Walker of the Secret Service/Chapter 11
XI. The Girl in the Picture
I advanced to meet the man with a sense of victory. The United States Secret Service had searched the world for him. He had been long concealed. But my sense of victory vanished when I saw him.
He sat in a great chair on the long terrace that overlooked the sweep of lawn and the dark, rapid river. He had been, all the time, under our very noses. We had thought of every other place except an English country house within a jump of London. And he had been sitting here in every comfort that money could assemble.
He did not rise when I was brought out to him.
He leaned back in the chair, lifted his heavy face, and laughed!
“And so,” he said, “you finally wormed it out of her.”
I could not keep my voice level—so effectively was the man escaping us after all this search.
And I did not know what the huge creature meant. On the night before, some one had called up Scotland Yard and said our man was here; the English Secret Service was giving us all the aid it could. The call from some shop in Regent Street could not be traced—so it had been a woman! I replied as though I were in his secret.
“She knew you were safe.”
He laughed again. “Sure, she knew itl”
He pointed to a chair a few feet beyond him across a table.
“Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk about her—that’s the reason I wanted you to come.” He laughed again. “You thought you’d sleuthed it out, eh? Not by a jugful. I sent her word to put you wise. I wanted to clear some things up before I cashed in. But it was a clean lie. What I wanted was somebody to listen while I talked about her. Sit down.”
It was a strange introductory. But it was a mystery that had puzzled everybody, and I was willing to hear all that he had to say about it. I took the chair beyond him.
He shot his head forward suddenly, in a tense gesture.
“She’s a heavenly angel!” he said. “I don’t know what God Almighty meant by setting her in the game with the bunch of crooks that He’s got running the world—unless He counted on me.” The laugh became a sort of chuckle in his big throat—“Ain’t she a heavenly angel?”
He whipped a worn photograph out of his pocket and reached it across the table to me.
It was the photograph of a girl with a narrow slit cut out across the face. It had been taken from a painting; one could tell from the flat surface. A strange background of beauty and an indescribable charm in the pose of the girl remained even in the mutilated picture.
“I cut the face,” he added, “so she wouldn’t come into the case if you caught me; your little Westridge must have been slaughtered at the loss of her.”
Again he touched me at an unexpected point.
Shortly after the thing had happened, Lord Westridge returned to England. He had come to visit some rich Americans, and there was a rumor that some adventure had befallen him. Nothing definite ever came to me, and I liked the man too little to inquire; all the blood from the original Glasgow solicitor would “bite a shilling.” But again I replied as though I were in his secret.
“What happened to Westridge?” I said.
The man twisted around in his chair.
“Friend,” he said, “you’ve got a head full of brains or you wouldn’t be Chief of the United States Secret Service; now answer me a question— What’s the biggest notion in the Christian Church?”
“I don’t know,” I answered him truthfully.
“Well, I know,” he went on. “It’s the notion that you’ll get what’s a-comin’ to you!”
He looked at me with a big, cynical leer.
“That’s what happened to your little Westridge—and the next time you see him he’s a-goin’ to get another jolt. He will be damned sorry that you found me. He couldn’t squeal, any place along the line, but I’ll bet a finger he didn’t let Scotland Yard forget about me.”
And again I saw an incident of this long search, for the man before me, from another angle. The Blackacre Bank had kept the search hot for him, pretending the public welfare. I saw it now, that was Westridge’s money box—that would be little Westridge in the background.
He eyed me curiously in a moment’s pause.
“He kept slippin’ you the word, eh? Well, she blocked him at that, even if she didn’t know it.”
There came a sudden energy into his voice.
“An’ if the plague hadn’t got me I’d ’a’ saved her that trouble; I’d ’a’ played ring-a-round-a-rosy with you.”
He lifted himself in the chair with the strength of his hands on the broad arm-rests. And I realized more fully what a physical wreck he was—the lower part of his body was motionless.
“I want to tell you about this thing,” he said. “And then you can go ahead with your warrant.”
“I fear,” I replied, “that a somewhat higher authority has got in before the King’s writ.”
He chuckled as though the deadly fact were a sort of pleasantry.
“Sure,” he said, “the big Judge has beat you to it.”
He looked out, a moment, at the woolly Highland cattle in the distant meadow, at the age-old beech-trees and the dark, swift, silent water, and then the upper part of his big body settled in the chair.
“I thought it was a slick trick, but maybe it was God Almighty. Anyway when the thing was pulled off I slid up to Bar Harbor and set down in a hotel. I figured it out like this—you look for a crook in the places that crooks go, and you look for a gentleman in the places where gentlemen go. I’ll switch it.
“I got me some quiet clothes. I limped a little to show that I wasn’t golf-fit and I didn’t talk. I just set about with the New York Times and the Financial Register and let the days pass. When there was doings in the hotel I was there in my all-right evening clothes, in a chair against the wall, and I limped along the sea path in the afternoon for a little exercise.
