Notwithstanding, after all these intermediate buffetings, it was only the ultimate disappointment which was reserved for the man who had come two thousand miles out of his way for a five-minute talk with a young woman. Almost at the last moment he found her, and in the same moment was made to realize that the similarity in handwriting was only a similarity. Miss Sanborn had been a passenger on the Belle Julie, boarding the steamboat at New Orleans and debarking at St. Louis. But she had known nothing of the Bayou State Security robbery until she had read of it in the newspapers; and one glance into the steadfast blue eyes that met his without flinching convinced Broffin that once more he had fired and missed.

Number Two in the list of seven being thus laboriously eliminated, Broffin, to be utterly consistent, should have boarded the first train for Minnesota. But inasmuch as three of the remaining five addresses were west of the Missouri River, he sacrificed consistency to common-sense, halting at a little town in the Colorado mountains, again at Pueblo, and a third time at Hastings, Nebraska only to find at each stopping-place that the ultimate disappointment had preceded and was waiting for him.

With his list cancelled down to two names, he resumed the eastward flight from the Nebraska town and was again beset by the devil of indecision. The two place-names remaining were Wahaska and a small coal-mining town in southern Iowa. Measuring again by railroad hours, he found that the Iowa town was the nearer; but, on the other hand, there were good connections from Omaha to Wahaska, and a rather poor one to the coal mines. Once more Broffin took the gambler's chance, spinning the coin in his hat, heads for Iowa and tails for Minnesota. It came heads; and the following day recorded the sixth in the string of failures.

Leaving What Cheer in the caboose of a coal train, with only the train's crew for company, and a hard bench for a bed, the man-hunter was already thrilling to the exultant view-halloo in the chase. By the light of the flickering caboose lamp he drew his pencil through the Iowa failure. The one uncancelled name was now something more than a chance; it was a certainty.

"I've got you for fair, girlie, this time!" he triumphed, and since he did it audibly, the coal-train conductor laughed and wanted to be told the color of her eyes and hair.

"Got 'em pretty bad, ain't you, pardner?" he commented, when Broffin, loose-tongued in his elation, confessed that he was chasing a woman whom he had never seen. "I know how it goes: seen a picture of one once on a bill-board, and I'd 'a' gone plum to Californy after her if I hadn't been too danged busy to take a lay-off."

Landing in Wahaska the next evening, Broffin's first request at the hotel counter was for the directory. Running an eager finger down the "F's" he came to the name. It was the only Farnham in the list, and after it he read: "Dr. Herbert C., office 8 to 10, 2 to 4, 201 Main St., res. 16 Lake Boulevard."

Broffin had a traveller's appetite, and the cafe doors were invitingly open. Yet he denied himself until the clerk, busy at the moment with other guests, should be at liberty.

"I see there's a Doctor Farnham here," he said, when his time came. "I was wondering if he was the man I met up with down in New Orleans last winter."

The clerk shook his head.

"I guess not. Doctor Bertie hasn't taken a vacation since the oldest inhabitant can remember."

"H'm; that's funny," mused the detective, as one nonplussed. "The name's just as familiar as an old song. Is your Doctor Farnham a sort of oldish man?"

"He's elderly, yes; old enough to have a grown daughter." Then the clerk laughed. "Perhaps you've got things tangled. Perhaps you 'met up' with Miss Charlotte. She was down on the Gulf Coast last winter."

"Not me," said Broffin, matching the ice-breaking laugh. And then he registered for a room and passed on into the cafe, deferring to the appetite which, for the first time in nearly four tedious weeks, he felt justified in indulging to the untroubled limit.

Having, by the slow but sure process of elimination, finally reduced his equation to its lowest terms, Broffin put the past four weeks and their failures behind him, and prepared to draw the net which he hoped would entangle the lost identity of the bank robber. After a good night's sleep in a real bed, he awoke refreshed and alert, breakfasted with an open mind, and presently went about the net-drawing methodically and with every contingency carefully provided for.

The first step was to assure himself beyond question that Miss Farnham was the writer of the unsigned letter. This step he was able, by a piece of great good fortune, to take almost immediately. A bit of morning gossip with the obliging clerk of the Winnebago House developed the fact that Dr. Farnham's daughter had once taught in the free kindergarten which was one of the charitable out-reachings of the Wahaska Public Library. Two blocks east and one south: Broffin walked them promptly, made himself known to the librarian as a visitor interested in kindergarten work, and was cheerfully shown the records. When he turned to the pages signed "Charlotte Farnham" the last doubt vanished and assurance was made sure. The anonymous letter writer was found.

It was just here that Matthew Broffin fell under the limitations of his trade. Though the detective in real life is as little as may be like the Inspector Buckets and the Javerts of fiction, certain characteristics persist. Broffin thought he knew the worth of boldness; where it was a mere matter of snapping the handcuffs upon some desperate criminal, the boldness was not wanting. But now, when he found himself face to face with the straightforward expedient, the craft limitations bound him. Instantly he thought of a dozen good reasons why he should make haste slowly; and he recognized in none of them the craftsman's slant toward indirection—the tradition of the trade which discounts the straightforward attack and puts a premium upon the methods of the deer-stalker.

Sooner or later, of course, the attack must be made. But only an apprentice, he told himself, would be foolish enough to make it without mapping out all the hazards of the ground over which it must be made. In a word, he must "place" Miss Farnham precisely; make a careful study of the young woman and her environment, to the end that every thread of advantage should be in his hands when he should finally force her to a confession. For by now the assumption that she knew the mysterious bank robber was no longer hypothetical in Broffin's mind: it had grown to the dimensions of a conviction.

Wahaska was not difficult of approach on its gossiping side. Though it owned a charter and called itself a city, it was still in the country-town stage which favors a wide distribution of news with the personal note emphasized. Broffin, conveying the impression that he was a Louisiana lumberman on a vacation, approved himself as a good listener, and little more was needed. In a week he had traced the social outlines of the town as one finds the accent of a painting; in a fortnight he had grouped the Griersons, the Raymers, the Oswalds, the Barrs, and the Farnhams in their various interrelations, business and otherwise.

With the patient curiosity of his tribe he suffered no detail, however trivial, to escape its jotting down. To familiarize himself with the goings and comings of one young woman, he made the acquaintance of an entire town. He knew Jasper Grierson's ambition, and its fruitage in the practical ownership of Wahaska. He knew that Edward Raymer had borrowed money from Grierson's bank—and was likely to be unable to pay it when his notes fell due. He had heard it whispered that there had once been a love affair between young Raymer and Miss Farnham, and that it had been broken off by Raymer's infatuation for Margery Grierson. Also, last and least important of all the gossiping details, as it seemed at the time, he learned that the bewitching Miss Grierson was a creature of fads; that within the past month or two she had returned from a Florida trip, bringing with her a sick man, a total stranger, who had been picked up on the train, taken to the great house on the lake shore and nursed back to life as Miss Grierson's latest defiance of the conventions.

It should have been a memorable day for Matthew Broffin when he had this sick man pointed out to him as Miss Grierson's companion in the high trap—which was also one of Miss Margery's bids for criticism in a town where the family carryall was still a feature. But Broffin was sufficiently human to see only a very beautiful young woman sitting correctly erect on the slanting driving-seat and holding the reins over a high-stepping horse which, he was told, had cost Jasper Grierson every cent of a thousand dollars. To be sure, he saw the man, as one sees a vanishing figure in a kaleidoscope. But there was nothing in the clean-shaven face of the gaunt, and as yet rather haggard, convalescent to evoke the faintest thrill of interest—or of memory.



XXII

IN THE BURGLAR-PROOF

A week and a day after the opening of new vistas at Miss Grierson's "evening," Griswold—Raymer's intercession with the Widow Holcomb having paved the way—took a favorable opportunity of announcing his intention of leaving Mereside. It figured as a grateful disappointment to him—one of the many she was constantly giving him—that Margery placed no obstacles in the way of the intention. On the contrary, she approved the plan.

"I know how you feel," she said, nodding complete comprehension. "You want to have a place that you can call your own; a place where you can go and come as you please and settle down to work. You are going to work, aren't you?—on the book, I mean?"

Griswold replaced in its proper niche the volume he had been reading. It was Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and he had been wondering by what ironical chance it had found a place in the banker's library.

"Yes; that is what I mean to do," he returned. "But it will have to be done in such scraps and parings of time as I can save from some bread-and-butter occupation. One must eat to live, you know."

She was sitting on the arm of one of the big library lounging-chairs and looking up at him with a smile that was suspiciously innocent and childlike.

