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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She spread her hands in a pretty affectation of embarrassment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Farnham took time to think.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



XVII

GROPINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hardly, I think."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

Again Johnson took time to be accurate.

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

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

"I've been working around to that notion myself, by the smalls, as the cat eat the grind-rock," he said. "I said to myself, Would he, with the big pull-off still trembling on the edge—would he have held back for a woman he didn't know? And if he did know her, it would be a good, chunky reason why he shouldn't crowd in and take his turn: he'd have to make good or lose whatever little ante he'd been putting up in the sociable game. Now one other little thing: you counted him out the single thousand in small bills first, you said: then what happened?"

"Then I went to the vault."

"And when you came back, the young woman was gone?"

"Oh, yes; she went while Mr. Galbraith was handing me his check."

"She left before you started for the vault?"

"Yes."

"You didn't notice whether she said 'Good-by' or 'Thank you,' or anything like that, I reckon?"

"No."

"But she might have, and you not see it?"

"Yes; she might have."

"All right; then we'll go on," Broffin continued, and the time having arrived for the putting of the second critical question, he planted it fairly. "You opened the wicket and passed the money out to the hold-up. He took it and backed to the door—this nearest door. Mr. Galbraith tells me he gave the alarm as quick as he could draw his breath. How much time did the fellow have before somebody went after him?"

Johnson's answer was gratifyingly prompt.

"You might say, no time at all. There were a number of people in the bank—perhaps a dozen or more—standing around waiting their turns at the different wickets. I should say that every single one of them made a rush for the doors, and I remember thinking at the time that the fellow couldn't possibly get away."

"Yet he did get away; made his drop-out so neatly that none of the rushers got to the doors soon enough to catch a sight of him?"

"That is the curious fact. Not a man of them saw him. They all told the same story. The sidewalk wasn't crowded at the time: we are on the sunny side of the street, and as you see now, the crowd is on the other side in the shade. Yet the fellow had vanished before the nimblest one of them got to the doors."

Broffin drew a deep breath and nodded slowly. The added details were fitting the new theory to a nicety. In conversation with the president he had previously marked the fact that the robber had claimed to be starving.

"Thank you, Mr. Johnson; I reckon that's all for this time," he said to the teller, and a minute later he was buying a cigar of the little Gascon proprietor of the restaurant next door to the bank.

"You have an excellent memory, I've been told, Monsieur Pouillard," he said, at the lighting of the cigar. "Do you recollect the day of the bank robbery next door pretty well?"

The Gascon shrugged amiably. "Vraiment, M'sieu' Broffin; it ees not possib' that one forgets."

"It was rather late for breakfast, and not quite late enough for lunch: were you feeding many people just then?"

"H-onlee one; he is yo'ng man w'at don' nevveh come on my 'otel biffo'. He is sit on dat secon' table; oui!"

Broffin pushed the probe of inquiry a little deeper. How did M. Pouillard happen to remember? Mais, it was because the young man was very droll; he was of the cold blood. When Victor, le garcon, would have brought news of the emeute, he had said, breakfast first, and the news afterward.

Questioned in his turn, the serving-man corroborated his employer's particulars and was able to add a few of his own. The young man was fair, with blue eyes and a reddish beard and mustaches. The mustaches were untrimmed, but the beard was clipped to a point, a les moeurs des etudiants des Beaux Arts. The waiter had once served tables in a Paris cafe, and he seldom lost an opportunity of advertising the fact. Pressed to account for his accurate memory picture of a chance patron, he confessed naively; the tip had been princely and the young man was one to mark and to remember—and to serve again.

Broffin left the restaurant with one more link in the chain neatly forged. There was an excellent reason why none of the first-aid pursuers had been able to catch a glimpse of the "strong-arm man." He had merely stepped from the bank entrance to Monsieur Pouillard's. Between the cafe breakfast and the departure of the Belle Julie there lay an hour and a quarter. In that interval he could easily perfect his simple disguise. Broffin was not specially interested in the incidental minutiae. It was the identity of the man with the untrimmed mustaches and the pointed beard that must be established.

After another week of patient groping, Broffin was obliged to confess that the problem of identification was too difficult to be solved on conventional lines. It presented no point of attack. With neither a name nor a pictured face for reference, inquiry was crippled at the very outset. None of the many boarding- and rooming-houses he visited had lost a lodger answering the verbal description of the missing man. Very reluctantly, for bull-dog tenacity was the detective's ruling characteristic, he was forced to the conclusion that the only untried solution lay in Teller Johnson's unfortified impression that the chance meeting at his wicket was not the first meeting between the robber and the young woman with the draft to be cashed.

It was the slenderest of threads, and Broffin realized sweatingly how difficult it might be to follow. Assuming that there had been a previous meeting or meetings, or rather the passing acquaintance which was all that the young woman's later betrayal of the man made conceivable, would the writer of the accusing letter be willing to add to her burden of responsibility by giving the true name and standing of the man whose real identity—if she knew it—she had been careful to conceal in the unsigned note to Mr. Galbraith? Broffin read the note again—"a deck-hand, whose name on the mate's book is John Wesley Gavitt," was the description she had given. It might, or it might not, be an equivocation; but the longer Broffin dwelt upon it the more he leaned toward the conclusion to which his theory and the few known facts pointed. The young woman knew the man in his proper person; she had been reluctant to betray him—that, he decided, was sufficiently proved by the lapse of time intervening between the date of her note and its postmark date; having finally decided to give him up, she had told only what was absolutely necessary, leaving him free to conceal his real name and identity if he would—and could.

Having come thus far on the road to convincement, Broffin knew what he had to do and set about the doing of it methodically. A telegram to the clerk of the Belle Julie served to place the steamer in the lower river; and boarding a night train he planned to reach Vicksburg in time to intercept the witnesses whose evidence would determine roughly how many hundreds or thousands of miles he could safely cut out of the zigzag journeyings to which the following up of the hypothetical clew would lead.

For, cost what it might, he was determined to find the writer of the unsigned letter.



XVIII

THE ZWEIBUND

On his second visit to the sick man lodged in the padded luxuries of one of the guest-rooms at Mereside, made on the morning following the Grierson home-coming, Dr. Farnham found the hospital status established, with the good-natured Swede installed as nurse, the bells muffled, and Miss Margery playing the part of Sister Superior and dressing it, from the dainty, felt-soled slippers to the smooth banding of her hair.

An hour later, however, it was the Margery of the Wahaskan Renaissance, joyously clad and radiant, who was holding the reins over a big English trap horse, parading down Main Street and smiling greetings to everybody.

By one of the chances which he was willing to call fortunate, Edward Raymer was at the curb to help her down from her high seat in the trap when she pulled the big horse to a stand in front of her father's bank.

"I'm the luckiest man in Red Earth County; I was just wondering when I should get in line to tell you how glad we are to have you back," he said, with his eyes shining.

"Are you, really? You are not half as glad as I am to be back. There is no place like home, you know."

