CHAPTER XVI
Rosamond Curwood
A clear, bright day followed the heavy thunder shower which had occurred late in the night. Peter, as he boarded the train for Hobart Falls, hoped that it was an omen.
He had just had time for a few minutes' talk with O'Malley, in which he gave his partner instructions about reaching him if anything of importance should transpire during the day.
"Better wire me at Hobart Falls," he said. "Have it left in the telegraph office to be called for. I can't tell where I'll be stopping and I can't think of any other way I'd be sure of getting it. I don't believe there'll be anything."
After that, he had hastily called Donald Morris on the telephone and explained briefly that he was rushing out of town on a new scent.
"Another false clue?" asked Morris, wearily, and Peter saw, in his mind's eye, the pale, tired face of his client.
"May be," said Peter, in a friendly, hopeful tone. "But you never can tell. We mustn't miss a trick and I've found something I'm bound to follow up. It may lead to nothing, of course, but there's always a chance. I'm in a deuce of a rush just now and I'll have to wait till I get back to tell you about it. Don't get discouraged. While there's life, there's hope. While there's life——" he repeated to himself as he hung up the receiver—"I wish to God I could be sure that Mary Blake is still alive. Well, anyway——"
He made the nine-thirty train for Hobart Falls with four minutes to spare. "Which is enough for anybody," thought Peter, as he watched the ugly houses and factories slip by.
The railroad ran northward on the west side of the Hudson, for Peter had ascertained Hobart Falls to be situated in the Catskill Mountains. After a time the train slipped from behind a range of hills into a tunnel and out again, and Peter, startled from his deep absorption, saw below him the great river, shining blue and silver, in the morning sun. No one who has ever seen it thus suddenly could fail to be impressed by its beauty and grandeur. Peter, city-bred as he was, was strongly affected by the sight of the blue-green wooded hills, lapping and over-lapping, and the great, serene river winding in between.
His thoughts ran—"I wonder if I'll be lucky enough to find Walter Lord, and what he'll know.... Gee, those rocks are corking, and those big, soft pines.... It was a long while ago—maybe twenty years since they wore that kind of clothes.... That's a house, way up on that mountain! Must have a ripping view.... And he may be dead by now.... But he mustn't dare to be—I need him too much...." And so his mind ran on, alternating between hope and discouragement, through the hours that followed.
He had to change cars twice, each time to a road of narrower gauge. "The next'll be roller skates, I should think," he said to himself as he jerked and bumped along in the little mountain train.
It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when they ran in to the tiny, ugly, red-painted station of Hobart Falls. They had passed through a number of stations, vociferous with red-faced hackmen and seething with fat, jewelled, and overdressed Hebrews of the middle class. This little place was quite different. There were no big hotels or boarding houses in the immediate vicinity, and so few people that only two trains a day stopped at Hobart Falls. The loungers about the station were obviously country-bred and American.
Peter quickly approached one of them and asked where the telegraph office could be found. He wished to ascertain at once if there was anything from O'Malley.
The man jerked his thumb in the direction of the waiting room. "In there," he said, briefly, "ticket office," and, with stupid, bovine eyes, watched the stranger as he disappeared inside the station.
"Nothing ain't come fer nobody to-day," said the agent, in reply to Peter's inquiry.
Peter stepped swiftly out again upon the platform, and looked about him. Blue hills and valleys surrounded the little station on every side. In the middle distance could be seen one or two small farmhouses, and in the immediate foreground, drawn up close to the platform, was a decrepit, dingy Ford. A long, lank man, sitting at the wheel, glanced up at Peter expectantly.
"Is this for hire?" asked Peter, indicating the ancient car with a motion of his head. "And can you take me to the village?"
The driver grinned at a man who was leaning against the edge of the doorway, and spat, generously, over the wheel.
"Git in," he said, laconically.
Peter threaded himself into the back seat, and the weary flivver, with a heavy groan, started down the empty road.