"You mean that you will have to work for your living?" she asked.

"Exactly."

"What were you thinking of doing?"

"I don't know," he confessed. "I have been hoping that Raymer might help me to find a place; possibly in the machine works as an under bookkeeper, or something of that sort. Not that I know very much about any really useful occupation, when it comes to that; but I suppose I can learn."

Again he surprised the lurking smile in the velvety eyes, but this time it was half-mischievous.

"We have a college here in Wahaska, and you might get a place on the faculty," she suggested; adding: "As an instructor in philosophy, for example."

"Philosophy? that is the one thing in the world that I know least about."

"In theory, perhaps," she conceded, laughing openly at him now. "But in practice you are perfect, Mr. Griswold. Hasn't anybody ever told you that before?"

"No; and you don't mean it. You are merely taking a base advantage of a sick man and making fun of me. I don't mind: I'm in a heavenly temper this afternoon."

"Oh, but I do mean it, honestly," she averred. "You are a philosopher, really and truly, and I can prove it. Do you feel equal to another little drive down-town?"

"Being a philosopher, I ought to be equal to anything," he postulated; and he went up-stairs to get a street coat and his hat.

She had disappeared when he came down again, and he went out to sit on the sun-warmed veranda while he waited. He had already forgotten what she had said about the object of the drive—the proving of the philosophic charge against him—and was looking forward with keenly pleasurable anticipations to another outing with her, the second for that day. It had come to this, now; to admitting frankly the charm which he was still calling sensuous, and which, in the moments of insight recurring, as often as they can be borne, to the imaginative, and vouchsafed now and then even to the wayfaring, he was still disposed to characterize as an appeal to that which was least worthy in him.

Latterly, however, he had begun to question himself more acutely as to the exact justice of this attitude; and while he was sunning himself on the veranda and listening for the hoof-beats of the big trap horse on the stable approach, he was doing it again. In those graver analytical moments he had called Margery a preternaturally clever little barbarian, setting his own immense obligation to her aside in deference to what he assumed to be the immutable realities. In the sun-warming excursion came another of those precious moments of insight; a moment in which he was given a sobering glimpse of the deathless Philistine within. Who was he to be setting his machine-made ideals above the living, breathing, human fact whose very limitations and shortcomings might figure as angelic virtues when weighed in any balance save that of the Philistinic ego?

To admit the query was to admit a doubtful distrust of all the charted anchorages; those sure holding-grounds which he had once believed to be the very bottoming of facts assured and incontestible. From his lounging seat the trees on the lawn framed a noble vista of lakescape and crescent-curved beach drive, the latter with its water-facing row of modest mansions, the homes of Wahaska's well-to-do elect. At the end of the crescent he could see the chimneys of the Raymer house rising above a groving of young maples; and nearer at hand the substantial, two-storied frame house which Miss Grierson had pointed out to him as the home of the kindly Doctor Bertie. When he found himself drifting, his thoughts reverted automatically to Charlotte Farnham. There, if anywhere, lay the touchstone of truth and the verities; there, he told himself, was at least one life into which the doubtful distrust of the anchorages had never come.

Passing easily from Miss Farnham the ideal to Miss Farnham the flesh-and-blood reality, he was moved to wonder mildly why the fate which had brought him twice into critically intimate relations with her was now denying him even a chance meeting. For a week or more he had been going out daily; sometimes with Miss Grierson in the trap, but oftener afoot and alone. The walking excursions had led him most frequently up and down the lakeside drive, but the doctor's house stood well back in its enclosure, and there was much shrubbery. Once he had heard her voice: she was reading aloud to some one on the vine-screened porch. And once again in passing, he had caught a glimpse of a shapely arm with the loose sleeve falling away from it as it was thrust upward through the porch greenery to pluck a bud from the crimson rambler adding its graceful mass to the clambering vines. It was rather disappointing, but he was not impatient. In the fulness of time the destiny which had twice intervened would intervene again. He was as certain of it as he was of the day-to-day renewal of his strength and vitality; and he could afford to wait. For, whatever else might happen in a mutable world, neither an ideal nor its embodiment may suffer change.

As if to add the touch of definitiveness to the presumptive conclusion, a voice broke in upon his revery; the voice of the young woman whose most alluring charm was her many-sided changefulness.

"What? no trap yet? Thorsen is outliving his usefulness; he is getting slower and pokier every added day he lives!" the voice was saying, with a faintly acid quality in it that Griswold had seldom heard. Then, as if she had marked his preoccupied gaze and divined its object: "You must have a little more patience, Mr. Griswold. All things come to him who waits. When you have left Mereside finally, Doctor Bertie will some time take you home to dinner with him."

For his own peace of mind, Griswold hastily assured himself that it was only the wildest of chance shots. Since the day when he had admitted that he knew Miss Farnham's name without knowing Miss Farnham in person, the doctor's daughter had never been mentioned between them.

"How did you happen to guess that I was thinking of the good doctor?" he asked, curiously.

"You were not thinking of Doctor Bertie; you were thinking of Doctor Bertie's 'only'," was the laughing contradiction; and Griswold was glad that the coming of the man with the trap saved him from the necessity of falling any farther into what might easily prove to be a dangerous pitfall. Later on, while he was mechanically lifting his hat in recognition of the many salutations acknowledged by his companion in their triumphal progress down Main Street, he was still thankful and still puzzling over the almost uncanny coincidence. It was not the first time that Miss Grierson had seemed able to read his inmost thoughts.

The short afternoon drive paused at the curb in front of Jasper Grierson's bank, and, as on former occasions, Margery lightly scorned the convalescent's up-stretched arms and sprang unhelped to the pavement. But now her mood was sweetly indulgent and she softened the refusal. "By and by, after you are quite well and strong again," she said; and when a horse-holding boy had been found, she led the way into the bank.

It was Griswold's first visit to the Farmers' and Merchants', and while his companion was speaking to the cashier he was absently contrasting its rather showy interior with the severe plainness of the Bayou State Security; contrasting, and congratulating himself upon the gift of the artistic memory which enabled him to recall with vivid accuracy all the little details of the New Orleans banking house—this notwithstanding the good excuse the observing eye might have had for wandering.

A moment later he found himself bringing up the rear of a procession of three, led by a young woman with a bunch of keys at her girdle. The procession halted for the opening of a massive gate in the steel grille at the rear of the public lobby; after which, with the gate latching itself automatically behind him, Griswold found himself in the grated corridor facing the safety deposit vaults.

"Number three-forty-five-A, please," his companion was saying to the young woman custodian, and he stood aside and admired the workmanship of the complicated time-locks while the two entered the electric-lighted vault and jointly opened one of the multitude of small safes. When Miss Grierson came out, she was carrying a small, japanned document box under her arm, and her eyes were shining with a soft light that was new to the man who was waiting in the corridor. "Come with me to one of the coupon-rooms," she said; and then to the custodian: "You needn't stay; I'll ring when we want to be let out."

Griswold followed in mild bewilderment when she turned aside to one of the little mahogany-lined cells set apart for the use of the safe-holders, saw her press the button which switched the lights on, and mechanically obeyed her signal to close the door. When their complete privacy was assured, she put the japanned box on the tiny table and motioned him to one of the two chairs.

"Do you know why I have brought you here?" she asked, when he was sitting within arm's-reach of the small black box.

"How should I?" he said. "You take me where you please, and when you please, and I ask no questions. I am too well contented to be with you to care very much about the whys and wherefores."

"Oh, how nicely you say it!" she commended, with the frank little laugh which he had come to know and to seek to provoke. She was standing against the opposite cell wall with her shoulders squared and her hands behind her: the pose, whether intentional or natural, was dramatically perfect and altogether bewitching. "I was born to be your fairy godmother, I think," she went on joyously. "Tell me; when you bought your ticket to Wahaska that night in St. Louis, were you meaning to come here to find work?—the bread-and-butter work?"

"No," he admitted; "I had money, then."

"What became of it?"

"I don't know. I suppose it was stolen from me on the train. It was in a package in one of my suit-cases; and Doctor Farnham said——"

"I know; he told you that we had searched your suit-cases when you were at your worst—thinking we owed it to you and your friends, if you had any."

"Yes; that is what he told me."

"Also, he told you that we didn't find any money?"

"Yes; he told me that, too. We agreed that somebody must have gone through the grips on the train."

"And you let it go at that? Why didn't you tell me, so that we might at least try to find the thief?"

