Young and yare; that was Cleopatra! Where was she? Who was she? More than who, whose might she be? Well, what good for me to wonder and worry? What good to feel, by remembrance, the softness of her hand in mine when we danced; and then the iron warning of her fingers on my wrist! What good to see in mind the beauty of her shoulder and the smallness of her foot. They were gone, all gone; and, if I looked at the whole business sensibly, I would see that somehow, in ways not yet entirely clear, I had been of service in the game of getting for Christina and her man insurance of five hundred thousand with which they had got away; or he had, after taking it from her.
XII I DISCOVER “THE QUEER.”
Then Tom Downs was getting married and he asked me to usher, so there I was in Caldon’s, picking out an after-dinner coffee set to be sent to the bride; and a lot I knew about breeds and varieties of Hepplewhite and Colonial and Queen Anne. Now if setter dogs could only be wedding presents, or beans, I’d be right on the spot; or a bag of Rio coffee would be all right; but the coffee container never meant anything to me. So I was about to judge by the good old way, which has proved such a help to the high cost of living, and order the most expensive when I heard a voice that I knew and turned about.
She wasn’t speaking to me but to the clerk at the watch-repair counter, which was just opposite the coffee sets:
“Bad?” she was saying. “Oh, you must mean counterfeit. Did I really have one? How interesting; please let me see.” And she put a small gloved hand across the counter for the bank note which he held.
A new twenty, I noticed it was, and then I looked again at her. Without any doubt, I knew her voice; I was absolutely certain I’d talked to her; but her face was a complete surprise to me. A pleasant surprise, right enough; she was rather a little thing, slender but with rounded neck and arms, in actually beautiful proportions; about twenty-two in age, I guessed. She had nice, clear white-and-pink skin; good, bold little mouth and a sort of I-dare-you-chin. Her nose turned up the barest trifle, darned attractively, and though I couldn’t from the side get a view of her eyes, it was pretty plain they weren’t easy ones to meet. Anyway, that clerk wobbled before her as he apologized that the government that week had just warned the banks and all big business houses in Chicago that new and unusually dangerous counterfeits of twenty-dollar Federal Reserve Notes were in circulation.
“Dangerous?” said my friend. “You mean the ink’s poisonous or something like that?” She seemed glad she had her gloves on.
The clerk laughed. “Oh, it’s quite safe that way, Miss Wellington. They mean, it’s an unusually good job of counterfeiting; very hard indeed to detect. In fact, they say in this case the printing and coloring is actually perfect, to all practical purposes. It is only the paper which is enough off so that an expert, like our cashier, suspected it.”
Miss Wellington opened her hand bag. “How interesting! But would you ask your clever cashier to look over these bills for me to make sure they’re all right? Why, what a frightful place Chicago is; I got in just this morning from Denver and bought a few things at Field’s and along Michigan Avenue, breaking a hundred-dollar bill somewhere, I can’t remember exactly where, and getting change——”
I heard, of course, but didn’t actually pay any attention to the rest she was saying. Miss Wellington of Denver! Now I didn’t know any Miss Wellington of Denver or any other place; but I did know that girl; her voice, anyway. She certainly had talked to me; and also, I was sure, I knew her hands and her figure, if I didn’t know her face. She had one glove off now, feeling the texture of the counterfeit bill in comparison with the others in her hand bag, which proved to be quite all right. Yes; I knew that pretty, slender, strong little hand.
She was going out now, after having given to the cashier—who had come up—the information that she thought she had broken her hundred dollars at Field’s and got her change there and supplying him with her Chicago address as the Blackstone Hotel.
“Beg pardon, sir,” said the coffee-set salesman, “did you make a choice?”
“Oh, shoot along the Queen Anne,” I said; and with the word “queen” something caught me.
“What name, sir?” said the salesman.
“Cleopatra,” I said, for I had it; and I got under way without worry over the impression I was leaving behind me. For now I had placed Miss Wellington of Denver, and I knew why I was familiar with her voice, with her hands, with her figure, and also why her face was a surprise to me. For she was Cleopatra, my ci-devant partner of the dances at the Flamingo Feather where I was ostensibly “Beets”, the safe blower in a hired Erasmus get-up, and she was mate to a lightly built Magellanic gent, who sopped up rather too much that evening and yet had proved nimble as any on the getaway.
I was absolutely sure of her; but she didn’t suspect me. I had been all swaddled in robes and cowls that night, you remember. Of course she’d heard my voice then, but she couldn’t have recognized it from anything I’d muttered at Caldon’s. I’m one of those mute buyers. So here I was, trailing her down Michigan Boulevard and wondering what in salvation to do.
From a Puritanical point of view, I had one plain duty; for I couldn’t feel the slightest doubt that Cleopatra there a few steps in front of me—present alias Miss Wellington of Denver—had never obtained that dangerous twenty in change. If she had just participated in any financial transaction at Field’s, I felt that Marshall III might just as well mark himself down twenty dollars or forty (or some higher multiple of twenty) on the total loss page of the day’s doings. Unquestionably I should, by all rules of citizenship, hand her over to the traffic officer at the approaching corner and ask him to blow his whistle to call the wagon.
On the other hand, my acquaintance with Cleopatra which now put me in position to suspect her (of course suspect doesn’t half say it) had been gained under circumstances which any one would call privileged. The whole fact of my presence at that dance was under a sort of sporting condition; and I couldn’t forget how this girl, herself, had held on to my wrist, warning me and keeping me out of trouble.
I actually owed something to her; but that wasn’t what I was thinking of, as I followed her. I was watching what a wallop she was as she went down the boulevard; much the neatest one in sight. She was rather small, I’ve said; and trim; wonderfully turned, she was, and dressed in plain, tailored things which always look the best, I think. I almost collided with a couple of my friends—girls—from up the Drive and around on Astor. We nearly crashed because they were looking, too. Everybody was gazing, at least a bit, at Miss Wellington; yet she wasn’t endeavoring at all to attract attention. Quite the opposite. She simply couldn’t help it.
She had me heeling her, therefore, without the least actual idea of handing her over to any one; but also without any intention of letting her go. For here I’d found her, after all that world of Jerry’s and of the Flamingo Feather had vanished into air.
I began to understand that of course they hadn’t really vanished. They’d been about—those queens and ladies, those sailors, pirates and lighting plants—but I simply had not known it when I saw them.