"There isn't, and there oughtn't to be," was his quick response. "I've been hoping you'd come to look upon Wahaska as your home, and now I know you do."

"Why shouldn't I?" she laughed, and she was reaching for a paper-wrapped package on the trap seat when he got it for her.

"You are going somewhere?—may I carry it for you?" he asked; but she shook her head and took it from him.

"Only into the bank," she explained; and she was beginning to tell him he must come to Mereside when the sick-man episode obtruded itself, and the invitation was broken in the midst, very prettily, very effectively.

"I know," Raymer said, in instant sympathy. "You have your hands full just now. Will you let me say that it's the finest thing I ever heard of—your taking that poor fellow home and caring for him?"

Gertrude Raymer had once said in her brother's hearing that Miss Grierson's color would be charming if it were only natural. Looking into Miss Grierson's eyes Raymer saw the refutation of the slander in the suffusing wave of generous embarrassment deepening in warm tints on the perfect neck and cheek.

"Oh, dear me!" she said in pathetic protest; "is it all over town so soon? I'm afraid we are still dreadfully 'country' in Wahaska, Mr. Raymer. Please cut it down to the bare, commonplace facts whenever you have a chance, won't you? The poor man was sick, and nobody knew him, and somebody had to take care of him."

Like the doctor, Raymer asked the inevitable question, "Who is he, Miss Margery?" and, like the doctor again, he received the same answer, "I haven't the smallest notion of an idea. But that doesn't make the slightest difference," she went on. "He is a fellow human being, sick and helpless. That ought to be enough for any of us to know."

Raymer stood watching her as she tripped lightly into the bank, and when he went to catch his car the conservative minority had lost whatever countenance or support he had ever given it.

"She's pure gold when you dig down through the little top layer of harmless scheming for the social Grand-Viziership," he told himself, tingling with the exultant thrills of the discoverer of buried treasure. "If all Wahaska doesn't open its doors to her after this, it'll sure earn what's coming to it."

True to her latest characterization of herself, Margery had a nod and a pleasant smile for the young men behind the brass grilles as she passed on her way to the president's room in the rear. She found her father at his desk, thoughtfully munching the unburned half of one of the huge cigars, and named her errand.

"I want a safety-deposit box big enough to hold this," she said briefly, exhibiting the paper-wrapped packet.

Jasper Grierson, deeply immersed in a matter of business to which he had given the better part of the forenoon, replied without looking up: "Go and tell Murray; he'll fix you out," and it was not until after she had gone that it occurred to him to wonder what use she was going to make of a private box in the safety vault—a wonder that had lost itself in a multiplicity of other things before he saw her again.

* * * * *

For a week after his unmarked arrival in Wahaska, the castaway in the upper room at Mereside made hard work of it, giving the good little doctor with the kindly eyes and the straight-line Puritan lips a rather anxious fight to gain the upper hand of the still unnamed malady.

During the week there were many callers at the lake-fronting mansion; some coming frankly to welcome the returned house-mistress, others to make the welcoming an excuse for finding out the particulars in the castaway episode. But neither faith nor good works seemed to have any effect on the rebellious minority, and at the end of the week Raymer once more had the pleasure of lifting Miss Grierson from the high trap at the door of the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank, and of exchanging a few words with her before she went in to see her father.

As on any other business day, President Grierson was solidly planted in his heavy arm-chair before a desk well littered with work. He nodded absently to his daughter as she entered, and knowing that the nod meant that he would come to the surface of things—her surface—when he could, she turned aside to the window and waited.

Though she had seen him develop day by day in less than three of the thirty-odd years of his Western exile, her father offered a constant succession of surprises to her. When she opened the door to retrospection, which was not often, she remembered that the man who had stumbled upon the rich quartz vein in Yellow Dog Gulch could scarcely sign his name legibly to the papers recording his claim; that in those days there was no prophecy of the ambitious present in the man, half drunkard and half outlaw, whose name in the Yellow Dog district had been a synonym for—but these were unpleasant memories, and Margery rarely indulged them.

Just now she put them aside by turning her back upon the window and taking credit for the tasteful and luxurious appointments of the private office, with its soft-piled rug and heavy mahogany furnishings. Her father was careless of such things; totally indifferent to them in business hours; but she saw to it that his surroundings kept pace with the march of prosperity. Here in Wahaska, as elsewhere, a little judicious display counted for much, even if there were a few bigoted persons who affected to despise it.

She was in the midst of a meditated attack upon the steamship lithographs on the walls—sole remaining landmarks of the ante-Grierson period—when her father wheeled in his pivot-chair and questioned her with a lift of his shaggy eyebrows.

"Want to see me, Madgie?"

"Just a moment." She crossed the room and stood at the end of the big desk. He reached mechanically for his check-book, but she smiled and stopped him. "No; it isn't money, this time: it's something that money can't buy. I met Mr. Edward Raymer at the front door a few minutes ago; does he have an account with you?"

"Yes."

"Is it an accommodation to the bank, or to him?"

Jasper Grierson's laugh was grimly contemptuous.

"The bank isn't making anything out of him. The shoe is on the other foot."

"Do you mean that he is a borrower?"

"Not yet; but he wants to be. He was in to see me about it just now."

"What is the matter? Isn't he making money with his plant?"

"Oh, yes; his business is good enough. But he's like all the other young fools, nowadays; he ain't content to bet on a sure thing and grow with his capital. He wants to widen out and build and put in new machinery and cut a bigger dash generally. Thinks he's been too slow and sure."

"Are you going to stake him?" Margery waged relentless war with her birthright inclination to lapse into the speech of the mining-camps, but she stumbled now and then in talking to her father.

"I don't know; I guess not. Somehow, I've never had much use for him; and, besides, I've had another plan in mind."

"And that was?"

"To organize another company and build a plant big enough to run him out."

Margery was turning the leaves of an illustrated prospectus of an Idaho irrigation company, and was apparently much more deeply interested in the electrotyped pictures than in the fortunes of Mr. Edward Raymer. And when she went on, she ignored the obliterative business suggestion and remained in the narrower channel of the personalities.

"Why haven't you any use for him?"

"Oh, I don't know: because, until just lately, he has never seemed to have much use for me, I guess. It's a stand-off, so far as likings go. I offered to reincorporate his outfit for him six months ago, and told him I'd take fifty-one per cent of the reorganization stock myself; but he wouldn't talk about it. Said what little he had was his own, and he proposed to keep it."

"But now he is willing to let you help him?"

"Not much; he don't look at it in that light. He wants to borrow money from the bank and put up the stock of his close corporation as collateral. It's safe enough, but I don't believe I'll do it."

The chatelaine of Mereside laid the prospectus aside and came abruptly to the point.

"I want you to do it," she said, decisively.

"The devil you do!" Then, with the dry door-hinge chuckle: "It was a waste of good money to put in the ice plant while you're here, Madgie. What's in the wind, now?"

"Maybe I'll tell you—sometime."

The president chuckled again and tilted to the comfortable angle in the arm-chair.