He had quite lost sight of the black box on the table by this time, and was consumed with curiosity to know why she had brought him to such a place to reproach him for his lack of confidence.

"How often are we able to tell the exact 'why' of anything?" he answered evasively. "Perhaps I didn't wish to trouble you—you who had already troubled yourself so generously in behalf of an unknown castaway."

"So you just let the money go?"

"So I just let it go."

She was laughing again and the bedazzling eyes were dancing with delight.

"I told you I was going to prove that you are a philosopher!" she exulted. "Sour old Diogenes himself couldn't have been more superbly indifferent to the goods the gods provide. Open that box on the table, please."

He did it half-absently: at the first sight of the brown-paper packet within, the electric bulb suspended over the table seemed to grow black and the mahogany walls of the tiny room to spin dizzily. Then, with a click that he fancied he could hear, the buzzing mental machinery stopped and reversed itself. A cold sweat, clammy and sickening, started out on him when he realized that the reversal had made him once again the crafty, cornered criminal, ready to fight or fly—or to slay, if a life stood in the way of escape. Without knowing what he did, he closed the box and got upon his feet, eying her with a growing ferocity that he could neither banish nor control.

"I see: you were a little beforehand with the doctor," he said, and he strove to say it naturally; to keep the malignant devil that was whispering in his ear from dictating the tone as well as the words.

"I was, indeed; several days beforehand," she boasted, still joyously exultant.

"You—you opened the package?" he went on, once more pushing the importunate devil aside.

"Naturally. How else would I have known that it was worth locking up?"

Her coolness astounded him. If she knew the whole truth—and the demon at his ear was assuring him that she must know it—she must also know that she was confronting a great peril; the peril of one who voluntarily shuts himself into a trap with the fear-maddened wild thing for which the trap was baited and set. He was steadying himself with a hand on the table when he said: "Well, you opened the package; what did you find out?"

"What did I find out?" He heard her half-hesitant repetition of his query, and for one flitting instant he made sure that he saw the fear of death in the wide-open eyes that were lifted to his. But the next instant the eyes were laughing at him, and she was going on confidently. "Of course, as soon as I untied the string I saw it was money—a lot of money; and you can imagine that I tied it up again, quickly, and didn't lose any more time than I could help in putting it away in the safest place I could think of. Every day since you began to get well, I've been expecting you to say something about it; but as long as you wouldn't, I wouldn't."

Slowly the blood came back into the saner channels, and the whispering demon at his ear grew less articulate. Was she telling the truth? Could it be possible that she had not opened the packet far enough to see and read the damning evidence of the printed bank-slips which, in a very bravado of carelessness, as he now remembered, he had neglected to remove and destroy? He was searching the dark eyes for the naked soul behind them when he ventured again.

"You—you and your father—must have thought it very singular that a sick man should be knocking about the country with so much money carried carelessly in a suit-case?"

"My father knows nothing about it; nor does any one else. And it wasn't my place to gossip or to wonder. I found it, and I took care of it for you. Are you glad, or sorry?"

He took the necessary forward step and stood before her. And his answer was no answer at all.

"Miss Grierson—Margery—are you telling me the truth?—all of it?" he demanded, seeking once again to pinion the soul which lay beyond the deepest depth of the limpid eyes.

Her laugh was as cheerful as a bird song.

"Telling you the truth? How could you suspect me of such a thing! No, my good friend; no woman ever tells a man the whole truth when she can help it. I didn't find your money, and I didn't lock it up in poppa's vault: I am merely playing a part in a deep and diabolical plot to——"

Griswold forgot that he was her poor beneficiary; forgot that she had taken him in as her guest; forgot, in the mad joy of the reactionary moment, everything that he should have remembered—saw nothing, thought of nothing save the flushed face with its glorious eyes and tempting lips: the eyes and lips of the daughter of men.

She broke away from him hotly after he had taken the flushed face between his hands and kissed her; broke away to drop into the chair at the other side of the table, hiding the flashing eyes and the burning cheeks and the quivering lips in the crook of a round arm which made room for itself on the narrow table by pushing the japanned money-box off the opposite edge.

It was the normal Griswold who picked up the box and put it in the other chair, gravely and methodically. Then he stood before her again with his back to the wall, waiting for what every gentle drop of blood in his veins was telling him he richly deserved. His punishment was long in coming; so long that when he made sure she was crying, he began to invite it.

"Say it," he suggested gently, "you needn't spare me at all. The only excuse I could offer would only make the offence still greater."

She looked up quickly and the dark eyes were swimming. But whether the tears were of anger or only of outraged generosity, he could not tell.

"Then there was an excuse?" she flashed up at him.

"No," he denied, as one who finds the second thought the worthier; "there was no excuse."

She had found a filmy bit of lace-bordered linen at her belt and was furtively wiping her lips with it.

"I thought perhaps you might be able to—to invent one of some sort," she said, and her tone was as colorless as the gray skies of an autumn nightfall. And then, with a childlike appeal in the wonderful eyes: "I think you will have to help me a little—out of your broader experience, you know. What ought I to do?"

His reply came hot from the refining-fire of self-abasement.

"You should write me down as one who wasn't worthy of your loving-kindness and compassion, Miss Grierson. Then you should call the custodian and turn me out."

"But afterward," she persisted pathetically. "There must be an afterward?"

"I am leaving Mereside this evening," he reminded her. "It will be for you to say whether its doors shall ever open to me again."

She took the thin safety-deposit key from her glove and laid it on the table.

"You have made me wish there hadn't been any money," she lamented, with a sorrowful little catch in her voice that stabbed him like a knife. "I haven't so many friends that I can afford to lose them recklessly, Mr. Griswold."

"Damn the money!" he exploded; and the malediction came out of a full heart.

"If you would only say you are sorry," she went on sadly, groping only half-purposefully for the bell-push which would summon the custodian. "You are sorry, aren't you?"

Unconsciously he had taken her former pose, with his back to the wall and his hands behind him.

"I ought to be decent enough to lie to you and say that I am," he returned, hardily. "I know you can't understand; you are too good and innocent to understand. I'm ashamed; that is, the civilized part of me is ashamed; but that is all. Knowing that he ought to be in the dust at your feet, the brutal other-man is unrepentant and riotously jubilant because, for a brief second or two, he was able to break away and——"

Her fingers had found the bell-push and were pressing it. When the custodian opened the door, Miss Grierson was her poiseful self again.

"Number three-forty-five-A is Mr. Kenneth Griswold's box, now," she announced briefly. "Please register it in his name, and then help him to put it away and lock it up."

Griswold went through the motions with the key-bearing young woman half-absently. By this time he was fathoms deep in the reactionary undertow. Must the recovered treasure always transform itself into a millstone to drag him down into some new and untried depth of degradation? Thrice he had given it up for lost, and in each instance its reappearance had been the signal for a relapse into primitive barbarism, for a plunge into the moral under-depths out of which he had each time emerged distinctively and definitely the loser. Was it to be always thus? Could it be even remotely possible that in a candidly material world there could still be standing-room for the myths and portents and superstitious traditions?

He was trying to persuade himself that there could not be standing-room when he rejoined Margery—herself the best imaginable refutation of the old-wives' tales—at the gate in the great steel grille. Man-like, he was ready to be forgiven and comforted; and there was at least oblivion in her charming little shudder as the custodian shot the bolts of the gate to let them out.

"Br-r-r!" she shivered, "I can never stand here and look at the free people out there without fancying myself in a prison. It must be a dreadful thing to be shut away behind bolts and bars, forgotten by everybody, and yet yourself unable to forget. Do you ever have such foolish thoughts, Mr. Griswold?"

For one poignant second fear leaped alive again and he called himself no better than a lost man. But the eyes that were lifted to his were the eyes of a questioning child, so guilelessly innocent that he immediately suffered another relapse into the pit of self-despisings.

"You have made me your poor prisoner, Miss Grierson," he said, speaking to his own thought rather than to her question. And when they reached the sidewalk and the trap: "May I bid you good-by here and go to my own place?"

"Of course not!" she protested. "Mr. Raymer is coming to dinner to-night and he will drive you over to Mrs. Holcomb's afterward, if you really think you must go."

And for the first time in their comings and goings she let him lift her to the high driving-seat.



XXIII

CONVERGING ROADS

Matthew Broffin had been two weeks and half of a third an unobtrusive spy upon the collective activities of the Wahaskan social group which included the Farnhams before he decided that nothing more could be gained by further delay.

By this time he knew all there was to be known about Miss Farnham; the houses she visited, the somewhat limited circle of her intimates and the vastly wider one of her acquaintances, her comings and goings in the town, her preference for church dissipations over the other sort, and for croquet over lawn tennis.