Think of the time it took me to identify Cleopatra, whom I’d made my chief companion that night.
Now she meant to me, besides what she was herself, a chance for getting into touch again with all that world. I got to thinking particularly of her friend, Magellan, and looking for him in the offing. But if he were about, I didn’t recognize him; she spoke to nobody and seemed not to be expecting any one. She just kept on down the boulevard, minding her own business and glancing, as any girl would, into show windows. Then suddenly she stopped, entered a store and, during the six seconds she was in ahead of me, she did an expert disappearing piece. She was gone; absolutely!
I stood and waited; I wandered about but drew a total blank. I taxied down to the Blackstone where she said she was staying. I thought I shouldn’t have believed that; yet it was true. There she was registered—at least somebody was registered, “Doris Wellington and maid, Denver.”
By a little casual questioning, I made sure it was she; and by my soul I couldn’t help liking her the better for it. Not only was she stopping at our best, the Blackstone, but she had her own maid. “Doris Wellington and maid!”
She’d come in that morning from Denver; at least that was what she’d told the hotel. She was checking out to leave for New York by the Century that noon.
The hotel people, knowing me, naturally supposed me her friend. If she heard of my inquiry, I didn’t know what she’d suppose, so I asked them not to mention it; and I beat it over to my bank to make ready for contingencies in case it proved true that she was on her way to New York by the Century.
Also I wanted to work up a little knowledge on the counterfeiting game; and I knew just the man to help me. Almost every big bank has its money crank. Old Wally Bailey holds the post at mine. His father founded the place and he has so much stock that, if the others won’t make him vice-president, he’ll have himself elected chief; so they all vote him vice, unanimously, at every election and put in half their thought between times at keeping him so busy at other ideas that he can’t gum up the banking game by having any time for business.
They thank God over there whenever a well-raised check drifts in; they rush it right around to Wally for it’ll make him forget to insult customers for a whole day at a time. A good forgery sometimes saves the other officers from practically all argument with Wally for a week; while if they can just get a good counterfeiting job to occupy him,—well, they hardly dare pray for good luck like that.
Everything was humming so and borrowers were looking so relieved when I wandered in that I knew Wally was happily engaged; and soon somebody told me the good news. Fresh and unusually deceptive counterfeit bank notes were in circulation. Wally wasn’t at his desk; he was in the Directors’ Room which he had to himself, and all that the others had to do to keep him harmless was to send him the new Federal Reserve notes as they were pushed into the tellers’ windows.
I found him with a catch of seven bad ones already this morning, and the banking day yet was young; five twenties, he had on the table before him, and two fifties. He greeted me with a happy glint in his eyes and shoved the secret service circular at me.
“Read that first”; so I read.
“Twenty-dollar Federal Reserve Note on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; check letter ‘A’ plate No. 121; Carter Glass, Secretary of the Treasury; John Burke, Treasurer of the United States; portrait of Cleveland.
“This counterfeit is a steel-plate production, with the exception of numbering, and is a particularly close and excellent piece of work; even the scrollwork of the borders is uniform and good. The numbering is clean and clear, and appears to have been done serially, as no two notes yet received bear the same number. It is printed on special paper which when flat closely resembles the genuine, but is too brittle when creased.
“The face of the bill is unusually deceptive, the seal and numbering being particularly good; the faults in the portrait are actually microscopic, consisting in a slight broadening of portrait of Cleveland; the texture of the paper, however, together with the frequent bunching of the silk fiber inserted, should detect this counterfeit.”
Wally ecstatically brandished one of his twenties beside one of the fifties before me.
“They haven’t got out the circular on the fifty yet; they just ’phoned round about it this morning; and I’ve these two already. Made by the same gang, you see. Same good seal and numbering; printed on the same paper; and also a steel-plate job. One of the old masters did that, Steve; spent weeks and weeks engraving that plate to make that reproduction. He’s none of your modern, lazy, loafing photo-engravers running off notes on a hand press. That’s a Janvier job, I know. A Chicago job, or a western job, anyway. I told Cantrell yesterday. But he still thinks it’s a New York piece of work because the notes appeared down there first. The photo-engraved jobs are done down there; but not pure art like this, I told him. Broadway can’t produce it; look here.” And he picked up a couple of fifty-dollar Federal Reserve notes and went on with his talk.
Up to that moment, money had just been money to me; of course I’d noticed, especially since the Federal Reserve notes began coming out, we’d been developing different varieties; and I was aware that each style had figures of its own and that some one—usually a particularly rotten penman—took it upon himself to sign each issue; also I had observed, as a matter of course, that our money ran to pictures of presidents, each labelled so you’d know him, and on the other side they printed unlabelled but occasionally exciting little scenes in green like the landing of Columbus or the wreck of the Hesperus. But the fine points of the art work had escaped me.
Now it appeared that the government hired expert engravers, not only for esthetic purposes but to make counterfeiting harder. Each issue was printed from steel plates, specially engraved and most particularly guarded. The paper also was specially made by secret process. Now, many years ago, occasionally a real artist and a patient and conscientious workman turned counterfeiter and cut a steel plate as good as the government’s, and then, if he had a fair paper to print on and good ink, he gave the secret service a lot of trouble.
“Janvier, some of whose fine work was still in circulation when I started with the bank, was by all odds the best of these,” Wally told me. “The secret service had got him about a year earlier; but his souvenirs were still coming in. His paper betrayed him; he couldn’t make that; he had to use the best he could get and imitate the silk shred lines with colored ink; but his plates were almost perfect—even to the scroll work of the borders, which the government makes by special lathes; his seals and numbers were perfect, even under the microscope; and his portraiture wonderful. He served ten years and then got out and put another series of gold notes in circulation, almost a thousand twenties in spite of being watched, before they got him again for ten more years, at the end of which he engraved the famous ‘living Cleveland’ plate from which the big counterfeit issue of 1912 was printed.
“He was watched, of course; so he couldn’t do the printing; he had to give the plate to others who got better paper but not good enough; and the government got them all. That trial was famous, Stephen; you must have read about it.”
I shook my head regretfully; I was interested in football in those days. So Wally told me:
“The government could not connect Janvier with the printing of the money but accused him of making the plates. Janvier offered no defence; he knew the secret service had him, but his attorneys put up the claim that the plates hadn’t been counterfeited at all; they claimed that the printers used government plates which had been stolen!”