“I looked some bored to keep the proper form. But I wasn’t bored. I was seeing something new and I was getting more light on it all the time.
“I was seeing that this bunch was living up to a standard that nearly all the people I’d ever seen were only pretending. That was the difference, I soon figured it out.”
He flung up his hand in a curious, expressive gesture.
“I’m a crook, keep that in your head, and the thing was like a theater to me. I began to watch the actors; then I saw her and Westridge.”
He moved in his chair.
“She was there with an old faded grandmother that read novels and smoked cigarettes—and was a lady. And right there is where this real bunch has got the goods! They don’t let down because they do some things that would make you cross your fingers on the other set.”
He leaned back in the chair.
“Well! I got to watching her and your Englishman. I watched them dancing in the hotel, and riding, and playing tennis at the Casino—I’d never seen any people like them.
“And pretty soon I got on to something; this Westridge gentleman was trying to buy the girl, but he didn’t want to pay for her. He was putting out the bait, but he had a string to it.
“I got on to his dope.
“If he could dazzle her into marrying him she’d get her board and clothes. The real thing that was next to his hide was his money. ‘All for me’ that was the notion.”
He went on with no break in his words.
“I got to thinking about it. This little Westridge was forty; he’d never change; and the girl was at the age when the things he was dangling were all mixed up with moonshine. He might win, and if he did she was headed for hell.
“I saw it all clean out to the end.”
He moved in the chair.
“I used to set about, and look at her, and it made me cold all over. The devil was on the job right here just as he was in the Tenderloin. He was working on a higher-class line, but it was only a different sort of road to his same old hell.
“It would be a heavenly angel flung to a wolf no matter how you dressed the situation up; an’ I said to myself, ‘You can’t beat him. The devil’s got a set of traps for any kind of a layout!’”
He lifted himself on his great hands and turned the whole of his body toward me.
“Now,” he said, “what’s the difference how you ruin a woman? When you got the job finished, ain’t it finished? If you string it out over a dozen years and kill everything nice and generous and lovely in her with your little, contemptible ‘all for me’ meanness, inside of a preacher’s permit, ain’t you ruined her, just the same as if you’d white-slaved her? And ain’t it the same motive, ‘all for me,’ darn the difference?
“I tell you,” he shook the arms of the chair in his great hands, “the thing begun to get my goat. Her father, a lawyer in the South, was dead. She had only the old Boston grandmother (I heard the talk among the women) and the coin was getting scarce. Your little Englishman played in form, every point correct, and he was goin’ to get her.
“I seen it!
“She was standing before the hotel desk with the bill that the clerk puts in your box at the end of the week, when his big motor snorted in against the wooden steps. Your little Westridge understood it for the grin started. It was the same old grin that goes with the job—I’ve seen it on all of ’em.
“An’ that settled it!”
His voice became cold, level, even like a metallic click.
“‘Now, my little gentleman,’ I said to myself, ‘we’ll just see if you do! Right here is where “Alibi Al” sets in with a stack of blues.’
“I got up, folded my newspaper, and took a turn up and down the veranda, as though I was trying out my game leg, an’ then I limped down to the fashionable church just across from the library.
“I stepped up inside the door.”
He paused, and his voice changed to its former note.
“You see I had to have a little help on this job. It had a big loose end.
“I went in and sat down in a pew. It was dim and quiet and I got right down to business. I didn’t run in any of the prayer-book curtain-raisers. I put the thing right up to the boss.
“‘Now, look here, Governor,’ I said, ‘has a helpless little girl got a pull with you, or is it bunk? Because I’m a-goin’ to call you, and if the line your barkers are putting out is on the level, you’ve got to come across with the goods. If there’s nothing to it, the Government ought to shut ’em up on a fraud order—I’m a-goin’ to carry one end of this thing; get busy at the other end!’
“Then I went out.
“That night I went over to see little Westridge.
“They’d been to dinner at Jordan’s Pond and had come in early. Westridge wasn’t in the hotel; he was stopping with the Lesterfields; a big, gray stone house facing the sea. The butler showed me in. There wasn’t anybody about but Westridge. The Lesterfields were down at Newport.
“He was surprised to see me—didn’t understand it; he’d never met me in the social line. But it was America where anything might happen, even a man come to see you that you hadn’t been introduced to.”
The speaker paused to move one of his knees; he lifted it with his hands.
“I didn’t waste any time cutting brush before Mr. Westridge. I went right in to what I had to say. My line was: friend of the girl’s father, blunt old Western business man, no manners, and don’t give a cuss for you. Easy stuff, you see, and the kind of thing your Englishman expects in the ‘States.’