"Any p'tickeler place?" asked the man at the wheel, turning his weather-beaten face, and looking Peter over from head to foot.
"I think I'll want to spend the night here," answered Peter, a trifle dubiously. "Is there a hotel?"
The man laughed. "This ain't no metrolopus," he vouchsafed, "but I guess the Widder Lord'll put you up for the night, if you'd like to go there."
The "Widder Lord." Peter's heart sank, but he only said, "That'll do all right, I guess. Take me there, will you?"
At that moment they turned a sharp corner, and Peter saw why the driver had grinned at the lounger on the station platform. The village, what there was of it, was not four minutes' walk from the station, but quite out of sight, hidden by the small, wooded shoulder of a hill.
It was a sleepy, quiet little place, shut in by rolling upland. There was one long street, or, rather, a wide place in the road, on each side of which were small, old village houses, mostly painted white, with green shutters. There were two stores, one of which was also the post office, and a blacksmith's shop. In front of the latter stood an old-fashioned buggy with empty shafts. From within came the ringing clink of metal upon metal. Save for an old dog wandering down the street, and a few loose hens dusting themselves in the road, there was no sign or sound of life.
"Rip Van Winkle might have taken his twenty-year nap right here in the middle of the street, instead of going to all the trouble of climbing up one of those mountains," thought Peter. "No wonder there aren't any Jews here. This place sure would cramp their style, and then some.... Wild-goose chase I've come on, anyway, I feel it in my bones. Walter Lord is probably as dead as the rest of the village." The silence got on his nerves and he spoke to the driver. "Think the Widow Lord will be awake when we get there?" he asked.
The man turned a sardonic, screwed-up eye upon him. "'S next house," he said, pointing, "and we'll be there in one shake of a lamb's tail. What'd she be asleep this time of day fer?"
Peter looked without much interest at the house indicated. It was old and gray and weather-beaten but had evidently once been the considerable house of Hobart Falls. Low and rambling, it faced the street, standing a few feet back, among some ragged, flowering shrubs.
Suddenly Peter's eye lightened and he reached over and caught the driver's shoulder.
"Stop here," he said, sharply. "This is the place where I want to stop."
"Sure it's the place ye want to stop," repeated the driver, disgustedly. "Ain't I been tellin' ye? This is the Widder Lord's."
"Oh, yes. I forgot for the moment." The light faded from Peter's eyes. "The 'Widder Lord's'," he muttered, inwardly. "The man's dead, of course. However——"
He glanced again at the object which had raised a sudden hope within him. At the far end of the house, standing out at right angles from it, and partly hidden by vines, was an old battered sign:
WALTER LORD
PHOTOGRAPHER
"I've got the right house, anyway, and without any lost motion," thought Peter. "And that's the luck of the Irish—as far as it goes."
He paid the driver the "two bits" suggested as the amount of the fare. The sum was paid so unconcernedly that the driver lingered while Peter stepped quickly up to the front door and rang the old jangling bell. A man as free as that with money didn't come to Hobart Falls so often.
Peter had made up his mind that he would spend the night there, in any case, if the "Widder Lord" would take him in. He knew he would have to take a taxi (he thought in city terms) to Kortenkill, two stations below, to catch the midnight train, which did not stop at Hobart Falls, if he were to go back to town that night, and the thought of bumping over the bad roads in a pre-historic flivver, after being up most of the previous night, made no appeal to him.
"I'll make her take me in," thought Peter, and rang the bell again.
"Anybody want me?"
The voice came from just over Peter's head, but he could see no one, for the roof of the little old Dutch porch hid the speaker.
"Who wants me, Josh?" the voice repeated.
"Nobuddy wants you, Walt," the driver in the road bawled out. "'S a stranger wants to spend the night. 'S yer sister-in-law to home?"
Peter's heart leaped harder, if not so far, as his long legs. One jump, and he was on the narrow brick walk, looking up at an open window from which protruded the quaintest old head he thought he had ever seen.