“Wait now!” I asked Wally, an old headline with a picture trickling through my memory along with Brickley’s drop-kick scores. “I did read that. Janvier—if that was his name—jumped up in the witness stand at that and stopped the lawyer; he said he didn’t mind going back to jail but he’d be damned if he’d see his own work classed with government plates. When he engraved a portrait of a president, he made him look as if he had once lived instead of——” my memory gave way just then so Wally finished for me:
“Instead of like a death mask with the eyes pried open. That was Janvier; so they sent him back to the Federal prison where they kept him till two years ago, when he went blind; they operated on him but couldn’t help him; and, considering him harmless, released him. But he must have got back his sight; anybody can see that. Why? For nine years what have we had in the way of counterfeiting? Clumsy, photo-engravers’ jobs. Some ordinary, dull dub takes a camera and photographs a government bill, makes a half-tone and smears it with green ink and runs off a batch of bills so coarse and blurred, compared to engraving from a cut-steel plate, that a child can spot it. That’s the modern way; easy enough, but they’re lucky to get a thousand dollars into circulation before the secret service has them behind bars. But here comes back a regular ‘old master,’ I say; looks like he’s a quarter million passed already; and he’s Janvier, if he did lose his sight two years ago. Cantrell doesn’t think so; he thinks it’s a new hand.”
“Who’s Cantrell?” I asked.
“He’s a secret service expert working here on this particular job.”
It was about ten minutes after this, while I was still there, looking and listening, that a girl, who proved to be Wally’s private secretary, broke the monotony of the clerks bringing in bad twenties and fifties.
“Hello, Miss Lane,” said Wally. “What have you?”
“Doctor Lathrom, sir,” reported Miss Lane, glancing at a card in her hand.
“Lathrom, the big eye surgeon, Steve,” whispered Wally to me. “I’ve had Miss Lane calling on the eye people since yesterday noon. Go on, Miss Lane.”
“He operated in August of last year on a short, stocky man, French or Austrian, of about sixty-five, he thought, who gave the name of Gans and who was almost totally blind from double cataract which had been previously operated upon unsuccessfully. Doctor Lathrom restored his sight. I showed the doctor the picture of Janvier among six other pictures. He picked out Janvier’s.”
Wally struck his hands together. “I told Cantrell so. I told him it was another Janvier job; and that Janvier was in Chicago, too. He always cut his plates in Chicago. He couldn’t work in the east.”
“Does the doctor happen to remember anybody who might have been with this Gans?” I asked Miss Lane.
“Yes, sir. Not only Gans impressed the doctor, but his daughter, also. Since Gans was blind when Doctor Lathrom first saw him, she brought him to the doctor and made all the original arrangements. She was about twenty—he thinks; he remembers her for unusually attractive, of the active type. Dark hair; pert nose, he particularly recalled.”
Wally wasn’t paying any attention to this; he already had what he wanted and he was chatting on about the superior artistic inspiration of Chicago over Manhattan, even in counterfeiting.
“I told Cantrell it was a Chicago job on the plates, anyway; New York is a photo-engravers’ town; an artist like Janvier couldn’t cut a plate like that within five hundred miles of Broadway. He’d smear it, if he tried to. Maybe they printed in the east; or made the paper, there; probably did.”
He was waiting for the switchboard operator to get a connection with the secret service so he could scream his news at them.
If he had learned what he wanted, I had, too. It was perfectly plain to me, of course, that my partner Cleopatra—Doris Wellington, with maid, from Denver—was this daughter of Janvier, engraver of government notes without the government’s coöperation. Her bit in the business was—to employ the convenient phrase of the Flamingo Feather—to blow out the bad dough, to shove “the queer.”
You may gather that this realization did not come exactly as a shock to me; in fact, I felt rather a relief. Participation in that affair at the Flamingo Feather might imply so many customs worse than the mere personal issue of money that I drifted back to the Blackstone with cheer. What I’d found about her family certainly might have been a lot worse; yes, a whole lot. She’d stuck with her father, evidently. I liked that.
“Miss Wellington,” they called her at the hotel; that meant if Magellan or any other young man were about, he was keeping his distance. Miss Wellington proved to be in; she sent her maid down from her room to fetch her mail. The maid, who was as French-looking and demure as anybody’s, went back and forth from the elevator with eyes down. She mailed a letter, which I didn’t see, and obtained an envelope which bore the address of “The Antlers,” Colorado Springs.
A guest hailed her. “Felice” he called her in Londonish tone. Obviously he was an Englishman; you might put him down as a polo player off his pony and in morning attire. He had on one of those pearl-gray velours from “Scott’s,” hatters to H. M. the King, Piccadilly and Old Bond Street. A genuine, that was; no counterfeit. I knew a bit about hats. His cutaway and shoes were from Piccadilly, too—from tailor and booter to H. M. the King, also, or at least to H. R. H. the Prince of Wales. His manners were from the Mall. Apparently he was just arrived to meet Miss Wellington, having heard she’d dropped in from “The Springs.” But I knew him; he had been the mariner at the ball who’d impressed me as being too light to class as Columbus. He was Magellan.
After he’d sent Felice up with the news he was here, he dallied before the elevators till Doris came down. She’d just left a mirror, evidently; smartness and style couldn’t commence to suggest her. She was a stunner.
“George” she called him; and he called her “Doris”; and he led her into the main dining room for luncheon, taking a table at a window directly over the Avenue. I sat down alone a few tables away. It was nearly twelve; and they went at luncheon lightly,—cold lobster, mainly. I took the same and, to that extent, mingled. I didn’t like George; not at all. I liked him even less than Magellan. He had a proprietorish way with him which was more irritating now that he was sober and out of costume.
She didn’t exactly play up to him; she was polite, registering interest in what he said, watching the parade of motor cars and pedestrians below their window. Have I said it was a clear, chilly, pleasant winter day?
They never even so much as glanced idly toward the door through which Cantrell and his government men might come. They seemed to think nothing of that at all, and if either of them gave me a thought, neither showed it. I heard Doris, in her clear, quick, amused voice, telling to George how she had discovered a counterfeit twenty in her change at Caldon’s.
They finished and George paid the check. I finished and followed them into the lobby in time to see Felice meeting Miss Wellington with a receipted bill for their accommodations. Appeared also handbags and a couple of small semi-trunks, semi suit cases of the “week-end box” variety. Porters piled the luggage in front of a taxi.
