the feral state.Her mere presence, as she sat there in the lucid morning light, exertedover me that same spell which keeps children rooted before acircus-animal's cage.
"What of it?" she quietly repeated.
"I'm afraid there's nothing of it," I admitted, "except in the onepoint where it impinges on my personal interests. I intend to get thatthirty thousand dollars back."
The resolution of my tone seemed only to amuse her.
"But why come to me?" she asked, turning back to her breakfast."Supposing I really was a cog in some such machinery as you speak of,how much would be left on one small cog when so many wheels had to beoiled?"
"I have no great interest in your gang and its methods. All I know isa tremendous wrong's been done, and I want to see it righted."
"From what motive?" she asked, with that barbaric immediacy of approachpeculiar to her.
"From the most disinterested of motives--I mean from the standpoint ofthat rather uncommon thing known as common honesty."
She looked at me, long and intently, before she spoke again. I had thefeeling of being taken up and turned over and inspected through a lenseof implacable clarity.
"Do you know this young man who lost his money on what he took for afixed race?"
"I have met him," I answered, a little discomfited at the recollectionof how tenuous that acquaintanceship was.
"And have you known him long?"
I was compelled to confess to the contrary.
"And you understand the case, through and through?"
"I think I do," was my curt retort.
She turned on me quickly, as though about to break into an answeringflash of anger. But on second thoughts she remained silent.
"If life were only as simple as y
ou sentimental charity-workers try tomake it!" she complained, studying me with a pitying look which I beganmost keenly to resent. She swept the room with a glance of contempt."If all those hay-tossers who come to this town and have their moneytaken away from them were only as lamb-like as you people imagine theyare!"
"Is this an effort toward the justification of theft?" I inquired. Forthe first time I saw a touch of deeper color mark her cheek. I hadbeen conscious of a certain duality in her mental equipment, just as Icould detect a higher and lower plane in her manner of speech.
"Not at all," she retorted. "I'm not talking of theft. And we may aswell keep to cases. I don't think very much is ever gained by beingimpolite, do you?"
I was compelled to agree with her, though I could not shake off thefeeling that she had in some dim way scored against me. And this wasthe woman I had once feared would try to toy with my coat-buttons.
"I'm afraid," she went on with her grave abstraction of tone, "thatyou'll find me very matter-of-fact. A woman can't see as much of theworld as I have and then--oh! and then beat it back to the Elsie Books."
I resented the drop to the lower plane, as though she had concluded theupper one to be incomprehensible to me.
"Pardon me, madam; it's not my windmills I'm trying to be true to; it'sone of my promises."
"The promise was a very foolish one," she mildly protested. "Yet forall that," she added, as an afterthought, "you're intelligent. And Ilike intelligence."
Still again her deep and searching eyes rested on my face. Her nextwords seemed more a soliloquy than a speech.
"Yet you are doing this just to be true to your windmills. You'redoing it out of nothing more than blind and quixotic generosity."
The fact that my allusion had not been lost on her pleased me a littlemore, I think, than did her stare of perplexed commiseration.
"Isn't is odd," she said, "how we go wrong about things, how we jump atconclusions and misjudge people? You think, at this very moment, thatI'm the one who sees crooked, that I'm the one who's lost myperspective on things. And now I'm going to do something I hadn't theremotest intention of doing when you came into this room."
"And what is that?"
"I'm going to show you how wrong you've been, how wrong you are."
"In what?" I inquired as she again sat in silence before me.
"In everything," she finally answered, as she rose to her feet. I wasat once more conscious of her physical appeal, of her inalienablebodily buoyancy, as I saw her standing there at her full height. Thedeep flow of color in her loosely draped gown gave her an almostpontifical stateliness. Instinctively I rose as she did. And I couldsee by her eyes that the courtesy was neither negligible nordistasteful to her. She was about to say something; then she stoppedand looked at me for a hesitating moment or two.
One would have thought, from the solemnity of that stare, that shefaced the very Rubicon of her life. But a moment later she laughedaloud, and with a multitudinous rustling of skirts crossed the room andopened an inner door.
Through this door, for a moment or two, she completely left my sight.Then she returned, holding a cabinet photograph in her hand.
"Do you know it?" she quietly asked as she passed it over to me.
It took but a glance to show me that it was a picture of the man whosecause I was at that moment espousing, the man I had followed from theNorth River pier-end the night before. A second glance showed me thatthe photograph had been taken in London; it bore the stampedinscription: "Garet Childs, Regent's Park, N. W."
The woman's sustained attitude of anticipation, of expectationunfulfilled, puzzled me. I saw nothing remarkable about the picture orher possession of it.
"This, I believe, is the man you're trying to save from the clutches ofa wire-tapper named Whelan, Coke Whelan, as you call him?"
