The parchment on the bones of his face wrinkled into a sort of smile.
His greatest friend on the Riviera was this pipe-smoking Briton.

Then suddenly, with a nimble gesture that one would not believe possible
in the aged, he stripped back his sleeve and exhibited a long, curiously
twisted scar, as though a bullet had plowed along the arm.

"Alas, monsieur," he said, "I myself live in the most primitive
condition of society! I pay a tribute for life.... Ah! no, monsieur;
it is not to the Camorra that I pay. It is quite unromantic. I think my
secretary carries it in his books as a pension to an indigent relative."

He turned to the American

"Believe me, monsieur, my estates in Salerno are not what they were; the
olive trees are old and all drains on my income are a burden--even this
gratuity. I thought I should be rid of it; but, alas, the extraordinary
conception of justice in your country!"

He broke the cigarette in his fingers, and flung the pieces over the
terrace.

"In the great range of mountains," he began, "slashing across the
American states and beautifully named the Alleghanies, there is a vast
measure of coal beds. It is thither that the emigrants from Southern
Europe journey. They mine out the coal, sometimes descending into the
earth through pits, or what in your language are called shafts, and
sometimes following the stratum of the coal bed into the hill.

"This underworld, monsieur--this, sunless world, built underneath the
mountains, is a section of Europe slipped under the American Republic.
The language spoken there is not English. The men laboring in those
buried communities cry out sparate when they are about to shoot down the
coal with powder. It is Italy under there. There is a river called the
Monongahela in those mountains. It is an Indian name."

He paused.

"And so, monsieur, what happened along it doubtless reminded me of
Cooper's story--Bough of Oak and the case of Corporal Flint."

He took another cigarette out of a box on the table, but he did not
light it.

"In one of the little mining villages along this river with the
enchanting name there was a man physically like the people of the Iliad;
and with that, monsieur, he had a certain cast of mind not unHellenic.
He was tall, weighed two hundred and forty pounds, lean as a gladiator,
and in the vigor of golden youth.

"There were no wars to journey after and no adventures; but there was
danger and adventure here. This land was full of cockle, winnowed out
of Italy, Austria and the whole south of Europe. It took courage and the
iron hand of the state to keep the peace. Here was a life of danger;
and this Ionian--big, powerful, muscled like the heroes of the Circus
Maximus--entered this perilous service.

"Monsieur, I have said his mind was Hellenic, like his big, wonderful
body. Mark you how of heroic antiquity it was! It was his boast, among
the perils that constantly beset him, that no criminal should ever take
his life; that, if ever he should receive a mortal wound from the hand
of the assassins about him, he would not wait to die in agony by it. He
himself would sever the damaged thread of life and go out like a man!

"Observe, monsieur, how like the great heroes of legend--like the
wounded Saul when he ordered his armor-bearer to kill him; like Brutus
when he fell on his sword!"

He looked intently at the American.

"Doubtless, monsieur," he went on, "those near this man along the
Monongahela did not appreciate his attitude of grandeur; but to us, in
the distance, it seemed great and noble."

He looked out over the Mediterranean, where the great adventurers who
cherished these lofty pagan ideals once beat along in the morning of the
world.

"On an afternoon of summer," he continued like one who begins a saga,
"this man, alone and fearless, followed a violator of the law and
arrested him in a house of the village. As he led the man away he
noticed that an Italian followed. He was a little degenerate, wearing a
green hat, and bearing now one name and now another. They traversed the
village toward the municipal prison; and this creature, featured like a
Parisian Apache, skulked behind.

"As they went along, two Austrians seated on the porch of a house heard
the little man speak to the prisoner. He used the word sparate. They did
not know what he meant, for he spoke in Italian; but they recognized
the word, for it was the word used in the mines before the coal was shot
down. The prisoner made his reply in Italian, which the Austrians did
not understand.

"It seemed that this man who had made the arrest did not know Italian,
for he stopped and asked the one behind him whether the prisoner was his
brother. The man replied in the negative."

The Count paused, as though for an explanation. "What the Apache said
was: 'Shall I shoot him here or wait until we reach the ravine?' And the
prisoner replied: 'Wait until we come to the ravine.'

"They went on. Presently they reached a sort of hollow, where the reeds
grew along the road densely and to the height of a man's head. Here the
Italian Apache, the degenerate with the green hat, following some three
steps behind, suddenly drew a revolver from his pocket and shot the man
twice in the back. It was a weapon carrying a lead bullet as large as
the tip of one's little finger. The officer fell. The Apache and the
prisoner fled.

"The wounded man got up. He spread out his arms; and he shouted, with a
great voice, like the heroes of the Iliad. The two wounds were mortal;
they were hideous, ghastly wounds, ripping up the vital organs in the
man's body and severing the great arteries. The splendid pagan knew he
had received his death wounds; and, true to his atavistic ideal, the
ideal of the Greek, the Hebrew and the Roman, the ideal of the great
pagan world to which he in spirit belonged, and of which the poets sing,
he put his own weapon to his head and blew his brains out."

The old Count, his chin up, his withered, yellow face vitalized, lifted
his hands like one before something elevated and noble. After some
moments had passed he continued:

"On the following day the assassin was captured in a neighboring
village. Feeling ran so high that it was with difficulty that the
officers of the law saved him from being lynched. He was taken about
from one prison to another. Finally he was put on trial for murder.

"There was never a clearer case before any tribunal in this world.

"Many witnesses identified the assassin--not merely English-speaking
men, who might have been mistaken or prejudiced, but Austrians, Poles,
Italians--the men of the mines who knew him; who had heard him cry out
the fatal Italian word; who saw him following in the road behind his
victim on that Sunday afternoon of summer; who knew his many names and
every feature of his cruel, degenerate face. There was no doubt anywhere
in the trial. Learned surgeons showed that the two wounds in the dead
man's back from the big-calibered weapon were deadly, fatal wounds that
no man could have survived.

"There was nothing incomplete in that trial.

"Everything was so certain that the assassin did not even undertake to
contradict; not one statement, not one word of the evidence against him
did he deny. It was a plain case of willful, deliberate and premeditated
murder. The judge presiding at the trial instructed the jury that a man
is presumed to intend that which he does; that whoever kills a human
being with malice aforethought is guilty of murder; that murder which is
perpetrated by any kind of willful, deliberate and premeditated killing
is murder in the first degree. The jury found the assassin guilty and
the judge sentenced him to be hanged."

The Count paused and looked at his companions about him on the terrace.

"Messieurs," he said, "do you think that conviction was just?"

There was a common assent. Some one said: "It was a cruel murder if ever
there was one." And another: "It was wholly just; the creature deserved
to hang."

The old Count bowed, putting out his hands.

"And so I hoped he would."

"What happened?" said the American.

The Count regarded him with a queer, ironical smile.

"Unlike the great British people, monsieur," he replied, "your courts
have never given the pig, or the pasture on which he gathers his acorns,
a consideration above the human family. The case was taken to your Court
of Appeals of that province."

He stopped and lighted his cigarette deliberately, with a match
scratched slowly on the table.

"Monsieur," he said, "I do not criticize your elevated court. It is
composed of learned men--wise and patriotic, I have no doubt. They
cannot make the laws, monsieur; they cannot coin a conception of justice
for your people. They must enforce the precise rules of law that the
conception of justice in your country has established.

"Nevertheless, monsieur"--and his thin yellow lips curled--"for the sake
of my depleted revenues I could have wished that the decision of this
court had been other than it was."

"And what did it decide?" asked the American.

"It decided, monsieur," replied the Count, "that my estates in Salerno
must continue to be charged with the gratuity to the indigent relative.

"That is to say, monsieur, it decided, because the great pagan did not
wait to die in agony, did not wait for the mortal wounds inflicted by
the would-be assassin to kill him, that interesting person--the man in
the green hat--was not guilty of murder in the first degree and could
not be hanged!"

Note--See State versus Angelina; 80 Southeastern Reporter, 141: "The
intervening responsible agent who wrongfully accelerates death is guilty
of the murder, and not the one who inflicted the first injury, though in
itself mortal."

VI. The Wrong Sign

It was an ancient diary in a faded leather cover. The writing was fine
and delicate, and the ink yellow with age. Sir Henry Marquis turned the
pages slowly and with care for the paper was fragile.

We had dined early at the Ritz and come in later to his great home in
St. James's Square.

He wished to show me this old diary that had come to him from a branch
of his mother's family in Virginia--a branch that had gone out with a
King's grant when Virginia was a crown colony. The collateral ancestor,
Pendleton, had been a justice of the peace in Virginia, and a spinster
daughter had written down some of the strange cases with which her
father had been concerned.

Sir Henry Marquis believed that these cases in their tragic details, and
their inspirational, deductive handling, equaled any of our modern time.
The great library overlooking St. James's Square, was curtained off from
London. Sir Henry read by the fire; and I listened, returned, as by some
recession of time to the Virginia of a vanished decade. The narrative of
the diary follows:

My father used to say that the Justice of God was sometimes swift and
terrible. He said we thought of it usually as remote and deliberate, a
sort of calm adjustment in some supernatural Court of Equity. But this
idea was far from the truth. He had seen the justice of God move on
the heels of a man with appalling swiftness; with a crushing force and
directness that simply staggered the human mind. I know the case he
thought about.

Two men sat over a table when my father entered. One of them got up. He
was a strange human creature, when you stood and looked calmly at him.
You thought the Artificer had designed him for a priest of the church.
He had the massive features and the fringe of hair around his bald
head like a tonsure. At first, to your eye, it was the vestments of the
church, he lacked; then you saw that the lack was something fundamental;
something organic in the nature of the man. And as he held and
stimulated your attention you got a fearful idea, that the purpose for
which this human creature was shaped had been somehow artfully reversed!

He was big boned and tall when he stood up.

"Pendleton," he said, "I would have come to you, but for my guest."

And he indicated the elegant young man at the table.

"But I did not send you word to ride a dozen miles through the hills on
any trivial business, or out of courtesy to me. It is a matter of some
import, so I will pay ten eagles."

My father looked steadily at the man.

"I am not for hire," he said.

My father was a justice of the peace in Virginia, under the English
system, by the theory of which the most substantial men in a county
undertook to keep the peace for the welfare of the State. Like
Washington in the service of the Colonial army, he took no pay.

The big man laughed.

"We are most of us for purchase, and all of us for hire," he said. "I
will make it twenty!"

The young man at the table now interrupted. He was elegant in the
costume of the time, in imported linen and cloth from an English loom.
His hair was thick and black; his eyebrows straight, his body and his
face rich in the blood and the vitalities of youth. But sensuality was
on him like a shadow. The man was given over to a life of pleasure.

"Mr. Pendleton," he said, with a patronizing pedantic air, "the
commonwealth is interested to see that litigation does not arise; and to
that end, I hope you will not refuse us the benefit of your experience.
We are about to draw up a deed of sale running into a considerable sum,
and we would have it court proof."

He made a graceful gesture with his jeweled hand.

"I would be secure in my purchase, and Zindorf in his eagles, and you,
Sir, in the knowledge that the State will not be vexed by any suit
between us. Every contract, I believe, upon some theory of the law, is
a triangular affair with the State a party. Let us say then, that you
represent Virginia!"

"In the service of the commonwealth," replied my father coldly, "I am
always to be commanded."

The man flicked a bit of dust from his immaculate coat sleeve.

"It will be a conference of high powers. I shall represent Eros; Mr.
Pendleton, Virginia; and Zindorf" and he laughed--"his Imperial Master!"

And to the eye the three men fitted to their legend. The Hellenic God
of pleasure in his sacred groves might have chosen for his disciple one
from Athens with a face and figure like this youth. My father bore
the severities of the law upon him. And I have written how strange a
creature the third party to this conference was.

He now answered with an oath.

"You have a very pretty wit, Mr. Lucian Morrow," he said. "I add to my
price a dozen eagles for it."

The young man shrugged his shoulders in his English coat.

"Smart money, eh, Zindorf... Well, it does not make me smart. It only
makes me remember that Count Augsburg educated you in Bavaria for the
Church and you fled away from it to be a slave trader in Virginia."

He got on his feet, and my father saw that the man was in liquor. He
was not drunken, but the effect was on him with its daring and its
indiscretions.

It was an April morning, bright with sun. The world was white with apple
blossoms, the soft air entered through the great open windows. And my
father thought that the liquor in the man had come with him out of a
night of bargaining or revel.

Morrow put his hands on the table and looked at Zindorf; then, suddenly,
the laughter in his face gave way to the comprehension of a swift,
striking idea.

"Why, man," he cried, "it's the devil's truth! Everything about you is a
negation! You ought to be a priest by all the lines and features of you;
but you're not... Scorch me, but you're not!"

His voice went up on the final word as though to convey some impressive,
sinister discovery.

It was true in every aspect of the man. The very clothes he wore,
somber, wool-threaded homespun, crudely patched, reminded one of the
coarse fabrics that monks affect for their abasement. But one saw, when
one remembered the characteristic of the man, that they represented here
only an extremity of avarice.

Zindorf looked coldly at his guest.

"Mr. Lucian Morrow," he said, "you will go on, and my price will go on!"

But the young blood, on his feet, was not brought up by the monetary
threat. He looked about the room, at the ceiling, the thick walls. And,
like a man who by a sudden recollection confounds his adversary with an
overlooked illustrative fact, he suddenly cried out:

"By the soul of Satan, you're housed to suit! Send me to the pit! It's
the very place for you! Eh! Zindorf, do you know who built the house you
live in?"