It became evident that George, having joined the party, was going right along. He got into the taxi after Doris and Felice. “Century” he said to the driver.
The taxis are thick about the Blackstone just before train-time for the Century to New York. I got a man without the least difficulty. “Century, sir?” he said.
“If that car goes there,” I told him. “If it doesn’t, follow it.”
XIII AND LEARN THE SOOTHING EFFECTS OF FOND DU LAC TWINS.
It went direct to the LaSalle Street station; and Doris and George and Felice were standing in the carriage court watching porters pick up their luggage, when I drove in.
They glanced at me; that was all. At least it was all I saw, and they went up to the train shed. I snatched a ticket and a coupon for an “upper” from the Pullman window and went through the cars. Doris and Felice had a compartment together about the middle of the train. George wasn’t with them; he seemed to possess a section in a car near mine. He possessed also a large, piggy, Trafalgar-Square-looking portmanteau, yellow in color. I didn’t know where he picked it up. I hadn’t seen it at the Blackstone; probably he’d had it sent direct to the train.
I had lost a lot of my prejudice against George since I saw him parked in a separate car from Doris. He looked at me, realized he had seen me several times recently and half nodded. I nodded and went on. When I glanced back, he was drifting rearward to the observation car where he sat down and picked up an afternoon paper. With as much casualness as I could manage, I dropped into a chair nearly opposite. The average Chicago to New York twenty-hour-train travel filled the other chairs with their varying degrees of self-consciousness and importance. There were the usual clothing merchants vociferous over discounts and braiding; there were a couple of advertising men lying—unless they were Sarazen and Johnny Black in disguise—about how they did the second nine at Skokie; there was a pleasant, middle-aged married couple, happy to all appearances; there was a mother with a son under her thumb; then there were half a dozen assorted males varying from the emphatic, self-made-man type to mild, chinless youths who might be either chorus men or bond salesmen. They always look alike to me.
And they always irritate me so that I did not notice that another man was beyond them until I observed that George was watching that far end of the car. He wasn’t doing it conspicuously; he was so subtle about it that if I had not been paying particular attention to him, I’d never have guessed anybody here was worrying him. But some one was—one of those bulldog-jaw, assertive sort of chaps that make you think right away of the reform candidate, and who gives you, at the same glance, the reason that reform administrations fail. Not a tactful face at all but highly determined. He was about thirty-five and was young for his type, I thought, until I considered that his type has to be younger sometime. Anyway, there he was, solid and belligerent, and with a copy of the Iron Age before his face.
I had to look at him eight or ten times before I became absolutely sure that he wasn’t reading it but, in turn, was watching George when George was looking the other way.
So a man hunt—other than my own (if you called my operations a hunt)—was on aboard this train; and the stalking was in process before me.
It was a woman hunt, too; for of course Doris and Felice, forward, must be a part of the quarry; and as I reckoned their chances, I thought that never a bulldog-jawed hound had run a quarry into a more hopeless hollow log than the one into which this man of the Iron Age had run my friends of the Flamingo Feather when he followed them on to the Century. He had them where and when he wanted them; they simply couldn’t get away. Of course, I didn’t know whether or not he was alone, in the sense whether he had other operatives with him; that made no difference; he had the clothing merchants and the golfers; the married pair, and mother and son; the assorted six with the bond salesmen,—if you cared to count them; he had a hundred with him whenever he wanted them. George and Doris, with Felice, had their wits and themselves; and, since there could be no possible doubt of the outcome of the stalking I was seeing, I couldn’t help wanting them to give “Iron Age” a run before he got them.
There’s something about authority—especially when it’s so satisfied and certain and when it has all the odds on its side—which does that to one. Doris Wellington was not in my sight now; but when I thought of her as she was at the dance and as I had seen her walking down Michigan Avenue, I simply couldn’t find any impulse to help old “Iron Age” over there snap his handcuffs upon her and put that active, eager, pert little thing behind jail bars to be locked up until she was ten years older.
Now if “Iron Age” could specialize on George, I could control my emotions perfectly. I’d become somewhat more indulgent toward George, I’ve told you; yet I was not wild over him, at all. However, if “Iron Age” got George, by the same process he’d probably have Doris and maid too. So I was feeling almost friendly with George when I noticed he was standing up. He seemed absolutely casual about where he wanted to go. He wandered down nearer “Iron Age” first, yawned and turned a few pages of a Harper’s on the desk there; that seemed to make him sleepier and he strolled forward out of the car.
I arose and drifted after him. Through two Pullmans he walked ahead of me wholly unaware, so far as I could guess, that I was behind him; then, in the vestibule of the third car—with doors closed before and behind us—he half-turned his head.
“Old dear, check him,” he said to me. “Here; this door’s jammed.”
He opened the door before him as he spoke, he sidled through and, as he shut it, he dropped something which engaged the bottom of the door. His words certainly were true, then; that door was jammed. I couldn’t open it.
“Iron Age” could not budge it, when he replaced me at the knob. He must have been half a car behind me but I hadn’t even suspected it till he joined me. Together we were the better part of three minutes at the door before we could enter the next car. George was then far forward.
I stopped in the washroom of that Pullman; for I wanted a minute or so alone to think over things since George had spoken to me. He had hailed me, you see, as a sort of comrade; he’d counted on me being with him.
Now I realized that after Doris had seen me at Caldon’s and then they both had seen me at the Blackstone and here on the train, they must have attached some significance to me. And it was becoming plain to me that they made it a friendly significance; at least, they did not put me down among their pursuers. Probably Doris recognized me, not in the sense that she knew me for Steve Fanneal, but in the far more decoying sense that she realized I had been her partner at the Flamingo Feather and that, therefore, she could count on me when she needed help in this emergency.
I couldn’t decide how “Iron Age” had marked me down. He went forward through a couple of cars but evidently lost George in some washroom or compartment and he decided to give up George for the present—there was no danger in that; we were skimming along about sixty-five miles the hour. Anyway, “Iron Age” paid me the compliment of returning to me in the Pullman smoking room and he plumped himself down, emphatically, and went about the job of clearing up any doubts of me.
“Now who are you?” he opened, with charming directness, a heavy hint of federal prison at Leavenworth lurking in his tone.
I gave him my business card without making any fuss and he looked me over and reached, with a now-I’ve-got-you gesture, for a copy of the Chicago Tribune which somebody had left on the leather seat.