I acknowledged that it was.
"Now look at the signature written across it," she prompted.
I did as she suggested. Inscribed there I read: "Sincerely and more,Duncan Cory Whelan."
"Have I now made the situation comparatively clear to you?" she asked,watching my face as I looked from her to the photograph and then backto her again.
"I must confess, I don't quite grasp it," I admitted, thinking at themoment how her face in the strong side-light from the windows had takenon a quite accidental touch of pathos.
"It's simply that the man you are trying to save from Coke Whelan is_Coke Whelan himself_."
"That's impossible!" was my exclamation.
"It's not impossible," she said a little wearily, "because the wholething's nothing more than a plant, a frame-up. And you may as wellknow it. It can't go on. The whole thing _was a plan to trap you_."
"A plan to trap me?"
"Yes, a carefully worked-out plan to gather you in. And now, you see,the machinery is slipping a cog where it wasn't expected to!"
I stood there incredulous, dazed, trying to digest the shock.
"You mean that the man I met and talked to last night is actually anaccomplice of yours?"
"Yes," she answered, "if you care to put it that way."
"But I can't believe it. I _won't_ believe it until you bring him hereand prove it."
She sank into her chair, with a half-listless motion for me to beseated.
"Do you know why he's called Coke Whelan?" she demanded.
I did not.
"That, too, you've got to know. It's because he's a heroin and cocainefiend. He's killing himself with the use of drugs. He's makingeverything impossible. It's left him irresponsible, as dangerous asany lunatic would be at large."
She turned and looked at a tiny jeweled watch.
"He will be here himself by ten o'clock. And if he heard me savingwhat I am at this moment, he would kill me as calmly as he'd sit at acafe table and lie to you."
"But what's the good of those lies?"
"Don't you suppose he knew you were Witter Kerfoot, that among otherthings you owned a house, and a car, that you were worth making a tryfor? Don't you suppose he found all that out before he laid his ropesfor this wire-tapping story? Can't you see the part _I_ was to play,to follow his lead and show you how we could never bring his moneyback, but that we could face the gang with their own fire. I was toweaken and show you how we could tap the tapper's own wire, choose therace that promised the best odds, and induce you to plunge against thehouse on what seemed a sure thing?"
I sat there doing my best to Fletcherize what seemed a remarkably bigbite of information.
"But why are you telling me all this?" I still parried, pushing backfrom the flattering consciousness that we had a secret in common, thatI had proved worthy an intimacy denied others.
"Because I've just decided it's the easiest way out."
"For whom?"
"For me!"
"What made you decide that?"
"I've done a lot of thinking since you came into this room. And for along time I've been doing a lot of thinking. I don't do things CokeWhelan's way. I took pity on him, once. But I'm getting tired oftrying to keep him up when he insists on dropping lower, lower andlower every day. Don't imagine, because you've got certain ideas of meand my life, that I haven't common sense, that I can't see what thisother sort of thing leads to. I've seen too many of them, and how theyall ended. I may have been mixed up with some strange company in myday, but I want you to know that I've kept my hands clean!"
She had risen by this time and was moving restlessly about the room.
"Do you suppose I'd ever be satisfied to be one of those paintedBroadway dolls and let my brain dry up like a lemon on a pantry shelf?I couldn't if I wanted to. I couldn't, although I can see how easy itmakes everything. I tell you, a woman with a reputation like mine hasgot to pay, and keep on paying. She's got to pay twice over for thedecencies of life. She's got to pay twice over for protection. Unlessyou're respectable you can't have respectable people about you. You'vegot to watch every one in your circle, watch them
always, like a hawk.You've got to watch every step you take, and every man you meet--andsometimes you get tired of it all."
She sat down, in the midst of her febrile torrent of words, and lookedat me out of clouded and questioning eyes. I knew, as I met thattroubled gaze, so touched with weariness and rebellion, that she wasspeaking the truth. I could see truth written on her face. I tried toimagine myself in her place, I tried to see life as she had seen itduring those past years, which no charity could translate into anythingapproaching the beautiful. And much as I might have wished it, I couldutter no emptiest phrase of consolation. Our worlds seemed toohopelessly wide apart for any common view-point.
"What are you going to do?" I asked, humiliated by the inadequacy ofthe question even as I uttered it.
"I'm going to get away from it. I'm going to get away where I canbreathe in peace. Oh, believe me, I can be irreproachable without evenan effort. I want to be. I prefer it. I've found how much easier itmakes life. It's not my past I've been afraid of. It's that onedrug-soaked maniac, that poor helpless thing who knows that if I stepaway from him he daren't round a street-corner without being arrested."