"Tell me now; you don't need to beat any of the bushes with me, little girl. If you say the word, I'll pinch him for you."

"I didn't say that I wanted him pinched. But I do want you to put him under obligations to you—the heavier the better. His mother and sister have gone out of their way to snub me, and I want to play even."

Grierson wagged his huge head, and this time the chuckle grew to a guffaw.

"I thought maybe that was the game. But it won't work with him; not for a single minute."

"Why won't it?"

"Because he ain't the man to go to his women-folks when he gets into hot water. He'll keep it to himself; and they'll go on bluffing you, same as ever."

Miss Grierson pulled on her gauntlets and made ready to go, leisurely, as befitted her pose.

"That is where you are mistaken," she objected, coolly. "It isn't very often that I can give you a business tip, but this is one of the times when I can. When John Raymer died, he left an undivided half of his estate to his wife, the other half to be shared equally by the two children. At the present moment, every dollar the entire family has is invested in the iron plant. So, you see, I know what I am doing."

Jasper Grierson turned the leaf of a calendar-pad and made a brief memorandum.

"I savez: I'll break the three-cornered syndicate for you."

"You will do nothing of the kind," asserted the radiant daughter of men, with serene assurance. "You will let Mr. Raymer get himself into hot water, as you call it, and then, when I say the word, you'll reach in and pull him out."

"Oh, that's the how of it, is it? All right; anything you say goes as it lays. But I'm going to make one condition, this time: you'll have to keep cases on the game yourself, and say when. I can't be bothered keeping the run of your society tea-parties."

"I don't want you to. Don't be late for dinner: we are going to the Rodneys' for the evening."

When she was gone, the president selected another of the overgrown cigars from a box in the desk drawer, lighted it, and tilted back in the big arm-chair to envelop himself in a cloud of smoke. It was his single expensive habit—the never-empty box of Brobdingnagian cigars in the drawer—and the indulgence helped him to push the Yellow-Dog period into a remoter past.

After a time the smoke cloud became articulate, rumbling forth chucklings and Elizabethan oaths, mingling with musings idiomatic and profane. "By God, I believe she thought she was fooling me—I do, for a fact! But it's too thin. Of course, she wants to make the women kow-tow, but that ain't all there is to it—not by a jugful. But it's all right: she plays her own hand, and she's bully good and able to play it. If she's after Raymer's scalp, he might as well get ready to wear a wig, right now. I'll back her to win, every time."

Accordingly, when Mr. Edward Raymer came out of the president's room at the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank the following morning, he was treading upon air. For in his mind's eye there was a fair picture of a great and successful industry to be built upon the substantial extension of credit promised by the capitalist whose presence chamber he had just quitted.



XIX

LOSS AND GAIN

Striving feebly as one who gathers up the shards and fragments after an explosion, Griswold remembered cloudily the supper of tasteless courses at the Hotel Chouteau, still less distinctly, a drive through the streets to a great, echoing railway station, a glare of lights too painful to be borne, and, last of all, an overpowering weariness shutting down upon him like a sudden closing in of darkness become thick and stifling.

Afterward there were vague impressions, momentary breaches in the wall of inclosing darkness when he had realized that he was curiously helpless, and that he was still on the train going somewhere, though he could not remember where. In one of these intervals a woman had stood beside him, and he seemed to remember that she had put her cool hand on his forehead.

Of the transition from the train to the bed in the upper room at Mereside, he recalled nothing, though the personalities of two strangers, the doctor and the nurse, obtruded themselves frequently in the later phases of the troubled dream, like figures in a shadow pantomime. Also, that suggestion of the presence of the woman with the cool palm became self-repeating; and finally, when complete consciousness returned, the dream impression was still so sharply defined that he was not surprised to find her standing at his bedside.

He did not recognize her. The memory of his supper companions of the Hotel Chouteau cafe was deeply buried under the dream debris, and the present moment was full of mild bewilderment. Yet the friendliness in her eyes seemed to shine out of some past which ought to be remembered.

Before he could frame any of the queries which came thronging to the door of the returned consciousness, she smiled and shook her head and forbade him.

"No, you mustn't talk," she said, with gentle authority. "It's the doctor's orders. By and by, when you are stronger, you may ask all the questions you please; but not now."

He wagged his head on the pillow. "Can't I even ask where I am?" he begged.

"Since you have asked, I'll tell you that much. You are in Wahaska, Minnesota, in the house of your friends; and you have nothing to do but to get well as fast and as comfortably as you can."

Her voice was even more remindful than her face of that elusive past which ought to be remembered, and he closed his eyes to try to recall it. When he opened them again, she was gone and her place was taken by one of the figures of the dream; a man with a thick mop of fair hair and a face of blank good-nature, and whose store of English seemed to be comprised in a single sentence: "Ja, ja; Hae bane poorty vell, t'ank yo'."

Later in the day the doctor came; and when the professional requirements were satisfied, Griswold learned the bare facts of his succoring. It was characteristic of the Griswold of other days that the immense obligation under which the Griersons had placed him made him gasp and perspire afresh.

"Who ever heard of such a thing, doctor?" he protested weakly. And then: "How am I ever going to repay them?"

Dr. Farnham was crisply explicit. "You may leave Mr. Grierson out of your problem. Miss Margery is an only child, and if she sees fit to turn Mereside into a temporary hospital, he is abundantly able to indulge her."

"Then I am indebted to the daughter, alone?"

"Entirely, I should say."

Griswold looked long and earnestly at the face of his professional adviser. It was a good face, clearly lined, benevolent; and, above all, trustworthy.

"Tell me one thing more, doctor, if you can. What was the motive? Was it just heavenly good-heartedness?—or——"

The doctor's smile was the least possible shade wintry.

"When you have lived a few years longer in this world of ours, you will not probe too deeply into motives; you will take the deed as the sufficient exponent of the prompting behind it. If I say so much, you will understand that I am not impugning Miss Grierson's motives. There are times when she is the good angel of everybody in sight."

"And this is one of the times?" persisted the analyst.

"We shall say that this is one of the times: say it and stick to it, Mr.——"

The pause after the courtesy title was significant, and Griswold filled it promptly. "Griswold—Kenneth Griswold. Do you mean to say that you haven't known my name, doctor?"

"We have not. We took the Good Samaritan's privilege and ransacked your belongings—Miss Margery and I—thinking that there might be relatives or friends who should be notified."

"And you found nothing?" queried the sick man, a cold fear gripping at his heart.

"Absolutely nothing to tell us who you were; no cards, letters, or memoranda of any kind. The conclusion was obvious: some one had taken advantage of your illness on the train and had picked your pockets."

Griswold moistened his lips and swallowed hard. "There were two suit-cases: were they lost?"

"No; they are here."

"And you found nothing in them?"

"Nothing but clothing and your toilet tools, a pistol, and a typewritten book manuscript bearing no signature."

Griswold turned his face away and shut his eyes. Once more his stake in the game of life was gone.

"There was another package of—of papers in one of the grips," he said, faintly; "quite a large package wrapped in brown paper."

