Keeban

IV I SIT IN ON FATE.

I got the money next day; I took it myself from the bank. Also I got my revolver and spent the evening in the city. About half an hour before ten, I went to our offices and roused the watchman to let me in. I pretended to work for a while and then let myself out the river door and started down the black, narrow walk above the water.

No one was anywhere about at that hour; not a window in the walls on either side was alight. Ships slid in and out; one minute deckhands, sailors and mates on watch would glide by within ten feet of me; the next I was alone with black, locked doors on one side, the water on the other.

I heard my name whispered in Jerry’s voice. “You’ve got it?” the voice said; and some one was beside me.

This was Jerry of the Mackinaw coat, of the basement room and of the companionship of Christina. If he were Keeban, I must hold him; I must not question nor show doubt. If he were Jerry, I had nothing to do.

“Here I am, Jerry,” I said.

“Give it to me.”

I kept him walking beside me until the faint light, which trickled down over the bridge at the end of the block, showed me his face, Jerry’s face; but, for all of that, also Keeban’s.

“Satisfied now?” he asked me, laughing. “Come, Steve!” And he put his hand on my wrist. I drew back, thinking that, if he were Keeban, he’d murder me for ten thousand dollars if, for her necklace, he attacked Dorothy Crewe. I had my hand on my revolver, yet he had the advantage of me, for he could strike without warning and I must wait to see what he meant to do.

Down the river, a steamer blew for bridges; and, “Come now!” he said again to me.

Then some one else was there; some one else of his sort and burly in a Mackinaw coat; and my wrist was my own; no one had hold of me.

They were grappled together and together went down.

“Stay out of this, Steve!” Jerry’s voice said to me; and some one choked; some one gasped for breath. I bent over them and in that trickle of light from the bridge, I saw a face—one face, Jerry’s. I could not see the other. Then they turned; the one on top was on the bottom but they were over again before I could see. There was Jerry’s face once more.

“Stay out, Steve!”

They were throttling each other as they rolled; they came to the edge of the water and I pulled them back, hauling on one and dragging the two.

A light was coming; soon I would see; for the boat, which had been blowing for the bridges, was slipping up. I looked about to it; and something happened; a splash below me. One of the two was gone; the other, gasping, stood on the edge of the timbers, staring down and moving along this way and that while he watched.

I had my gun out now and shoved it against him.

“Steve, you old fool,” he cried. “He broke my hold; he’s in the water! Watch; where is he?”

“You tell me this,” I came back at him. “What was the book we kept first in the case at the edge of your bed? What were you always reading? Damn you, tell me quick!”

He laughed, sucking for breath. “‘Westward Ho,’ Steve, you old fool!”

“And the next one? You hardly knew which was better.”

“‘Kidnapped!’”

“Jerry!”

“Here’s the boat!” Jerry cried. “Damn him, he’ll get away!” For the big hull, with her lights, her sprays of steam, her splash of screws, was beside us. “He’s swum under water to the other side; he’s come up there. He’s got away,” Jerry finished.

Of course we waited till the ship was past and waited and searched long after but found no one for our trouble.

“Where’s the money?” Jerry asked me then. “You didn’t give it to him?”

“He’s the one that met me first?” I said.

“Yes; of course. Did you give it to him?”

“No; I didn’t have it. I’m not the complete fool, Jerry. I got it from the bank and left it in our office.”

“Let’s go there.”

We entered our building by the river door and went up the back way to my office. Jerry knew those stairs; he knew where to turn in the dark; he found the light switch by feel and without fumbling. There was not the slightest doubt, when the light came on, that I was with my brother Jerry. My trouble was simply had I been with any one else?

Of course I had seen some one else in a Mackinaw coat who had fought with Jerry; but all I saw was his size and his coat; I never saw, together, two faces which were Jerry’s. I could not help thinking this as we sat down; I could not help wondering if all that business down there beside the river was a set stage play of Jerry’s to fool me.

He opened the drawer where I kept cigarettes and took one and lighted it. “How’re sales?” he asked me.

“Oh, fair.”

“Tell me, did Smetsheen, in Minneapolis, pay his account?”

“In full, yesterday. You keep on thinking about the office, Jerry?”

“To tell the truth, not once till just now.”

“Where have you been keeping yourself?”

He smiled. “Moving mostly.” He walked to the door of the room which had been his office and looked in. “Who’s there now?”

“Nobody.”

“Not waiting for me?”

“I am,” I said.

He shut the door, running his finger over the space where they’d dissolved the gold letters of his name. “They’re right,” he commented. “I’ll never be back—to stay; that is unless I’m caught before I catch Keeban. He had a good idea for me on that money, Steve; I can use it. Got it here?”

I nodded.

“Want to give it to me?”

“There’s a squeal set against you which you’ve got to square?” I asked.

“Who told you that?”

“Christina.”

“Haven’t you got us mixed now?” He looked at me.

“Maybe,” I said, boldly.

He got up. “Keep your damn money. By God, you, Steve——”

I got up and pushed him down into his chair. “I don’t deserve that. You know it.”

He laughed. “You sure don’t. Old Top, I had a hundred on me that night at the station; it’s spent. Problem; how to live? Bigger problem; how to entertain? I might blow a peter, work a second story, stick up a store, scratch some paper; but non-felonious endeavor, old Bean, is absolutely closed to me. I’ll come to some of the big-time stuff; I’ll have to, if I keep my place; but I can’t help a certain prejudice in favor of postponing it as long as possible. Meantime, I’ve simply got to entertain. I’m supposed to have rocks worth a quarter million, you see.”