“He was mighty formal, as you’d say, but he didn’t throw any stuttering into Alibi Al. I set down, just as if the place belonged to me, and I waved a hand at him. I said to myself, ‘You’re a little piker; line up and take what’s coming to you.’
“But what I said out loud was like this,
“‘Carrots has got a little bunch of stuff that’s goin’ to be wiped out if it ain’t covered.’
“That was her nickname among the youngsters, because her blue-black hair in the sun had a heavenly copper glint.
“He looked mixed up.
“‘What, precisely, do you mean?’ he says.
“I didn’t pay any attention to him. I went on just as if he hadn’t said a word.
“‘Women’s got no sense about business—she’s agoin’ to lose it?’
“‘Lose what?’ he says.
“‘Rotten the way they bring girls up,’ I says, the same as if he hadn’t spoke. ‘Here’s this steel bunch beating the stuff down; her broker wires for somethin’ to cover it, an’ she sticks the telegram up against the lookin’-glass so she’ll re member to write to him next week—can you beat it?’
“I saw everything that was goin’ through him, same as if you’d rolled it out on the picture reel.
“The ‘old friend, no manners, darn the difference’ stuff had hooked him. And there were two other hooks: this girl had some property that he didn’t know of, and the friends of the family, like me, was a-coming to him about it.
“Because what?
“Because it was settled stuff on our side that she was goin’ to take his arm up the church aisle. It was the first straight dope he’d had, an’ it bucked him, same as it bucked me to know that she was dangling him with no word passed.
“He set up now pleasant as you please.
“‘Ah—er, yes,’ he says; he hadn’t got the name I was playing under.
“I bellowed at him, an’ he mighty near jumped.
“‘Johnson!’ I said. ‘Alonzo Johnson, Kansas City!’
“‘Quite so, Mr. Johnson,’ he says, quick, same as you’d apologize, ‘there’s some business affair to discuss, I fauncy?’
“He fell right in with the line of dope mighty easy and comfortable. You see it was something like the way they do things up in his country. The old uncle or the family lawyer calls on you, when ma thinks that things are pretty well understood with the young people, and gits down to figgerin’. It was near enough to my line to go across with him. He knew that the girl hadn’t got any men folk, so an old friend of the family would fit the form as a sort of next-of-kin, as the law-books say.”
The big man linked his fingers together on the chair arm.
“As I was sayin’, he walked right in and made himself at home with the notion. He called her ‘Carrots’ straight back at me; it was ‘Kiss her, pap; she’s our’n now,’ and he begun to grin.
“On the soul of Satan, man, it was all I could do to keep my foot away from him. I wanted to hoist him out of that chair and skite him around among the furniture—but I had to keep my poker face on.
“He bounced up and got a box of cigars and a little dish full of matches and shoved them across the table. I took one, bit the end off, scratched the match on my foot, lighted it, and went ahead.
“‘It’s the butt end of what she’s got,’ I says, ‘an’ it’s in the door.’
“He knew all about business, and he picked the things right out.
“‘You mean,’ he says, ‘that her solicitor has invested her fortune in a stock on margin and the market is declining?’
“‘You got it,’ I says, ‘only she done it herself, on some tip from her swell friends.’
“‘How extraordinary!’ he piped; his voice got thin when it hit money. ‘Is it a legitimate stock?’
“‘Sure,’ I answered, ‘one of the six good ones.’ I didn’t know how many good ones there was.
“‘Why does it decline?’ His voice went up like a singing school.
“‘The steel bunch are clubbing it,’ I says.
“He understood that, and began to finger around his little wax mustache.
“‘Quite so,’ he cheeped, ‘quite so.’ Then he squared toward me.
“‘Ah—er, Mr. Johnson,’ he says, ‘I fauncy you came with some plan about it.’
“‘Plan nothin’,’ I says; ‘the stuff’s got to be covered—they’ll git it beat under her figger in another day’s poundin’.’
“‘Ah—er—quite so,’ he was cool as a julep; ‘you are intending, I fauncy, to cover the margin?’
“I leaned over the table and blew a mouthful of smoke on him.
“‘Sure!’ I roared in his face, ‘if I can get fifty thousand dollars, quick.’
“He ducked out of the smoke.
“‘That’s a very large sum of money,’ he says.
“I lolled over the table an’ smoked on him like a Dutch uncle.
“‘Big money!’ I gurgled it, like a man choking on a laugh. ‘Do you know how much Carrots has got hanging on it?’
“He didn’t answer that; I knew he wouldn’t.
“‘Where, precisely, do you expect to get this money?’ he says.
“I set up more calm like at that.
“‘Well,’ I says, ‘I thought maybe we could raise it together.’
“He wanted that fake fortune saved for him, so it would come along with the girl, but he wanted somebody else to carry the chance.