"Valuables?" queried the doctor, sympathetically curious.

"Y-yes; rather valuable."

"We found nothing but the manuscript. Could any one else make use of the papers you speak of?"

Griswold was too feeble to prevaricate successfully.

"There was money in the package," he said, leaving the physician to infer what he pleased.

"Ah; then you were robbed. It's a pity we didn't know it at the time. It is pretty late to begin looking for the thief now, I'm afraid."

"Quite too late," said Griswold monotonously.

The doctor rose to go.

"Don't let the material loss depress you, Mr. Griswold," he said, with encouraging kindliness. "The one loss that couldn't have been retrieved is a danger past for you now, I'm glad to say. Be cheerful and patient, and we'll soon have you a sound man again. You have a magnificent constitution and fine recuperative powers; otherwise we should have buried you within a week of your arrival."

It was not until after the doctor had gone that Griswold was able to face the new misfortune with anything like a sober measure of equanimity. Imaginative to the degree which facilely transforms the suppositional into the real, he was still singularly free from superstition. Nevertheless, all the legends clustering about the proverbial slipperiness of ill-gotten gains paraded themselves insistently. It was only by the supremest effort of will that he could push them aside and address himself to the practical matter of getting well. That was the first thing to be considered; with or without money, he must relieve the Griersons of their self-assumed burden at the earliest possible moment.

This was the thought with which he sank into the first natural sleep of convalescence. But during the days which followed, Margery was able to modify it without dulling the keen edge of his obligation. What perfect hospitality could do was done, without ostentation, with the exact degree of spontaneity which made it appear as a service rendered to a kinsman. It was one of the gifts of the daughter of men to be able to ignore all the middle distances between an introduction and a friendship; and by the time Griswold was strong enough to let the big, gentle Swede plant him in a Morris chair in the sun-warmed bay-window, the friendship was a fact accomplished.

"Do you know, you're the most wonderful person I have ever known?" he said to Margery, on the first of the sunning days when she had come to perch in the window-seat opposite his chair.

"It's propinquity," she laughed. "You haven't seen any other woman for days and weeks. Wait until you are strong enough to come down to one of my 'evenings.'"

"No, it isn't propinquity," he denied.

"Then it's the unaccustomed. You are from the well-behaved East. There are some people even here in Wahaska who will tell you that I have never properly learned how to behave."

"Your looking-glass will tell you why they say that," he said gravely.

Her smile showed the perfect rows of white teeth. "You are recovering rapidly, Mr. Kenneth; don't you think so? Or was that only a little return of the fever?"

He brushed the bit of mockery aside. "I want to be serious to-day—if you'll let me. There are a lot of things I'd like to know."

"About Wahaska?"

"About you, first. Where did we meet?—before I came out of the fever woods and saw you standing by the bed?"

"We didn't 'meet,' in the accepted meaning of the word. My father and I happened to sit at your table one evening in the Hotel Chouteau, in St. Louis."

"Ah; I knew there was a day back of the other days. Do you believe in destiny?"

She nodded brightly. "Sometimes I do; when it brings things out the way I want them to come out."

"I've often wondered," he went on musingly. "Think of it: somewhere back in the past you took the first step in a path which was to lead you to that late supper in the Chouteau. Somewhere in my past I took the first step in the crooked trail that was to lead me there."

"Well?" she encouraged.

"The paths crossed—and I am your poor debtor," he finished. "I can never hope to repay you and your father for what you have done."

"Oh, yes you can," she asserted lightly. "You can pass it along to the man farther down. Forget it, and tell me what you want to know about Wahaska."

"First, I'd like to know my doctor's name."

"The idea!" she exclaimed. "Hasn't there been anybody to introduce you? He is Wahaska's best-beloved 'Doctor Bertie'; otherwise Doctor Herbert C. Farnham."

"Doctor Farnham?—not Miss Char——" He bit the name in two in the middle, but the mischief was done.

"Yes; Charlotte's father," was the calm reply. Then: "Where did you meet Miss Farnham?"

"I haven't met her," he protested instantly; "she—she doesn't know me from Adam. But I have seen her, and I happened to learn her name and her home address."

Miss Margery's pretty face took on an expression of polite disinterest, but behind the mask the active brain was busily fitting the pegs of deduction into their proper holes. Her involuntary guest did not know the father; therefore he must have seen the daughter while she was away from home. Charlotte Farnham had been South, at Pass Christian, and doubtless in New Orleans. The convalescent had also been in New Orleans, as his money packet with its Bayou State Security labels sufficiently testified.

Miss Grierson got up to draw one of the window shades. It had become imperative that she should have time to think and an excuse for hiding her face from the eyes which seemed to be trying masterfully to read her inmost thoughts.

"You think it is strange that I should know Miss Farnham's name and address without having met her?" Griswold asked, when the pause had become a keen agony.

Miss Grierson's rejoinder was flippant. "Oh, no; she is pretty enough to account for a stranger thing than that."

"She is more than pretty," said Griswold, impulsively; "she has the beauty of those who have high ideals, and live up to them."

"I thought you said you didn't know her," was the swift retort.

"I said I hadn't met her, and that she doesn't know me."

"Oh," said the small fitter of deduction pegs; and afterward she talked, and made the convalescent talk, pointedly of other things.

This occurred in the forenoon of a pleasant day in May. In the afternoon of the same day, Miss Grierson's trap was halted before the door of the temporary quarters of the Wahaska Public Library. Raymer saw the trap and crossed the street, remembering—what he would otherwise have forgotten—that his sister had asked him to get a book on orchids.

Miss Margery was in the reference room, wading absently through the newspaper files. She nodded brightly when Raymer entered—and was not in the least dust-blinded by the library card in his hand.

"You are just in time to help me," she told him. "Do you remember the story of that daring bank robbery in New Orleans a few weeks ago?—the one in which a man made the president draw a check and get it cashed for him?"

Raymer did remember it, chiefly because he had talked about it at the time with Jasper Grierson, and had wondered curiously how the president of the Farmers' and Merchants' would deport himself under like conditions.

"Do you remember the date?" she asked.

Since it was tied to his first business interview with Grierson pere, Raymer was able to recall the date, approximately, and together they turned the file of the Pioneer Press until they came to the number containing the Associated Press story of the crime. It was fairly circumstantial; the young woman at the teller's window figured in it, and there was a sketchy description of the robber.

"If you should meet the man face to face, would you recognise him from the description?" she flashed up at Raymer.

"Not in a thousand years," he confessed. "Would you?"

"No; not from the description," she admitted. Then she passed to a matter apparently quite irrelevant.

"Didn't I see Miss Farnham's return noticed in the Wahaskan the other day?"

With Charlotte's father a daily visitor at Mereside, it seemed incredible that Miss Grierson had not heard of the daughter's home-coming. But Raymer answered in good faith.

"You may have seen it some time ago. She and Miss Gilman have been home for three or four weeks."

"Somebody said they were coming up the river by boat; did they?"

"Yes, all the way from New Orleans."