“You mean, in the underworld, of course you’re Keeban.”

He laughed. “Underworld’s good, Steve. Marvellous how the human race laps up that ‘up’ and ‘down’ rot. We simply have to have it, heaven and hell, above and below. Who believes in either as a place? Think it out a second, Steve; where, exactly, d’you suppose is the underworld?”

“Why,” I said. “South State Street, partly; and part of the west side. Down in New York along the Bowery, in spots, and near the east end docks.”

Jerry shook his head, still smiling.

“Where is it, then?” I retorted.

“Where’s hell, Steve, these days?”

“Why,” I said, “within one.”

“That’s it; there’s where’s the underworld, too. Among those who carry the underworld within their breasts, I’m Keeban; and therefore needing, more or less immediately,” his tone trailed off practically, “as much of ten thousand dollars as you’ve got in that peter behind you and which you feel inclined to give. It’ll go to good use, Steve; great use! No sense trying to tell you now. Take Christina, for an example. You saw her last night.”

“Of course.”

“Recognize her?”

“No,” I said, but I wondered; and at his hint, something stirred in my memory.

“Think red hair, not yellow.”

I couldn’t, to any use; yet now I was sure I had seen her. More than that, I’d known her, and I groped for her name and her right association, in my memory.

“Who is she, Jerry?”

He shook his head. “Not now.”

“Where’d I meet her before?”

He smiled again. “In the underworld, one time you went there.”

“You mean that time you and I went down South State Street to——”

“There you go, thinking up a place again, whereas, old Top, the place was most proper; polite, in fact, and almost in our highest circles. The only underworld about was the bit she packed with her; but it was quite a bit, believe me. And it’s growing.”

“That means,” I guessed, “something’s going to happen where she is?”

Jerry looked away and thought and looked again at me. “That’s one place something’s fairly sure to happen soon; of course, there are several others. It’s funny, Steve, to see ourselves now.”

“From where you are, you mean?”

“That’s it. Take me, for instance, as I was. Down there, in the east end of New York, was my particular friend, Keeban. I knew nothing of him; he knew nothing of me, probably, till a bunch from Princeton ran onto him and took him for somebody they knew. They sure must have puzzled him, but they started something in his head which he half tried out by ‘touching’ another Princeton bunch for a hundred and getting it from Davis. About that time—as long as eight years ago—Keeban ‘marked up’ me.”

“‘Marked up?’” I repeated.

“Marked up my name on his board as good game for attention when he could get around to me. What made him put it off so long, I don’t know; probably he’d a lot of prospects chalked on his board ahead of me; probably he felt he’d wait until he could put in the time to make proper preparation to appear as me. He guessed he had a great chance for a big haul; and—he made it.”

Jerry went pale and looked down. “There’s many more marked up on Keeban’s board and on others’. I know some of the names marked up and something about what’s going to occur to them. It’s a little like sitting in on fate, Steve,” he said, color coming back to his face, “to see this man’s number and that creeping up to the top of the board; to a limited extent, one knows what’s behind to-morrow, what’s going to happen. Here’s a man you know and I know and, to all appearances, he’s sitting secure; but on Harry Vine’s board, we’ll say, his number is up toward the top. He doesn’t guess it and you can’t nor anybody else in the city; but at a certain time, and at a certain place and exactly in one way, he’s going to die; and that’s all there is to it.”

“Who’re you talking about, Jerry?” I demanded.

He changed swiftly. “Nobody; just talk. What was I up here for, anyway?”

“I left the money up here,” I reminded. “We came up to get it.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

I turned to the safe and spun the combination. When I touched the banknotes, I thought to compromise with myself, give him some but not all. Like Jerry, he guessed it.

“All or none, Steve,” he said.

I gave him all.

“That’ll be useful.”

“Wait!” I held him.

“Want it back?”

“No. You’re sitting in on fate, you said,” I went at him. “You know what crimes are going to be committed; then why don’t you stop them?”

He laughed. “After I’d stopped the first, wouldn’t I soon cease to know? Old Top, a man in my position has rather to pick and choose. He can stop one, perhaps; then let it be a good one! Besides, that’s not my business now; I’m getting Keeban. Yet, if certain names get to the top of the board, I’ll call you—perhaps. On your own wire. Now Hamlet’s father’s ghost again. G’night, Steve.” He left me.

Sometimes, when I thought it over, I believed Jerry and Keeban, separate people, had met me that night; sometimes I was sure that Jerry had worked ten thousand dollars out of me. I would analyze his talk and realize how he led me along, shifting from direct discussion of the money to his hints about Christina and the numbers coming “up” and then, after making me interested in this, how he got the money from me.

But one thing was true and undeniable; I did know Christina. Many times during the following days I tried to place her, but never did until that call reached me about the next “number up.”

V THE UNDERWORLD INTRUDES.

It came completely out of the blue. Ten minutes to twelve, noon, was the time; and no doings could have been more dull and drab than mine the minute before the buzzer under my desk rattled my “personal” call. This meant my private wire, which did not run through the office switchboard and which had no published number in the telephone book; so, when my buzzer jerked, Miss Severns always left the call to me and quietly rose and vanished from my room.

She always acted as though I owned some enormous, private intrigue into which her ear must not pry, whereas the truth was that line never carried any conversation more bizarre than my mother’s voice reminding me to meet Aunt Charlotte on the Lake Shore Limited; or perhaps mother wanted to be sure I had my rubbers; or else Jim Townsend might be after me for a round of golf at Indian Hill. Consequently I liked the compliment of Miss Severns’s silent disappearance; but I bet she knew the truth. Anyway, now she got out and so I was there alone.