"I do not, Mr. Lucian Morrow," said the man. "Who built it?"

One could see that he wished to divert the discourses of his guest. He
failed.

"God built it!" cried Morrow.

He put out his hands as though to include the hose.

"Pendleton," he said, "you will remember. The people built these walls
for a church. It burned, but the stone walls could not burn; they
remained overgrown with creeper. Then, finally, old Wellington Monroe
built a house into the walls for the young wife he was about to marry,
but he went to the coffin instead of the bride-bed, and the house
stood empty. It fell into the courts with the whole of Monroe's tangled
business and finally Zindorf gets it at a sheriff's sale."

The big man now confronted the young blood with decision.

"Mr. Lucian Morrow," he said, "if you are finished with your fool talk,
I will bid you good morning. I have decided not to sell the girl."

The face of Morrow changed. His voice wheedled in an anxious note.

"Not sell her, Zindorf!" he echoed. "Why man, you have promised her to
me all along. You always said I should have her in spite of your cursed
partner Ordez. You said you'd get her some day and sell her to me.
Now, curse it, Zindorf, I want her... I've got the money: ten thousand
dollars. It's a big lot of money. But I've got it. I've got it in gold."

He went on:

"Besides, Zindorf, you can have the money, it'll mean more to you. But
it's the girl I want."

He stood up and in his anxiety the effect of the liquor faded out.

"I've waited on your promise, Zindorf. You said that some day, when
Ordez was hard-pressed he would sell her for money, even if she was
his natural daughter. You were right; you knew Ordez. You have got an
assignment of all the slaves in possession, in the partnership, and
Ordez has cleared out of the country. I know what you paid for his
half-interest in this business, it's set out in the assignment. It was
three thousand dollars.

"Think of it, man, three thousand dollars to Ordez for a wholesale,
omnibus assignment of everything. An elastic legal note of an assignment
that you can stretch to include this girl along with the half-dozen
other slaves that you have on hand here; and I offer you ten thousand
dollars for the girl alone!"

One could see how the repetition of the sum in gold affected Zindorf.

He had the love of money in that dominating control that the Apostle
spoke of. But the elegant young man was moved by a lure no less potent.
And his anxiety, for the time, suppressed the evidences of liquor.

"I'll take the risk on the title, Zindorf. You and Ordez were partners
in this traffic. Ordez gives you a general assignment of all slaves on
hand for three thousand dollars and lights out of the country. He leaves
his daughter here among the others. And this general assignment can be
construed to include her. Her mother was a slave and that brings her
within the law. We know precisely who her mother was, and all about it.
You looked it up and my lawyer, Mr. Cable, looked it up. Her mother
was the octoroon woman, Suzanne, owned by old Judge Marquette in New
Orleans.

"There may have been some sort of church marriage, but there's no legal
record, Cable says.

"The woman belonged to Marquette, and under the law the girl is a slave.
You got a paper title out of Marquette's executors, privily, years
ago. Now you have this indefinite assignment by Ordez. He's gone to the
Spanish Islands, or the devil, or both. And if Mr. Pendleton can draw
a deed of sale that will stand in the courts between us, I'll take the
risk on the validity of my title."

He paused.

"The law's sound on slaves, Judge Madison has a dozen himself, not all
black either; not three-eighths black!" and he laughed.

Then he turned to my father.

"Mr. Pendleton," he said, "I persuaded Zindorf to send for you to draw
up this deed of sale. I have no confidence in the little practicing
tricksters at the county seat. They take a fee and, with premeditation,
write a word or phrase into the contract that leaves it open for a suit
at law."

He made a courteous bow, accompanied by a dancing master's gesture.

"I do not offend you with the offer of a fee, but I present my gratitude
for the conspicuous courtesy, and I indicate the service to the
commonwealth of legal papers in form and court proof. May I hope, Sir,
that you will not deny us the benefit of your highly distinguished
service."

My father very slowly looked about him in calm reflection.

He had ridden ten miles through the hills on this April morning, at
Zindorf's message sent the night before. The clay of the roads was still
damp and plastic from the recent rain. There were flecks of mud on him
and the splashing of the streams.

He was a big, dominating man, in the hardened strength and experience
of middle life. He had come, as he believed, upon some service of the
state. And here was a thing for the little dexterities of a lawyer's
clerk. Everybody in Virginia, who knew my father, can realize how he was
apt to meet the vague message of Zindorf that got him in this house, and
the patronizing courtesies of Mr. Lucian Morrow.

He was direct and virile, and while he feared God, like the great
figures in the Pentateuch, as though he were a judge of Israel enforcing
his decrees with the weapon of iron, I cannot write here, that at
any period of his life, or for any concern or reason, he very greatly
regarded man.

He went over to the window and looked out at the hills and the road that
he had traveled.

The mid-morning sun was on the fields and groves like a benediction. The
soft vitalizing air entered and took up the stench of liquor, the ash of
tobacco and the imported perfumes affected by Mr. Lucian Morrow.

The windows in the room were long, gothic like a church, and turning
on a pivot. They ran into the ceiling that Monroe had built across the
gutted walls. The house stood on the crown of a hill, in a cluster of
oak trees. Below was the abandoned graveyard, the fence about it rotted
down; the stone slabs overgrown with moss. The four roads running into
the hills joined and crossed below this oak grove that the early people
had selected for a house of God.

My father looked out on these roads and far back on the one that he had
traveled.

There was no sound in the world, except the faint tolling of a bell in
a distant wood on the road. It was far off on the way to my father's
house, and the vague sound was to be heard only when a breath of wind
carried from that way.

My father gathered his big chin, flat like a plowshare, into the trough
of his bronze hand. He stood for some moments in reflection, then he
turned to Mr. Lucian Morrow.

"I think you are right," he said. "I think this is a triangular affair
with the state a party. I am in the service of the state. Will you
kindly put the table by this window."

They thought he wished the air, and would thus escape the closeness of
the room. And while my father stood aside, Zindorf and his guest carried
the flat writing table to the window and placed a chair.

My father sat down behind the table by the great open window, and looked
at Zindorf.

The man moved and acted like a monk. He had the figure and the tonsured
head. His coarse, patched clothes cut like the homely garments of the
simple people of the day, were not wholly out of keeping to the part.
The idea was visualized about him; the simplicity and the poverty of the
great monastic orders in their vast, noble humility. All striking and
real until one saw his face!

My father used to say that the great orders of God were correct in this
humility; for in its vast, comprehensive action, the justice of God
moved in a great plain, where every indicatory event was precisely
equal; a straw was a weaver's beam.

God hailed men to ruin in his court, not with spectacular devices, but
by means of some homely, common thing, as though to abase and overcome
our pride.

My father moved the sheets of foolscap, and tested the point of the
quill pen like one who considers with deliberation. He dipped the point
into the inkpot and slowly wrote a dozen formal words.

Then he stopped and put down the pen.

"The contests of the courts," he said, "are usually on the question of
identity. I ought to see this slave for a correct description."

The two men seemed for a moment uncertain what to do.

Then Zindorf addressed my father.

"Pendleton," he said, "the fortunes of life change, and the ideas suited
to one status are ridiculous in another. Ordez was a fool. He made
believe to this girl a future that he never intended, and she is under
the glamor of these fancies."

He stood in the posture of a monk, and he spoke each word with a clear
enunciation.

"It is a very delicate affair, to bring this girl out of the
extravagances with which Ordez filled her idle head, and not be brutal
in it. We must conduct the thing with tact, and we will ask you,
Pendleton, to observe the courtesies of our pretension."

When he had finished, he flung a door open and went down a stairway. For
a time my father heard his footsteps, echoing, like those of a priest
in the under chambers of a chapel. Then he ascended, and my father was
astonished.

He came with a young girl on his arm, as in the ceremony of marriage
sometimes the priest emerges with the bride. The girl was young and of a
Spanish beauty. She was all in white with blossoms in her hair. And
she was radiant, my father said, as in the glory of some happy
contemplation. There was no slave like this on the block in Virginia.
Young girls like this, my father had seen in Havana in the houses of
Spanish Grandees.

"This is Mr. Pendleton, our neighbor," Zindorf said. "He comes to offer
you his felicitations."

The girl made a little formal curtsy.

"When my father returns," she said in a queer, liquid accent, "he will
thank you, Meester Pendleton; just now he is on a journey."

And she gave her hand to Lucian Morrow to kiss, like a lady of the time.
Then Zindorf, mincing his big step, led her out.

And my father stood behind the table in the enclosure of the window,
with his arms folded, and his chin lifted above his great black stock.
I know how my father looked, for I have seen him stand like that before
moving factors in great events, when he intended, at a certain cue, to
enter.

He said that it was at this point that Mr. Lucian Morrow's early comment
on Zindorf seemed, all at once, to discover the nature of this whole
affair. He said that suddenly, with a range of vision like the great
figures in the Pentateuch, he saw how things right and true would work
out backward into abominations, if, by any chance, the virtue of God in
events were displaced!

Zindorf returned, and as he stepped through the door, closing it
behind him, the far-off tolling of the bell, faint, eerie, carried by
a stronger breath of April air, entered through the window. My father
extended his arm toward the distant wood.

"Zindorf," he said, "do you mark the sign?" The man listened.

"What sign?" he said.

"The sign of death!" replied my father.

The man made a deprecating gesture with his hands, "I do not believe in
signs," he said.

My father replied like one corrected by a memory.

"Why, yes," he said, "that is true. I should have remembered that. You
do not believe in signs, Zindorf, since you abandoned the sign of the
cross, and set these coarse patches on your knees to remind you not to
bend them in the sign of submission to the King of Kings."

The intent in the mended clothing was the economy of avarice, but my
father turned it to his use.

The man's face clouded with anger.

"What I believe," he said, "is neither the concern of you nor another."

He paused with an oath.

"Whatever you may believe, Zindorf," replied my father, "the sound of
that bell is unquestionably a sign of death." He pointed toward the
distant wood. "In the edge of the forest yonder is the ancient church
that the people built to replace the burned one here. It has been long
abandoned, but in its graveyard lie a few old families. And now and
then, when an old man dies, they bring him back to put him with his
fathers. This morning, as I came along, they were digging the grave for
old Adam Duncan, and the bell tolls for him. So you see," and he looked
Zindorf in the face, "a belief in signs is justified."

Again the big man made his gesture as of one putting something of no
importance out of the way.

"Believe what you like," he said, "I am not concerned with signs."

"Why, yes, Zindorf," replied my father, "of all men you are the very
one most concerned about them. You must be careful not to use the wrong
ones."

It was a moment of peculiar tension.

The room was flooded with sun. The tiny creatures of the air droned
outside. Everywhere was peace and the gentle benevolence of peace. But
within this room, split off from the great chamber of a church, events
covert and sinister seemed preparing to assemble.

My father, big and dominant, was behind the table, his great shoulders
blotting out the window.

Mr. Lucian Morrow sat doubled in a chair, and Zindorf stood with the
closed door behind him.

"You see, Zindorf," he said, "each master has his set of signs. Most of
us have learned the signs of one master only. But you have learned the
signs of both. And you must be careful not to bring the signs of your
first master into the service of your last one."

The big man did not move, he stood with the door closed behind him, and
studied my father's face like one who feels the presence of a danger
that he cannot locate.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"I mean," replied my father, "I mean, Zindorf, that each master has a
certain intent in events, and this intent is indicated by his set of
signs. Now the great purpose of these two masters, we believe, in all
the moving of events, is directly opposed. Thus, when we use a sign
of one of these masters, we express by the symbol of it the hope that
events will take the direction of his established purpose.

"Don't you see then... don't you see, that we dare not use the signs of
one in the service of the other?"

"Pendleton," said the man, "I do not understand you."

He spoke slowly and precisely, like one moving with an excess of care.

My father went on, his voice strong and level, his eyes on Zindorf.

"The thing is a great mystery," he said. "It is not clear to any of us
in its causes or its relations. But old legends and old beliefs, running
down from the very morning of the world, tell us--warn us, Zindorf--that
the signs of each of these masters are abhorrent to the other. Neither
will tolerate the use of his adversary's sign. Moreover, Zindorf, there
is a double peril in it."

And his voice rose.

"There is the peril that the new master will abandon the blunderer for
the insult, and there is the peril that the old one will destroy him for
the sacrilege!"

At this moment the door behind Zindorf opened, and the young girl
entered. She was excited and her eyes danced.

"Oh!" she said, "people are coming on every road!"

She looked, my father said, like a painted picture, her dark Castilian
beauty illumined by the pleasure in her interpretation of events. She
thought the countryside assembled after the manner of my father to
express its felicitations.

Zindorf crossed in great strides to the window: Mr. Lucian Morrow, sober
and overwhelmed by the mystery of events about him, got unsteadily on
his feet, holding with both hands to the oak back of a chair.

My father said that the tragedy of the thing was on him, and he acted
under the pressure of it.

"My child," he said, "you are to go to the house of your grandfather in
Havana. If Mr. Lucian Morrow wishes to renew his suit for your hand in
marriage, he will do it there. Go now and make your preparations for the
journey."

The girl cried out in pleasure at the words.