Also, he had a more minute knowledge which would have terrified her if she had suspected that any strange man was keeping an accurately tabulated note-book record of her waking employments. He knew at what hour she breakfasted, what time in the forenoons she spent upon her Chautauqua readings, how much of her day was given to the care of her invalid aunt, and, most important item of all, how, in the afternoons, when her father was at his town office and the invalid was taking a nap in her room, Miss Charlotte was usually alone in the living-rooms of the two-storied house in Lake Boulevard: practically so for four days out of the seven; actually so on Wednesdays and Fridays when Hilda Larsen, the Swedish maid of all work, had her afternoons off.

Having his own private superstition about Friday, Broffin chose a Wednesday afternoon for his call at the house on the lake front. It was a resplendent day of the early summer which, in the Minnesota latitudes, springs, Minerva-like, full-grown from the nodding head of the wintry Jove of the north. In the doctor's front yard the grass was vividly green, gladioli and jonquils bordered the path with a bravery of color, and the buds of the clambering rose on the porch trellis were swelling to burst their calyxes.

Broffin turned in from the sidewalk and closed the gate noiselessly behind him. If he saw the bravery of colors in the path borders it was only with the outward eye. There was a faint stir on the porch, as of some one parting the leafy screen to look out, but he neither quickened his pace nor slowed it. While he had been three doors away in the lake-fronting street, a small pocket binocular had assured him that the young woman he was going to call upon was sitting in a porch rocker behind the clambering rose, reading a book.

She had risen to meet him by the time he had mounted the steps, and he knew that her first glance was appraisive. He had confidently counted upon being mistaken for a strange patient in search of the doctor, and he was not disappointed.

"You are looking for Doctor Farnham?" she began. "He is at his office—201 Main Street."

Broffin was digging in his pocket for a card. It was not often that he was constrained to introduce himself formally, and for an awkward second or two the search was unrewarded. When he finally found the bit of pasteboard he was explaining verbally.

"I know well enough where your father's office is, but you are the one I wanted to see," he said; and he gave her the round-cornered card with its blazonment of his name and employment.

He was watching her narrowly when she read the name and its underline, and the quick indrawing of the breath and the little shudder that went with it were not thrown away upon him. But the other signs; the pressing of the even teeth upon the lower lip and the coming and going of three straight lines between the half-closed eyes were not so favorable.

"Will you come into the house, Mr.——" she had to look at the card again to get the name—"Mr. Broffin?" she asked.

"Thank you, Miss; it's plenty good enough out here for me if it is for you," he returned, beginning to fear that the common civilities were giving her time to get behind her defences.

She made way for him on the porch and pointed to a chair, which he took, damning himself morosely when he caught his foot in the porch rug and knocked the book from its resting-place on the railing.

"It is no matter," she said, when he would have gone outside to recover the book; but he knew from that moment that whatever advantage a fair beginning may give was gone beyond recall.

"I guess we can take it for granted that you know what I want, Miss Farnham," he began abruptly, when he had shifted his chair to face her rocker. "Something like three months ago, or thereabouts, you went into a bank in New Orleans to get a draft cashed. While you were at the paying teller's window a robbery was committed, and you saw it done and saw the man that did it. I've come to get you to tell me the man's name."

If he had thought to carry the defences by direct assault he was quickly made to realize that it could not be done. Miss Farnham's self-possession was quietly convincing when she said:

"I have told it once, in a letter to Mr. Galbraith."

Broffin nodded. "Yes; in a letter that you didn't sign: we'll come to that a little later. The name you gave was John Wesley Gavitt, and you knew that wasn't his right name, didn't you?"

She made the sign of assent without thinking that it might imply the knowing of more.

"It was the name under which he was enrolled in the Belle Julie's crew, and it was sufficient to identify him," she countered; adding: "It did identify him. The officers found him and arrested him at St. Louis."

"Yes; and he made his get-away in about fifteen minutes after they had nabbed him, as you probably read in the papers the next morning. He's loose yet, and most naturally he ain't signing his name 'Gavitt' any more whatever. I've come all the way from New Orleans, and a whole heap farther, to get you to tell me his real name, Miss Farnham."

"Why do you think I can tell you?" was the undisturbed query.

"A lot of little things," said the detective, who was slowly coming to his own in the matter of self-assurance. "In the first place, he spoke to you in the bank, and you answered him. Isn't that so?"

She nodded, but the firm lips remained closed where the lips of another woman might have opened to repeat what had been said at the teller's wicket.

"Then, afterwards, on the boat, before you sent the letter, you talked with him. It was one evening, just at dusk, on the starboard promenade of the saloon-deck: he was comin' down from the pilot-house and you stopped him. That was when he told you what his name was on the steamboat's books, wasn't it?—what?"

She nodded again. "You know so much, it is surprising that you don't know it all, Mr. Broffin," she commented, with gentle sarcasm.

"The one thing I don't know is the thing you're goin' to tell me—his real name," he insisted. "That's what I've come here for."

In spite of her inexperience, which, in Mr. Broffin's field, was no less than total, Charlotte Farnham had imagination, and with it a womanly zest for the matching of wits with a man whose chief occupation was the measuring of his own wit against the subtle cleverness of criminals. Therefore she accepted the challenge.

"I did my whole duty at the time, Mr. Broffin," she demurred, with a touch of coldness in her voice. "If you were careless enough to let him escape you at St. Louis, you shouldn't come to me. I might say very justly that it was never any affair of mine."

Matthew Broffin's gifts were subtle only in his dealings with other men; but he was shrewd enough to know that his last and best chance with a woman lay in an appeal to her fears.

"I don't know what made you write this letter, in the first place," he said, taking the well-thumbed paper from his coat pocket; "but I know well enough now why you didn't sign it, and why you didn't put the man's real name in it. You—you and him—fixed it up between you so that you could say to yourself afterwards what you've just said to me—that you'd done your duty. But you haven't finished doin' your duty, yet. The law says——"

"I know very well what the law says," was her baffling rejoinder; "I have taken the trouble to find out since I came home. I am not hiding your criminal."

Broffin was trying to gain a little ease by tilting his chair. But the house wall was too close behind him.

"People will say that you are helpin' to hide him as long as you won't tell his real name—what?" he grated.

"You still think I could tell you that, if I chose?" she said, wilfully misleading him, or at least allowing him to mislead himself.

"I don't think anything about it: I know! You'd met him somewhere before that day in the bank—before you knew he was goin' to turn gentleman hold-up. That's why you don't want to give up his real name."

She had risen in answer to the distant chatter of an electric bell, and in self-defence, Broffin had to grope on the floor for his hat and stand up, too.

"I think my aunt is calling and I shall have to go in," she said, calmly dismissing him. "You'll excuse me, I am sure, Mr. Broffin."

"In just one second, Miss Farnham. Ain't you goin' to tell me that fellow's name?"

"No."

"Wait a minute. I'm an officer of the law, and I could arrest you and take you to New Orleans on what evidence I've got. How about that?—what?"

There was good fighting blood on the Farnham side, notwithstanding the kindly Doctor Bertie's peaceful avocation, and the calm gray eyes that met Broffin's were militantly angry when the retort came.

"If I had a brother, Mr. Broffin, he would be able to answer you better than I can!" she flamed out. "Let me pass, please!"

It was not often that Broffin lost his head or his temper, but both were gone when he struck back.

"That'll be all right, too!" he broke out harshly, blocking the way to force her to listen to him. "You think you've bluffed me, don't you?—what? Let me tell you: some fine day this duck whose name isn't Gavitt will turn up here—to see you; then I'll nab him. If you find out where he is, and write to him not to come, it'll be all the same; he'll come anyway, and when he does come, I'll get him!"

When Miss Farnham had gone in and there was nothing left for him to do but to compass his own disappearance, Broffin went away, telling himself with many embellishments that for once in his professional career he had made an ass of himself. He had made a sorry botch of a measurably simple detail, to say nothing of letting his temper push him into the final foolish boast which might easily defeat him.

None the less, he was able to set some few gains over against the one critical loss—if one may be said to lose what he has never had. Failing to learn the true name and place of the Bayou State Security robber, he told himself that he had established beyond question the correctness of his hypothesis. The doctor's daughter knew the man; she had known him before the robbery; she was willing to be his accomplice to the extent of her ability. There was only one explanation of this attitude. In Broffin's wording of it, Miss Farnham was "gone on him," if not openly, at least to such an extent as to make her anxious to shield him.