I had nothing at all on my mind; I had been just finishing a letter to Red Wing about those five carloads of Minnesota potatoes which we had found somewhat nipped by frost and I’d begun the phrasing, in my head, of a crisp, businesslike note to Baraboo, Wisconsin, about a shipment of presumably dried lima beans which must have been caught in the rain somewhere. From which you may gather that Austin Fanneal and Company are wholesalers, packers, canners and jobbers of food; a sound profitable business and socially absolutely all right in Chicago, but still it’s not the most enthralling pursuit here. I must admit it had its dull spots, even for me; but I was up to my eyes in it; for, as I’ve mentioned, I was the only child; father was over sixty; and I knew that some day I must carry on. So there I was cheerily concentrating on the most polite yet effective phrase for telling the Baraboo commission house that their beans had got wet; and the world was to me a wan expanse of farmers dragging bean vines, Wisconsin warehouses, city grocery stores and delicatessens and flat buildings full of clamorous families shrieking for food. Then that buzz; Miss Severns on her feet and out of the office; the door shut and, as I spoke, I heard Jerry’s voice:

“Steve!”

“Old fellow, hello! Where are you?”

That was a foolish question, I knew before I got it out. He disregarded it entirely.

“Put your mind on Winton Scofield, Steve. Don’t let him ride home in his own car to-night; make him take a taxi.”

“Why?” I cut in before taking time to think. Of course, Jerry could not tell me. It was perfectly plain from his voice that, wherever he was, he had only a few seconds in which to speak to me; and if anything was plainer, it was that his situation precluded explanations.

“Make him!” Jerry repeated quickly. “And don’t let him know he’s being made. Don’t say a word of this to any one, whatever happens!”

And the wire at the other end went dead; but I continued to hold the receiver until central’s voice briskly inquired, “Number, please?”

So I hung up and sat staring down on the pile of correspondence about potatoes and beans and canned cherries; but my world was no waste of brown bean stalks and pickley delicatessen shops; nor was my world the usual dreary array of my own social sort,—those who have big homes on the Lake Shore Drive and on Astor Street and in Winnetka and Lake Forest; who have coveys of servants, of course, and put up a parade of cars and clubs and country places and everything else that looks impressive from outside but inside is duller than Deuteronomy.

They’ve pretty sets of silver and gold things about, naturally; and they’ve a good deal of platinum, too, with diamonds and rubies and sapphires and those green stones—oh, emeralds—stuck in. They’ve big bank accounts and a lot of other venal environment too tiresome to give you a thrill until you hear, all of a sudden, it has unduly tempted a gentleman from a stratum quite different but yet extremely adjacent to your own and the gentleman is likely to use some exceedingly direct, not to say personal, methods of getting your environment—and you.

For that was what Jerry’s call meant. Win Scofield’s name had crept to the top of somebody’s board in the free society of the gentlemen—and their lady friends—of the “gat” and the “soup job,” the “Hunk” and the “bump off”; in that region, where Jerry had gone, Winton Scofield’s number was “up”; he had been chalked for a “croaking.” And as I sat there staring and wondering why and how, suddenly I ceased to have difficulty in thinking red hair, instead of yellow, upon Christina, the riverside companion of Keeban. I “placed” her and knew her name and her association and where I had met her; for she was Winton Scofield’s wife. Of course she was; that was it! What an extension of the underworld into the polite world of my own!

Of course I realized that, as Jerry had said, I was thinking like a child; for the underworld’s not a compact, separate region; its territory is wherever its citizens set foot; and this may be at your office door? At the threshold of your servant’s hall? On the step of your town car? Who knows? For obviously it’s not a place at all but a contact, an association, a habit of conduct, an attitude toward life and, more than incidentally, toward death. Why should I be surprised that a citizeness had staked out a claim in the Scofield mansion?

I tried not to be. “Old Win Scofield!” I thought. He was sitting secure, if any one was, you’d say. But somewhere else Jerry was sitting in on fate; he’d seen Win Scofield’s number come up to the top of the rack at Keeban’s club; and his ’phoning me meant that an unusual job was up. For Jerry had told me he would pick and choose and not try to stop a job, unless it was a good one.

“Say not a word to any one,” he’d told me; I took that to mean not to say he’d warned me. It couldn’t mean that I wasn’t to get information. So I took up my ’phone and called Fred, who was my particular friend in the Scofield family.

Winton, the old man, was his father; of course Christina, of the alterable hair, wasn’t Fred’s mother; she was his father’s fourth, or fifth wife.

There was rather a lot of unpaid publicity about him when he got her; and it turned on him, rather than on her, because he’d fallen for that rejuvenation operation and, of course, he tried to have it secret.

Naturally the newspapers learned and, as a result, Win Scofield fled the town as soon as the hospital let him out. As secretly as possible—that is, with only a few friends besides newspapermen and film news service photographers present—he’d married Shirley Fendon, a girl he’d met at a cabaret. Of course, being sixty-seven or so and she twenty-two, he took her to Paris; but recently he’d slunk back to his home city.

Now it had never occurred to me until this moment that, in the general excitement over Winton’s rejuvenation, nobody asked much about Shirley. The spotlight simply wasn’t swung her way.

There she was where several wives—three or four, I couldn’t remember—had been before her and where, if rejuvenation really meant a return to old Win’s youth, several more would stand again.