"My grandfather is a great person in New Spain. I have always longed to
see him... father promised... and now I am to go ... when do we set out,
Meester Pendleton?"

"At once," replied my father, "to-day." Then he crossed the room and
opened the door for her to go out. He held the latch until the girl was
down the stairway. Then he closed the door.

The big man, falsely in his aspect, like a monk, looking out at the
far-off figures on the distant roads, now turned about.

"A clever ruse, Pendleton," he said, "We can send her now, on this
pretended journey, to Morrow's house, after the sale."

My father went over and sat down at the table. He took a faded silk
envelope out of his, coat, and laid it down before him. Then he answered
Zindorf.

"There will be no sale," he said.

Mr. Lucian Morrow interrupted.

"And why no sale, Sir?"

"Because there is no slave to sell," replied my father. "This girl is
not the daughter of the octoroon woman, Suzanne."

Zindorf's big jaws tightened.

"How did you know that?" he said.

My father answered with deliberation.

"I would have known it," he said, "from the wording of the paper you
exhibit from Marquette's executors. It is merely a release of any claim
or color of title; the sort of legal paper one executes when one gives
up a right or claim that one has no faith in. Marquette's executors were
the ablest lawyers in New Orleans. They were not the men to sign away
valuable property in a conveyance like that; that they did sign such a
paper is conclusive evidence to me that they had nothing--and knew they
had nothing--to release by it." He paused.

"I know it also," he said, "because I have before me here the girl's
certificate of birth and Ordez's certificate of marriage."

He opened the silk envelope and took out some faded papers. He unfolded
them and spread them out under his hand.

"I think Ordez feared for his child," he said, "and stored these papers
against the day of danger to her, because they are copies taken from the
records in Havana."

He looked up at the astonished Morrow.

"Ordez married the daughter of Pedro de Hernando. I find, by a note
to these papers, that she is dead. I conclude that this great Spanish
family objected to the adventurer, and he fled with his infant daughter
to New Orleans." he paused.

"The intrigue with the octoroon woman, Suzanne, came after that."

Then he added:

"You must renew your negotiations, Sir, in, a somewhat different manner
before a Spanish Grandee in Havana!"

Mr. Lucian Morrow did not reply. He stood in a sort of wonder. But
Zindorf, his face like iron, addressed my father:

"Where did you get these papers, Pendleton?" he said.

"I got them from Ordez," replied my father.

"When did you see Ordez?"

"I saw him to-day," replied my father.

Zindorf did not move, but his big jaw worked and a faint spray of
moisture came out on his face. Then, finally, with no change or quaver
in his voice, he put his query.

"Where is Ordez?"

"Where?" echoed my father, and he rose. "Why, Zindorf, he is on his
way here." And he extended his arm toward the open window. The big man
lifted his head and looked out at the men and horses now clearly visible
on the distant road.

"Who are these people," he said, "and why do they come?" He spoke as
though he addressed some present but invisible authority.

My father answered him

"They are the people of Virginia," he said, "and they come, Zindorf, in
the purpose of events that you have turned terribly backward!"

The man was in some desperate perplexity, but he had steel nerves and
the devil's courage.

He looked my father calmly in the face.

"What does all this mean?" he said.

"It means, Zindorf," cried my father, "it means that the very things,
the very particular things, that you ought to have used for the glory of
God, God has used for your damnation!"

And again, in the clear April air, there entered through the open window
the faint tolling of a bell.

"Listen, Zindorf! I will tell you. In the old abandoned church yonder,
when they came to toll the bell for Duncan, the rope fell to pieces; I
came along then, and Jacob Lance climbed into the steeple to toll the
bell by hand. At the first crash of sound a wolf ran out of a thicket
in the ravine below him, and fled away toward the mountains. Lance, from
his elevated point, could see the wolf's muzzle was bloody. That would
mean, that a lost horse had been killed or an estray steer. He called
down and we went in to see what thing this scavenger had got hold of."

He paused.

"In the cut of an abandoned road we found the body of Ordez riddled with
buckshot, and his pockets rifled. But sewed up in his coat was the silk
envelope with these papers. I took possession of them as a Justice of
the Peace, ordered the body sent on here, and the people to assemble."

He extended his arm toward the faint, quivering, distant sound.

"Listen, Zindorf," he cried; "the bell began to toll for Duncan, but
it tolls now for the murderer of Ordez. It tolls to raise the country
against the assassin!"

The false monk had the courage of his master. He stood out and faced my
father.

"But can you find him, Pendleton," he said. And his harsh voice was
firm. "You find Ordez dead; well, some assassin shot him and carried his
body into the cut of the abandoned road. But who was that assassin? Is
Virginia scant of murderers? Do you know the right one?"

My father answered in his great dominating voice

"God knows him, Zindorf, and I know him!... The man who murdered Ordez
made a fatal blunder... He used a sign of God in the service of the
devil and he is ruined!"

The big man stepped slowly backward into the room, while my father's
voice, filling the big empty spaces of the house, followed after him.

"You are lost, Zindorf! Satan is insulted, and God is outraged! You are
lost!"

There was a moment's silence; from outside came the sound of men and
horses. The notes of the girl, light, happy, ascended from the lower
chamber, as she sang about her preparations for the journey. Zindorf
continued to step awfully backward. And Lucian Morrow, shaken and sober,
cried out in the extremity of fear:

"In God's name, Pendleton, what do you mean; Zindorf, using a sign of
God in the service of the devil."

And my father answered him:

"The corpse of Ordez lay in the bare cut of the abandoned road, and
beside it, bedded in the damp clay where he had knelt down to rifle the
pockets of the murdered body, were the patch prints of Zindorf's knees!"

VII. The Fortune Teller

Sir Henry Marquis continued to read; he made no comment; his voice clear
and even.

It was a big sunny room. The long windows looked out on a formal garden,
great beech trees and the bow of the river. Within it was a sort of
library. There were bookcases built into the wall, to the height of a
man's head, and at intervals between them, rising from the floor to the
cornice of the shelves, were rows of mahogany drawers with glass knobs.
There was also a flat writing table.

It was the room of a traveler, a man of letters, a dreamer. On the
table were an inkpot of carved jade, a paperknife of ivory with gold
butterflies set in; three bronze storks, with their backs together, held
an exquisite Japanese crystal.

The room was in disorder--the drawers pulled out and the contents
ransacked.

My father stood leaning against the casement of the window, looking out.
The lawyer, Mr. Lewis, sat in a chair beside the table, his eyes on the
violated room.

"Pendleton," he said, "I don't like this English man Gosford."

The words seemed to arouse my father out of the depths of some
reflection, and he turned to the lawyer, Mr. Lewis.

"Gosford!" he echoed.

"He is behind this business, Pendleton," the lawyer, Mr. Lewis, went on.
"Mark my word! He comes here when Marshall is dying; he forces his way
to the man's bed; he puts the servants out; he locks the door. Now,
what business had this Englishman with Marshall on his deathbed? What
business of a secrecy so close that Marshall's son is barred out by a
locked door?"

He paused and twisted the seal ring on his finger.

"When you and I came to visit the sick man, Gosford was always here, as
though he kept a watch upon us, and when we left, he went always to this
room to write his letters, as he said.

"And more than this, Pendleton; Marshall is hardly in his grave before
Gosford writes me to inquire by what legal process the dead man's papers
may be examined for a will. And it is Gosford who sends a negro riding,
as if the devil were on the crupper, to summon me in the name of the
Commonwealth of Virginia,--to appear and examine into the circumstances
of this burglary.

"I mistrust the man. He used to hang about Marshall in his life, upon
some enterprise of secrecy; and now he takes possession and leadership
in his affairs, and sets the man's son aside. In what right, Pendleton,
does this adventurous Englishman feel himself secure?"

My father did not reply to Lewis's discourse. His comment was in another
quarter.

"Here is young Marshall and Gaeki," he said.

The lawyer rose and came over to the window.

Two persons were advancing from the direction of the stables--a tall,
delicate boy, and a strange old man. The old man walked with a quick,
jerky, stride. It was the old country doctor Gaeki. And, unlike any
other man of his profession, he would work as long and as carefully on
the body of a horse as he would on the body of a man, snapping out his
quaint oaths, and in a stress of effort, as though he struggled with
some invisible creature for its prey. The negroes used to say that the
devil was afraid of Gaeki, and he might have been, if to disable a man
or his horse were the devil's will. But I think, rather, the negroes
imagined the devil to fear what they feared themselves.

"Now, what could bring Gaeki here?" said Lewes.

"It was the horse that Gosford overheated in his race to you," replied
my father. "I saw him stop in the road where the negro boy was leading
the horse about, and then call young Marshall."

"It was no fault of young Marshall, Pendleton," said the lawyer. "But,
also, he is no match for Gosford. He is a dilettante. He paints little
pictures after the fashion he learned in Paris, and he has no force or
vigor in him. His father was a dreamer, a wanderer, one who loved the
world and its frivolities, and the son takes that temperament, softened
by his mother. He ought to have a guardian."

"He has one," replied my father.

"A guardian!" repeated Lewis. "What court has appointed a guardian for
young Marshall?"

"A court," replied my father, "that does not sit under the authority of
Virginia. The helpless, Lewis, in their youth and inexperience, are not
wholly given over to the spoiler."

The boy they talked about was very young--under twenty, one would say.
He was blue-eyed and fair-haired, with thin, delicate features, which
showed good blood long inbred to the loss of vigor. He had the fine,
open, generous face of one who takes the world as in a fairy story. But
now there was care and anxiety in it, and a furtive shadow, as though
the lad's dream of life had got some rude awakening.

At this moment the door behind my father and Lewis was thrown violently
open, and a man entered. He was a person with the manner of a barrister,
precise and dapper; he had a long, pink face, pale eyes, and a
close-cropped beard that brought out the hard lines of his mouth. He
bustled to the table, put down a sort of portfolio that held an inkpot,
a writing-pad and pens, and drew up a chair like one about to take the
minutes of a meeting. And all the while he apologized for his delay.
He had important letters to get off in the post, and to make sure, had
carried them to the tavern himself.

"And now, sirs, let us get about this business," he finished, like one
who calls his assistants to a labor:

My father turned about and looked at the man.

"Is your name Gosford?" he said in his cold, level voice.

"It is, sir," replied the Englishman, "--Anthony Gosford."

"Well, Mr. Anthony Gosford," replied my father, "kindly close the door
that you have opened."

Lewis plucked out his snuffbox and trumpeted in his many-colored
handkerchief to hide his laughter.

The Englishman, thrown off his patronizing manner, hesitated, closed the
door as he was bidden--and could not regain his fine air.

"Now, Mr. Gosford," my father went on, "why was this room violated as we
see it?"

"It was searched for Peyton Marshall's will, sir," replied the man.

"How did you know that Marshall had a will?" said my father.

"I saw him write it," returned the Englishman, "here in this very room,
on the eighteenth day of October, 1854."

"That was two years ago," said my father. "Was the will here at
Marshall's death?"

"It was. He told me on his deathbed."

"And it is gone now?"

"It is," replied the Englishman.

"And now, Mr. Gosford," said my father, "how do you know this will is
gone unless you also know precisely where it was?"

"I do know precisely where it was, sir," returned the man. "It was
in the row of drawers on the right of the window where you stand--the
second drawer from the top. Mr. Marshall put it there when he wrote it,
and he told me on his deathbed that it remained there. You can see, sir,
that the drawer has been rifled."

My father looked casually at the row of mahogany drawers rising along
the end of the bookcase. The second one and the one above were open; the
others below were closed.

"Mr. Gosford," he said, "you would have some interest in this will, to
know about it so precisely."

"And so I have," replied the man, "it left me a sum of money."

"A large sum?"

"A very large sum, sir."

"Mr. Anthony Gosford," said my father, "for what purpose did Peyton
Marshall bequeath you a large sum of money? You are no kin; nor was he
in your debt."

The Englishman sat down and put his fingers together with a judicial
air.

"Sir," he began, "I am not advised that the purpose of a bequest is
relevant, when the bequest is direct and unencumbered by the testator
with any indicatory words of trust or uses. This will bequeathes me a
sum of money. I am not required by any provision of the law to show the
reasons moving the testator. Doubtless, Mr. Peyton Marshall had reasons
which he deemed excellent for this course, but they are, sir, entombed
in the grave with him."

My father looked steadily at the man, but he did not seem to consider
his explanation, nor to go any further on that line.

"Is there another who would know about this will?" he said.

"This effeminate son would know," replied Gosford, a sneer in the
epithet, "but no other. Marshall wrote the testament in his own hand,
without witnesses, as he had the legal right to do under the laws of
Virginia. The lawyer," he added, "Mr. Lewis, will confirm me in the
legality of that."

"It is the law," said Lewis. "One may draw up a holograph will if he
likes, in his own hand, and it is valid without a witness in this State,
although the law does not so run in every commonwealth."

"And now, sir," continued the Englishman, turning to my father, "we will
inquire into the theft of this testament."

But my father did not appear to notice Mr. Gosford. He seemed perplexed
and in some concern.

"Lewis," he said, "what is your definition of a crime?"

"It is a violation of the law," replied the lawyer.

"I do not accept your definition," said my father. "It is, rather, I
think, a violation of justice--a violation of something behind the law
that makes an act a crime. I think," he went on, "that God must take a
broader view than Mr. Blackstone and Lord Coke. I have seen a murder
in the law that was, in fact, only a kind of awful accident, and I have
seen your catalogue of crimes gone about by feeble men with no intent
except an adjustment of their rights. Their crimes, Lewis, were merely
errors of their impractical judgment."