That being the case, Broffin set it down as a fact as good as accomplished that the man would sooner or later come to Wahaska. The detective's knowledge of masculine human nature was as profoundly acute as the requirements of his calling demanded. With a woman like Miss Farnham for the lure, he could be morally certain that his man would some time fling caution, or even a written prohibition, to the winds, and walk into the trap.

This misfire of Broffin's happened upon a Wednesday, which, in its calendar placing, chanced to be three weeks to a day after Griswold had left Mereside to settle himself studiously in two quiet upper rooms in the Widow Holcomb's house in upper Shawnee Street.

That it was also a day of other coincidences will appear in the casting up of the items on the page of events.

For one thing, it marked the formal opening of the De Soto Inn for the summer season; the De Soto being the resort hotel spoken of by the clerk of the Hotel Chouteau in the little ante-dinner talk which had given Griswold his first outline sketch of Wahaska. For another, the special train from the far South arriving at noon and bearing the first detachment of the Inn's guests, had for one of its Pullman passengers an elderly gentleman with a strongly marked Scottish face; a gentleman with the bushy white eyebrows of age, the long upper lip of caution, the drooping eyelid of irascibility, and the bearing of a man of routine; in other words, Mr. Andrew Galbraith, faring northward on his customary summer vacation, which—the fates intervening—he had this time determined to spend at the Wahaskan resort.

For a third item, it was at three o'clock of this same Wednesday that Raymer came out of Jasper Grierson's bank with his head down and a cloud on his brow; the cloud dating back to an interview just closed, a short and rather brittle conference with the bank's president held in Jasper Grierson's private room, with the president sitting at ease in his huge arm-chair and his visitor standing, quite destitute of ease, at the desk-end.

A little farther along, this third item dovetailed with a fourth and fifth. Raymer, dropping into a friend's office to use the telephone, chanced upon a crossed wire. He had called up Mrs. Holcomb, and while he was waiting for the widow to summon Griswold from his up-stairs den, there was a confused skirling of bells and Raymer, innocently eavesdropping, overheard part of a conversation between two well-known voices; namely, the voices of Miss Charlotte Farnham and her father. The talk was neither confidential, nor of any special significance. Miss Farnham was explaining that she had heard the bell, but could not answer promptly because she had had a caller; and the doctor was telling her that it was no matter—that he merely wanted to let her know that he was going to bring a dinner guest, the guest prospective being his late patient, Mr. Kenneth Griswold.

The mention of Griswold's name reminded Raymer of his own affair, and he became suddenly anxious to have the connection with the Widow Holcomb's house renewed. When the crossed wire was plugged out, Griswold was ready and waiting.

"I was afraid you might be out somewhere, and I want to have a pow-wow with you," said Raymer, when the reassuring voice came over the wire. "Can you give me a little time if I drive around?" And when the prompt assent came: "All right; thank you. I'll be with you in a pair of minutes."

Raymer's horse was only a short half-square away, hitched in front of the Winnebago House, and he went to get it. But at the instant of unhitching, Miss Grierson's trap was driven up and the untying of knots paused while he stepped from the curb to stand at the wheel of the modish equipage.

"You are getting to be as bad as all the others," was the greeting he got from the high driving-seat. "You haven't been at Mereside for an age—only once since the night you took Mr. Griswold away from us. By the way, what has become of Mr. Griswold? He doesn't show himself in public much oftener than you do."

"I think he has been getting to work on his writing," said Raymer, good-naturedly apologizing for his friend. "He'll come down out of the clouds after a little." And then, before he could stop it, out came the bit of unchartered information: "I understand he dines at Doctor Bertie's to-night."

The young iron-founder was looking up into the eyes of beguiling when he said this, and, being a mere man, he wondered what made them flash and then grow suddenly fathomless and brooding.

"When you see him, tell him that we are still on earth over at Mereside," said the magnate's daughter pertly; and a moment later Raymer was free to keep his appointment with Griswold.

All in all, the little interruption had consumed no more than five minutes, but the time interval was sufficient to form another link in the chain of Wednesday incidents. For, as Raymer was turning out of Main Street into Shawnee, he narrowly missed running over a heavy-set man with a dark face and drooping mustaches; a pedestrian whose preoccupation seemed so great as to make him quite oblivious to street crossings and passing vehicles until Raymer pulled his horse back into the shafts and shouted.

When the man looked up, Raymer recognized him as the stranger from the South who was stopping at the Winnebago House and who gave himself out as a Louisiana lumberman open to conviction on the subject of Minnesota pine lands as an investment. But he had no means of knowing that Broffin's momentary preoccupation was chargeable to a fruitless interview lately concluded; or that in driving away to the house three squares up the street he was bridging the narrow gap between a man-hunter and his quarry—a gap which had suddenly grown into a chasm for the man-hunter himself.

One more small coincidence will serve to total the items on the Wednesday page. If Broffin had not stopped to look after the man who had so nearly run him down, he might not have been crossing Main Street in front of the Winnebago at the precise instant when Miss Grierson, with young Dahlgren in the second seat of the trap, came around the square and pulled up to let her horse drink at the public fountain.

"Who is that Bitter-Creekish-looking man crossing over to the Winnebago House?" asked Miss Grierson of her seatmate, indicating Broffin with a wave of the whip, and skilfully making the query sound like the voicing of the idlest curiosity.

"Fellow named Broffin, from Louisiana," said Dahlgren, who, as assistant editor of the Daily Wahaskan, knew everybody. "Says he's in the lumber business down there, but, 'I doubt it,' said the carpenter, and shed a bitter tear."

"Why do you doubt it?" queried Miss Grierson, neatly flicking a fly from the horse's back with the tip of the whiplash.

"Oh, on general principles, I guess. You wouldn't say he had any of the ear-marks of a business man."

"What kind of ear-marks has he got?" persisted Miss Grierson—merely to make talk, as Dahlgren decided.

"I don't know. We were talking about him around at the club the other night, and Sheffield—he's from Kentucky, you know—thought he remembered the name as the name of a 'moonshine' raider he'd heard of down in his home State."

"A moonshine raider? What is that?" By this time Miss Margery's curiosity was less inert than it had been, or had seemed to be, at first.

"A deputy marshal, you know; a sort of Government policeman and detective rolled into one. He looks it, don't you think?"

Miss Grierson did not say what she thought, then, or later, when she set Dahlgren down at the door of his newspaper office in Sioux Avenue. But still later, two hours later, in fact, she gave a brief audience in the Mereside library to a small, barefooted boy whose occupation was sufficiently indicated by the bundle of evening papers hugged under one arm.

"Well, Johnnie; what did you find out?" she asked.

"Ain't had time," said the boy. "But he ain't no milyunaire lumber-shooter, I'll bet a nickel. I sold him a pape' jes' now, down by Dutchie's lumber yard, and I ast him what kind o' lumber that was in the pile by the gate. He didn't know, no more'n a goat."

Miss Margery filliped a coin in the air and the newsboy caught it dexterously.

"That will do nicely for a beginning, Johnnie," she said sweetly. "Come and see me every once in a while, and perhaps there'll be more little white cart-wheels for you. Only don't tell; and don't let him catch you. That's all."



XXIV

THE FORWARD LIGHT

During the days which followed his setting up of the standard of independence in Mrs. Holcomb's second-floor front, Griswold found himself entering upon a new world—a world corresponding with gratifying fidelity to that prefigured future which he had struck out in the waking hours of his first night on the main-deck of the Belle Julie.

Wahaska, as a fortunate field for the post-graduate course in Experimental Humanity, was all that his fancy had pictured it. It was neither so small as to scant the variety of subjects, nor so large as to preclude the possibility of grasping them in their entirety. In strict accord with the forecast, it promised to afford the writing craftsman's happy medium in surroundings: it would reproduce, in miniature, perhaps, but none the less in just proportions, the social problems of the wider world; and for a writer's seclusion the village quiet of upper Shawnee Street was all that could be desired.

When he came to go about in the town, as he did daily after the pleasant occupation of refurnishing his study and bed-room was a pleasure past, he found that in some mysterious manner his fame had preceded him. Everybody seemed to know who he was; to be able to place him as a New Yorker, as an author in search of health, or local color or environment or some other technical quality not to be found in the crowded cities; to be able to place him, also, as Miss Margery Grierson's friend and beneficiary—which last, he surmised, was his best passport to the good graces of his fellow-townsmen.