The sons—they were Kenyon and Fred, about my own age and both by the original Mrs. Winton Scofield—astutely realized this and did a little deal in self-defense. They took over the grain business, when the old man was honeymooning, retiring father on an income, leaving him no vote or interest in the firm which a wife, past or present or future, could attach.

Perhaps this had something to do with his floating back to Chicago; perhaps his present wife worked that for purposes about to become plainer.

I arranged for Fred to lunch with me and, as tactfully as possible, I brought up the subject of father.

When you’ve a pater who’s been flattered with the spread of news print that had been lavished on Winton Scofield, he’s a bit difficult to mention; but I managed to drift in a remark about him and I certainly detonated something. Fred had been storing too much inside of him concerning father and had required only the gentlest tap on the fuse to cause him to explode.

“Isn’t he absolutely ludicrous!” Fred shot at me. “Age, damn it, Steve, age is no disgrace. It ought to be the noblest, most dignified stage of a man’s development. What does Shakespeare say about age, ‘His silver hairs will purchase good opinion!’ And Byron——”

I let him rave on as it seemed to relieve him; I knew he wasn’t talking to me so much as he was rehearsing father.

“—he dyed his silver hairs twenty years back; and about the time the tango came in, he began pumping his face full of paraffin. Occasionally some of it slipped down in his cheek toward his chin.—Now I suppose you’ve heard of his rejuvenation operation.”

I thought for a while and admitted that I had. “Wasn’t it a success?” I ventured.

“A howling one—with father. He’s so young now he shouldn’t be married, legally, not having his parents’ consent. He ought to go back and start over at Andover Academy; in about four years, he’ll be ready for Yale once more. Young? We’re the old men, Ken and me, Steve! He’s sure he’s just fifteen; well, he surely acts it.”

After this, I felt I could inquire, without seeming too personal, “How’s he getting along with his new wife?”

Fred jumped. “Good God! He hasn’t married again since yesterday morning? I saw him then and——”

“No,” I said. “I meant Shirley Fendon.”

“Oh, you call her new?” Fred comprehended my peculiar point of view. “He’s had her going on three months now.”

“There’s trouble between them?” I persisted.

“Of course,” said Fred, “being twenty-two, she’s a little old for him, but they do bunny-dip beautifully together.”

“Who was she?” I kept after Fred.

“Who? Shirley? Why, you just said her name; Shirley Fendon she was.”

“Wasn’t that just her cabaret name?” I inquired.

“Well,” said Fred cautiously, “why go back of that? We were willing not to.”

“You’ve met any of her friends?”

Fred shook his head. “That, at least, has been spared us.”

I steered the talk around so I could ask after a while, “Your father goes down to business now?”

“You bet not! We see to that.”

“Then what does he do?”

“When he manages to break away from Shirley? Well, in spite of his youth, he keeps up with some of his old friends; he likes his rubbers of bridge, you know; so every other evening or so you’ll find the young chap down at the club at his old place among the unrejuvenated.”

“To-night, for instance?”

“Friday; let’s see,” Fred considered. “Yes; he’ll be there to-night; why?”

Of course I didn’t tell him and I was more careful with my next remarks which finally drew out the information that, on the nights when he played bridge, Shirley, his wife—Christina, that was—herself drove down with the chauffeur to bring him home.

That made one thing clear to me, which was that the ride which Winton Scofield must not take in his car to-night was the ride he would take with his wife. I wanted to tell it all to Fred; but Jerry had warned me not to.

I was feeling quite comfortable over Jerry that day; I figured he must be all right or he’d never have ’phoned me that warning. When I returned to my office, I merely went through the motions of business while I was waiting, really, for Jerry to call me again; but he did not. So I set to working up a simple, obvious sort of scheme that any one, in my place, might resort to. Likely enough, I thought, Jerry would be satisfied with such a scheme; he would expect about that much of me.

I’d found out from Fred that his father’s bridge game broke up after eleven; so at ten that night, to make my plan sure, I took my roadster up through Lincoln Park and then up Sheridan Road to the big, new home of Win Scofield.

He’s had a new one for each new wife, each farther north by a mile or so than the one just before; and as I went by them (the houses not the wives, unless they happened to be in them) I checked up my count; four before Shirley Fendon’s.

She’d worked old Win for a wide, low, long shack of stone with plenty of plate glass and colored decoration; stunning probably was the word for it. The expense was patent. I didn’t know then that title to land and building was in Fred and Ken; they were simply letting Win live in the house on an allowance which certainly must have been liberal.

The house had one front on the lake and another on the boulevard; and at one end was a two-car garage. I parked my car below the house, went by on foot and, looking into the garage, saw both cars within.

It was easy to see, under the half-raised shades and between the curtains of the house, that the mistress of the mansion was at home.

VI AND I FAIL TO PREVENT A BUMP-OFF.

Shirley was at her piano near a window facing the boulevard walk. As the night was cool and therefore the window was down, I could not hear what she played but her fingers moved over the keys and her red lips parted and closed and her red head tossed with animation as she sang her song.

She sang to no one; at least, no one but she was visible from the walk. Surely it was a light, happy song which she sang as she tossed her head and smiled. Her hair was bobbed and it flung like fine spun bronze about her pretty ears. I thought that if I could paint, I’d take a try at her just now with the soft pink light of her piano lamp upon her. I’d paint her as Youth—Youth and something else. Youth Enchained!

No; that wouldn’t do. There should be something submissive, or at least something pathetic about a young person enchained; and there was nothing submissive about Shirley Fendon Scofield; and not the slightest touch of pathos. Not at this moment, at least. Quite the contrary.