Then he seemed to remember that the Englishman was present.

"And now, Mr. Gosford," he said, "will you kindly ask young Marshall to
come in here?"

The man would have refused, with some rejoinder, but my father was
looking at him, and he could not find the courage to resist my father's
will. He got up and went out, and presently returned followed by the lad
and Gaeki. The old country doctor sat down by the door, his leather
case of bottles by the chair, his cloak still fastened under his chin.
Gosford went back to the table and sat down with his writing materials
to keep notes. The boy stood.

My father looked a long time at the lad. His face was grave, but when he
spoke, his voice was gentle.

"My boy," he said, "I have had a good deal of experience in the
examination of the devil's work." He paused and indicated the violated
room. "It is often excellently done. His disciples are extremely clever.
One's ingenuity is often taxed to trace out the evil design in it, and
to stamp it as a false piece set into the natural sequence of events."

He paused again, and his big shoulders blotted out the window.

"Every natural event," he continued, "is intimately connected with
innumerable events that precede and follow. It has so many serrated
points of contact with other events that the human mind is not able to
fit a false event so that no trace of the joinder will appear. The most
skilled workmen in the devil's shop are only able to give their false
piece a blurred joinder."

He stopped and turned to the row of mahogany drawers beside him.

"Now, my boy," he said, "can you tell me why the one who ransacked this
room, in opening and tumbling the contents of all the drawers, about,
did not open the two at the bottom of the row where I stand?"

"Because there was nothing in them of value, sir," replied the lad.

"What is in them?" said my father.

"Only old letters, sir, written to my father, when I was in
Paris--nothing else."

"And who would know that?" said my father.

The boy went suddenly white.

"Precisely!" said my father. "You alone knew it, and when you
undertook to give this library the appearance of a pillaged room, you
unconsciously endowed your imaginary robber with the thing you knew
yourself. Why search for loot in drawers that contained only old
letters? So your imaginary robber reasoned, knowing what you knew. But a
real robber, having no such knowledge, would have ransacked them lest he
miss the things of value that he searched for."

He paused, his eyes on the lad, his voice deep and gentle.

"Where is the will?" he said.

The white in the boy's face changed to scarlet. He looked a moment
about him in a sort of terror; then he lifted his head and put back his
shoulders. He crossed the room to a bookcase, took down a volume, opened
it and brought out a sheet of folded foolscap. He stood up and faced my
father and the men about the room.

"This man," he said, indicating Gosford, "has no right to take all my
father had. He persuaded my father and was trusted by him. But I did not
trust him. My father saw this plan in a light that I did not see it,
but I did not oppose him. If he wished to use his fortune to help our
country in the thing which he thought he foresaw, I was willing for him
to do it.

"But," he cried, "somebody deceived me, and I will not believe that it
was my father. He told me all about this thing. I had not the health
to fight for our country, when the time came, he said, and as he had
no other son, our fortune must go to that purpose in our stead. But my
father was just. He said that a portion would be set aside for me, and
the remainder turned over to Mr. Gosford. But this will gives all to Mr.
Gosford and leaves me nothing!"

Then he came forward and put the paper in my father's hand. There was
silence except for the sharp voice of Mr. Gosford.

"I think there will be a criminal proceeding here!"

My father handed the paper to Lewis, who unfolded it and read it aloud.
It directed the estate of Peyton Marshall to be sold, the sum of fifty
thousand dollars paid to Anthony Gosford and the remainder to the son.

"But there will be no remainder," cried young Marshall. "My father's
estate is worth precisely that sum. He valued it very carefully, item by
item, and that is exactly the amount it came to."

"Nevertheless," said Lewis, "the will reads that way. It is in legal
form, written in Marshall's hand, and signed with his signature, and
sealed. Will you examine it, gentlemen? There can be no question of the
writing or the signature."

My father took the paper and read it slowly, and old Gaeki nosed it over
my father's arm, his eyes searching the structure of each word, while
Mr. Gosford sat back comfortably in his chair like one elevated to a
victory.

"It is in Marshall's hand and signature," said my father, and old Gaeki,
nodded, wrinkling his face under his shaggy eyebrows. He went away still
wagging his grizzled head, wrote a memorandum on an envelope from his
pocket, and sat down in, his chair.

My father turned now to young Marshall.

"My boy," he said, "why do you say that some one has deceived you?"

"Because, sir," replied the lad, "my father was to leave me twenty
thousand dollars. That was his plan. Thirty thousand dollars should be
set aside for Mr. Gosford, and the remainder turned over to me."

"That would be thirty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, instead of
fifty," said my father.

"Yes, sir," replied the boy; "that is the way my father said he would
write his will. But it was not written that way. It is fifty thousand
dollars to Mr. Gosford, and the remainder to me. If it were thirty
thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, as my father, said his will would be,
that would have left me twenty thousand dollars from the estate; but
giving Mr. Gosford fifty thousand dollars leaves me nothing."

"And so you adventured on a little larceny," sneered the Englishman.

The boy stood very straight and white.

"I do not understand this thing," he said, "but I do not believe that my
father would deceive me. He never did deceive me in his life. I may have
been a disappointment to him, but my father was a gentle man." His voice
went up strong and clear. "And I refuse to believe that he would tell me
one thing and do another!"

One could not fail to be impressed, or to believe that the boy spoke the
truth.

"We are sorry," said Lewis, "but the will is valid and we cannot go
behind it."

My father walked about the room, his face in reflection. Gosford sat at
his ease, transcribing a note on his portfolio. Old Gaeki had gone back
to his chair and to his little case of bottles; he got them up on his
knees, as though he would be diverted by fingering the tools of his
profession. Lewis was in plain distress, for he held the law and its
disposition to be inviolable; the boy stood with a find defiance,
ennobled by the trust in his father's honor. One could not take his
stratagem for a criminal act; he was only a child, for all his twenty
years of life. And yet Lewis saw the elements of crime, and he knew that
Gosford was writing down the evidence.

It was my father who broke the silence.

"Gosford," he said, "what scheme were you and Marshall about?"

"You may wonder, sir," replied the Englishman, continuing to write at
his notes; "I shall not tell you."

"But I will tell you," said the boy. "My father thought that the states
in this republic could not hold together very much longer. He believed
that the country would divide, and the South set up a separate
government. He hoped this might come about without a war. He was in
horror of a war. He had traveled; he had seen nations and read their
history, and he knew what civil wars were. I have heard him say that men
did not realize what they were talking when they urged war."

He paused and looked at Gosford.

"My father was convinced that the South would finally set up an
independent government, but he hoped a war might not follow. He believed
that if this new government were immediately recognized by Great
Britain, the North would accept the inevitable and there would be
no bloodshed. My father went to England with this scheme. He met Mr.
Gosford somewhere--on the ship, I think. And Mr. Gosford succeeded in
convincing my father that if he had a sum of money he could win over
certain powerful persons in the English Government, and so pave the way
to an immediate recognition of the Southern Republic by Great Britain.
He followed my father home and hung about him, and so finally got
his will. My father was careful; he wrote nothing; Mr. Gosford wrote
nothing; there is no evidence of this plan; but my father told me, and
it is true."

My father stopped by the table and lifted his great shoulders.

"And so," he said, "Peyton Marshall imagined a plan like that, and left
its execution to a Mr. Gosford!"

The Englishman put down his pen and addressed my father.

"I would advise you, sir, to require a little proof for your
conclusions. This is a very pretty story, but it is prefaced by an
admission of no evidence, and it comes as a special pleading for a
criminal act. Now, sir, if I chose, if the bequest required it, I could
give a further explanation, with more substance; of moneys borrowed by
the decedent in his travels and to be returned to me. But the will, sir,
stands for itself, as Mr. Lewis will assure you."

Young Marshall looked anxiously at the lawyer.

"Is that the law, sir?"

"It is the law of Virginia," said Lewis, "that a will by a competent
testator, drawn in form, requires no collateral explanation to support
it."

My father seemed brought up in a cul-de-sac. His face was tense and
disturbed. He stood by the table; and now, as by accident, he put out
his hand and took up the Japanese crystal supported by the necks of the
three bronze storks. He appeared unconscious of the act, for he was
in deep reflection. Then, as though the weight in his hand drew his
attention, he glanced at the thing. Something about it struck him, for
his manner changed. He spread the will out on the table and began to
move the crystal over it, his face close to the glass. Presently his
hand stopped, and he stood stooped over, staring into the Oriental
crystal, like those practicers of black art who predict events from what
they pretend to see in these spheres of glass.

Mr. Gosford, sitting at his ease, in victory, regarded my father with a
supercilious, ironical smile.

"Sir," he said, "are you, by chance, a fortuneteller?"

"A misfortune-teller," replied my father, his face still held above the
crystal. "I see here a misfortune to Mr. Anthony Gosford. I predict,
from what I see, that he will release this bequest of moneys to Peyton
Marshall's son."

"Your prediction, sir," said Gosford, in a harder note, "is not likely
to come true."

"Why, yes," replied my father, "it is certain to come true. I see it
very clearly. Mr. Gosford will write out a release, under his hand and
seal, and go quietly out of Virginia, and Peyton Marshall's son will
take his entire estate."

"Sir," said the Englishman, now provoked into a temper, "do you enjoy
this foolery?"

"You are not interested in crystal-gazing, Mr. Gosford," replied my
father in a tranquil voice. "Well, I find it most diverting. Permit me
to piece out your fortune, or rather your misfortune, Mr. Gosford!
By chance you fell in with this dreamer Marshall, wormed into his
confidence, pretended a relation to great men in England; followed and
persuaded him until, in his ill-health, you got this will. You saw it
written two years ago. When Marshall fell ill, you hurried here, learned
from the dying man that the will remained and where it was. You
made sure by pretending to write letters in this room, bringing your
portfolio with ink and pen and a pad of paper. Then, at Marshall's
death, you inquired of Lewis for legal measures to discover the dead
man's will. And when you find the room ransacked, you run after the
law."

My father paused.

"That is your past, Mr. Gosford. Now let me tell your future. I see you
in joy at the recovered will. I see you pleased at your foresight in
getting a direct bequest, and at the care you urged on Marshall to leave
no evidence of his plan, lest the authorities discover it. For I see,
Mr. Gosford, that it was your intention all along to keep this sum of
money for your own use and pleasure. But alas, Mr. Gosford, it was not
to be! I see you writing this release; and Mr. Gosford"--my father's
voice went up full and strong,--"I see you writing it in terror--sweat
on your face!"

"The Devil take your nonsense!" cried the Englishman.

My father stood up with a twisted, ironical smile.

"If you doubt my skill, Mr. Gosford, as a fortune, or rather a
misfortune-teller I will ask Mr. Lewis and Herman Gaeki to tell me what
they see."

The two men crossed the room and stooped over the paper, while my father
held the crystal. The manner and the bearing of the men changed. They
grew on the instant tense and fired with interest.

"I see it!" said the old doctor, with a queer foreign expletive.

"And I," cried Lewis, "see something more than Pendleton's vision. I see
the penitentiary in the distance."

The Englishman sprang up with an oath and leaned across the table. Then
he saw the thing.

My father's hand held the crystal above the figures of the bequest
written in the body of the will. The focused lens of glass magnified
to a great diameter, and under the vast enlargement a thing that would
escape the eye stood out. The top curl of a figure 3 had been erased,
and the bar of a 5 added. One could see the broken fibers of the paper
on the outline of the curl, and the bar of the five lay across the top
of the three and the top of the o behind it like a black lath tacked
across two uprights.

The figure 3 had been changed to 5 so cunningly is to deceive the eye,
but not to deceive the vast magnification of the crystal. The thing
stood out big and crude like a carpenter's patch.

Gosford's face became expressionless like wood, his body rigid; then he
stood up and faced the three men across the table.

"Quite so!" he said in his vacuous English voice. "Marshall wrote a 3
by inadvertence and changed it. He borrowed my penknife to erase the
figure."

My father and Lewis gaped like men who see a penned-in beast slip out
through an unimagined passage. There was silence. Then suddenly, in the
strained stillness of the room, old Doctor Gaeki laughed.

Gosford lifted his long pink face, with its cropped beard bringing out
the ugly mouth.

"Why do you laugh, my good man?" he said.

"I laugh," replied Gaeki, "because a figure 5 can have so many colors."

And now my father and Lewis were no less astonished than Mr. Gosford.

"Colors!" they said, for the changed figure in the will was black.

"Why, yes," replied the old man, "it is very pretty."

He reached across the table and drew over Mr. Gosford's memorandum
beside the will.

"You are progressive, sir," he went on; "you write in iron-nutgall ink,
just made, commercially, in this year of fifty-six by Mr. Stephens. But
we write here as Marshall wrote in 'fifty-four, with logwood."

He turned and fumbled in his little case of bottles.

"I carry a bit of acid for my people's indigestions. It has other uses."
He whipped out the stopper of his vial and dabbed Gosford's notes and
Marshall's signature.

"See!" he cried. "Your writing is blue, Mr. Gosford, and Marshall's
red!"