He turned to the produce market page and questioned me temptingly:
“What do you do in the firm, Mr. Fanneal?”
“Oh, I buy a little,” I admitted. “Overlook sales some.”
“You buy butter, eggs and cheeses, for instance?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. Now what was centralized Chicago yesterday?” he sprung at me.
“What score?” I said; and he was sure I was stalling.
“Ninety-three,” he mentioned.
“Not quoted,” I told him.
“Ninety-two, then!” he dared me.
“That was blob, too. But ninety was forty-seven and a half; eighty-nine opened at forty-five and lifted a half. Ninety-three in New York was fifty-five and was a half higher in Philadelphia. Butter to Chicago retailers, best (ninety-two to ninety-four) tubs, fifty-three, prints one and a half more, cartons yet a half higher. Good tubs——”
He held up a hand. I’d looked up butter, he, figured; so he skipped down the column. “Eggs?” he asked me.
“Extras, first or miscellaneous?” I asked him. “Checks or dirties? Forty-eight to forty-nine, and down to twenty-five.”
I shook him; but that bulldog jaw was not for nothing. He still held on. “Cheese!” he dared me.
“Flats?” I came back at him. “Twins? Daisies? Double Daisies? Longhorns or square prints? And Chicago? Or Fond du Lac? New York or Philadelphia? Flats at Fond du Lac opened twenty-six and three quarters; twins——”
Never had I uttered anything more soothing; he had nothing whatever to say. And I’ll say this for him, he may have been stubborn and hard to convince, but once won over, he came all the way.
“Now exactly who are you?” I inquired, as he dropped the paper. “Private or government operative?”
He refrained from laying back his coat impressively to display a shining star. Apparently they do that only on the stage, or in the “sets” out in Los Angeles. Also he lacked the scintillating line of language I’d been led to expect by the Actors’ Equity. Somehow, since actually playing about with Jerry’s friends, I’ve lost my feeling for the crook drama.
“You may consider me government, if you prefer; and you may call me Dibley,” “Iron Age” confided indulgently and with complete trust. Hereafter, when any one questions me, I’ll remember the stupifying effect of cheese quotations. I never saw anything lull a mind so. The trouble was—or perhaps it was an advantage—“Iron Age” now considered me not only harmless but probably childish.
“Have you any idea who that fellow was who wedged the door in front of you?” he asked.
“Did he wedge the door?” I asked, innocently. I wasn’t growing any keener about “Iron Age” Dibley, but I saw no harm in gratifying him.
“Didn’t you realize that? Well, he’s Stanley Sydenham—St. James Stanley, he’s sometimes called—the title tapper.”
“What?” I really didn’t know that.
“Land swindler. He’s out of Colorado State penitentiary last April after serving five years in the long house on his last irrigated-land transaction. Has he talked to you?”
“A few words,” I said truthfully.
“Probably he’ll talk to you again,” Dibley suggested, in a tone which hinted that he believed that George, having made a start with the simplest person on the train, would probably continue imposing on a good thing. “Also meet, if you can, Miss Doris Wellington and her maid in compartment E of car No. 424. Then don’t let any of them see you and me talking together.”
“All right,” I agreed willingly. “But what particularly do you suspect?”
“Exclude nothing,” Dibley said and got up, the soothing effect of the double daisies and Fond du Lac twins still strong upon him.
I wandered forward to my seat when I discovered that, in my absence, I had acquired hand baggage; and I had sense enough not to question anybody about it or show surprise; I just accepted it; for there it was,—a neat, new, creditable-looking suit case under the forward seat in the position usually assigned to the baggage of the passenger of an upper berth; and it was, beyond any mistake of recognition, the neatest and newest of the suit cases which, at the Blackstone, had been the property of Doris Wellington.
I bent down, after loafing in the seat for a while, and I tried the locks in a careless sort of way, as though making sure I’d fastened my luggage. The bag was locked; and I shoved it farther under the seat and soon went forward.
I was willing to wager that “Iron Age” had no hint of that transfer of luggage to me; and this was no time to tell him about it. Besides, I already was under government orders which I ought to be obeying. So I stepped forward to car No. 424 and to the door labelled E and I tapped upon it.
Felice opened it, like the alert little maid she was. As I confronted her, I tried again to place her in the Flamingo Feather; but I couldn’t. She’d been one of the lighting plants, maybe.
Then I saw Cleopatra of the Flamingo Feather, Doris Wellington of Caldon’s and the Blackstone and Michigan Boulevard, the daughter of Janvier, engraver of plates and herself shover of the queer. She was alone with her maid in the compartment.
“Can I come in?” I said, as she gazed up at me from her seat.
“Why, certainly; come right in,” she said immediately, for all the world as though she was doing nothing there but waiting for me.
XIV I TAKE GOVERNMENT ORDERS.
She nodded to Felice who admitted me and went out. Felice closed the door and, as I remained standing, Doris invited me to sit down.
“You remember me?” I asked her.
“Erasmus?” she said. “The thriller of Holbein? Certainly.”
I dropped upon the seat opposite her and, as I gazed at her, she gazed at me and continued, “Also we were both at Caldon’s, as well as at the Blackstone, weren’t we, Mr. Fanneal?”
“You not only remember me but you know me, then.”
“Certainly. Don’t you know me? Or what were you doing at the bank?”
“How’d you know I went to the bank?”
She smiled pleasantly—pleasantly as the Dickens. “Don’t you also know me?” she repeated.
“You’re Janvier’s daughter!” I blurted.
“Excellent!” she approved me and I felt like a boy in school.
She had been leaning slightly forward, not exactly tense, not at ease, either. Poised was the word for it; she’d been poised ever since I entered. Now she sat back more comfortably, being no longer in suspense about how much I knew.
“George was your friend Magellan?” I asked.
“That’s what you named him.”
“Felice also was present at the Feather?”
“She was the one who led you into the shed.”
“I’m indebted,” I acknowledged; and conversation languished.
For a second more I stared at her, as gay and piquant a little thing as ever a twenty-hour-train boasted; then, decidedly stumped as to my next step, I stared a while out the window.
Pleasant, Indiana winter scenery was skipping past us. There was clean, light snow on the fields through which stuck brown cornstalks, in those great, even patterns which so intriguingly alter as you dash past. There were frozen brooks with ice-encased willows bent over them; there were lots of agreeable looking farmhouses and farm people Fording to and from little crossroads towns which looked idyllic, rather, whatever the facts may be.