I am not a fanciful or figurative man; I can watch symbolic dancing from Pavlova and Ukrainsky up and down and, unless I hold my programme in a good light, the performance never brings to me any pervading sense of “Dawn” or “Death,” of “The Swan” or “Wild Pansies.” But that dance of Shirley Scofield’s gave me a thrill.

It was a dance, almost, as she tossed and flung herself to the lilt of the song I could not hear. Perhaps you say I took my thrill from the programme which Jerry had furnished to me. Let it go at that; anyway, I got it. Youth was set on snapping her chains to-night; and it was not to be nice snapping. Not at all! Youth was wild, orgiastic, reckless and bent on being free.

I thought her over while I stood out there after her dance was done and she had disappeared. Beyond any doubt, she was Christina. For her appearance to me in that room beside the river, she’d assumed yellow hair and a different dress and changed several other things; yet I was sure of her. I wondered what was her place in the plot afoot to-night.

I was looking in on a last act, I knew; the first had started long ago when Win Scofield met her in some cabaret and she decided to marry him. She might have been Keeban’s woman then, I thought; and he, hearing her plan, had told her to go ahead. Or perhaps he had made the plan for her, marking up Win Scofield on his board then; and to-night old Win’s number had come to the top.

I went down the street to my car and started the engine and kept it going to be ready while I watched. Ten minutes past eleven, I saw a light in Win Scofield’s garage; a black car came out and a girl got into it. I waited until it was in the street and then, stepping on my gas, I charged up the road and gave that black car all I had.

It went into the curb and smashed a wheel and bent the axle too. I wrecked my front, naturally. Shirley Scofield’s driver was out yelling at me; he turned and opened the door of his car and switched on the light and I saw Christina sitting in a corner. Youth snapping her chains wasn’t there. A scared girl was, you’d think; but she wasn’t scared. Not she! She was merely pretending to be frightened, while she sat there mighty quiet and trying to size me up.

She was wondering whether I recognized her from that room by the river, I thought; she must have been wondering several other things. For one, how did I happen to run into her just at this moment? For another, how much did I know?

One thing about me, I’m slow but I’m not expressive. I may be gradual about getting a fact from somebody else but not many learn much from me. In bridge, when I bid my hand, nobody’s sure whether I have the cards or whether I’m just trying to force the other fellow up. To-night I stepped up to the car as though I’d no idea who might be in it.

“I hope you’re not hurt?” I started; and then, “Why, isn’t it Mrs. Scofield?”

She spoke my name; I said the obvious regrets and all that. She made the ordinary replies.

“I was going down after Mr. Scofield,” she mentioned and she spoke to the chauffeur who had come about beside me. “Thurston, if you’ll get out the other car now.”

For a moment that stumped me; for if she was going to use another car, I had to use another plan and I hadn’t another. My own machine, as I’ve commented, was in no shape to respond to an encore on the act I’d just finished. At this crisis, Thurston saved me.

“You’re all shook up, Mrs. Scofield,” he told her; and then I was sure, as I’d suspected before, that he was in on her game. He knew that I hadn’t just accidentally run him down; and he had different ideas about the advisability of trying their old plan with the other car.

He was a thin, Cassius-looking driver of about thirty and of the sort that smoke and dope, as well as think, too much. He was a smooth-shaven chap and would be good looking if the bones of his cheeks were less sharp.

“I’m all right, Thurston,” she assured him; but I saw she was thinking things over and sparring for time.

“You’d better go back into the house and rest, Mrs. Scofield,” Thurston suggested respectfully enough but strengthened the suggestion with a jerk of his head which he supposed I didn’t see.

Cars were stopping all about us and people piling out and asking questions and offering help and so on. Shirley took Thurston’s tip and let him and me assist her across the street into her house.

She thanked me beautifully and tried at once to be rid of me; but I said I’d stay awhile to make sure she suffered no bad effect from my carelessness. So she gave up in a few minutes and telephoned her husband, at his club, that she wasn’t coming down to-night and he’d better take a taxi home. I waited till I was sure he’d started in that taxi and then I left.

I’d done fairly well, I thought; I didn’t fool myself into feeling that I’d seen old Win out of danger absolutely but I did feel sure that I’d pried his demise out of the present into the future. What’s the phrase that surgeons use? I’d considerably prolonged his life, I thought; and, so thinking and fairly much pleased with my plan after all, I went to bed and to sleep.

It was half-past four, as I learned after I got fully awake, when I was roused by some one shaking me. It was father.

“Wake up, Stephen!” he was saying to me. “Wake up! The police are here. They want to talk to you. Jerry has just shot and killed Winton Scofield.”

I stumbled up, as you may imagine, with father’s words painting the picture in my mind. Jerry was in that picture. Then I shook myself and cast him out of the image and put Keeban, Harry Vine, in his place.

“When was it, father?” I asked.

“Less than an hour ago. The police roused your mother who woke me.”

He was in pajamas and dressing gown, was father, with bedroom slippers on. He was tall and gray and gaunt-looking in the glow of my reading lamp which he’d lit. He shook a little and bent a little more; he believed that Jerry did it.

“Where was it?”

“Jerry killed him at home.”

“How?”

“He shot him, I said; he shot him down in cold blood.”

I began at this time to feel it; and what I felt was not that Jerry had shot Win Scofield; no, not Jerry who’d grown up beside me as my brother in this house. That duplicate of Jerry, whom I myself had mistaken for Jerry when I found him in that basement room, that man and his Christina, who then was with him, had “got” Win Scofield; and my rage rose against her. She was his wife and, if she had not fired the shot, she’d been in the plot. I thought how I had seen her last night singing and exultant. I clenched my hands and shook.