"That must have been delightful, if they were fortunate enough to get a good boat. I've been told that the table is simply impossible on some of them."

"So it is. But they came up as far as St. Louis on one of the Anchor Lines—the Belle Julie—and even Miss Gilman admits that the accommodations were excellent."

She nodded absently and began to turn the leaves of the newspaper file. Raymer took it as his dismissal and went to the desk to get the orchid book. When he looked in again on his way to the street, Miss Grierson had gone, leaving the file of the Pioneer Press open on the reading desk. Almost involuntarily he glanced at the first-page headings, thrilling to a little shock of surprise when one of them proved to be the caption of another Associated Press despatch giving a twenty-line story of the capture and second escape of the Bayou State Security robber on the levee at St. Louis.

The reading of the bit of stale news impressed him curiously. Why had Miss Margery interested herself in the details of the New Orleans bank robbery? Why—with no apparent special reason—should she have remembered it at all? or remembering it, have known where to look for the two newspaper references?

Raymer left the library speculating vaguely on the unaccountable tangents at which the feminine mind could now and then fly off from the well-defined circle of the conventionally usual. On rare occasions his mother or Gertrude did it, and he had long since learned the folly of trying to reduce the small problem to terms of known quantities masculine.

"Just the same, I'd like to know why, this time," he said to himself, as he crossed the street to the Manufacturers' Club. "Miss Grierson isn't at all the person to do things without an object."



XX

THE CONVALESCENT

After a few more days in the Morris chair; days during which he was idly contented when Margery was with him, and vaguely dissatisfied when she was not; Griswold was permitted to go below stairs, where he met, for the first time since the Grierson roof had given him shelter, the master of Mereside.

The little visit to Jasper Grierson's library was not prolonged beyond the invalid's strength; but notwithstanding its brevity there were inert currents of antagonism evolved which Margery, present and endeavoring to serve as a lightning-arrester, could neither ground nor turn aside.

For Griswold there was an immediate recrudescence of the unfavorable first impression gained at the Hotel Chouteau supper-table. He recalled his own descriptive formula struck out as a tag for the hard-faced, heavy-browed man at the end of the cafe table—"crudely strong, elementally shrewd, with a touch, or more than a touch, of the savage: the gray-wolf type"—and he found no present reason for changing the record.

Thus the convalescent debtor to the Grierson hospitality. And as for the Wahaskan money lord, it is to be presumed that he saw nothing more than a hollow-eyed, impractical story-writer (he had been told of the manuscript found in Griswold's hand-baggage), who chanced to be Margery's latest and least accountable fad.

Griswold took away from the rather constrained ice-breaking in the banker's library a renewed resolve to cut his obligation to Jasper Grierson as short as possible. How he should begin again the mordant struggle for existence was still an unsolved problem. Of the one-thousand-dollar spending fund there remained something less than half: for a few weeks or months he could live and pay his way; but after that.... Curiously enough, the alternative of another attack upon the plutocratic dragon did not suggest itself. That, he told himself, was an experiment tried and found wanting. But in any event, he must not outstay his welcome at Mereside; and with this thought in mind he crept down-stairs daily after the library episode, and would give Margery no peace because she would not let him go abroad in the town.

"Not to-day, but to-morrow," she said, finally, when there was no longer any good reason for denying him. "Wait until to-morrow, and if it's a fine day, I'll drive you in the trap."

"But why not to-day?" he complained.

"'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless'—what shall I say; patient, or guest, or—friend?" she laughed, garbling the quotation to fit the occasion.

"Shakespeare said 'child,'" he suggested mildly.

"And so shall I," she gibed—but the gibe itself was almost a caress. "Sometimes you remind me of an impatient boy who has been promised a peach and can't wait until it ripens. But if you must have a reason why I won't drive you this afternoon, you may. We are going to have a tiny little social function at Mereside this evening, and I want you to be fresh and rested for it."

"Oh, my dear Miss Margery!" protested the convalescent, reluctant to his finger-tips; "not to meet your friends! I am only your poor charity patient, and——"

"That will do," she declared, tyrannizing over him with a fine affectation of austere hostess-ship. "I say you are to come down-stairs this evening to meet a few of our friends. And you will come."

"Certainly, I shall come, if you wish it," he assented, remembering afresh his immense obligation; and when the time was ripe he made himself presentable and felt his way down the dimly lighted library stair, being minded to slip into the social pool by the route which promised the smallest splash and the fewest ripples.

It was a stirring of the Philistine in him that led him to prefigure weariness and banality in the prospect. Without in the least suspecting it, Griswold was a Brahmin of the severest sect on his social side; easily disposed to hold aloof and to criticise, and, as a man Eastern-bred, serenely assured that nothing truly acceptable in the social sense could come out of the Nazareth of the West.

For this cause he was properly humiliated when he entered the spacious double drawing-rooms and found them so comfortably crowded by a throng of conventionally clothed and conventionally behaved guests that he was immediately able to lose himself—and any lingering trace of self-consciousness—in a company which, if appearances were to be trusted, was Western only by reason of Wahaska's location on the map. Indeed, the sudden and necessary rearrangement of the pieces on the prefigured chess-board was almost embarrassing; and Margery's greeting and welcome brought a grateful sense of relief and a certain recovery of self-possession for which, a few minutes earlier, he had thought there could be no possible Wahaskan demand.

"Thank you so much for coming down, and for resolving heroically not to be bored," she began brightly. "And now that you've made your little concession, I'll make mine. I sha'n't ask anything at all of you"—piling the cushions in the corner of a wide window-seat and making him sit down; "you are just to be an invalid this evening, you know, and you needn't meet any more people than you want to."

When she had patted the pillows into place and was gone to welcome still later comers, Griswold had a chance to look around him. The readjusting mechanism was still at work. Beyond question it was all very different, strikingly different, from his forecastings. A young woman was at the piano, with a young man whose clothes fitted him and who was in nowise conscious of them, turning the music for her. There was a pleasant hum of conversation; the lights were not glaring; the furnishings were not in bad taste—on the contrary, they were in exceedingly good taste. Griswold smiled when he remembered that he had been looking forward to something suggesting a cross between a neighborhood tea-drinking and a church social. He was agreeably disappointed to find that the keynote was distinctly well-mannered, passably urban, undeniably conventional.

And the charming young hostess.... From his corner of the window-seat Griswold had a comprehensive view of the two great rooms, and beyond them through a pillared opening to the candle-lighted dining-room where the refreshments were served. Though the rooms were well filled, there was but a single personality pervading them for the eager student of types. Admitting that there were other women more beautiful, Griswold, groping always for the fitting figure and the apt phrase, told himself that Miss Grierson's crowning gift was an acute sense of the eternal harmonies; she was always "in character."