The face was that of a man of seventy or more, but the hair and long sweeping moustache were brilliantly black. The hair was thin and carefully brushed forward above the ears, in a bygone style. Two little twinkling eyes looked down from either side of a long, thin, pointed nose—looked down at Peter in mild surprise.
"You wanted to stay the night, Mr.—uh——"
"Clancy," Peter supplied, eagerly. "Yes. I want to look around Hobart Falls a little. Could you——This is Mr. Walter Lord, isn't it?" He glanced aside, as if for verification, to the half-hidden sign.
"That's me," replied the owner of the craning head, with a smile. "That's me, all right."
Peter's heart settled down to a steady beat.
"Well, Mr. Lord," he said, "it's just like this. I've got a little business here in Hobart Falls, and I want to spend the night. Josh," he spoke as if the driver, who still lingered, were an old and intimate friend, "Josh thought Mrs. Lord would take me in. I'm sorry she's away, but couldn't you manage to put me up? It'd be a great favour."
"Aw, take him in, Walt," urged Josh, from the road. "'N let me know if you'll need a hack again, Mister. I got the best car in the Falls."
Peter was anxiously watching the face above him.
"Well, you see, Miranda not being here, and all—makes it kind of hard. She's awful particular about the linen closet, and I don't know what sheets——"
"Never mind the sheets," Peter interrupted, quickly. "I'll sleep on the floor, if necessary. I've just got to stay to-night, Mr. Lord, and if you don't take me in——"
"Wait a second, and I'll come down," said Walter Lord, disappearing from the window with the abruptness of a Jack-in-the-box.
"He'll take ye, all right," Josh called out, encouragingly, as he turned his little car. "Lemme know when ye want me agin," and was gone, in a cloud of dust.
"If you wouldn't mind coming around this way, Mr. Clancy——"
The entire figure of Walter Lord disclosed itself at the corner of the house, and the figure was in strict accord with the face. Slender, bent, and old it was, but almost jauntily clad. Light gray trousers, somewhat stained with chemicals, were carefully pressed into a knife-like crease down the front. A double-breasted waistcoat of starched white duck sported a long festoon of old worn gold watch-chain. Around his neck was a standing collar with tall points, and so large that it made his thin neck look, so Peter thought, like a lily in a pot. About the collar was tied a long, black "shoe-string" tie of silk. He was just settling his thin shoulders into a wide-lapelled, square-tailed, black broadcloth coat which he had obviously donned for the occasion.
"Come this way, Mr. Clancy," he repeated. "The front door sticks in this warm, damp weather, for we scarcely ever use it. All our friends come in here," and with a gracious, hospitable gesture, he held open the side door for Peter to pass.
Peter had just time to notice that there was a small outside stairway leading to the second floor, built on at this end of the house, and that, upon the second floor, there was a fairly good-sized slanting window, and on the roof a skylight. "The photographic studio," thought Peter, as he followed Lord into the house. As he crossed the threshold, he unostentatiously dropped his small handbag just inside the door.
"I'm afraid I can't make you very comfortable, Mr. Clancy," said the old man, doubtfully, drawing forward a sagging rocker with an elaborate "tidy" on the back. "Won't you sit down? My sister has gone over to Letty Bowen's just for the day and to spend the night. She'll be home in the morning. Too bad, too bad. There's only a cold supper. D'you mind cold suppers? I rather like 'em myself, this hot weather—and I said to Miranda, 'I'll be as happy as a clam at high tide.' But I didn't expect to have a visitor. (Let me take your hat.) Not that I'm not always glad of company. Miranda says I'm worse than misery. (Misery loves company, you know. Her joke.) But I do like to see new people—new faces. Keeps you young, don't you think?—Oh, I almost forgot. Do have a cigar——"
He slipped one thin, stained hand into his breast pocket and drew out a Pittsburg stogie of the longest, thinnest, and stogiest type. Peter shuddered inwardly and ventured to ask if he might smoke cigarettes instead. "Perhaps you would have one yourself, sir," he added, noting a funny little twinkle in the old man's eye.