Coincidently he discovered that, in the same mysterious manner, everybody seemed to know that he was, in the Wahaskan phrase, "well-fixed." Here, again, he guessed that something might be credited to Margery. Beyond a hint to Raymer, he had told no one of the comfortable assurance against want lying snugly secure in the small strong-box in the Farmers' and Merchants' safety vault, and he was reasonably certain that Raymer could not have passed the hint so fast and so far as the town-wide limits to which the fact of the "well-fixed" phrase had spread.

All this was very nourishing, not to say stimulating, to the starved soul of a proletary. Not in any period of the past had he so fully understood that an acute appreciation of the wrongs of the race is no bar to an equally acute hungering and thirsting after the commonplace flesh-pots, or to a very primitive and soul-satisfying enjoyment of the same when they were to be had. Nevertheless, the reaction into self-indulgence proved to be only temporary. God had been good to him, enabling him to realize in miraculous fulfilment the ideal environment and opportunity: therefore he would do his part, proclaiming the holy war and fighting, single-handed if need be, the battle of the weak against the strong.

So ran the renewed determination, dusted off and re-pedestaled after many days. As to the manner of conducting the war against inequality and the crime of plutocracy, the plan of campaign had been sufficiently indicated in that white-hot moment of high resolves on the cargo-deck of the Belle Julie. For the propaganda, there was his book; for the demonstration, he would put the sacred fund into some industry where the weight of it would give him the casting vote in all questions involving the rights of the workers. It was absurdly simple, and he wondered that none of the sociological reformers whose books he had read had anticipated him in the discovery of such an obviously logical point of attack.

With the re-writing of the book fairly begun, he was already looking about for the practical opportunity when the growing friendship with Edward Raymer promised to offer an opening exactly fulfilling the experimental requirements. Raymer had over-enlarged his plant and was needing more capital. So much Griswold had gathered from the talk of the street; and some of Raymer's half-confidences had led him to suspect that the need was, or was likely to become, imperative. It was only the finer quality of friendship that had hitherto kept him from offering help before it was asked, and thus far he had contented himself with hinting to Raymer that he had money to invest. From every point of view a partnership with the young iron-founder promised to afford the golden opportunity. The industry was comparatively small and self-contained; and Raymer was himself openly committed to the cause of uplifting. Griswold waited patiently; he was still waiting on the Wednesday afternoon when Raymer called him over the telephone and made the appointment for a meeting at the house in Shawnee Street.

"Your 'pair of minutes' must have found something to grow upon," laughed the patient waiter, when Raymer, finding Mrs. Holcomb's front door open, had climbed the stair to the newly established literary workshop. "I've had time to smoke a pipe and write a complete paragraph since you called up."

Raymer flung himself into a chair at the desk-end and reached for a pipe in the curiously carved rack which had been one of Griswold's small extravagances in the refurnishing.

"Yes," he said; "Margery Grierson drove up while I was unhitching, and I had to stop and talk to her. Which reminds me: she says you're giving Mereside the go-by since you set up for yourself. Are you?"

"Not intentionally," Griswold denied; and he let it stand at that.

"I shouldn't, if I were you," Raymer advised. "Margery Grierson is any man's good friend; and pretty soon you'll be meeting people who will lift their eyebrows when you speak of her. You mustn't make her pay for that."

"I'm not likely to," was the sober rejoinder. "My debt to Miss Grierson is a pretty big one, Raymer; bigger than you suspect, I imagine."

"I'm glad to hear you put the debt where it belongs, leaving her father out of it. You don't owe him anything; not even a cup of cold water. There's a latter-day buccaneer for you!" he went on, warming to his subject like a man with a sore into which salt has been freshly rubbed. "That old timber-wolf wouldn't spare his best friend—allowing that anybody could be his friend. By Jove! he's making me sweat blood, all right!"

"How is that?" asked Griswold.

"I've been on the edge of telling you two or three times, but next to a quitter I do hate the fellow who puts his fingers into a trap and then squawks when the trap nips him. Grierson has got me down and he is about to cut my throat, Griswold."

"Tell me about it," said the one who had been patiently waiting to be told.

"It begins back a piece, but I'll brief it for you. I suppose you've been told how Grierson came here a few years ago with a wad of money and a large and healthy ambition to own the town?"

Griswold nodded.

"Well, he has come pretty close to making a go of it. What he doesn't own or control wouldn't make much of a town by itself. A year ago he tried to get a finger into my little pie. He wanted to reorganize the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and offered to furnish the additional capital and take fifty-one per cent of the reorganization stock. Naturally, I couldn't see it. My father had left the plant as an undivided legacy to my mother, my sister, and myself; and while we haven't been getting rich out of it, we've managed to hold our own and to grow a little. Don't let me bore you."

"You couldn't do that if you should try. Go on."

"This spring Wahaska began to feel the boost of the big crop year. Everything was on the upward slant, and I thought we ought to move along with other people. Before the snow was off the ground we had hit the capacity limit in the old plant and the only thing to do was to enlarge. I borrowed the money at Grierson's bank and did it."

"And you can't make the enlarged plant pay?"

"Oh, yes, it's paying very well, indeed; we're earning dividends, all right. But in the money matter I simply played the fool and let Grierson cinch me. As I've told you more than once, I'm an engineer and no finance shark. My borrow at the bank was one hundred thousand dollars, and there was a verbal understanding that it was to be repaid out of the surplus earnings, piecemeal. I told Grierson that I should need a year or more, and he didn't object."

"This was all in conversation?" said Griswold: "no writing?"

Raymer made a wry face.

"Don't rub it in. I'm admitting that I was all the different kinds of a fool. There was no definite time limit mentioned. I was to give my personal notes and put up the family stock as collateral. A day or two later, when I went around to close the deal, the trap was standing wide open for me and a baby might have seen it. Grierson said he had proposed the loan to his directors, and that they had kicked on taking the stock as collateral. He said they wanted a mortgage on the plant."

Griswold nodded. "Which brought on more talk," he suggested.

"Which brought on a good bit more talk. Really, it didn't make any intrinsic difference. Stock collateral or property collateral, the bank would have us by the throat until the debt should be paid. But you know how women are: my mother would about as soon sign her own death warrant as to put her name on a mortgage; so there we were—blocked. Grierson was as smooth as oil; said he wanted to help me out, and was willing to stretch his authority to do it. Then he sprung the trap."

"Having got you just where he wanted you," put in the listener.

"Yes; having got me down. The new proposition was apparently a mere modification of the first one. I was an accredited customer of the bank, like other business men of the town, and as such I could ask for an extension of credit on accommodation paper, and Grierson, as president, was at liberty to grant it if he saw fit. He offered to take my paper without an endorser if I would cover his personal risk with my stock collateral, assigning it, not to the bank, but to him. I fell for it like a woolly sheep. The stock transfers were made, and I signed a note for one hundred thousand dollars, due in sixty days; Grierson explaining that two months was the bank's usual limit on accommodation paper—which is true enough—but giving me to understand that a renewal and an extension of time would be merely a matter of routine."

Griswold was shaking his head sympathetically. "I can guess the rest," he said. "Grierson is preparing to swallow you whole."

"He has as good as done it," was the dejected reply. "The note falls due to-morrow; and, as I happened to be uptown this afternoon, I thought I would drop in and pay the discount and renew the paper. To tell the truth, I'd been getting more nervous the more I thought of it; and I didn't dare let it go to the final moment. Grierson shot me through the heart. He gave me a cock-and-bull story about some bank examiner's protest, and told me I must be prepared to take up the paper to-morrow. He knew perfectly well that he had me by the throat. I had checked out every dollar of the loan, and a good bit of our own balance in addition, paying the building and material bills."

"Of course you reminded him of his agreement?"

"Sure; and he sawed me off short: said that any business man borrowing money on accommodation paper knew that it was likely to be called in on the expiration date; that an extension is really a new transaction, which the bank is at liberty to refuse to enter. Oh, he gave it to me cold and clammy, sitting back in his big chair and staring up at me through the smoke of a fat black cigar while he did it!"

"And then?" prompted Griswold.

"Then I remembered the mother and sister, Kenneth, and did what I would have died rather than do for myself—I begged like a dog. But I might as well have gone outside and butted my head against the brick wall of the bank."

Griswold forgot his own real, though possibly indirect, obligation to Jasper Grierson.

"That is where you made a mistake: you should have told him to go to hell with his money!" was his acrid comment. And then: "How near can you come to lifting this note to-morrow, Raymer?"

"'Near' isn't the word. Possibly I might sweep the corners and gather up twelve or fifteen thousand dollars."