With an oath the trapped man struck at Gaeki's hand. The vial fell and
cracked on the table. The hydrochloric acid spread out over Marshall's
will. And under the chemical reagent the figure in the bequest of fifty
thousand dollars changed beautifully; the bar of the 5 turned blue, and
the remainder of it a deep purple-red like the body of the will.

"Gaeki," cried my father, "you have trapped a rogue!"

"And I have lost a measure of good acid," replied the old man. And he
began to gather up the bits of his broken bottle from the table.

VIII. The Hole in the Mahogany Panel

Sir Henry paused a moment, his finger between the pages of the ancient
diary.

"It is the inspirational quality in these cases," he said, "that
impresses me. It is very nearly absent in our modern methods of criminal
investigation. We depend now on a certain formal routine. I rarely find
a man in the whole of Scotland Yard with a trace of intuitive impulse to
lead him.... Observe how this old justice in Virginia bridged the gaps
between his incidents."

He paused.

"We call it the inspirational instinct, in criminal investigation ...
genius, is the right word."

He looked up at the clock.

"We have an hour, yet, before the opera will be worth hearing; listen to
this final case."

The narrative of the diary follows:

The girl was walking in the road. Her frock was covered with dust. Her
arms hung limp. Her face with the great eyes and the exquisite mouth
was the chalk face of a ghost. She walked with the terrible stiffened
celerity of a human creature when it is trapped and ruined.

Night was coming on. Behind the girl sat the great old house at the end
of a long lane of ancient poplars.

This was a strange scene my father came on. He pulled up his big
red-roan horse at the crossroads, where the long lane entered the
turnpike, and looked at the stiff, tragic figure. He rode home from
a sitting of the county justices, alone, at peace, on this midsummer
night, and God sent this tragic thing to meet him.

He got down and stood under the crossroads signboard beside his horse.

The earth was dry; in dust. The dead grass and the dead leaves made
a sere, yellow world. It looked like a land of unending summer, but a
breath of chill came out of the hollows with the sunset.

The girl would have gone on, oblivious. But my father went down into the
road and took her by the arm. She stopped when she saw who it was, and
spoke in the dead, uninflected voice of a person in extremity.

"Is the thing a lie?" she said.

"What thing, child?" replied my father.

"The thing he told me!"

"Dillworth?" said my father. "Do you mean Hambleton Dillworth?"

The girl put out her free arm in a stiff, circling gesture. "In all the
world," she said, "is there any other man who would have told me?"

My father's face hardened as if of metal. "What did he tell you?"

The girl spoke plainly, frankly, in her dead voice, without
equivocation, with no choice of words to soften what she said:

"He said that my father was not dead; that I was the daughter of a
thief; that what I believed about my father was all made up to save the
family name; that the truth was my father robbed him, stole his best
horse and left the country when I was a baby. He said I was a burden on
him, a pensioner, a drone; and to go and seek my father."

And suddenly she broke into a flood of tears. Her face pressed against
my father's shoulder. He took her up in his big arms and got into his
saddle.

"My child," he said, "let us take Hambleton Dillworth at his word."

And he turned the horse into the lane toward the ancient house. The
girl in my father's arms made no resistance. There was this dominating
quality in the man that one trusted to him and followed behind him. She
lay in his arms, the tears wetting her white face and the long lashes.

The moon came up, a great golden moon, shouldered over the rim of the
world by the backs of the crooked elves. The horse and the two persons
made a black, distorted shadow that jerked along as though it were a
thing evil and persistent. Far off in the thickets of the hills an owl
cried, eerie and weird like a creature in some bitter sorrow. The lane
was deep with dust. The horse traveled with no sound, and the distorted
black shadow followed, now blotted out by the heavy tree tops, and now
only partly to be seen, but always there.

My father got down at the door and carried the girl up the steps and
between the plaster pillars into the house. There was a hall paneled
in white wood and with mahogany doors. He opened one of these doors and
went in. The room he entered had been splendid in some ancient time.
It was big; the pieces in it were exquisite; great mirrors and old
portraits were on the wall.

A man sitting behind a table got up when my father entered. Four tallow
candles, in ancient silver sticks, were on the table, and some sheets
with figured accounts.

The man who got up was like some strange old child. He wore a number of
little capes to hide his humped back, and his body, one thought, under
his clothes was strapped together. He got on his feet nimbly like a
spider, and they heard the click of a pistol lock as he whipped the
weapon out of an open drawer, as though it were a habit thus always to
keep a weapon at his hand to make him equal in stature with other men.
Then he saw who it was and the double-barreled pistol slipped out of
sight. He was startled and apprehensive, but he was not in fear.

He stood motionless behind the table, his head up, his eyes hard, his
thin mouth closed like a trap and his long, dead black hair hanging on
each side of his lank face over the huge, malformed ears. The man stood
thus, unmoving, silent, with his twisted ironical smile, while my father
put the girl into a chair and stood up behind it.

"Dillworth," said my father, "what do you mean by turning this child out
of the house?"

The man looked steadily at the two persons before him.

"Pendleton," he said, and he spoke precisely, "I do not recognize
the right of you, or any other man, to call my acts into account;
however"--and he made a curious gesture with his extended hands "not at
your command, but at my pleasure, I will tell you.

"This young woman had some estate from her mother at that lady's death.
As her guardian I invested it by permission of the court's decree." He
paused. "When the Maxwell lands were sold before the courthouse I bid
them in for my ward. The judge confirmed this use of the guardian funds.
It was done upon advice of counsel and within the letter of the law. Now
it appears that Maxwell had only a life interest in these lands; Maxwell
is dead, and one who has purchased the interest of his heirs sues in the
courts for this estate.

"This new claimant will recover; since one who buys at a judicial sale,
I find, buys under the doctrine of caveat emptor--that is to say, at his
peril. He takes his chance upon the title. The court does not insure it.
If it is defective he loses both the money and the lands. And so," he
added, "my ward will have no income to support her, and I decline to
assume that burden."

My father looked the hunchback in the face. "Who is the man bringing
this suit at law?"

"A Mr. Henderson, I believe," replied Dillworth, "from Maryland."

"Do you know him?" said my father.

"I never heard of him," replied the hunchback.

The girl, huddled in the chair, interrupted. "I have seen letters," she
said, "come in here with this man's return address at Baltimore written
on the envelope."

The hunchback made an irrelevant gesture. "The man wrote--to inquire
if I would buy his title. I declined." Then he turned to my father.
"Pendleton," he said, "you know about this matter. You know that every
step I took was legal. And with pains and care how I got an order out
of chancery to make this purchase, and how careful I was to have this
guardianship investment confirmed by the court. No affair was ever done
so exactly within the law."

"Why were you so extremely careful?" said my father.

"Because I wanted the safeguard of the law about me at every step,"
replied the man.

"But why?"

"You ask me that, Pendleton?"' cried the man. "Is not the wisdom of my
precautions evident? I took them to prevent this very thing; to protect
myself when this thing should happen!"

"Then," said my father, "you knew it was going to happen."

The man's eyes slipped about a moment in his head. "I knew it was
going to happen that I would be charged with all sorts of crimes and
misdemeanors if there should be any hooks on which to hang them. Because
a man locks his door is it proof that he knows a robber is on the way?
Human foresight and the experience of men move prudent persons to a
reasonable precaution in the conduct of affairs."

"And what is it," said my father, "that moves them to an excessive
caution?"

The hunchback snapped his fingers with an exasperated gesture. "I will
not be annoyed by your big, dominating manner!" he cried.

My father was not concerned by this defiance. "Dillworth," he said, "you
sent this child out to seek her father. Well, she took the right road to
find him."

The hunchback stepped back quickly, his face changed. He sat down in
his chair and looked up at my father. There was here suddenly uncovered
something that he had not looked for. And he talked to gain time.

"I have cast up the accounts in proper form," he said while he studied
my father, his hand moving the figured sheets. "They are correct and
settled before two commissioners in chancery. Taking out my commission
as guardian, the amounts allowed me for the maintenance and education of
the ward, and no dollar of this personal estate remains."

His long, thin hand with the nimble fingers turned the sheets over on
the table as though to conclude that phase of the affair.

"The real property," he continued, "will return nothing; the purchase
money was applied on Maxwell's debts and cannot be followed. This new
claimant, Henderson, who has bought up the outstanding title, will take
the land."

"For some trifling sum," said my father.

The hunchback nodded slowly, his eyes in a study of my father's face.

"Doubtless," he said, "it was not known that Maxwell had only a life
estate in the lands, and the remainder to the heirs was likely purchased
for some slight amount. The language of the deeds that Henderson
exhibits in his suit shows a transfer of all claim or title, as though
he bought a thing which the grantees thought lay with the uncertainties
of a decree in chancery."

"I have seen the deeds," said my father.

"Then," said the hunchback, "you know they are valid, and transfer the
title." He paused. "I have no doubt that Mr. Henderson assembled these
outstanding interests at no great cost, but his conveyances are in form
and legal."

"Everything connected with this affair," said my father, "is strangely
legal!"

The hunchback considered my father through his narrow eyelids.

"It is a strange world," he said.

"It is," replied my father. "It is profoundly, inconceivably strange."

There was a moment of silence. The two men regarded each other across
the half-length of the room. The girl sat in the chair. She had got back
her courage. The big, forceful presence of my father, like the shadow
of a great rock, was there behind her. She had the fine courage of her
blood, and, after the first cruel shock of this affair, she faced the
tragedies that might lie within it calmly.

Shadows lay along the walls of the great room, along the gilt frames of
the portraits, the empty fireplace, the rosewood furniture of ancient
make and the oak floor. Only the hunchback was in the light, behind the
four candles on the table.

"It was strange," continued my father over the long pause, "that your
father's will discovered at his death left his lands to you, and no acre
to your brother David."

"Not strange," replied the hunchback, "when you consider what my brother
David proved to be. My father knew him. What was hidden from us, what
the world got no hint of, what the man was in the deep and secret places
of his heart, my father knew. Was it strange, then, that he should leave
the lands to me?"

"It was a will drawn by an old man in his senility, and under your
control."

"Under my care," cried the hunchback. "I will plead guilty, if you like,
to that. I honored my father. I was beside his bed with loving-kindness,
while my brother went about the pleasures of his life."

"But the testament," said my father, "was in strange terms. It
bequeathed the lands to you, with no mention of the personal property,
as though these lands were all the estate your father had."

"And so they were," replied the hunchback calmly. "The lands had been
stripped of horse and steer, and every personal item, and every dollar
in hand or debt owing to my father before his death." The man paused
and put the tips of his fingers together. "My father had given to my
brother so much money from these sources, from time to time, that he
justly left me the lands to make us even."

"Your father was senile and for five years in his bed. It was you,
Dillworth, who cleaned the estate of everything but land."

"I conducted my father's business," said the hunchback, "for him, since
he was ill. But I put the moneys from these sales into his hand and he
gave them to my brother."

"I have never heard that your brother David got a dollar of this money."

The hunchback was undisturbed.

"It was a family matter and not likely to be known."

"I see it," said my father. "It was managed in your legal manner and
with cunning foresight. You took the lands only in the will, leaving the
impression to go out that your brother had already received his share
in the personal estate by advancement. It was shrewdly done. But there
remained one peril in it: If any personal property should appear under
the law you would be required to share it equally with your brother
David."

"Or rather," replied the hunchback calmly, "to state the thing
correctly, my brother David would be required to share any discovered
personal property with me." Then he added: "I gave my brother David a
hundred dollars for his share in the folderol about the premises, and
took possession of the house and lands."

"And after that," said my father, "what happened?"

The hunchback uttered a queerly inflected expletive, like a bitter
laugh.

"After that," he answered, "we saw the real man in my brother David, as
my father, old and dying, had so clearly seen it. After that he turned
thief and fugitive."

At the words the girl in the chair before my father rose. She stood
beside him, her lithe figure firm, her chin up, her hair spun darkness.
The courage, the fine, open, defiant courage of the first women of the
world, coming with the patriarchs out of Asia, was in her lifted face.
My father moved as though he would stop the hunchback's cruel speech.
But she put her fingers firmly on his arm.

"He has gone so far," she said, "let him go on to the end. Let him omit
no word, let us hear every ugly thing the creature has to say."

Dillworth sat back in his chair at ease, with a supercilious smile. He
passed the girl and addressed my father.

"You will recall the details of that robbery," he said in his
complacent, piping voice. "My brother David had married a wife, like the
guest invited in the Scriptures. A child was born. My brother lived
with his wife's people in their house. One night he came to me to borrow
money."

He paused and pointed his long index finger through the doorway and
across the hall.

"It was in my father's room that I received him. It did not please me to
put money into his hands. But I admonished him with wise counsel. He
did not receive my words with a proper brotherly regard. He flared up in
unmanageable anger. He damned me with reproaches, said I had stolen his
inheritance, poisoned his father's mind against him and slipped into the
house and lands. 'Pretentious and perfidious' is what he called me. I
was firm and gentle. But he grew violent and a thing happened."

The man put up his hand and moved it along in the air above the table.

"There was a secretary beside the hearth in my father's room. It was an
old piece with drawers below and glass doors above. These doors had not
been opened for many years, for there was nothing on the shelves behind
them--one could see that--except some rows of the little wooden boxes
that indigo used to be sold in at the country stores."

The hunchback paused as though to get the details of his story precisely
in relation.