"Well—you know——" Walter Lord spoke with slight embarrassment, at the same time reaching out an eager hand, "I must say I do prefer 'em to cigars, but Miranda, well, she kind of feels that—that cigars are more suitable for a man of my age—and so——"
He lit one of Peter's cigarettes, inhaled a long, delicious whiff, and smiled gently.
"Dear old duck," thought Peter, "with the heart of a kid, and scared to death of his sister-in-law. Bet she's a Tartar. Thank heaven she isn't here."
Peter leaned his head back against a large yellow butterfly worked in wool on a black background, crossed his long legs and smoked leisurely, with the air of a man at ease.
"There must be a lot of good fishing around here," he remarked, taking a long shot at a possible hobby of the man he had determined should be his host. "Crossed a lot of likely looking streams as we came up through the mountains."
He saw, by the expression of Walter Lord's face, that he had made a bull's-eye. The little man leaned forward and spoke with enthusiasm.
"There's the best fishing to be found in the Catskills just beyond that meadow over there," he pointed out of the window. "You can't see the stream from here, on account of the tall grass, but it's fine, open fishing and just full of trout. Of course they're not very large, but along at the beginning of the season I caught one that weighed two pounds. Yes, sir. He was a beauty. And there are more of 'em, if you know the pools. I could show you——"
After that, Peter had things pretty much his own way. The talk ran largely on flies and tackle. ("He was sure to be a fly fisherman, if he fished at all, the good old sport," thought Peter, smiling at his host.) Peter told a story of some wonderful fishing he had once had, up in Nova Scotia, and Lord capped it with an experience of his in the Adirondacks when he was a boy—and so the minutes flew.
There was no further question as to Peter's spending the night there. The lonely old man was too eager for society, and too trusting and unsophisticated to raise any objections to the harbouring of an unheralded guest, particularly since the guest was a fisherman, and a fly fisherman, at that.
If Walter Lord had any idea that Mr. Clancy had come to Hobart Falls with a purpose other than to investigate the fishing possibilities of that region, his curiosity on the subject was completely held in check by his innate courtesy.
In the first few minutes of their acquaintance Peter's quick mind had invented several stories to account for his presence there. He hesitated between the advisability of being a doctor, seeking a good site for a sanitarium. ("For patients troubled with insomnia, this would be ideal," Peter grinned to himself.) Or, perhaps, it would awaken more sympathy to have a young wife who was ill, and needed mountain air and seclusion.
But before he had talked with the old man very long Peter conceived a deep distaste for subterfuge. "Dammit all, I won't lie to the good old scout unless he makes me," he said to himself, as he watched Walter Lord making his fussy little preparations for supper, and listened to his constant flow of pleasant chatter as he passed back and forth from the kitchen.
"Cold lamb and some of Miranda's currant jelly," he said, as he placed a blue platter and a sauce dish filled with a truncated cone of wobbling, clear crimson upon a small table near the west window. "Beautiful, rich colour where the sun strikes it, isn't it?" He stepped back to note the effect. "Let me see, there's a salad, too. Lettuce from our own garden, Mr. Clancy. Pretty late for lettuce, but I plant it right along through the summer and it does real well. Oh, I almost forgot the pot cheese."
He bustled out in the kitchen and presently returned with a crisp salad and a yellow bowl brimming with creamy cheese.
"The coffee's almost ready, and it'll be good, too," he chuckled. "Miranda thinks strong coffee, three times a day, is bad for my nerves, but I made this myself, and I'll bet you won't get a better cup of coffee at the St. Denis Hotel." (Peter had told him that his home was in New York.) "I used to go there quite a bit when I was younger. It's a grand, good place, don't you think so, Mr. Clancy?"