My father was going on. “He was seen and recognized by three persons. There’s no doubt about it at all.”

“Who saw him?” I said.

“Mrs. Scofield.”

I laughed at that and it must have seemed mad to father. “Who else?” I asked him.

“The chauffeur.”

I laughed again.

“And the butler,” father finished.

I didn’t laugh at that. I hadn’t seen the butler but there was no reason for believing he was not in the game.

“They got him,” I thought to myself. “They got old Win Scofield.”

His life was not an invaluable one, as perhaps you have gathered; but that wasn’t the point with me. They—his wife and other people close about him and upon whom he had a right to depend—had got him, and certainly in some low, treacherous way. No wonder Jerry had warned me to try and stop this; he’d told me he’d pick and choose, so when he took the risk of warning, he’d warn against a more than ordinary crime.

“Jerry killed Winton Scofield,” my father repeated just then; and I came back at him now, “He didn’t.”

I couldn’t tell him that Jerry had sent me to try to stop this murder. I remembered in time that Jerry forbade me a word. There was no use talking to father, anyway.

“Get some clothes on,” was all he said to me.

“Keeban did that!” I proclaimed; and father pulled up and faced me.

“There’s no Keeban; don’t let me hear you say that again. This family faces the fact; Jerry’s gone to crime. We face it and we do not shirk our responsibility. Come to yourself, Stephen. Jerry’s picture is in police headquarters in every city east or west; New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Baltimore, every headquarters has reported the same; they have no criminal in their galleries who would be taken for Jerry. There’s never been a Keeban in crime; it’s Jerry.”

“Keeban, he goes by the name of Harry Vine,” I returned; “he’s not in their galleries because he’s kept out of their hands. They’ve got to catch a man before they can photograph him.”

My father gave me up. “Come talk to the police,” he said and stalked from my room.

Downstairs I met Mullaney and a plain clothes man from the central detective bureau who wanted to know how I happened to run into Mrs. Scofield’s car at eleven in the evening.

I wanted to know something before I answered this; I wanted to know that the witnesses, Shirley and Thurston and the butler, were being held by the police.

All three were; so there could be no harm in keeping what I knew. You can always tell what you’ve kept to yourself but never call back what you’ve chattered. I thought, “When Jerry warned me of this murder, he said ‘not a word to any one.’ If I say he warned me against Shirley, and the news gets out, not only the police’ll be after him; the crowd he trains with now will go for him and get him, surely.” So I said to Mullaney about my collision with Shirley’s car, “You have the report on that accident.”

“So you stick to it that ’twas an accident?”

I nodded.

“Then tell us, please, what was you doing up that way alone at that time so that you had the little accident?”

I didn’t like his tone; I didn’t like it at all.

There was no possibility of my convincing him of the existence of Keeban; and the impossibility of it only made me surer of Keeban, just as it always did when I argued with father. You see at that time, it was a matter of faith with me; and nothing feeds up faith like antagonism. I was slow but also stubborn, as perhaps you’ve perceived. These men were here because they were sure Jerry had shot down Winton Scofield; Jerry’d been seen doing it. I wouldn’t believe that; therefore I had to believe in Keeban.

“What are you getting at?” I asked Mullaney.

He changed his tone. “Our cards are face up on your table, Mr. Fanneal,” he said, respectfully enough. “We’re not accusin’ you of any doin’s; but we think you know more about him who was Jerry Fanneal than you are telling us.”

“What do you think I know?”

“We figure that you thought he was up by Mr. Scofield’s big house last night and that’s why you was there; we think you was lookin’ for him when you bumped into Mrs. Scofield comin’ out.”

I could deny that directly and I did. “That’s wrong.”

“You didn’t know he was there or you didn’t expect him there?”

“No: that’s flat.”

“Where may he be now? Do you know that?”

“I do not.”

“That’s flat too, sir?”

“Absolutely.”

They gave me up after a while; and the reporters arrived, bringing details not mentioned to me by Mullaney or his companion. The reporters had to see all the Fanneal household and learn what we thought of Jerry now; they wanted fresh pictures, previously unpublished, of Jerry and of the rest of us; they had no doubt at all that Jerry had committed the murder.

“Why would he?” I asked them.

“Why?” was exactly what they wished most to know. They asked, “When Jerry was one of your family and before he ‘reverted,’ had he ever quarrelled with or taken a particular dislike to Winton Scofield?”

They were all full of that “reversion” idea which they played up in their papers.

I went to my office that morning, not with an intention of doing any business but to wait by my private wire on which yesterday Jerry had called me. Likely enough it was being watched this morning, I thought; surely I was being watched as a natural consequence of the police knowledge that I was loyal to Jerry. Every few minutes, on the office wire, a newspaper or some friend or some crank was calling me; once mother called me on the private line; but otherwise it was silent.

By midforenoon the newspapers were strewing all over the streets the news that Jerry Fanneal, who had vanished since his attack upon Dorothy Crewe, had reappeared in the rôle of murderer and shot down old Winton Scofield, the recently rejuvenated. It gave them full flood tide for all their sensation stuff with the sun of the new murder and the moon of old scandals pulling the same way. Naturally they raked over the robbery of Dorothy Crewe and the fate of old Win with his former wives. You know those pages of pictures which every news sheet seems to have these days,—three-quarters photographs of the people who stopped their car on the railroad crossing, the lady who ate the poison and the lady who sent it, the new back-stroke swimming champion and the tenor who sang at the Auditorium. Well, the Fanneals and the Scofields, with Win’s wives, pushed them all off the page that day; we had it solid.