"That will do," said the querist, shortly. "Make it ten thousand, and I'll contribute the remaining ninety."

Raymer sprang out of his chair as if its padded arms had been suddenly turned into high-voltage electrodes.

"You will?—you'll do that for me, Griswold?" he said, with a queer stridency in his voice that made the word-craftsman, always on the watch for apt similes, think of a choked chicken. But Raymer was swallowing hard and trying to go on. "By Jove—it's the most generous thing I ever heard of!—but I can't let you do it. I haven't a thing in the world to offer you but the stock, and that may not be worth the paper it is printed on if Jasper Grierson has made up his mind to break me."

"Sit down again and let us thresh it out," said Griswold. "How much of a Socialist are you, Raymer?"

The young ironmaster sat down, gasping a little at the sudden wrenching aside of the subject.

"Why, I don't know; enough to want every man to have a square deal, I guess."

"Including the men in your shops?"

"Putting them first," was the prompt correction. "It was my father's policy, and it has been mine. We have never had any labor troubles."

"You pay fair wages?"

"We do better than that. A year ago, I introduced a modified plan of profit-sharing."

Griswold's eyes were lighting up with the altruistic fires.

"Once in awhile, Raymer, a thing happens so fortuitously as to fairly compel a belief in the higher powers that our fathers included in the word 'Providence'," he said, almost solemnly. "You have described exactly an industrial situation which seems to me to offer a solution of the whole vexed question of master and man, and to be a seed-sowing which is bound to be followed by an abundant and most humanizing harvest. Ever since I began to study, even in a haphazard way, the social system under which we sweat and groan, I've wanted in on a job like yours. I still want in. Will you take me as a silent partner, Raymer? I'm not making it a condition, mind you: come here any time after ten o'clock to-morrow, and you'll find the money waiting for you. But I do hope you won't turn me down."

Raymer was gripping the arms of his chair again, but this time they were not unpleasantly electrified.

"If I had only myself to consider, I shouldn't keep you waiting a second," he returned, heartily. "But it may take a little time to persuade my mother and sister. If they could only know you"—then, forgetting the crossed wire and his late overhearings—"why can't you come out to dinner with me to-night?"

"For the only reason that would make me refuse; I have a previous bidding. But I'll be glad to go some other day. There is no hurry about this business matter; take all the time you need—after you have made Mr. Grierson take his claws out of you."

Raymer had filled the borrowed pipe again and was pulling at it reflectively. "About this partnership; what would be your notion?" he asked.

"The simplest way is always the best. Increase your capital stock and let me in for as much as my ninety thousand dollars will buy," said the easily satisfied investor. "We'll let it go at that until you've had time to think it over, and talk it over with your mother and sister."

The iron-founder got up and reached for his hat.

"You are certainly the friend in need, Griswold, if ever there was one," he said, gripping the hand of leave-taking as if he would crack the bones in it. "But there is one thing I'm going to ask you, and you mustn't take offense: this ninety thousand; could you afford to lose it?—or is it your whole stake in the game?"

Griswold's smile was the ironmaster's assurance that he had not offended.

"It is practically my entire stake—and I can very well afford to lose it in the way I have indicated. You may call that a paradox, if you like, but both halves of it are true."

"Then there is one other thing you ought to know, and I'm going to tell it now," Raymer went on. "We do a general foundry and machine business, but a good fifty per cent of our profit comes from the Wahaska & Pineboro Railroad repair work, which we have had ever since the road was opened."

Griswold was smiling again. "Why should I know that, particularly?" he asked.

"Because it is rumored that Jasper Grierson has been quietly absorbing the stock and bonds of the road, and if he means to remove me from the map——"

"I see," was the reply. "In that case you'll need a partner even worse than you do now. You can't scare me off that way. Shall I look for you at ten to-morrow?"

"At ten to the minute," said the rescued plunger; and he went down-stairs so full of mingled thankfulness and triumph that he mistook Doctor Farnham's horse for his own at the hitching-post two doors away, and was about to get into the doctor's buggy before he discovered his mistake.



XXV

THE BRIDGE OF JEHENNAM

Doctor Farnham had been about to make his daily call upon old Mrs. Breda, two doors up the street from the Widow Holcomb's, when he had climbed the stair of literary aspirations to give the convalescent his dinner bidding.

Griswold had accepted gratefully on the spur of the moment; and it was not until after Raymer had come and gone that sober second thought began to point out the risk he would run in meeting Charlotte Farnham face to face under conditions which would give her the best conceivable opportunity to recognize him, if recognition were possible.

The more he thought of it, the more he regretted his haste in consenting to incur the risk. Reflectively weighing the chances for and against, he made sure that in characterizing the young woman whose life-thread had been so strangely tangled with his own he had not overrated her intelligence. Giving heredity its due, with the keen-witted little physician for her father she could scarcely fail to measure up to the standard of those whose gifts are apperceptive. For many days she had had ample opportunity to familiarize herself with all the little identifying individualities of the deck-hand: reasoning from cause to effect, it might be assumed that her crushing responsibility had driven her to make use of it. Having recognized him once, under conditions far less favorable than those he was about to hazard, was it not more than probable that she would be able to do it again?

Griswold took a final look at himself in his dressing-case mirror before going to keep his evening appointment at the doctor's down-town office. It was comfortably reassuring. So far as he could determine, there was little in the clean-shaven, square-shouldered, correctly garmented young fellow who faced him in the mirror to suggest either the bearded outcast of New Orleans or the unkempt and toil-soddened roustabout of the Belle Julie. If only she had not made him speak to her: he had a sharp conviction that the greatest of all the hazards lay in the chance that she might remember his voice.

He found the cheery little doctor waiting for him when he had walked the few squares to the Main Street office.

"I was beginning to be afraid you were going to be fashionably late," said the potential host; and then, with a humorous glance for the correct garmenting: "Regalia, heh? Hasn't Miss Grierson told you that Wahaska is still hopelessly unable to live up to the dress-coat and standing collar? I'm sure she must have. But never mind; climb into the buggy and we'll let old Bucephalus take us around to see if the neighbors have brought in anything good to eat."

The drive was a short one, and it ended at the gate through which Matthew Broffin had preceded by only a few hours the man whose eventual appearance at the Farnham home he had so confidently predicted. As at many another odd moment when there had been nothing better to do, Broffin was once more shadowing the house in which, first or last, he expected to trap his amateur MacHeath; and when the buggy was halted at the carriage step he was near enough to mark and recognize the doctor's companion.

"Not this time," he muttered, sourly, when the two had passed together up the gravelled path and the host was fitting his latch-key to the front door. "It's only the sick man that writes books. I wonder what sort of a book he thinks he's going to write in this inforgotten, turkey-trodden, come-along village of the Reuben yaps!"

Griswold, waiting on the porch while Doctor Farnham fitted his key, had a nerve-tingling shiver of apprehension when the latch yielded with a click and he found himself under the hall lantern formally shaking hands with the statuesque young woman of the many imaginings. It gave him a curious thrill of mingled terror and joy to find her absolutely unchanged. Having, for his own part, lived through so many experiences since that final glimpse of her standing on the saloon-deck guards of the Belle Julie at St. Louis, the distance in time seemed almost immeasurable.

"You are very welcome to Home Nook, Mr. Griswold; we have been hearing about you for many weeks," she was saying when he had relinquished the firm hand and was hanging his coat and hat on the hall-rack. And then, with a half-embarrassed laugh: "I am afraid we are dreadful gossips; all Wahaska has been talking about you, you know, and wondering how it came to acquire you."

"It hasn't acquired anything very valuable," was the guest's modest disclaimer, its readiness arising out of a grateful easing of strains now that the actual face-to-face ordeal had safely passed its introductory stage. "And you mustn't say a word against your charming little city, Miss Farnham," he went on. "It is the friendliest, most hospitable——"

The doctor's daughter was interrupting with an enthusiastic show of applause.

"Come on out to dinner, both of you," she urged; and then to Griswold: "I want you to say all those nice things to Aunt Fanny, and as many more as you can think of. She has never admitted for a single moment that Wahaska can be compared with any one of a dozen New Hampshire villages she could name."