Hitherto he had known her only as his benefactress and the thoughtful caretaker for his comfort. But now, at this first sight of her in the broader social field, she shone upon and dazzled him. Admitting that the later charm might be subtly sensuous—he refused to analyze it too closely—it was undeniable that it warmed him to a newer and a stronger life; that he could bask in its generous glow like some hibernating thing of the wild answering to the first thrilling of the spring-tide. True, Miss Grierson bore little resemblance to any ideal of his past imaginings. She might even be the Aspasia to Charlotte Farnham's Saint Cecilia. But even so, was not the daughter of Axiochus well beloved of men and of heroes?

It was some little time afterward, and Jasper Grierson, stalking like a grim and rather unwilling master of ceremonies among his guests, had gruffly introduced three or four of the men, when Griswold gladly made room in the window-seat for his transformed and glorified mistress of the fitnesses. As had happened more than once before, her nearness intoxicated him; and while he made sure now that the charm was at least partly physical, its appeal was none the less irresistible.

"Are you dreadfully tired?" she asked; adding quickly: "You mustn't let us make a martyr of you. It's your privilege to disappear whenever you feel like it."

"Indeed, I'm not at all tired," he protested. "It is all very comforting and homelike; so vastly—" he hesitated, seeking thoughtfully for the word which should convey his meaning without laying him open to the charge of patronizing superciliousness, and she supplied it promptly.

"So different from what you were expecting; I know. You have been thinking of us as barbarians—outer barbarians, perhaps—and you find that we are only harmless provincials. But really, you know, we are improving. I wish you could have known Wahaska as it used to be."

"Before you took it in hand?" he suggested. "I can imagine it."

"Can you? I don't have to imagine it—I can remember: how we used to sit around the edges of the room behaving ourselves just as hard as ever we could, and boring one another to extinction. I'm afraid some of them do it yet, sometimes; but I won't let them do it here."

Once more Griswold let his gaze go at large through the stately rooms. He understood now. His prefigurings had not been so wide of the mark, after all. He had merely reckoned without his hostess.

"It is a miracle," he said, giving her full credit. "I'd like to ask how you wrought it, only I mustn't keep you from your duties."

She laughed joyously, with a little toss of the shapely head which was far more expressive than many words.

"I haven't any duties; I have taught them to amuse themselves. And they are doing it very creditably, don't you think?"

"They are getting along," he admitted. "But tell me: how did you go about it?"

"It was simple enough. When we came here we found a lot of good people who had fallen into the bad habit of boring one another, and a few who hadn't; but the few held themselves aloof. We opened our house to the many, and tried to show them that a church sewing-circle isn't precisely the acme of social enjoyment. That is all."

Griswold saw in his mind's eye a sharply etched picture of the rise and progress of a village magnate cleanly struck out in the two terse sentences, and his respect for his companion in the wide window-seat increased in just proportion. Verily, Miss Margery had imagination.

"It is all very grateful and delightful to me," he confessed, at length. "I have been out of the social running for a long time, but I may as well admit that I am shamelessly Epicurean by nature, and an ascetic only when the necessities drive."

"I know," she assented, with quick appreciation. "An author has to be both, hasn't he?—keen to enjoy, and well hardened to endure."

He turned upon her squarely.

"Where did you ever learn how to say such things as that?" he demanded.

It was an opening for mockery and good-natured raillery, but she did not make use of it. Instead, she let him look as deeply as he pleased into the velvety eyes when she said: "It is given to some of us to see and to understand where others have to learn slowly, letter by letter. Surely, your own gift has told you that, Mr. Griswold?"

"It has," he acknowledged. "But I have found few who really do understand."

"Which is to say that you haven't yet found your other self, isn't it? Perhaps that will come, too, if you'll only be patient—and not expect too many other gifts of the gods along with the one priceless gift of perfect sympathy."

"When I find the one priceless gift, I shall confidently expect to find everything else," he asserted, still held a willing prisoner by the bewitching eyes.

She laughed softly. "You'll be disappointed. The gift you demand will preclude some of the others; as the others would certainly preclude it. How can you be an author and not understand that?"

"I am not an author, I am sorry to say," he objected. "I have written but the one book, and I have never been able to find a publisher for it."

"But you are not going to give up?"

"No; I am going to rewrite the book and try again—and yet again, if needful. It is my message to mankind, and I mean to deliver it."

"Bravo!" she applauded, clapping her hands in a little burst of enthusiasm which, if it were not real, was at least an excellent simulation. "It is only the weak ones who say, 'I hope.' For the truly strong hearts there is only the one battle-cry, 'I will!' When you get blue and discouraged you must come to me and let me cheer you. Cheering people is my mission, if I have any."

Griswold's pale face flushed and the blood sang liltingly in his veins. He wondered if she had been tempted to read the manuscript of the book while he was fighting his way back to consciousness and life. If they had been alone together, he would have asked her. The bare possibility set all the springs of the author's vanity upbubbling within him. There and then he promised himself that she should hear the rewriting of the book, chapter by chapter. But what he said was out of a deeper, and worthier, underthought.

"You have many missions, Miss Margery: some of them you choose, and some are chosen for you."

"No," she denied; "nobody has ever chosen for me."

"That may be true, without making me a false prophet. Sometimes when we think we are choosing for ourselves, chance chooses for us; oftener than not, I believe."

She turned on him quickly, and for a single swiftly passing instant the velvety eyes were deep wells of soberness with an indefinable underdepth of sorrow in them. Griswold had a sudden conviction that for the first time in his knowing of her he was looking into the soul of the real Margery Grierson.

"What you call 'chance' may possibly have a bigger and better name," she said, gravely. "Had you ever thought of that?"

"Give it any name you please, so long as you admit that it is something beyond our control," he conceded.

As had happened more than once before, she seemed to be able to read his inmost thought.

"You are thinking of the chain of incidents that brought you here? It is only the details that have 'happened.' You meant to come to Wahaska; you were carrying out a definite purpose of your own that night in St. Louis when you took your ticket. And coming here, sooner or later you would have found your way to this house—to a seat on these cushions. I could tell you more, but my prophetic soul warns me that Agatha Severance is protesting to Mr. Wamble that she can't possibly play the particular song he is asking for without the music. I'm going to convince her that she can."

Some little time after this, Raymer, who had been one of the men introduced by Jasper Grierson, turned up again in the invalid's corner.

"Sit down, won't you?" said Griswold, making a move to share the cushions with the young ironmaster; and it was thus that the door to a friendship was opened. Farther on, when they had gotten safely beyond the commonplaces, Raymer suggested the smoking-room and a cigar, and Griswold went willingly.

"I was wondering if you were like me in that, Mr. Raymer," he said. "I never feel properly acquainted with a man until I have smoked with him."

"Or with a woman until she has made a cup of tea for you?" laughed the native. "That is Miss Margery's try-out. She has taught us the potentialities that lie in a cup of tea well brewed and skilfully sweetened."

From that on, the path to better acquaintance was the easiest of short-cuts, even as the mild cigar which Raymer found in his pocket-case paved the way for a return of the smoker's zest in the convalescent. Without calling himself a reformer, the young ironmaster proved to be a practical sociologist. Wherefore, when Griswold presently mounted his own sociological hobby, he was promptly invited to visit the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, to the end that he might have some of his theories of the universal oppression of wage-earners charitably modified.