"I sat at my father's table in the middle of the room. My brother David
was a great, tall man, like Saul. In his anger, as he gesticulated by
the hearth, his elbow crashed through the glass door of this secretary;
the indigo boxes fell, burst open on the floor, and a hidden store of my
father's money was revealed. The wooden boxes were full of gold pieces!"

He stopped and passed his fingers over his projecting chin.

"I was in fear, for I was alone in the house. Every negro was at a
distant frolic. And I was justified in that fear. My brother leaped on
me, struck me a stunning blow on the chest over the heart, gathered up
the gold, took my horse and fled. At daybreak the negroes found me on
the floor, unconscious. Then you came, Pendleton. The negroes had washed
up the litter from the hearth where the indigo about the coins in the
boxes had been shaken out."

My father interrupted:

"The negroes said the floor had been scrubbed when they found you."

"They were drunk," continued the hunchback with no concern. "And, does
one hold a drunken negro to his fact? But you saw for yourself the
wooden boxes, round, three inches high, with tin lids, and of a diameter
to hold a stack of golden eagles, and you saw the indigo still sticking
about the sides of these boxes where the coins had lain."

"I did," replied my father. "I observed it carefully, for I thought the
gold pieces might turn up sometime, and the blue indigo stain might be
on them when they first appeared."

Dillworth leaned far back in his chair, his legs tangled under him, his
eyes on my father, in reflection. Finally he spoke.

"You are far-sighted," he said.

"Or God is," replied my father, and, stepping over to the table, he spun
a gold piece on the polished surface of the mahogany board.

The hunchback watched the yellow disk turn and flit and wabble on its
base and flutter down with its tingling reverberations.

"To-day, when I rode into the county seat to a sitting of the justices,"
continued my father, "the sheriff showed me some gold eagles that your
man from Maryland, Mr. Henderson, had paid in on court costs. Look,
Dillworth, there is one of them, and with your thumb nail on the milled
edge you can scrape off the indigo!"

The hunchback looked at the spinning coin, but he did not touch it. His
head, with its long, straight hair, swung a moment uncertain between his
shoulders. Then, swiftly and with a firm grip, he took his resolution.

"The coins appear," he said. "My brother David must be in Baltimore
behind this suit."

"He is not in Baltimore," said my father.

"Perhaps you know where he is," cried the hunchback, "since you speak
with such authority."

"I do know where he is," said my father in his deep, level voice.

The hunchback got on his feet slowly beside his chair. And the girl came
into the protection of my father's arm, her features white like plaster;
but the fiber in her blood was good and she stood up to face the thing
that might be coming. After the one long abandonment to tears in my
father's saddle she had got herself in hand. She had gone, like the
princes of the blood, through the fire, and the dross of weakness was
burned out.

The hunchback got on his feet, in position like a duelist, his hard,
bitter face turned slantwise toward my father.

"Then," he said, "if you know where David is you will take his daughter
to him, if you please, and rid my house of the burden of her."

"We shall go to him," said my father slowly, "but he shall not return to
us."

The hunchback's eyes blinked and bated in the candlelight.

"You quote the Scriptures," he said. "Is David in a grave?"

"He is not," replied my father.

The hunchback seemed to advance like a duelist who parries the first
thrust of his opponent. But my father met him with an even voice.

"Dillworth," he said, "it was strange that no man ever saw your brother
or the horse after the night he visited you in this house."

"It was dark," replied the man. "He rode from this door through the gap
in the mountains into Maryland."

"He rode from this door," said my father slowly, "but not through the
gap in the mountains into Maryland."

The hunchback began to twist his fingers.

"Where did he ride then? A man and a horse could not vanish."

"They did vanish," said my father.

"Now you utter fool talk!" cried Dillworth.

"I speak the living truth," replied my father. "Your brother David and
your horse disappeared out of sound and hearing--disappeared out of the
sight and knowledge of men--after he rode away from your door on that
fatal night."

"Well," said the hunchback, "since my brother David rode away from my
door--and you know that--I am free of obligation for him."

"It is Cain's speech!" replied my father.

The hunchback put back his long hair with a swift brush of the fingers
across his forehead.

"Dillworth," cried my father, and his voice filled the empty places of
the room, "is the mark there?"

The hunchback began to curse. He walked around my father and the girl,
the hair about his lank jaws, his fingers working, his face evil. In
his front and menace he was like a weasel that would attack some larger
creature. And while he made the great turn of his circle my father, with
his arm about the girl, stepped before the drawer of the table where the
pistol lay.

"Dillworth," he said calmly, "I know where he is. And the mark you felt
for just now ought to be there."

"Fool!" cried the hunchback. "If I killed him how could he ride away
from the door?"

"It was a thing that puzzled me," replied my father, "when I stood in
this house on the morning of your pretended robbery. I knew what had
happened. But I thought it wiser to let the evil thing remain a mystery,
rather than unearth it to foul your family name and connect this child
in gossip for all her days with a crime."

"With a thief," snarled the man.

"With a greater criminal than a thief," replied My father. "I was not
certain about this gold on that morning when you showed me the empty
boxes. They were too few to hold gold enough for such a motive. I
thought a quarrel and violent hot blood were behind the thing; and for
that reason I have been silent. But now, when the coins turn up, I see
that the thing was all ruthless, cold-blooded love of money.

"I know what happened in that room. When your brother David struck the
old secretary with his elbow, and the dozen indigo boxes fell and burst
open on the hearth, you thought a great hidden treasure was uncovered.
You thought swiftly. You had got the land by undue influence on your
senile father, and you did not have to share that with your brother
David. But here was a treasure you must share; you saw it in a flash.
You sat at your father's table in the room. Your brother stood by the
wall looking at the hearth. And you acted then, on the moment, with the
quickness of the Evil One. It was cunning in you to select the body over
the heart as the place to receive the imagined blow--the head or face
would require some evidential mark to affirm your word. And it was
cunning to think of the unconscious, for in that part one could get up
and scrub the hearth and lie down again to play it."

He paused.

"But the other thing you did in that room was not so clever. A picture
was newly hung on the wall--I saw the white square on the opposite wall
from which it had been taken. It hung at the height of a man's shoulders
directly behind the spot where your brother must have stood after he
struck the secretary, and it hung in this new spot to cover the crash of
a bullet into the mahogany panel!"

My father stopped and caught up the hunchback's double-barreled pistol
out of the empty drawer.

The room was now illumined; the moon had got above the tree tops and its
light slanted in through the long windows. The hunchback saw the thing
and he paused; his face worked in the fantastic light.

"Yes," continued my father, in his deep, quiet voice, "this is your
mistake to-night--to let me get your weapon. Your mistake that other
night was to shoot before you counted the money. It was only a few
hundred dollars. The dozen wooden boxes would hold no great sum. But the
thing was done, and you must cover it."

He paused.

"And you did cover it--with fiendish cunning. It would not do for your
brother to vanish from your house, alone and with no motive. But if
he disappeared, with the gold to take him and a horse to ride, the
explanation would have solid feet to go on. I give you credit here for
the ingenuity of Satan. You managed the thing. You caused your brother
David and the horse to vanish. I saw, on that morning, the tracks of
the horse where you led him from the stable to the door, and his tracks
where you led him, holding the dead man in the saddle, from the door to
the ancient orchard where the grass grows over the fallen-down chimney
of your grandsire's house. And there, at your cunning, they wholly
vanished."

The mad courage in the hunchback got control, and he began to advance on
my father with no weapon and with no hope to win. His fingers crooked,
his body in a bow, his wizen, cruel face pallid in the ghostly light.

"Dillworth," cried my father, in a great voice, like one who would
startle a creature out of mania, "you will write a deed in your
legal manner granting these lands to your brother's child. And after
that"--his words were like the blows of a hammer on an anvil--"I will
give you until daybreak to vanish out of our sight and hearing--through
the gap in the mountains into Maryland on your horse, as you say your
brother David went, or into the abandoned cistern in the ancient orchard
where he lies under the horse that you shot and tumbled in on his
murdered body!"

The moon was now above the gable of the house. The candles were burned
down. They guttered around the sheet of foolscap wet with the scrawls
and splashes of Dillworth's quill. My father stood at a window looking
out, the girl in a flood of tears, relaxed and helpless, in the
protection of his arm.

And far down the long turnpike, white like an expanded ribbon, the
hunchback rode his great horse in a gallop, perched like a monkey,
his knees doubled, his head bobbing, his loose body rolling in the
saddle--while the black, distorted shadow that had followed my father
into this tragic house went on before him like some infernal messenger
convoying the rider to the Pit.

IX. The End of the Road

The man laughed.

It was a faint cynical murmur of a laugh. Its expression hardly
disturbed the composition of his features.

"I fear, Lady Muriel," he said, "that your profession is ruined. Our
friend--'over the water'--is no longer concerned about the affairs of
England."

The woman fingered at her gloves, turning them back about the wrists.
Her face was anxious and drawn.

"I am rather desperately in need of money," she said.

The cynicism deepened in the man's face.

"Unfortunately," he replied, "a supply of money cannot be influenced by
the intensity of one's necessity for it."

He was a man indefinite in age. His oily black hair was brushed
carefully back. His clothes were excellent, with a precise detail.
Everything about him was conspicuously correct in the English fashion.
But the man was not English. One could not say from what race he
came. Among the races of Southern Europe he could hardly have been
distinguished. There was a chameleon quality strongly dominant in the
creature.

The woman looked up quickly, as in a strong aversion.

"What shall you do?" she said.

"I?"

The man glanced about the room. There was a certain display within
the sweep of his vision. Some rugs of great value, vases and bronzes;
genuine and of extreme age. He made a careless gesture with his hands.

"I shall explore some ruins in Syria, and perhaps the aqueduct which the
French think carried a water supply to the Carthage of Hanno. It will
be convenient to be beyond British inquiry for some years to come; and
after all, I am an antiquarian, like Prosper Merimee."

Lady Muriel continued to finger her gloves. They had been cleaned and
the cryptic marks of the shopkeeper were visible along the inner side of
the wrist hem. This was, to the woman, the first subterfuge of decaying
smartness. When a woman began to send her gloves to the laundry she
was on her way down. Other evidences were not entirely lacking in the
woman's dress, but they were not patent to the casual eye. Lady Muriel
was still, to the observer, of the gay top current in the London world.

The woman followed the man's glance about the room.

"You must be rich, Hecklemeir," she said. "Lend me a hundred pounds."

The man laughed again in his queer chuckle.

"Ah, no, my Lady," he replied, "I do not lend." Then he added.

"If you have anything of value, bring it to me.... not information
from the ministry, and not war plans; the trade in such commodities is
ended."

It was the woman's turn to laugh.

"The shopkeepers in Oxford Street have been before you, Baron.. .. I've
nothing to sell."

Hecklemeir smiled, kneading his pudgy hands.

"It will be hard to borrow," he said. "Money is very dear to the
Britisher just now--right against his heart.... Still.... perhaps one's
family could be thumb screwed......An elderly relative with no children
would be the most favorable, I think. Have you got such a relative
concealed somewhere in a nook of London? Think about it. If you could
recall one, he would be like a buried nut."

The man paused; then he added, with the offensive chuckling laugh:

"Go to such an one, Lady Muriel. Who shall turn aside from virtue
in distress? Perhaps, in the whole of London, I alone have the
brutality--shall we call it--to resist that spectacle."

The woman rose. Her face was now flushed and angry.

"I do not know of any form of brutality in which you do not excel,
Hecklemeir," she said. "I have a notion to, go to Scotland Yard with the
whole story of your secret traffic."

The man continued to smile.

"Alas, my Lady," he replied, "we are coupled together. Scotland Yard
would hardly separate us.... you could scarcely manage to drown me and,
keep afloat yourself. Dismiss the notion; it is from the pit."

There was no virtue in her threat as the woman knew. Already her mind
was on the way that Hecklemeir had ironically suggested--an elderly
relative, with no children, from whom one might borrow,--she valued
the ramifications of her family, running out to the remote, withered
branches of that noble tree. She appraised the individuals and rejected
them.

Finally her searching paused.

There was her father's brother who had gone in for science--deciding
against the army and the church--Professor Bramwell Winton, the
biologist. He lived somewhere toward Covent Garden.

She had not thought of him for years. Occasionally his name appeared in
some note issued by the museum, or a college at Oxford.

For almost four years she had been relieved of this thought about one's
family. The one "over the water" for whom Hecklemeir had stolen the
Scottish toast to designate, had paid lavishly for what she could find
out.

She had been richly, for these four years, in funds.

The habit was established of dipping her hand into the dish. And now
to find the dish empty appalled her. She could not believe that it was
empty. She had come again, and again to this apartment above the shops
in Regent Street, selected for its safety of ingress; a modiste and a
hairdresser on either side of a narrow flight of steps.

A carriage could stop here; one could be seen here.

Even on the right, above, at the landing of the flight of steps Nance
Coleen altered evening gowns with the skill of one altering the plumage
of the angels. It must have cost the one "over the water" a pretty penny
to keep this whole establishment running through four years of war.

She spoke finally.

"Have you a directory of London, Hecklemeir?"

The man had been watching her closely.

"If it is Scotland Yard, my Lady," he said, "you will not require a
direction. I can give you the address. It is on the Embankment,
near..."

"Don't be a fool, Hecklemeir," she interrupted, and taking the book from
his hands, she whipped through the pages, got the address she sought,
and went out onto the narrow landing and down the steps into Regent
Street:

She took a hansom.