She stopped suddenly and the color ebbed out of her face. Then I sawher slowly rise to her feet and look undecidedly about the four cornersof the room. Then she turned to me. Her eyes seemed ridiculouslyterrified.
"_He's come!_" she said, in little more than a whisper. "He's herenow!"
The door opened before I could speak. But even before the mummy-facedman I had left at the cafe table the night before could stride into theroom, the woman in front of me sank back into her chair. Over her facecame a change, a veil, a quickly coerced and smiling-lipped blanknessthat reminded me of a pastoral stage-drop shutting out some grim andmoving tragedy.
The change in the bearing and attitude of the intruder was equallyprompt as his startled eyes fell on me calmly seated within those fourwalls. He was not as quick as the woman in catching his cue.
I could plainly detect the interrogative look he flashed at her, thelook which demanded as plain as words: "What is this man doing here?"
"This," said the woman at the table, in her most dulcet and equabletones, "is the altruistic gentleman who objects to your losing thirtythousand dollars in a race which I had no earthly way of controlling."
Here, I saw, was histrionism without a flaw. Her fellow-actor, I couldalso see, was taking more time to adjust himself to his role. He wasless finished in his assumption of accusatory indignation. But he didhis best to rise to the occasion.
"I've got to get that money back," he cried, leveling a shaking fingerat her. "And I'm going to do it without dragging my friends into it!"
She walked over to the windows and closed them before she spoke.
"What's the use of going over all that?" she continued, and I had theimpression of sitting before a row of foot-lights and watching an acteddrama. "You took your risk and lost. I didn't get it. It's not myfault. You know as well as I do that McGowan and Noyes will never openup unless you're in a position to make them. It's a case of dog eatdog, of fighting fire with fire. And I've just been telling it all toyour friend Mr. Kerfoot, who seems to think he's going to have some onearrested if we don't suddenly do the right thing."
"I want my money!" cried the man named Whelan. I could see, even as hedelivered his lines, that his mind was floundering and groping wildlyabout for solid ground.
"And Mr. Kerfoot," continued the tranquil-voiced woman at the table,"says he has a house in Gramercy Square where we can go and have aconference. I've phoned for a telegraph operator called Downey to bethere, so we can decide on a plan for tapping McGowan's wire."
"And what good does that do me?" demanded the mummy-faced youth.
"Why, that gives Mr. Kerfoot his chance to bet as much as he likes, toget as much back from McGowan as he wants to, without any risk oflosing."
"But who handles the money?" demanded the wary Whelan.
"That's quite immaterial. _You_ can, if you're his friend, or he canhandle it himself. The important thing is to get your plan settled andyour wire tapped. And if Mr. Kerfoot will be so good as to telephoneto his butler I'll dress and be ready in ten minutes."
She leaned forward and swung an equipoise phone-bracket round to myelbow.
But I did not lift the receiver from its hook. For at that moment thedoor abruptly opened. The maid in the white cap and apron stoodtrembling on its threshold.
"That's a lie!" she was crying, in her shrill and sudden abandon, andthe twin badges of servitude made doubly incongruous her attitude offierce revolt. "It's a lie, Tony! She's welched on you!"
She took three quick steps into the room.
"She's only playing you against this guy. I've heard every word of it.She never phoned for an operator. That's a lie. She's throwing youdown, for good. She's told him who you are and what your game is!"
I looked at the other woman. She was now on her feet.
"Don't let her fool you this time, Tony," was the passionate cry fromthe quivering breast under the incongruous white apron-straps. "Lookat how she's treated you! Look at your picture there, that she cinchedher talk with! She never did half what I did for you! And now you'reletting her throw you flat! You're standing there and letting--"
The woman stopped, and put her hands over her ears. For she saw, evenas I did, the hollow-eyed, mummy-faced youth reach a shaking hand backto his hip.
"You liar!" he said, as his hand swung up with the revolver in it."You lying welcher!" he cried, in a thin and throaty voice that waslittle more than a cackle.
He took one step toward the woman in the rose-colored dressing-gown.She was, I could see, much the taller of the two. And she wasstanding, now, with her back flat against the wall. She made noattempt to escape. She was still staring at him out of wide andbewildered eyes when he fired.
I saw the spit of the plaster and the little shower of mortar thatrained on her bare shoulder from the bullet-hole in the wall.
Then I did a very ordinary and commonplace thing. I stooped quicklyforward to the end of the table and caught up the nickeled coffee-potby its ebony handle. The lunatic with the smoking revolver saw mysudden movement, for as I swung the metal instrument upward he turnedon me and fired for the second time.
I could feel the sting of the powder smoke on my up-thrust wrist. Iknew then that it was useless to try to reach him. I simply brought myarm forward and let the metal pot fly from my hand. I let it flyforward, targeting on his white and distorted face.