When I looked at the picture of Win’s last wife, Shirley of the yellow hair, knowing she was also Christina, you may imagine I had some arguments with myself about staying silent.

A buyer was bothering me all through this time. I’d told the doorkeeper and the telephone girl, “Turn off everybody you can.” But weak words had taken no effect upon this gentleman who, by his own account, was one Klangenberg, a keeper of a delicatessen on a fourth-rate street off Larrabee. He demanded to see me personally about a claim over a shipment of Hawaiian pineapple.

“He will see you, sir,” my office manager reported. “He says you promised to see him.”

I shook my head.

“He says to say to you, sir, if you don’t remember,” my manager continued, “that when you promised, he asked you about Smetsheen of Minneapolis.”

I sat up at that; for Jerry was the one who had last asked me about Smetsheen of Minneapolis. I went out to see Klangenberg, who was a tall, phlegmatic Swede entirely positive on the subject of pineapple and quite fluent about it until he had drawn me off alone with him. Then he said, “‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Westward Ho’ says to Steve, ‘They crossed us last night; but stick. Not a word; you can help and we’ll get them. Stick, Steve.’”

That was all he would say; when I asked him anything more, he went back to pineapple; he was a buyer again, seeking satisfaction on a claim.

This word, which surely was from Jerry, of course helped me to stick. It meant to me that he’d tried to prevent the murder and, having been “crossed” somewhere, had failed; but he counted on me to stick while he kept after Keeban.

A few minutes later, Fred Scofield ’phoned me and asked me to come up to his father’s place.

VII I KEEP MY OWN COUNSEL.

When I arrived at the big gaudy house, where I had watched Shirley singing last evening, the coroner’s men were filing out; they’d completed their examination. Police were all about the doors, keeping back a crowd; the officers passed me and Fred came down almost immediately and took me into the long, gay room where Shirley had played and sung.

The shades were drawn to-day but as they were white they let in plenty of light; the glass doors to the hall were closed and so, though we could talk without being heard, we could be seen from the hall and we could see most of the lower part of the house and also the stairs.

Fred pointed first to a French window, which opened on the lawn upon the lake side; it had been forced open and now was braced shut, with the catch torn out, the screws hanging.

“Here’s where he came in,” Fred told me.

“Who?” I said.

“Jerry.”

“He was alone?”

“Nobody else was seen. Apparently he went first to the sideboard in the dining room.” Fred gazed across the hall. “He made a noise there.”

When Fred stopped, I commented, “The papers say he made it intentionally.”

Fred nodded. “He wasn’t after silver. That was simply a bluff. He brought a bag with him and emptied two drawers into it. There it is.”

A canvas sack, like a mail pouch, lay in the corner and bulged half full. I didn’t bother to examine it. I was trying to figure out Fred’s attitude towards me: he wasn’t expressing much but keeping hold of himself pretty firm.

“Jerry made the rattle with the silver,” Fred went on, “to draw father downstairs. He did it.

“As father appeared on the landing, Jerry fired from here—from beside this silk hanging. He fired twice; and neither before the shots nor between them nor afterwards did Jerry make any attempt to hide, in spite of the portière right there; and the light was on. He hit father both times; and father’s pistol went off in his hand as he was falling; father fired wild, undoubtedly, but in Jerry’s general direction.” Fred showed the bullet hole near the door. “Jerry wasn’t hit; but he did a complete job with his gun. He hit father first——”

I stopped Fred. “I know from the papers,” I said.

“Well, they had that right. Father lived about five minutes. He fell on the landing and was dead before they carried him up.”

Fred’s voice cracked; and I put my hand on his arm without saying anything. Old Win, if he had played the fool towards the end of his life, at least had showed good nerve at the finish; and when everything else was said, he was Fred’s father. When Fred was a boy, Winton Scofield had been a good father; no one called him a fool then. Every one knows the thousand touches of memories of fondness from a father; and Fred was thinking of them.

He went on telling: “Shirley ran down to him as soon as he fell; she must have been nearly behind him when he got the second bullet. She wasn’t hurt but she certainly took a big chance to help father. Rowan reached him maybe a minute later.”

“Rowan, the butler?” I said.

“That’s right.”

“How long has he been in your family?”

“I can’t remember when he hasn’t been.”

“He saw the actual shooting, as the papers say?”

“Not the firing of the shots. Father was down when Rowan arrived at the top of the stairs; but Jerry wasn’t gone. Rowan saw him plainly. That’s one of the surest things.”

“What is?”

“That Jerry showed himself; he made no effort either to hide when father came down or to get away immediately afterwards.”

“Where was Thurston when he saw Jerry?”

“He’d just come in from the wing through that door.”

“He shot at Jerry, they say.”

“Yes; and missed. Jerry fired once at him and grazed him. Then Jerry got out.”

Fred and I looked each other over. I was thinking, “Jerry didn’t do that but it is no use telling you so.”

Fred said to me, “You ran into Shirley last night.”

I admitted it.

He went on. “After you’d had me to lunch to talk over father’s affairs, Steve. I’ve not mentioned that to the reporters or even to the police yet; but of course I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Mentioning it?” I said.

“I wanted this talk with you first, Steve. Why did you call me yesterday and afterwards smash Shirley’s car? What did you know?”

I stared at him and shook my head.

“Yesterday at lunch,” Fred kept at me, “you asked me particularly about father’s engagements for last night; you asked whether Shirley would drive down to meet him. I told you she would.”