His tone was so wistful, so full of pleasant pictures and recollections, that Peter hadn't the heart to tell him that the old St. Denis had vanished long ago. He only said that it certainly was one of the best places in New York, and let it go at that.
In a few minutes they were seated on either side of the little table near the window, a simple but bountiful meal spread between them. The westering sun gleamed on the quaint old blue-and-white china and on the jug of larkspur and madonna lilies which Walter Lord had moved to one side of the table so that he could look at Peter as they ate and talked.
Peter had but one object, for the moment, and that was to captivate the mind of his host, a feat which his experience and ready Irish wit made easy of accomplishment. He told some stories which brought tears of laughter to Walter Lord's little, twinkling eyes, and made him rock backward and forward in his chair. In order to invite the old man's confidence, Peter told some of his early experiences. Truthful stories they were, in the main, only slightly embellished, and most effective in their skilful blending of humour and pathos—but in them was no hint of Peter's present profession.
By the time supper was finished, Peter had achieved a footing of such friendly intimacy that he was allowed to help clear away. And all the while he had been studying the little old man, whose quaint appearance would have been simply ridiculous to one less sympathetic than Peter Clancy. To him, the dyed hair and the jauntily worn old-fashioned clothes spoke aloud of a spirit of undying youthfulness and simplicity, a heart kept young by the love of all things beautiful, a mind so filled with imagination and artistic longings that it had selected a thing as impractical as photography for its profession.
Peter thought of the little, sleepy village and the emptiness of the wooded hills, and could imagine how few were the sitters who came to Walter Lord's old photographic studio. And he wondered, in that remote spot, what incentive kept the light gray trousers so carefully creased, the linen vest so stiffly starched, the old, worn broadcloth coat so immaculately brushed.
"He must be like 'St. Ives'," Peter concluded, at last. "Since there's no one else to dress for, he 'dresses for God.'"
They had left things tidy in the kitchen, and now, at ease in their pleasant relationship of host and welcome guest, they sat beside the open west window, smoking limitless cigarettes and talking endlessly.
Peter, looking always for an opening for the introduction of the subject which was uppermost in his mind, carefully guided the old man into speaking further of himself and his pursuits, a matter presenting no difficulties whatever, for Walter Lord had many hobbies and rode them with an enthusiasm which age could not abate.
He learned, among other things, that the Lords had once been well off, but that the family estate had dwindled before Walter and his older brother, Tom, came into possession, and that after Tom had died and left his elderly widow and the remainder of the property to Walter's care, it had suffered still more.
"I did the best I could," said the old man, wistfully, "but there it was—I always felt that I could have made more money if I could have gone to New York—but Miranda—and the old house—they seemed sort of to anchor me."
"And your photograph studio, Mr. Lord. I should think you'd have hated to leave that," said Peter, at last boldly approaching the subject deepest in his thoughts. "By the way, speaking of photography"—he smiled and leaned forward across the table, confidentially—"you may be surprised, but I've seen some of your work. It's bully, too!"
"What?" cried Walter Lord, excitedly. "You don't say so, Mr. Clancy. Some of my work in New York! Now I wonder who it could have been. I've only taken pictures of people around here—and there aren't so many—it's never been what you could call a paying profession, and Miranda——But never mind. Whose picture was it that you saw? And how did you know that I——"
"By George, I believe I've got it with me," said Peter, slapping his pockets, the while his heart beat quickly. Now or never—"Here it is, sure enough," he added, gleefully—and laid the small carte-de-visite, the sole trophy of his midnight quest, face upward on the table.
There was a moment of suspense while the old man carefully adjusted his glasses and took the old photograph up in his hand. Peter watched his face, narrowly. It had been many years. Would he——
"Why! Why!" exclaimed Walter Lord, in tones of deep surprise. "Why, how, in Heaven's name, Mr. Clancy, did you get a picture of—of little Rosamond Curwood?"