“Has Sinclair Lewis spoiled this sort of landscape for you?” Doris asked me suddenly, as though reading my mind.
“I’m damned if he has for me!” I said sincerely.
She brought her small hands together. “Good! Nor has he for me. Poor fellow, if he really feels as he writes, what a world he lives in! I imagine him riding through lovely country like this with shades drawn or else emitting low, melancholy moans as each habitation heaves in sight. Now I like to think of Willa Cather’s people when we’re whistling through tank towns.”
“So do I,” I said, agreeing again. “They’re there; they’re hearing the whistle. You meet ’em. You ever been in a tank town?”
“When I was a child, I lived in one,” she told me; “when father was serving his second term in the ‘long house’ at Leavenworth.”
She might have said his second term in the House of Congress, from the way she spoke. No shame in it at all. Yet it brought me back to business. For a minute she had been just a girl, mighty pretty and bright and pleasant and with tastes and distastes, both, which I liked.
She’d known about Erasmus and Holbein when we talked at the ball, you remember; now she knew about the same books I’d been reading. Likely she’d dipped into “This Freedom” too, in order to help herself decide whether, after marriage, she should drop business for the sake of the children or should keep right on to help husband.
Probably, in Chicago, she’d seen “Lightnin’” and “The Hairy Ape” and heard Galli-Curci and Chaliapin. Of course she had. A crook can’t be crooking all the time; she’s at the normal round most of it. But I’d never realized that till I took a little leisure to think it over. Now when you say a person’s a counterfeiter, for instance, naturally you think of him or her, or both of them, crouching somewhere covertly together, printing off their money and then slipping out, with many glances around, to convert it into groceries and some of our ordinary authorized currency. But actually, very little of their time may be spent so. Most of it goes into just living,—maybe looking at movies, at dance halls or driving around; or at the Art Institute, a good play or two, the opera, and maybe a lecture also, according to taste. I’ve heard of a gerver, lately, who even made it a habit to attend Sunday-evening club talks; and he was crazy over Burton Holmes.
So here was a girl like any other I knew, only quite some little quicker and pleasanter and better looking, with nothing really strange about her except her proclivity for passing out the bank notes father gave her. She knew it was wrong, of course, so very wrong that, for it, she ought to be shut in the “long house” at Leavenworth herself, serving her own long term.
But I had not the smallest impulse to put her there; quite on the contrary. In fact, I imagined, at that moment, that I heard somebody trying to listen at the door; and, thinking it was old “Iron Age,” I felt myself going definitely to her side. Nobody was going to shut this girl up in prison for ten years. I was going to do something about her; but not that. I had no idea of shifting responsibility. Not at all; I was going to see to this business myself.
I got up and opened the door, while she watched me. Nobody was there and I sat down again.
“I’ve called on you by orders, I think you ought to know,” I told her.
“Government orders?” she said.
“That’s it.”
She feigned a shudder, prettily. “My soul!” she said. “What I’ve told you! Now you’ll arrest us all, I suppose!”
I laughed, for I felt mighty good. There was no denying it; I felt as happy as ever I had in my life; happier on some counts; on others, of course, there was my knowledge of her character and the chances she was running. But the chances only made it more exciting for me to like her.
Obviously, I’d let her see she’d hooked me; she could feel me on the line. Yet she hadn’t me in the net—not quite.
“I’d gladly arrest George,” I said. “And lock him up for life.”
“Why?”
“Because you care about him.”
“Oh, do I?”
And then, for no more reason than that—but you’d have understood it, had you heard her voice—I felt better yet. I switched the subject back to business.
“I’ve accumulated some hand baggage,” I mentioned.
“Yes. Don’t you want it?”
“That part’s all right,” I said. “But what to do with it? It’s not a gift, I take it.”
“No.”
“I see. You expect a search. Meanwhile I’m to have the bag and then give it back to you.”
She nodded; and there she proved she knew I was not in the net; for instead of asking anything final, one way or the other, she merely suggested, “Think it over a while, won’t you?”
I promised and got up; for she’d put in that a hint of dismissal. Then I remembered Dibley. After being in her compartment all this time, I had to bring to him something more tellable than our talk so far.
“George is in on this game with you?” I asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I want to,” I said; and she told me, “No; we’re just going on together.”
“He has a lay of his own, then?”
She avoided direct answer to that. “Well, he’s still a young man,” she said. “He hasn’t retired; so naturally you’d suppose so, wouldn’t you?”
“All right. Now as well as I can guess, old “Iron Age”—you know who I mean?”
She nodded.
I went on. “He’s aboard because George is. He knows him; but he doesn’t know you. I’m here to find out about you. What shall I tell him?”
“That we’re getting off at Cleveland, please.”
“What?” I said. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
“And you want me to tell him that?”
“If you’ll be so good.”
I waited with my hand on the knob. “I’ll see you again.”
“Oh, please do!” she invited; and, feeling flushed and mighty good, I stepped into the corridor and drifted to the rear.
My new baggage was still under my seat in my Pullman but George was lost to sight. I wouldn’t have put it past Dibley to have locked him up somewhere but that didn’t seem to be the case when I encountered old “Iron Age” in the door of the smoking room of one of the last Pullmans. Rather, he encountered me, reaching out and dragging me in behind the curtains.
“Now what have you found out?” he went after me with his delightful tact.
“She’s a charming girl,” I assured him. “I called at her compartment, as you suggested, and pretended we had mutual acquaintances and got away with it.”
“You probably did not,” said Dibley, to take me down from the hang-over of satisfaction which he detected on me.
“She let you in because you look easy. What did she tell you?”
“She’s a low opinion of Sin Lewis.”
“Who?” said Dibley.
“But she’s keen on Miss Cather.”
“Who?”
Sin Lewis, so put to him, seemed to suggest somebody, possibly one of similar name who was on Dib’s list for rum-running or using the mails to defraud; but Cather wasn’t on his cards at all.
“They write books,” I explained. “We started talking about books.” I thought it just as well to use the truth as long as possible.
“Books!” he jeered me.
I remained polite. “How would you have started?” I asked courteously. “Something like this? ‘Good afternoon, Miss Wellington or whatever your real name is. I suspect you’re a crook but for the moment don’t place you. Now if you’ll just tell me——’”
“Drop it,” said Dib, not agreeably.