"Of course, I don't deny that we're a long way from the Millennium, yet," was Raymer's summing up of the conditions in his own plant. "But I do claim that we are on a present-day, living footing. So far as the men understand loyalty, they are loyal; partly to my father's memory; partly, I hope, to me. We have never had a strike or an approach to one, or a disagreement that could not be adjusted amicably. Whether these conditions can be maintained after we double our capacity and get in a lot of new blood, I can't say. But I hope they can."

"You are enlarging?" said Griswold.

Raymer waited until the only other man in the smoking-den had gone back to the drawing-rooms before he said: "Yes; I caught the fever along with the rest of them a few weeks ago, and I'm already beginning to wish that I hadn't."

"You are afraid of the market?"

"N-no; times are good, and the market—our market, at least—is daily growing stronger. It is rather a matter of finances. I am an engineer, as my father was before me. When it comes to wrestling with the money devil, I'm outclassed from the start."

"There are a good many more of us in the same boat," said Griswold, leaving an opening for further confidences if Raymer chose to make them. But the young ironmaster was looking at his watch, and the confidences were postponed.

"I'm keeping you up, when I daresay you ought to be in bed," he protested; but Griswold held him long enough to ask for a suggestion in a small matter of his own.

Now that he was able to be about, he was most anxious to relieve Miss Grierson and her father of the charge and care of one whose obligation to them was already more than mountain-high: did Raymer happen to know of some quiet household where the obligated one could find lodging and a simple table?

Raymer, taking time to think of it, did know. Mrs. Holcomb, the widow of his father's bookkeeper, owned her own house in Shawnee Street. It was not a boarding-house. The widow rented rooms to two of Mr. Grierson's bank clerks, and she was looking for another desirable lodger. Quite possibly she would be willing to board the extra lodger. Raymer, himself, would go and see her about it.

"It is an exceedingly kind-hearted community this home town of yours, Mr. Raymer," was the convalescent's leave-taking, when he shook hands with the ironmaster at the foot of the stairs; and that was the thought which he took to bed with him after Raymer had gone to make his adieux to the small person who, in Griswold's reckoning, owned the kindest of the kind hearts.



XXI

BROFFIN'S EQUATION

Having Clerk Maurice's telegram to time the overtaking approach, Broffin found the Belle Julie backing and filling for her berth at the Vicksburg landing when, after a hasty Vicksburg breakfast, he had himself driven to the river front.

Going aboard as soon as the swing stage was lowered, he found Maurice, with whom he had something more than a speaking acquaintance, just turning out of his bunk in the texas.

"I took it for granted you'd be along," was Maurice's greeting. "What bank robber are we running away with now?"

Broffin grinned.

"I'm still after the one you took on in the place of John Gavitt."

"Humph!" said the clerk, sleepily; "I thought that one was John Gavitt."

"No; he merely took Gavitt's place and name. Tell me all you know about him."

"I don't know anything about him, except that he was fool enough to pull Buck M'Grath out of the river just after M'Grath had tried to bump him over the bows."

This was a new little side-light on the characteristics of the man who was wanted. Broffin pulled gently at the thread of narrative until he had all the particulars of the humane mutiny and the near-tragedy in which it had terminated.

"Stuck to him and kept him from drowning till you could pick 'em up, did he—what?" was his commentary on the story. "Then what happened?"

"Oh, nothing much—or nothing very different. Of course, Mac favored the fellow all he could, after that; gave him the light end of it when there was any light end. But he didn't get his chance to even up right until we got to St. Louis."

Here, apparently, was another overlooked item in the list of things to be considered, and Broffin grappled for it.

"How was that?" he asked.

"I don't know for a certainty. But I put it up that the fellow took Mac into his confidence—a little—and told him he wanted to make a run for it as soon as we hit the levee at St. Louis. He hadn't got his pay; we always hold the 'rousties'' money back till we're unloaded, if we can; so Mac advanced it, or claimed that he did."

It was Broffin's business to put two and two together, and at this conjuncture the process was sufficiently simple. With a hundred thousand dollars in his possession, the make-believe deck-hand would not be foolish enough to run even a hypothetical risk for the sake of saving the bit of wage-money. Broffin's next query seemed wholly irrelevant.

"Do you carry any nippers or handcuffs on the Belle Julie, Maurice?" he asked.

"Yes; I believe Mac has an odd pair or so in his dunnage; in fact, I know he has. I've seen him use 'em on an obstreperous nigger."

From the handcuffs Broffin went off at another tangent.

"Of course, so far as you know, nobody on the boat suspected that the fellow who called himself Gavitt was anything but the 'roustie' he was passing himself off for? You didn't know of his having any talk with any of the upper-deck people?"

"Only once," said the day-clerk, promptly.

"When was that?"

"It was one day just after the 'man-overboard' incident, a little while after dusk in the evening. I was up here in the texas, getting ready to go to supper. Gavitt—we may as well keep on calling him that till you've found another name for him—Gavitt had been cubbing for the pilot. I saw him go across the hurricane-deck and down the companion to the saloon-deck guards; and a minute later I heard him talking to somebody—a woman—on the guards below."

"You didn't hear what was said?"

"I didn't pay any attention. Passengers, women passengers especially, often do that—pull up a 'roustie' and pry into him to see what sort of wheels he has. But I noticed that they talked for quite a little while; because, when I finished dressing and went below, he was just leaving her."

Broffin rose up from the bunk on which he had been sitting and laid a heavy hand on Maurice's shoulder. "You ain't going to tell me that you didn't find out who the woman was, Clarence—what?" he said anxiously.

"That's just what I've got to tell you, Matt," returned the clerk reluctantly. "I was due at the second table, and I didn't go as far forward as the stanchion she was holding on to. All I can tell you is that she was one of the half-dozen or so younger women we had on board; I could guess at that much."

Broffin's oath was not of anger; it was a mere upbubbling of disappointment.

"Maurice, I've got to find that young woman if I have to chase her half-way round the globe, and it's tough luck to figure out that if you hadn't been in such a blazing hell of a hurry to get your supper that night, I might be able to catch up with her in the next forty-eight hours or so. But what's done is done, and can't be helped. Chase out and get your passenger list for that trip. We'll take the women as they come, and when you've helped me cull out the names of the ones you're sure it wasn't, I'll screw my nut and quit buzzing at you."

The clerk went below and returned almost immediately with the list. Together they went over it carefully, and by dint of much memory-wringing Maurice was able to give the detective leave to cancel ten of the seventeen names in the women's list, the remaining seven including all the might-have-beens who could possibly be fitted into the clerk's recollection of the woman he had seen clinging to the saloon-deck stanchion after her interview with the deck-hand.

To these seven names were appended the addresses given in the steamer's registry record, though as to these Maurice admitted that the patrons of the boats were not always careful to comply with the regulation which required the giving of the home address.

"About as often as not they write down the name of the last place they stopped at," he asserted; and Broffin swore again.