Where or how it struck I could not tell. All I knew was that he wentdown under a scattering geyser of black coffee. He did not fire again.He did not even move. But as he fell the woman in the cap and aprondropped on her knees beside him. She knelt there with an inarticulatecry like that of an animal over its fallen mate, a ludicrous,mouse-like sound that was almost a squeak. Then she suddenly edgedabout and reached out for the fallen revolver.
I saw her through the smoke, but she had the gun in her hand before Icould stop her. She fought over it like a wildcat. The peril of thatcombat made me desperate. Her arm was quite thin, and not overlystrong. I first twisted it so the gun-barrel pointed outward. Thepain, as I continued to twist, must have been intense. But I knew itwas no time for half-measures. Just how intense that pain was camehome to me a moment later, when the woman fell forward on her face, ina dead faint.
The other woman had calmly thrown open the windows. She watched me,almost apathetically, as I got to my feet and stooped in alarm over theunconscious man in his ridiculous welter of black coffee. Then shestepped closer to me.
"Have you killed him?" she asked, with more a touch of childlike wonderthan any actual fear.
"No; he's only stunned."
"But how?"
"It caught him here on the forehead. He'll be around in a minute ortwo."
Once more I could hear the multitudinous rustle as she crossed the room.
"Put him here on
my bed," she called from an open door. And as Icarried him in and dropped him in a sodden heap on the white coverlet,I saw the woman unsheathe her writhing body of its rose-coloredwrapping. From that flurry of warmth her twisting body emerged almostsepulchrally white. Then she came to a pause, bare-shouldered andthoughtful before me.
"Wait!" she said as she crossed the room. "I must telephoneMcCausland."
"Who's McCausland?" I asked as she stepped out into the dining-room.
"He's a man I know at Headquarters," was her impersonal-noted reply.
For the second time, as she stepped hurriedly back into the room withme, I was conscious of the satin-like smoothness of her skin, thebaby-like whiteness of her rounded bare arms. Then wholly unabashed bymy presence, she flung open a closet door and tossed a cascade ofperfumed apparel out beside the bed where I stood.
"What are you going to do?" I demanded, as I saw her white-clad figurewrithe itself into a street dress. There was something primordial andAdamitic in the very calmness with which she swept through the flimsyreservations of sex. She was as unconscious of my predicament as acave woman might have been. And the next moment she was crushinglingerie and narrow-toed shoes and toilet articles and undecipherablegarments of folded silk into an English club-bag. Then she turned toglance at her watch on the dresser.
"I'm going!" she said at last, as she caught up a second hand-bag ofalligator skin and crammed into it jewel boxes of dark plush and casesof different colored kid, and still more clothing and lingerie. "I'mgoing to catch the _Nieuw Amsterdam_."
"For where?"
"For Europe!"
Her quick and dextrous hands had pinned on a hat and veil as I stood inwonder watching her.
"Call a taxi, please," she said, as she struggled into her coat. "Anda boy for my bags."
I was still at the receiver when she came into the room and looked downfor a moment at the woman moaning and whimpering on the coffee-stainedfloor. Then she began resolutely and calmly drawing on her gloves.
"Couldn't we do something for them?" I said as I stepped back into thebedroom for her hand-bag.
"What?" she demanded, as she leaned over the bed where Whelan'sreviving body twitched and moved.
"There must be something."
"There's nothing. Oh, believe me, you can't help him. I can't helphim. He's got his own way to go. And it's a terribly short way!"
She flung open a bureau drawer and crammed a further article or twodown in her still open chatelaine bag.
Then she opened the outer door for the boy who had come for the bags.Then she looked at her watch again.
"You must not come back," she said to me. "They may be here any time."
"Who may?" I asked.
"The police," she answered as she closed the door.
She did not speak again until we were at the side of the taxicab.
"To the Holland American Wharf," she said.
Nor did she speak all the while we purred and hummed and dodged our wayacross the city. She did not move until we jolted aboard theferry-boat, and the clanging of the landing-float's pawl-and-rachettold us we were no longer on that shrill and narrow island where thefever of life burns to the edge of its three laving rivers. It wasthen and only then that I noticed the convulsive shaking of hershoulders.
"What is it?" I asked, helplessly, oppressed by the worlds that seemedto stand between us.
"It's nothing," she said, with her teeth against her lip. But the nextminute she was crying as forlornly and openly as a child.
"What is it?" I repeated, as inadequately as before, knowing theuselessness of any debilitating touch of sympathy.
"It's so hard," she said, struggling to control her voice.
"What is?"
"It's so hard to begin over."
"But they say you're the cleverest woman in the world!" was the onlyconsolation I could offer her.