In the progress to the cozy, home-like dining-room, Griswold found himself at once in an atmosphere of genuine comfort and refinement; the refinement which speaks of generations of good breeding chastened and purified by the limitations of a slender purse; in the present instance the purse of the good little doctor whose attempted charity in the matter of his own fee was fresh in the mind of the castaway. Griswold had the writing craftsman's ingathering eye: he saw that the furnishings were frugally well-worn, that the sitting-room rug was country-woven, and that the spotless dining-room napery was soft and pliable with age. The contrast between the Farnham home and the ornate mansion three streets away on the lake front was strikingly apparent; as cleanly marked as that between Margery Grierson and the sweetly serene and conventional young person who was introducing him to her aunt across the small oval dining-table.

So far, all was going well. Griswold, with a pleasant word for the frail little woman opposite and a retort in kind now and then for the doctor's raillery, still had time to be narrowly observant of the signs and omens. But a little later, when the Swedish maid was serving the meat course, he had his first warning shock. Through the bouillon and the fish the doctor had borne the brunt of the table-talk, joking the guest on his humiliating descent from Mereside and the luxuries to a country doctor's table, and laughing at Griswold's half-hearted attempts to decry the luxuries. What word or phrase or trick of speech it was that served to stir the sleeping memories, Griswold could not guess; but it became suddenly apparent that the memories were stirring. In the midst of a half-uttered direction to the serving-maid, Miss Farnham stopped abruptly, and Griswold could feel her gaze, wide-eyed and half-terrified, seemingly fixed upon him.

It was all over in the turning of a leaf: there had been no break in the doctor's genial raillery, and the breathless little pause at the other end of the table was only momentary. But Griswold fancied that there was a subtle change in the daughter's attitude toward him dating from the moment of interruptions.

Farther along, he decided that the change was in himself, and was merely the outcropping of the morbid vein which persists, with more or less continuity, in all the temperamental workings of the human mind. When the dinner was over and there was an adjournment to the sitting-room, little Miss Gilman presently found her reading-glasses and a book; and the doctor, in the act of filling two long-stemmed pipes for his guest and himself, was called away professionally. Griswold saw himself confronting the really crucial stage of the ordeal, and prudence was warning him that it would be safer to make his adieux and to go with his host. It was partly Miss Farnham's protest, but more his own determination to prove the bridge of peril to the uttermost, that made him stay.

Miss Gilman, least obtrusive of chaperones, had been peacefully napping for a good half-hour in her low rocker under the reading-lamp, and the pictures in a thick quarto of Gulf Coast views had pleasantly filled the interval for the two who were awake, when Griswold finally assured himself that the danger of recognition was a danger past. As a mental analyst he knew that the opening of each fresh door in the house of present familiarity was automatically closing other doors opening upon the past; and it came to him with a little flush of the seer's exaltation that once again his prefigurings were finding their exact fulfilment. In a spirit of artistic daring he yielded to a sudden impulse, as one crossing the flimsiest of bridges may run and leap to prove that his theory of safety-stresses is a sufficient guarantee of his own immunity.

"You were speaking of first impressions of places," he said, while they were still turning the leaves of the picture-book. "Are you a believer in the absolute correctness of first impressions?"

"I don't know," was the thoughtful reply; but its after-word was more definite: "As to places, I'm not sure that the first impression always persists; in a few instances I am quite certain it hasn't. I didn't like the Gulf Coast at all, at first; it seemed so foreign and different and unhomelike. As to people, however——"

She paused, and Griswold entered the breach hardily.

"As to people, you are less easily converted from the original prejudice—or prepossession. So am I. I have learned to place the utmost confidence in the first impression. In my own case it is invariably correct, and if for any reason whatever I suffer any later characterization to take its place, I am always the loser."

She was regarding him curiously over the big book which still lay open between them.

"Is that a part of the writing gift?" she asked.

"No, not specially; most people have it in some more or less workable quantity, though for many it expresses itself only in a vague attraction or repulsion."

"I've had that feeling," she answered quickly.

"I know," he affirmed. "There have been times when, with every reasonable fibre in you urging you to believe the evil, a still stronger impulse has made you believe in the good."

"How can you know that?" she asked; and again he saw in the expressive eyes the flying signals of indeterminate perplexity and apprehension.

Resolutely he pressed the hazardous experiment to its logical conclusion. Once for all, he must know if this young woman with the sympathetic voice and the goddess-like pose could, even under suggestion, be led to link up the past with the present.

"It is my trade to know," he said quietly, closing the book of views and laying it aside. "There have been moments in your life when you would have given much to be able to decide a question of duty or expediency entirely irrespective of your impressions. Isn't that so?"

For one flitting instant he thought he had gone too far. In the hardy determination to win all or lose all, he had been holding her eyes steadily, as the sure mirror in which he should be able to read his sentence, of acquittal or of condemnation. This time there was no mistaking the sudden widening of the pupils to betray the equally sudden awakening of womanly terror.

"Don't be afraid," he began, and he had come thus far on the road to open confession when he saw that she was not looking at him; she was looking past him toward one of the windows giving upon the porch. "What is it?" he demanded, turning to look with her.

"It was a man—he was looking in at the window!" she returned in low tones. "I thought I saw him once before; but this time I am certain!"

Griswold sprang from his chair and a moment later was letting himself out noiselessly through the hall door. There was nothing stirring on the porch. The windless night was starlit and crystal clear, and the silence was profound. As soon as the glare of the house lights was out of his eyes, Griswold made a quick circuit of the porch. Not satisfied with this, he widened the circle to take in the front yard, realizing as he did it that a dozen men might easily play hide-and-seek with a single searcher in the shrubbery. He was still groping among the bushes, and Miss Farnham had come to the front door, when the doctor's buggy appeared under the street lights and was halted at the home hitching-post.

"Hello, Mr. Griswold; is that you?" called the cheery one, when he saw a bareheaded man beating the covers in his front yard.

Griswold met his host at the gate and walked up the path with him.

"Miss Charlotte thought she saw some one at one of the front windows," he explained; and a moment afterward the daughter was telling it for herself.

"I saw him twice," she insisted; "once while we were at dinner, and again just now. The first time I thought I might be mistaken, but this time——"

Griswold was laughing silently and inwardly deriding his gifts when, under cover of the doctor's return, he made decent acknowledgments for benefits bestowed and took his departure. On the pleasant summer-night walk to upper Shawnee Street he was congratulating himself upon the now quite complete fulfilment of the wishing prophecy. Miss Farnham was going to prove to be all that the most critical maker of studies from life could ask in a model; a supremely perfect original for the character of Fidelia in the book. Moreover, she would be his touchstone for the truths and verities; even as Margery Grierson might, if she were forgiving enough to let by-gones be by-gones, hold the mirror up to Nature and the pure humanities. Moreover, again, whatever slight danger there might have been in a possibility of recognition was a danger outlived. If the first meeting had not stirred the sleeping memories in Miss Farnham, subsequent ones would serve only to widen the gulf between forgetfulness and recollection by just such distances as the Wahaskan Griswold should traverse in leaving behind him the deck-hand of the Belle Julie.

Thus the complacent, musing upper thought in the mind and on the lips of the proletary as he wended his way through the quiet and well-nigh deserted streets to the older part of the town. How much it might have been modified if he had known that the man whose face Miss Farnham had seen at the window was silently tracking him through the tree-shadowed streets is a matter for conjecture. Also, it is to be presumed that much, if not all, of the complacency would have vanished if he could have been an unseen listener in the Farnham sitting-room, dating from the time when little Miss Gilman pattered off to bed, leaving the father and daughter sitting together under the reading-lamp.

At first their talk was entirely of the window apparition; the daughter insisting upon its reality, and the father trying to push it over into the limbo of things imagined. Driven finally to give all the reasons for her belief in the realities, Charlotte related the incident of the afternoon.

"You may remember that I told you over the 'phone that I had a caller this afternoon," she began.

The doctor did remember it, and said so.

"You can imagine how frightened I was when I tell you that it was a man—a detective from New Orleans who has, or at least who says he has, been travelling thousands of miles to find me."

Doctor Bertie was tickling his bearded chin thoughtfully. "He should have come to me first," he said, frowning a little at the invasion of his home. "It was about that bank robbery, I suppose?"

"Yes; he thought I could tell him the man's real name. It seems that they have no identity clew to work upon. I knew at the time that 'Gavitt' was an assumed name; the man as good as told me so, you remember. This Mr. Broffin wouldn't believe that I couldn't tell him the real name, and along toward the last he grew quite angry and threatening. He insisted upon it that I knew the robber—that I had known him before the crime was committed; and he intimated pretty broadly that I am still in communication with him. Of course, it is all very absurd; but it is also very annoying to think that somebody is spying upon you all the time. I didn't want to speak of it before Mr. Griswold; but it was this detective who came twice to look in at our windows this evening."