I obliged.
“Now forget the start,” he told me. “What did you get to?”
“Oh,” I said. “I found one thing out you want to know. They’re getting off at Cleveland.”
“What makes you think so?”
“She told me so.”
Old “Iron Age” gazed fixedly out of the window with the thought in his head (if his expression meant anything) of pulling the cord to stop the train if we happened to be passing an institution for the feeble-minded; but all was farm scenery, so I was safe.
“Thank you so much,” he said to me feelingly. “It was always possible that they would try to escape at Cleveland; so it is of some advantage to know they’re going on.”
He released me after a few more words and I went to my section. I had his permission to continue my acquaintance with Miss Wellington; but it was plain that he wasn’t depending much on me. He was taking to telegrams, scratching off any number of yellow sheets to go from the next stop.
It reminded me that, in my preoccupation at keeping Doris in sight after I found she was leaving the city, I hadn’t ’phoned my office. I had thought I’d wire; but now I decided not to.
I didn’t want Dibley to have any chance to oversee the fact that this trip was a last inspiration of mine. I immersed myself, ostensibly, in cost estimates of our new can and bottling plant which I happened to have in my pocket, while I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper into this game I’d entered with Cleopatra Doris Janvier.
XV IN WHICH I ASSIST A GET-AWAY.
She came into my car, blithe and smiling; at least she smiled at me. Every one looked up and every one, seeing that smile for me, put me down as lucky, I know. When she was past and out of the car, I could feel them gazing at me and wondering what I’d done to deserve such a smile.
She was a gay, delightful maid. Suppose that, not having had the advantage of acquaintance at the Flamingo Feather, I had met her in an ordinary way. I’d have been mad over that girl. Heaven salvage my soul, I was anyway.
She had a trick of playing up to me, which probably she used with everybody, but I never really saw it except with me. Anyway, she did it with me; and nobody else ever did. It was her trick of looking up quickly, when I was about to say something, and smiling in that pleasant way of hers (pleasant doesn’t half do it; but it has to go at that) as if she was always sure of something good every time I talked and as if she liked my line and me. When you’re decidedly slow and ordinary, that makes quite a hit.
I sat figuring out her life. Put her down as twenty-two; then she was born during the year Janvier was out after his first term in the “long house” and while he was busy engraving the plates which sent him in again. Some one—she hadn’t said who—took her into the country for ten years. Maybe she had a mother then; maybe not; her mother had dropped out somewhere. She was about twelve, then, when her father got out again and began his famous “living Cleveland” series of engravings.
Twelve, they say, is the child’s most impressionable age; the parent or guardian molds the future then.
Now I knew nothing about the guardian, when the parent was in the “long house,” but I had considerable information about father; and I could imagine him emerging from the pen all filled with eagerness to be back at his game of showing up the government engravers and of getting away with what he’d tried twice.
Wally Bailey had given me a graphic glimpse of Janvier and his aim which, from one point of view, was actually a pursuit of perfection. What Wally suggested was that Janvier wanted, more than anything else, the satisfaction of doing the thing which had stumped him. That was what he wanted his sight back for,—to have a go at it again. And here he had it.
His daughter was helping him, naturally. She’d been born and bred to his business and surely had caught something of the spirit of her father who wouldn’t give in, in spite of three terms, till he’d shown up the government.
I thought of what Jerry had told me of the Socratic genius of gervers and housemen; undoubtedly counterfeiters had their talent for dialectics too.
It might go something like this: the printing of a little extra money would not directly injure any individual. In fact, there was quite an argument whether it damaged people in general at all.
Many highly approved people were openly in favor of a freer issue of currency without bothering whether a gold or silver dollar was behind every bank note. Mr. Ford and Mr. Edison themselves had spoken for a scheme which, while not similar to Janvier’s system, yet had sent the good bankers into frightful attacks of financial hydrophobia.
Mightn’t Janvier show plenty of authority to suggest that he wasn’t in a bad business at all?
And suppose he compared it with other businesses; mine, for choice. What was the harm in shoving out a little informal currency compared with the damage in passing out drugged and adulterated food, which many a first family has done?
Then compare it with the coal brokerage business, from which many of my firmest friends are fat. What did they do for their profits, during a late, lamented shortage, but hold a few carloads of coal back from the market and away from people freezing for it so they could whoop the price a little more? Wouldn’t everybody be a bit ahead if these people, who haven’t the slightest fear of any “long house,” had stayed out of the coal business and simply printed their own money for their profits and shoved it into circulation without harming anybody?
You see, as I thought it over, it didn’t seem strange to me that Doris Wellington could smile and smile at me and not feel herself a villainess at all.
I wondered, from time to time, exactly what was in that nice, new suit case under my feet. A few hundred thousand in neat, new bills, I thought; or possibly plates. Maybe both.
That suit case kept bothering my bean-business conscience. It was decidedly one matter to like Doris Wellington and wish her to stay out of the clutches of old “Iron Age”; but it was something quite up another street to take charge of that handbag full of cash and plates and deliver them at destination for her. Obviously, this was what she meant me to do.
The day was waning; and all lights were on as we drew into Toledo, where old “Iron Age” sent his sheaf of telegrams over to Western Union. He received a couple of yellow envelopes too. I saw him strolling on the platform, reading enclosures and watching the doors of the train. He was developing a more menacing look.
Neither Doris nor George got off; Felice did, flirting expertly with one of the clothing merchants. “All aboard.” We were going again. Cleveland, the next stop.
In the observation car, I found “Iron Age” ponderously on duty beside Doris who was reading Harper’s. A good touch that, I thought; there’s something so disarming about Harper’s. But it wasn’t Harper’s alone which made the effect. There was George a couple of seats away and he was reading the Atlantic Monthly, with Galsworthy’s “Forsythe Saga” ready beside him for good measure, yet he didn’t appear half so innocuous.
This was probably because he wasn’t. The more I looked at George, the more I questioned his general character; but the more I gazed at Doris, the surer I was that—in all but one of the essential senses—she was a “good” girl. Looseness of living simply wasn’t in her make-up.
You couldn’t associate her with anything personally depraved or disagreeable. She’d no more steal a diamond ring, left in the ladies’ wash room, than my mother, I felt certain. No; I was confident that her dereliction was highly specialized to the subject represented in that suit case of hers under my seat.
I wanted to talk to her about that and about other topics; but old “Iron Age” was asserting a priority claim just now.