With some concern she examined the contents of her purse. There was a
guinea, a half crown and some shillings in it--the dust of the bin. And
her profession, as Hecklemeir had said, was ended.

She leaned over, like a man, resting her arms on the closed doors.

The future looked troublous. Money was the blood current in the life she
knew. It was the vital element. It must be got.

And thus far she had been lucky.

Even in this necessity Bramwell Winton had emerged, when she could not
think of any one. He would not have much. These scientific creatures
never accumulated money, but he would have a hundred pounds. He had no
wife or children to scatter the shillings of his income.

True these creatures spent a good deal on the absurd rubbish of their
hobbies. But they got money sometimes, not by thrift but by a sort of
chance. Had not one of them, Sir Isaac Martin, found the lost mines from
which the ancient civilization of Syria drew its supply of copper. And
Hector Bartlett, little more than a mummy in the Museum, had gone one
fine day into Asia and dug up the gold plates that had roofed a temple
of the Sun.

He had been shown in the drawing rooms, on his return, and she had
stopped a moment to look him over--he was a sort of mummy. She was not
hoping to find Bramwell Winton one of these elect. But he was a hive
that had not been plundered.

She reflected, sitting bent forward in the hansom, her face determined
and unchanging. She did not undertake to go forward beyond the hundred
pounds. Something would turn up. She was lucky... others had gone to
the tower; gone before the firing squad for lesser activities in
what Hecklemeir called her profession, but she had floated through...
carrying what she gleaned to the paymaster. Was it skill, or was she a
child of Fortune?

And like every gambler, like every adventurer in a life of hazard, she
determined for the favorite of some immense Fatality.

It was an old house she came to, built in the prehistoric age of London,
with thick, heavy walls, one of a row, deadly in its monotony. The row
was only partly tenanted.

She dismissed the hansom and got out.

It was a moment before she found the number. The houses adjoining on
either side were empty, the windows were shuttered. One might have
considered the middle house with the two, for its step was unscrubbed,
and it presented unwashed windows.

It was a heavy, deep-walled structure like a monument. Even the
street in the vicinity was empty. If the biologist had been seeking an
undisturbed quarter of London, he had, beyond doubt, found it here.

There was a bridged-over court before the house. Lady Muriel crossed.
She paused before the door. There had been a bell pull in the wall, but
the brass handle was broken and only the wire remained.

She was uncertain whether one was supposed to pull this wire, and in
the hesitation she took hold of the door latch. To her surprise the door
yielded, and following the impulse of her extended hand, she went in.

The hall was empty. There was no servant to be seen. And immediately the
domestic arrangement of the biologist were clear to her. They would be
that of one who had a cleaning woman in on certain days, and so lived
alone. She was not encouraged by this economy, and yet such a custom in
a man like Bramwell Winton might be habit.

The scientist, in the popular conception, was not concerned with the
luxury of life--they were a rum lot.

But the house was not empty. A smart hat and stick were in the rack and
from what should be a drawing room, above, there descended faintly the
sound of voices.

It seemed ridiculous to Lady Muriel to go out and struggle with the
broken bell wire. She would go up, now that she had entered, and
announce herself, since, in any event, it must come to that.

The heavy oak door closed without a sound, as it had opened. Lady Muriel
went up the stairway. She had nothing to put down. The only thing she
carried was a purse, and lest it should appear suggestive--as of one
coming with his empty wallet in his hand--she tucked the gold mesh into
the bosom of her jacket.

The door to the drawing room was partly open, and as Lady Muriel
approached the top of the stair she heard the voices of two men in an
eager colloquy; a smart English accent from the world that she was so
desperately endeavoring to remain in, and a voice that paused and
was unhurried. But they were both eager, as I have written, as though
commonly impulsed by an unusual concern.

And now that she was near, Lady Muriel realized that the conversation
was not low or under uttered. The smart voice was, in fact, loud and
incisive. It was the heavy house that reduced the sounds. In fact, the
conversation was keyed up. The two men were excited about something.

A sentence arrested the woman's advancing feet.

"My word! Bramwell, if some one should go there and bring the things
out, he would make a fortune, and would be famous. Nobody ever believed
these stories."

"There was Le Petit, Sir Godfrey," replied the deliberate voice. "He
declared over his signature that he had seen them."

"But who believed Le Petit," continued the other. "The world took him
to be a French imaginist like Chateaubriand... who the devil, Bramwell,
supposed there was any truth in this old story? But by gad, sir, it's
true! The water color shows it, and if you turn it over you will see
that the map on the back of it gives the exact location of the spot.
It's all exact work, even the fine lines of the map have the bearings
indicated. The man who made that water color, and the drawing on the
back of it, had been on the spot.

"Of course, we don't know conclusively who made it. Tony had gone in
from the West coast after big game, and he found the thing put up as
a sort of fetish in a devil house. It was one of the tribes near the
Karamajo range. As I told you, we have only Tony's diary for it. I found
the thing among his effects after he was killed in Flanders. It's pretty
certain Tony did not understand the water color. There was only this
single entry in the diary about how he found it, and a query in pencil.

"My word! if he had understood the water color, he would have beaten
over every foot of Africa to Lake Leopold. And it would have been the
biggest find of his time. Gad! what a splash he'd have made! But he
never had any luck, the beggar... stopped a German bullet in the first
week out.

"Now, how the devil, Bramwell, do you suppose that water color got into
a native medicine house?"

The reflective voice replied slowly.

"I've thought about the thing, Sir Godfrey. It must have been the work
of the Holland explorer, Maartin. He was all about in Africa, and he
died in there somewhere, at least he never came out... that was ten
years ago. I've looked him up, and I find that he could do a water
color--in fact there's a collection of his water colors in, the Dutch
museum. They're very fine work, like this one; exquisite, I'd say. The
fellow was born an artist.

"How it got into the hands of a native devil doctor is not difficult
to imagine. The sleeping sickness may have wiped Maartin out, or the
natives may have rushed his camp some morning, or he may have been
mauled by a beast. Any article of a white man is medicine stuff you
know. When you first showed me the thing I was puzzled. I knew what
it was because I had read Le Petit's pretension... I can't call it a
pretension now; the things are there whether he saw them or not.

"I think he did not see them. But it is certain from this water color
that some one did; and Maartin is the only explorer that could have done
such a color. As soon as I thought of Maartin I knew the thing could
have been done by no other."

Lady Muriel had remained motionless on the stair. The door to the
drawing room, before her, was partly open. She stepped in to the angle
of the wall and drew the door slowly back until it covered this angle in
which she stood.

She was rich in such experiences, for her success had depended, not a
little, on overhearing what was being said. Through the crack of the
door the whole interior of the room was visible.

Sir Godfrey Halleck, a little dapper man, was sitting across the table
from Bramwell Winton. His elbows were on the table, and he was looking
eagerly at the biologist. Bramwell Winton had in his hands the thing
under discussion.

It seemed to be a piece of cardboard or heavy paper about six inches in
length by, perhaps, four in width. Lady Muriel could not see what was
drawn or painted on this paper. But the heart in her bosom quickened.
She had chanced on the spoor of something worth while.

The little dapper man flung his head up.

"Oh, it's certain, Bramwell; it's beyond any question now. My word!
If Tony were only alive, or I twenty years younger! It's no great
undertaking, to go in to the Karamajo Mountains. One could start from
the West Coast, unship any place and pick up a bunch of natives. The map
on the back of the water color is accurate. The man who made that knew
how to travel in an unknown country. He must have had a theodolite and
the very best equipment. Anybody could follow that map."

There was a battered old dispatch box on the table beside Sir Godfrey's
arm--one that had seen rough service.

"Of course," he went on, "we don't know when Tony picked up this
drawing. It was in this box here with his diary, an automatic pistol and
some quinine. The date of the diary entry is the only clue. That would
indicate that he was near the Karamajo range at the time, not far from
the spot."

He snapped his fingers.

"What damned luck!"

He clinched his hands and brought them down on the table.

"I'm nearly seventy, Bramwell, but you're ten years under that. You
could go in. No one need know the object of your expedition. Hector
Bartlett didn't tell the whole of England when he went out to Syria for
the gold plates. A scientist can go anywhere. No one wonders what he is
about. It wouldn't take three months. And the climate isn't poisonous. I
think it's mostly high ground. Tony didn't complain about it."

The biologist answered without looking up.

"I haven't got the money, Sir Godfrey."

The dapper little man jerked his head as over a triviality.

"I'll stake you. It wouldn't cost above five hundred pounds."

The biologist sat back in his chair, at the words, and looked over the
table at his guest.

"That's awfully decent of you, Godfrey," he said, "and I'd go if I saw a
way to get your money to you if anything happened."

"Damn the money!" cried the other.

The biologist smiled.

"Well," he said, "let me think about it. I could probably fix up some
sort of insurance. Lloyd's will bet nearly any sane man that he won't
die for three months. And besides I should wish to look things up a
little."

Sir Godfrey rose.

"Oh, to be sure," he said, "you want to make certain about the thing. We
might be wrong. I hadn't an idea what it was until I brought it to you,
and of course Tony hadn't an idea. Make certain of it by all means."

The biologist extended his long legs under the table. He indicated the
water color in his hand.

"This thing's certain," he said. "I know what this thing is."

He rapped the water color with the fingers of his free hand.

"This thing was painted on the spot. Maartin was looking at this thing
when he painted it. You can see the big shadows underneath. No living
creature could have imagined this or painted it from hearsay. He had to
see it. And he did see it. I wasn't thinking about this, Godfrey. I was
thinking the Dutch government might help a bit in the hope of finding
some trace of Maartin and I should wish to examine any information they
might have about him."

"Damn the Dutch government!" cried the little man. "And damn Lloyd's. We
will go it on our own hook."

The biologist smiled.

"Let me think about it, a little," he said.

The dapper man flipped a big watch out of his waistcoat pocket.

"Surely!" he cried, "I must get the next train up. Have you got a place
to lock the stuff? I had to cut this lid open with a chisel."

He indicated the tin dispatch box.

"Better keep it all. You'll want to run through the diary, I imagine.
Tony's got down the things explorer chaps are always keen about;
temperature, water supply, food and all that..... Now, I'm off. See you
Thursday afternoon at the United Service Club. Better lunch with me."

Then he pushed the dispatch box across the table. The biologist rose and
turned back the lid of the box. The contents remained as Sir Godfrey's
dead son had left them; a limp leather diary, an automatic pistol of
some American make, a few glass tubes of quinine, packed in cotton wool.

He put the water color on the bottom of the box and replaced them.

Then he took the dispatch box over to an old iron safe at the farther
end of the room, opened it, set the box within, locked the door, and,
returning, thrust the key under a pile of journals on the corner of the
table. Then he went out, and down the stairway with his guest to the
door.

They passed within a finger touch of Lady Muriel.

The woman was quick to act. There would be no borrowing from Bramwell
Winton. He would now, with this expedition on the way, have no penny for
another. But here before her, as though arranged by favor of Fatality,
was something evidently of enormous value that she could cash in to
Hecklemeir.

There was fame and fortune on the bottom of that dispatch box.

Something that would have been the greatest find of the age to Tony
Halleck... something that the biologist, clearly from his words and
manner, valued beyond the gold plates of Sir Hector Bartlett.

It was a thing that Hecklemeir would buy with money... the very thing
which he would be at this opportune moment interested to purchase. She
saw it in the very first comprehensive glance.

Her luck was holding Fortune was more than favorable, merely. It
exercised itself actively, with evident concern, in her behalf.

Lady Muriel went swiftly into the room. She slipped the key from under
the pile of journals and crossed to the safe sitting against the wall.

It was an old safe of some antediluvian manufacture and the lock was
worn. The stem of the key was smooth and it slipped in her gloved hands.
She could not hold it firm enough to turn the lock. Finally with her
bare fingers and with one hand to aid the other she was able to move the
lock and so open the safe.

She heard the door to the street close below, and the faint sound of
Bramwell Winton's footsteps as though he went along the hall into the
service portion of the house. She was nervous and hurried, but this
reassured her.

The battered dispatch box sat within on the empty bottom of the a safe.

She lifted the lid; an automatic pistol lay on a limp leather-backed
journal, stained, discolored and worn. Lady Muriel slipped her hand
under these articles and lifted out the thing she sought.

Even in the pressing haste of her adventure, the woman could not forbear
to look at the thing upon which these two men set so great a value. She
stopped then a moment on her knees beside the safe, the prized article
in her hands.

A map, evidently drawn with extreme care, was before her. She glanced
at it hastily and turned the thing quickly over. What she saw amazed and
puzzled her. Even in this moment of tense emotions she was astonished:
She saw a pool of water,--not a pool of water in the ordinary sense--but
a segment of water, as one would take a certain limited area of the
surface of the sea or a lake or river. It was amber-colored and as
smooth as glass, and on the surface of this water, as though they
floated, were what appeared to be three, reddish-purple colored flowers,
and beneath them on the bottom of the water were huge indistinct
shadows.

The water was not clear to make out the shadows. But the appearing
flowers were delicately painted. They stood out conspicuously on the
glassy surface of the water as though they were raised above it.

Amazement held the woman longer than she thought, over this
extraordinary thing. Then she thrust it into the bosom of her jacket,
fastening the button securely over it.