I had nothing to do but to nod at this.

Fred asked directly, “You smashed into her car to stop her?”

I stared at him and kept thinking of Jerry’s “Not a word to any one” and the message Klangenberg brought me from “Kidnapped” and “Westward Ho” which begged me “to stick.” Yet I had to say something here or I might as well, since my actions already had spoken for me.

“Yes, Fred; I smashed into her to stop her from meeting your father.”

“I was sure of it. You had reason to think, yesterday, that something was going to happen to him?”

There was nothing for it but another nod at this.

“Where did you get your reason?”

I might as well have told him; he told me that he knew I got it from Jerry. He held the police theory with this variation; I had been having some sort of communication with Jerry through which I had stumbled upon the idea that something was going to happen to Winton Scofield. I had got the notion that it was going to happen through his wife, and so, in my stupid way, I’d driven up to the house deliberately to smash into her car and scare her out of whatever plan she had in her mind.

Fred was emotionally worked up, of course, he believed that I meant well by what I tried to do; he didn’t doubt I meant well now. He didn’t blame me for having supposed when I found something was planned against his father that Shirley was in it.

“That’s what I thought,” he told me, “when Rowan ’phoned me this morning and got me out of bed to tell me, ‘Mr. Fred, your father’s shot.’

“The family—Kenyon and I—always figured, naturally, that money was what Shirley was after. That’s why we fixed his affairs so she could never get much, even if father had wanted to give it to her. He didn’t have it to give; we had him on an allowance. The only big sum she could get in a lump was his life insurance, which he made over to her. He carried it from the old days, nearly half a million.”

Here was some of the stuff I’d come for. All morning my mind had been reaching for a motive, you see,—why old Win Scofield had found a place on Keeban’s board and why his number had come to the top just now. Fred talked on and made it perfectly plain to me.

While he talked, I put myself in Keeban’s place for a while and tried to take things from his point of view. I went back a bit to do this—back a few months to the time when old Win, divorced once more and rejuvenated, had arrived again at the cabarets and resumed beau-ing about with the girls. I thought that when Shirley—or Christina—had met him, she talked him over with Keeban and they’d marked him down between them for easy meat. She married him to get away with the big money old Win was supposed to have but hadn’t; for Fred and Kenyon had seen to that, as I’ve mentioned. Win took her to Paris and brought her back to live with him on an allowance.

Maybe from the first she had had her eyes on the old man’s insurance; but I didn’t think so. I thought, “She got into this marriage with an idea of an easy get-away with a pile; and when Ken and Fred fooled her, she decided to fool them; she saw Keeban again and they decided to get that insurance money. But they had a big difficulty with that; they had to do more than merely ‘croak’ old Win; they had to do it so Shirley would not possibly be connected and so the insurance money would be paid over to her and she could get away with it.”

There, surely, was a job for them when the family and friends thought what they did of Shirley.

Fred was saying to me, “Ken and I got bothered about that insurance. In the first place, we didn’t want Shirley to have the money, half a million for marrying father; then it was costing us over thirty thousand a year to pay the premiums; and, also, we figured it might be dangerous as a temptation.

“Not that we thought Shirley’d kill father directly, Steve; but there’s many a way to shorten a man’s life, indirectly. Father played he was young again. Well, all she’d have to do would be to over-encourage him with her eye on that half million. Anyway, Ken and I decided to stop paying the premiums on that insurance—save ourselves about thirty thousand a year and make father a little safer.”

Of course, this told me why old Win’s number had jumped to the top of the board just now; the sons were stopping his insurance. Fred continued:

“But since the insurance was still in force, I couldn’t help thinking of that when Rowan called me; I couldn’t help thinking Shirley was mixed up in that murder. Then Rowan told me it was Jerry Fanneal who’d shot father and I knew Shirley couldn’t have anything to do with it.”

Fred talked on; but I didn’t pay much attention for a few minutes; for now I could see through the rest of Keeban’s scheme; I could see not only why he had shot Win Scofield, but why he had done it himself and why he had shown himself in the doing, making no attempt to hide.

For he wanted to be seen; he wanted to be identified, particularly by Rowan. For Rowan would identify him, as Rowan did, for Jerry Fanneal; and, so identified, no one would connect Shirley with the murder. Who was Jerry Fanneal, in these days? A wild, irresponsible criminal, a man from nowhere who had betrayed the breeding bestowed upon him and had “reverted.” As he had attacked and robbed Dorothy Crewe, now he had entered Win Scofield’s house and shot him either wantonly or for some old, brooded-over pique; that was what the newspapers assumed and the police and even Win Scofield’s sons who had most hated and doubted Shirley.

Fred was feeling badly over how he’d ridiculed his father the last time he’d talked with me and how he’d mistaken Shirley. “She was right there beside father and she never thought of herself, Rowan says,” Fred repeated to me. “She held him while he died and——”

“How’s she now?” I asked.

“Nearly collapsed. She gave her evidence to the police and afterwards to the coroner. She’s in bed now.”

“Can I see her?”

“You?” said Fred. “Why?”

“She’s accused Jerry.”

“So has Rowan; why don’t you talk to him?”

“I will,” I said, “afterwards. Do you mind asking her if she’ll see me?”

He went up himself and came down with her excuses. But I had expected them and I’d written on one of my cards “Bulls and Beefers”; just that and I’d put it in an envelope unsealed. I knew Fred wouldn’t look in it when he took it up to her.

“She’ll see you,” said Fred when he came down again.