He looked up at me and cut me dead, signifying of course that just now he and I weren’t to know each other. Doris nodded to me and I to her and I found a chair opposite.
Watching Dibley, I perceived that he was in the throes of opening a casual conversation. Of course Doris perceived it, too, and about a minute after I sat down, she dropped her Harper’s.
Old “Iron Age” dove for it and restored it to her, pompously. She thanked him.
He said, “You’re entirely welcome. You’re going to New York?”
“Oh, no,” Doris told him. “We’re off at Cleveland.”
“Iron Age” gave a glance at me, which eloquently said, “You see, you believed that. Now watch me.”
I watched them both and George, too.
Evidently she’d told Dibley what she wished and she was at her Harper’s again, as though she enjoyed it. George was at his Atlantic but he was poised; oh, decidedly poised.
“Iron Age” had two options, either to stay silent or start something crude like an arrest. But I doubted whether, in spite of his telegrams, he had enough evidence yet. So that was as far as he got in the light talk; and he’d jeered at me!
A waiter from the dining car appeared with the usual word for six o’clock; and Doris got up.
“We’re going in early,” she volunteered to me, “since we’re off at Cleveland.”
This gave Dib another cue to rehearse his superior glance at me.
George followed her out of the car and Dibley beckoned me over to him.
“Get her talking again,” he told me. “Leave him to me.”
When I found her seated alone at a table for two in the dining car, I interpreted Dib’s orders liberally. She smiled at me and, when I asked, “How about my sitting here?” she said, “Oh, I’d like it!” So there I was across the table from her, ordering her supper and mine together.
There’s something about that—the breaking of bread together, you know—which rather does more than you’d ever suspect unless you’ve tried it under conditions like mine. We not only broke bread; we broke a full portion of broiled white fish between us, another of cauliflower au gratin. I served those while she poured our two cups of orange pekoe from the same little pot and, for both of us, she mixed salad dressing of her own in a bowl. The best dressing, by the way, I’d ever tasted.
She’d the prettiest hands I’d ever seen; and to have them doing things for me!
Occasionally, but with rapidly lessening frequency, I wondered about George,—why he didn’t show up for supper and to what I’d left him with Dib. I ventured to ask Doris about him.
“Oh, he’s not hungry,” she assured me.
As I remembered him, he hadn’t looked it; he’d only looked worried, whereas she didn’t at all. She had true nerve, you see.
That dinner was so delightful that I longed to forget that she was playing for her liberty for the next ten years. I didn’t want any other element in this but just her and me.
It ended with the check which she let me pay without silly argument; then we had to get up, and never more reluctant feet than mine moved from a dining car.
She went through the Pullmans in front of me; at each door, I came beside her, opened it; for a moment we were close. I hoped we were going to her compartment; but she surprised me in the vestibule of the third car rear from the diner.
No one was following just then; the doors on both sides were tightly shut.
She turned and looked up at me. “Which is it?” she asked, straight.
I knew what she meant; and at that second I suddenly decided. “I keep your suit case,” I said.
“And you’ll give it back to me?”
“Where will you want it?”
“New York. I’m off at Cleveland, as I said, but I’ll come to New York later.”
“I’ll take it there for you,” I said, and it was in the manner of an agreement, “if I possibly can; and I will give it to you under one condition.” I waited.
“Nobody’s listening,” she urged me.
I told her. “It’s this. I bring it to you, alone. I’ll be alone; you must be. You must give me a chance then to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“Can’t you imagine?”
She gazed into my eyes without wavering. “I reckon! You’ll give it back and ask me to give it back again to you—to destroy! All right! That’s a go! I’ll run that chance with you!”
She held out her hand and I grasped it and she grasped mine, firmly and well. Somebody came through; just an ordinary passenger; but of course we dropped hands. When the doors were closed again, she went into her bag.
“Here’s the key to the suit case,” she offered it to me. “Sorry you won’t find more for you to use inside; but there’s a new toothbrush, anyway. Please have it!”
“You’ve another?” We were suddenly particular about little things with each other.
“There’re more in Cleveland,” she replied. “Where do you stop in New York?”
“The Belmont.”
“I’ll wire you my address.”
“Where we’ll meet?”
“That’s it. Can you remember this?” she asked. “Don’t put it down. Take five from the first number, three from the second; one from the third. That much for numbers. For words read from Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary—they’re everywhere—first five up, second three down, third one up, and so on. A street named after a number will be spelled in syllables, taking the first in a word. You can find any syllable in the dictionary. Now tell me that.”
I told it to her; and still we had an instant there alone.
“What do you know about happenings after the scatter from the Feather?” I said to her. “Did Vine get Christina?”
“No; she got away.”
“He’s in Chicago?”
“No; New York.”
“What else do you know about him?”
She shook her head and opened the door toward her car. “Don’t stay about now,” she asked me; and she went into her compartment.
I should have known that she wouldn’t talk over others’ affairs. She’d said a good deal, all things considered. So Christina had escaped Keeban and he was back in New York, whence he had come. Probably, therefore, Jerry was in New York, too.
I asked myself what Doris’s move to the east might have to do with them; how might she be mixed in?
Likely she was not mixed with them at all except when, more or less by chance, her group encountered one of their group in business. I could not possibly connect her with any scheme for murder. Christina, herself, had refused such a scheme; how much more surely would Doris have kept free from anything like that!
With her key in my hand, I stood in the vestibule of the next car, daydreaming about her. The train was bounding along too beautifully, rushing us right into Cleveland. I wanted to see Doris again but she’d dismissed me; I could only endanger her now by hanging around.
When we stopped at Cleveland, at eight-thirty, old “Iron Age” again was on the platform; and this time I tumbled off with him. I didn’t plan anything quite so subtle as the succeeding event; really, I wasn’t up to that at all. You see, what happened was this.
I’d reported to him, on parting from Doris after dinner, that I was sure they were leaving the train at Cleveland because she’d mentioned the matter, quite definitely, again. Of course Dibley only regarded me more in sorrow than otherwise; he was certain they were only playing me. So when I was on the platform with him, for my benefit he was a bit over-ostentatious in acting out his conviction that they were staying on the train. He had a new sheaf of messages to clutter up the telegraph office and Western Union had a boy burdened down with replies for him; so Doris and George, with Felice, were off and started away almost before “Iron Age” guessed it.