The act kept her head down. When she lifted it Bramwell Winton was
standing in the door.

In terror her hand caught up the automatic pistol out of the tin box.
She acted with no clear, no determined intent. It was a gesture of fear
and of indecision; escape through menace was perhaps the subconscious
motive; the most primitive, the most common motive of all creatures in
the corner. It extends downward from the human mind through all life.

To spring up, to drag the veil over her face with her free hand, and to
thrust the weapon at the figure in the doorway was all simultaneous and
instinctive acts in the expression of this primordial impulse of escape
through menace.

Then a thing happened.

There was a sharp report and the figure standing in the doorway swayed
a moment and fell forward into the room. The unconscious gripping of the
woman's fingers had fired the pistol.

For a moment Lady Muriel stood unmoving, arrested in every muscle by
this accident. But her steady wits--skilled in her profession--did not
wholly desert her. She saw that the man was dead. There was peril in
that--immense, uncalculated peril, but the prior and immediate peril,
the peril of discovery in the very accomplishment of theft, was by this
act averted.

She stooped over, her eyes fixed on the sprawling body and with her free
hand closed the door of the safe. Then she crossed the room, put the
pistol down on the floor near the dead man's hand and went out.

She went swiftly down the stairway and paused a moment at the door to
look out. The street was empty. She hurried away.

She met no one. A cab in the distance was appearing. She hailed it as
from a cross street and returned to Regent. It was characteristic of the
woman that her mind dwelt upon the spoil she carried rather than upon
the act she had done.

She puzzled at the water color. How could these things be flowers?

Bramwell Winton was a biologist; he would not be concerned with flowers.
And Sir Godfrey Halleck and his son Tony, the big game hunter, were
not men to bother themselves with blossoms. Sir Godfrey, as she now
remembered vaguely, had, like his dead son, been a keen sportsman in his
youth; his country house was full of trophies.

She carried buttoned in the bosom of her jacket something that these men
valued. But, what was it? Well, at any rate it was something that would
mean fame and fortune to the one who should bring it out of Africa. That
one would now be Hecklemeir, and she should have her share of the spoil.

Lady Muriel found the drawing-room of her former employer in some
confusion; rugs were rolled up, bronzes were being packed. But in the
disorder of it the proprietor was imperturbable. He merely elevated his
eyebrows at her reappearance. She went instantly to the point.

"Hecklemeir," she said, "how would you like to have a definite objective
in your explorations?"

The man looked at her keenly.

"What do you mean precisely?" he replied.

"I mean," she continued, "something that would bring one fame and
fortune if one found it." And she added, as a bit of lure, "You remember
the gold plates Hector Bartlett dug up in Syria?"

He came over closer to her; his little eyes narrowed.

"What have you got?" he said.

His facetious manner--that vulgar persons imagine to be
distinguished--was gone out of him. He was direct and simple.

She replied with no attempt at subterfuge.

"I've got a map of a route to some sort of treasure--I don't know
what--It's in the Karamajo Mountains in the French Congo; a map to it
and a water color of the thing."

Hecklemeir did not ask how Lady Muriel came by the thing she claimed;
his profession always avoided such detail. But he knew that she had gone
to Bramwell Winton; and what she had must have come from some scientific
source. The mention of Hector Bartlett was not without its virtue.

Lady Muriel marked the man's changed manner, and pushed her trade.

"I want a check for a hundred pounds and a third of the thing when you
bring it out."

Hecklemeir stood for a moment with the tips of his fingers pressed
against his lips; then replied.

"If you have anything like the thing you describe, I'll give you a
hundred pounds... let me see it."

She took the water color out of the bosom of her jacket and gave it to
him.

He carried it over to the window and studied it a moment. Then he turned
with a sneering oath.

"The devil take your treasure," he said, "these things are
water-elephants. I don't care a farthing if they stand on the bottom of
every lake in Africa!"

And he flung the water color toward her. Mechanically the stunned woman
picked it up and smoothed it out in her fingers.

With the key to the picture she saw it clearly, the shadowy bodies of
the beasts and the tips of their trunks distended on the surface like
a purple flower. And vaguely, as though it were a memory from a
distant life, she recalled hearing the French Ambassador and Baron Rudd
discussing the report of an explorer who pretended to have seen these
supposed fabulous elephants come out of an African forest and go down
under the waters of Lake Leopold.

She stood there a moment, breaking the thing into pieces with her bare
hands. Then she went out. At the door on the landing she very nearly
stepped against a little cockney.

"My Lidy," he whined, "I was bringing your gloves; you dropped them on
your way up."

She took them mechanically and began to draw them on... the cryptic
sign of the cleaner on the wrist hem was now to her indicatory of
her submerged estate. The little cockney hung about a moment as for a
gratuity delayed, then he disappeared down the stair before her.

She went slowly down, fitting the gloves to her fingers.

Midway of the flight she paused. The voice of the little cockney, but
without the accent, speaking to a Bobby standing beside the entrance
reached her.

"It was Sir Henry Marquis who set the Yard to register all laundry marks
in London. Great C. I. D. Chief, Sir Henry!"

And Lady Muriel remembered that she had removed these gloves in order to
turn the slipping key in Bramwell Winton's safe lock.

X.-The Last Adventure

The talk had run on treasure.

I could not sleep and my friends had dropped in. I had the big South
room on the second floor of the Hotel de Paris. It looks down on the
Casino and the Mediterranean. Perhaps you know it.

Queer friends, you'd say. Every man-jack of them a gambler. But when one
begins to sit about all night with his eyes open, the devil's a friend.

Barclay was standing before the fire. The others had drifted out. He's
a big man pitted with the smallpox. He made a gesture, flinging out his
hand toward the door.

"That bunch thinks there's a curse on treasure, Sir Henry. That's one of
the oldest notions in the world... it's unlucky."

"But I know where there's a treasure that's not unlucky. At least it was
not unlucky for poor Charlie Tavor. He did not get it, but there was no
curse on it that reached to him. It helped poor Charlie finish in style.
He died like a lord in a big country house, with a formal garden and a
line of lackeys."

Barclay paused.

"Queer chap, Tavor. He was the best all round explorer in the world. I
bar nobody. Charlie Tavor could take a nigger and cross the poisonous
plateau south west of the Libyan desert. I've backed him. I know... but
he had no business sense, anybody could fool him. He found the stock of
bar silver on the west face of the Andes that made old Nute Hardman a
quarter of a million dollars, clear, after the cursed beast had split it
a half dozen ways with a crooked South American government."

Barclay's teeth set and he jerked up his clinched hand.

"It was a damned steal, Sir Henry. A piece of low down, dirty robbery;
and it was like taking candy away from a child.... 'Sign here, Mr.
Tavor,' and Charlie would scrawl on his fist.. .. Some people think
there's no hell, but what's God Almighty going to do with Old Nute?"

He flung out his hand again.

"Still the thing didn't dent Charlie. He never missed a step. 'Don't
bother, Barclay, old man,' he'd say, 'I'll find something else,' and
then he'd go off into this dream he had of coming back when he'd struck
it, to the old home county in England and laying it over the bunch that
had called him 'no good.' He never talked much, but I gathered from odds
and ends that he was the black sheep in a pretty smart flock.

"Then, I'd stake him to a cheap outfit--not much, I've said he could
push through the Libyan desert with a nigger--and he'd drop out of
the world. It wasn't charity. I got my money's worth. The clay pots he
brought me from Yucatan would sell any day for more cash than I ever
advanced him."

Barclay moved a little before the fire. I was listening in a big chair,
my feet extended toward the hearth; a smoking jacket had replaced my
dinner coat.

"It was five years ago, in London," Barclay went on, "that I fitted
Charlie out for his last adventure. He wanted to land in the gulf of
Pe-chi-li and go into the great desert of the Shamo in Central Mongolia.
You'll find the Shamo all dotted out on the maps; but it's faked dope.
No white man knows anything about the Shamo.

"It's a trick to lay off these great waste areas and call them elevated
plateaus or sunken plateaus. You can't go by the atlas. Where's Kane's
Open Polar Sea and Morris K. Jessup's Land? Still, Charlie thought the
Shamo might be a low plain, and he thought he might find something in
it. You see the great gold caravans used to cross it, three thousand
years ago... and as Charlie kept saying, 'What's time in the Shamo?'

"Well, I bought him a kit of stuff, and he took a P. and O. through the
Suez. I got a long letter from Pekin two months later; and then Charlie
Tavor dropped out of the world. I went back to America. No word ever
came from Charlie. I thought he was dead. I suppose a white man's life
is about the cheapest thing there is northwest of the Yellow River; and
Charlie never had an escort. A coolie and an old service pistol would
about foot up his defenses.

"And there's every ghastly disease in Mongolia.... Still some word
always came from Tavor inside of a year; a tramp around the Horn would
bring in a dirty note, written God knows where, and carried out to the
ship by a naked native swimming with the thing in his teeth; or some
little embassy would send it to me in a big official envelope stamped
with enough red wax to make a saint's candle.

"But the luck failed this time. A year ran on, then two, then three and
I passed Charlie up. He'd surely 'gone west!'"

Barclay paused, thrust his hands into the pockets of his dinner jacket
and looked down at me.

"One night in New York I got a call from the City Hospital. The
telephone message came in about ten o'clock. I was in Albany; I found
the message when I got back the following morning and I went ever to the
hospital.

"The matron said that they had picked up a man on the North River docks
in an epileptic fit and the only name they could find on him was my New
York address. They thought he was going to die, he was cold and stiff
for hours, and they had undertaken to reach me in order to identify him.
But he did not die. He was up this morning and she would bring him in."

Barclay paused again.

"She brought in Charlie Tavor!... And I nearly screamed when I saw the
man. He was dressed in one of those cheap hand-me-downs that the Germans
used to sell in the tropics for a pound, three and six, his eyes looked
as dead as glass and he was as white as plaster. How the man managed to
keep on his feet I don't know.

"I didn't stop for any explanation. I got Tavor into a taxi, and over to
my apartment."

Barclay moved in his position before the fire.

"But on the way over a thing happened that some little god played in
for a joke. There was a block just where Thirty-third crosses into Fifth
Avenue, and our taxi pulled up by a limousine."

Barclay suddenly thrust out his big pock-marked face.

"The thing couldn't have happened by itself. Some burlesque angel put
it over when the Old Man wasn't looking. Spread out on the tapestry
cushions of that limousine was Nute Hardman!

"There they were side by side. Not six feet apart; Old Nute in a
sable-lined coat and Charlie in his hand-me-down, at a pound, three and
six."

The muscles in Barclay's big jaw tightened.

"Maybe there is a joker that runs the world, and maybe the devil runs
it. Anyhow it's a queer system. Here was Charlie Tavor, straight as a
string, down and out. And here was Nute Hardman, so crooked that a fly
couldn't light on him and stand level, with everything that money could
buy.

"I cast it up while the taxi stood there beside the car. Nute was consul
in a South American port that you couldn't spell and couldn't find on
the map. He didn't have two dollars to rub together, until Charlie Tavor
turned up. There he sat, out of the world, forgotten, growing moss and
getting ready to rot; and God Almighty, or the devil, or whatever it is,
steered Charlie Tavor in to him with the bar silver.

"He picked Charlie to the bone and cut for the States. And this damned
crooked luck went right along with him. He was in a big apartment, now,
up on Fifth Avenue and four-flushing toward every point of the
compass. His last stunt was 'patron of science.' He'd gotten into the
Geographical Society, and he was laying lines for the Royal Society in
London. He had a Harvard don working over in the Metropolitan library,
building him a thesis!

"The thing made me ugly. I wanted to have a plain talk with the devil.
He wasn't playing fair. Old Nute couldn't have been worth the whole run
of us; I've legged some myself, and I had a right to be heard. The devil
ought to make old Nute split up with Charlie. True, Charlie belonged in
the other camp, but I didn't. And if I wanted a little favor I felt that
the devil ought to come across with it... I put it up to him, or down to
him, as you'd say, while I sat there in that taxi."

There was a grim energy in Barclay's face. He was no ordinary person.

"I got Tavor up to my apartment, and a goblet of brandy in him. I never
saw anybody look like Tavor as he sat there propped up in the chair with
a lot of cushions around him. It was winter and cold. He had no clothes
to speak of, but he did not seem to notice either the cold outside or
the heat in the apartment, as though, somehow, he couldn't tell the
difference.

"And he was the strangest color that any human being ever was in the
world. I've said that he looked like plaster, and he did look like it,
but he looked like a plaster man with a thin coat of tan colored paint
on him."

Barclay paused.

"It's hardly a wonder that no message reached me. The devil couldn't
have got word out of the hell land he'd been in. Lost is no name for it.
He'd been all over the Shamo, and the big Sahara's a park to it. He'd
been North to the Kangai where they used to get the gold that the
caravans carried across the Shamo, and he'd followed the old trails
South to the great wall.

"It's all a Satan's country. I don't know why God Almighty wanted to
make a hell hole like the Shamo!"

He paused, then he went on.

"But it wasn't in the Shamo that Tavor got track of the thing he was
after. He said that the age he was trying to get back into was much
more remote than he imagined. It must have been a good many thousands
of years ago. He couldn't tell; long before anything like dependable
history at any rate.... There must have been an immense age of great
oriental splendor in the South of Asia and along the East African coast,
dying out at about the time our knowledge of human history begins."