"Which means that I may have to pound my ear eight or ten thousand miles on the varnished cars for nothing," he growled. "Well, there ain't any rest for the wicked, I reckon. Now tell me where I can find this man Buck M'Grath, and I'll fade away."

M'Grath was on duty, superintending the loading and unloading of the Vicksburg freight quotas; but when Broffin tapped him on the shoulder and showed his badge, the second mate was called in and M'Grath stood aside with his unwelcome interrupter.

There were difficulties from the outset. A man-driver himself, the chief mate shared with the sheerest outcast in his crew a hearty hatred for the man-catchers all and singular; and in the present instance his sympathies were with the fugitive from justice, on general principles first, and for good and sufficient personal reasons afterward. Then, too, Broffin was hardly at his best. At the thought of what this man M'Grath could tell him, and was gruffly refusing to tell him, he lost his temper.

"You're edgin' up pretty close to the law, yourself, by what you're keeping back," he told the mate finally. "Sooner or later, I'm going to run this gentleman-roustie of yours down, anyhow, and it'll be healthier for you to help than to hinder. Do you know what he's wanted for?"

M'Grath did not know, and his enlargement upon the simple negative was explosively profane.

"Then I'll tell you. He was the 'strong-arm' man that held up the president of the Bayou State Security and made his get-away with a hundred thousand. Now will you come across?"

"No!" rasped the Irishman—and again there were embellishments.

"All right. When I catch up with him, you'll fall in for your share in the proceeds as an accessory after the fact. My men nabbed him on the levee at St. Louis, and when he euchred them he carried away a pair of handcuffs that somebody had to help him get shut of. He came back to the boat, and you are the man who took the handcuffs off!"

"'Tis a scrimshankin' lie, and ye can't prove ut!" said M'Grath.

"Maybe not; but there's one thing I can prove. This side-partner of yours didn't get his pay before he went ashore with the spring-line; but you drew it for him afterwards!"

M'Grath was cruelly cornered, but he still had the courage of his gratitude.

"Well, then, I did be taking the bracelets off av 'm. Now make the most av ut, and be damned to you! Did I know what he'd been doing? I did not. Do I know where he wint? I do not. Have I seen the naygur that skipped with him, from that day to this? I have not; nor would I be knowing 'm if I did see 'm. Anything else yez'd like to know? If there is, ye'll be taking ut on the tip av my fisht!" And he went back to his work, oozing profanity at every pore.

Thrown back upon the one remaining expedient, Broffin went ashore and became a student of railroad time-tables. Passing the incidents of the stubborn chase in review after many days, he wondered that it had not occurred to him to question Captain Mayfield. But that the captain would know anything at all about any particular bit of human driftwood in the ever-changing deck crew seemed easily incredible; and there was no good angel of clairvoyance to tell him that the captain had once been made the half-confidant of a distressed young woman who was anxious to be both just and merciful.

It was while he was waiting for the departure of the first northbound train that he planned the search for the young woman, arranging the names of the seven might-have-beens in the order of accessibility as indicated by the addresses given in the Belle Julie's register. In this arrangement Miss Charlotte Farnham's name stood as Number Three; the two names outranking hers being assigned respectively to Terre Haute, Indiana, and Baldwin, Kansas.

In his after-rememberings, Broffin swore softly under the drooping mustaches when he recalled how, in that morning waiting at Vicksburg, he had hesitated and changed his mind many times before deciding upon the first three zigzags of the search. Terre Haute, Baldwin, and Wahaska lay roughly at the three extremities of a great triangle whose sides, measured in hours of railroad travel, were nearly equal. Failing at Terre Haute, the nearest point, he could reach either of the two remaining vertices of the triangle with fairly equal facility; and it was surely an ironical fate that led him to decide finally upon the Kansas town as the second choice.

Some twenty-odd hours after leaving Vicksburg, Broffin the tireless found himself in Terre Haute. Here failure had at least the comfort of finality. The Miss Heffelfinger of his list, whom he found and interviewed within an hour of his arrival, was a teacher of German whose difficulties with the English language immediately eliminated her from the diminishing equation. Broffin got away from the voluble little Berliner as expeditiously as possible and hastened back to the railway station. Kansas came next in his itinerary, and a westbound train was due to leave in a few minutes.

It was here again that fate mocked him. Arriving at the station, he found that the westbound train was an hour late; also, that within the hour there would be a fast train to the north, with good connections for Wahaska. Once more he stumbled and fell into the valley of indecision. A dozen times during the forty-five minutes of grace he was on the point of changing his route; nay, more; at the last minute, when the caller had announced the northern train, he took a gambler's chance and spun a coin—heads for the north and tails for the west. The twirling half-dollar slipped from his fingers and rolled under one of the stationary seats in the waiting-room. Broffin got down on his hands and knees to grope for it, and while he was groping the chance to take the northbound "Limited" was lost. Moreover, when he finally found the coin it was standing upright in a crack in the floor.

Having now no alternative to distract him, he held to his original plan and was soon speeding westward toward the Kansan experiment-station. For two full days of twenty-four hours each he fought as only a determined man and a good traveller could fight to cover a distance which should have been traversed in something less than half of the time. Washouts, blocked tracks, missed connections, all these got in the way; and it was not until late in the afternoon of the third day out from Terre Haute that he was set down at the small station which serves the needs of the Kansas university town.

Having had himself conveyed quickly to the university, which was given as the address of the Miss Sanborn whose name stood second in his list, he learned how shrewd a blow his implacable ill-luck had dealt him in making him the victim of so many delays. Miss Sanborn, it appeared, had been fitting herself at the denominational school to go out as a missionary. And some twelve hours before his arrival she had started on her long journey to the antipodes, going by way of San Francisco and the Pacific Mail.

Another man might have taken the more easily reached addresses in the list, leaving the appalling world-tour for the last. But the doggedness which had hitherto been Broffin's best bid for genius in his profession asserted itself as a ruling passion. Twenty minutes after having been given his body-blow by the dean of the theological school he had examined some specimens of Miss Sanborn's handwriting, had compared them with the unsigned letter, and was back at the little railroad station burning the wires to Kansas City in an attempt to find out the exact sailing date of the missionary's steamer from San Francisco.

When the answer came he found that his margin of time was something of the narrowest, but it was still a margin. By taking the first overland train which could be reached and boarded, he might, barring more of the ill-luck, arrive at San Francisco in time to overtake the young woman whose handwriting was so like, and yet in some respects quite strikingly unlike, that of the writer of the letter to Mr. Galbraith.

Under such conditions the long journey to the Pacific Coast was begun, continued, and, in due course of time, ended. As if it had exhausted itself in the middle passage, ill-luck held aloof, and Broffin's overland train was promptly on time when it rolled into its terminal at Oakland. An hour later he had crossed the bay and was in communication with the steamship people. Though it was within a few hours of the China steamer's sailing date, Miss Sanborn had not yet made her appearance, and once more, though the subject this time was wholly innocent, Broffin swore fluently.