“I knew it, and I smoked on him. I hung over the table and puffed it in his face. He tried to duck out of it, and I followed him around. It done me good. I couldn’t spit on the little tightwad.
“‘Now, look here, Mr. Westridge,’ I says, ‘don’t you get a wrong notion in your head; I’m not a-goin’ to let you take any risk on this. I’m a-goin’ to take the risk; there ain’t none, in fact; the stuff’s got to bounce back. It’ll go to the sky when the steel bunch get all they can grab of it. But whatever risk there may be,’ I sputtered it out on him, ‘is mine. I’ll put up the backing an’ you get me the money by to-morrow at noon.’ I was nearly across the table, an’ I didn’t wait for him to cut in with a question. I took a big envelope out of my pocket and flashed the stuff on him. He came up with a chirp.
“‘My word!’ he says, ‘where did you get this?’
“‘Well,’ I answered, ‘London’s a big selling point with us—you can’t trade with the English and not take their stuff, can you? The Johnny whose name’s on that stuff put it up with me—same as I’m putting it up with you. There’s fourteen of them. Ain’t they good for fifty thousand?’
“He spread the certificates out on the table and run his fingers over them. It was old-fashioned love-touchin’.
“‘Oh!’ his voice flickered up, ‘beyond question.’
“‘Done!’ I says. ‘Keep it until I come back with your money—an’ get me the cash before noon to-morrow.’
“‘Don’t you want a memorandum?’ he says.
“I waved my hand, careless, like it was nothin’.
“‘That’s all right,’ I says; ‘I don’t want any promises about that, but there is a thing that I do want a promise about.’
“I threw my cigar in the fireplace and set down.
“‘I want you to promise me that you won’t ever say anything to Carrots about this, nor to anybody; it’s between us—she’s a high-strung youngster,’ I added; ‘this thing’s got to be buried with us, no matter what happens. Is it a trade?’
“We shook hands on it and I got out.
“Before twelve the next day he sent me a draft on New York for the money—an’ I’d won a lap.”
The afternoon sun lay on the terrace of the gray stone house, where the big creature, dead to the middle, talked from his chair, clearing the mystery that had covered his disappearance from the world. It was an extraordinary story, and I wished to get it, in detail, precisely clear.
“It was fiction,” I asked, “this explanation to Westridge?”
He looked at me in a sort of wonder.
“Sure,” he said. “I made it up.”
“There wasn’t any of it true?”
“Not a word,” he answered. “Don’t you understand? This was a little game that me and God Almighty was settin’ up on the side.”
“You knew nothing of the girl’s affairs?” The thing seemed incredible to me.
“That’s right,” he replied, “not a thing, except that her father, a lawyer in the South, was dead, and the small coin was beginning to mean something—an’ of course the little game of this Westridge person—it was a blind pool; nobody in on it but God Almighty.”
I could not forbear a comment.
“He seems to have helped you in the opening.”
The big creature turned heavily toward me.
“With little Westridge?” There was deep irony in his voice. “I didn’t need any help to handle him. That was ABC stuff. The big trouble was ahead.”
“With the girl?” the query escaped me.
“No,” he replied; “that was my job too. You listen. I’m comin’ to it.
“I looked out for a chance to get the girl by herself, an’ about four o’clock I got it. There had been a fog in; it cleared a little and she went for a walk. She took the path along the sea toward Cromwell’s Harbor and I followed her. She turned back where the path ends at the harbor, and just before a big house, that hadn’t been opened that season, I met her.
“I stopped in the path.
“‘Missie,’ I said, ‘could I speak to you a minute?’
“There was no sham business about her. She was clean and straight and afraid of nothin’, like an angel of God.
“‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘What is it, sir?’
“‘It’s about something I owe to your father,’ I said.
“She looked me straight in the face.
“‘My father’s executor, Mr. Lewis, would be the one to see,’ she said. ‘I know nothing about' business.’
“‘It ain’t business,’ I said, ‘it’s honor. Could I walk along with you a step?’
“‘Why, yes,’ she answered, ‘if you like.’”
The big man moved his loose bulk in the chair.
“I know something about stories,” he said. “I’ve had to make ’em up so a jury would believe ’em, an’ I done my best as I limped along by her.
“‘I ain’t always been rich,’ I says. ‘I was down an’ out in the eighties, an’ I was a-goin’ to do somethin’ that would have ruined me, when by God’s luck I met Harry in Louisville.’ (I’d heard the old women call her father Harry, so I had that much to go on.)
“‘Al,’ he says, ‘what’s the trouble?’
“I suppose it was in my face. I was broke down an’ I told him. He got it all in his head, an’ then he patted me on the shoulder. ‘Old man,’ he said, ‘a little money ain’t goin’ to do you any good. I’ll get you fifty thousand dollars an’ you go out to the race course this afternoon an’ pick a winner.’
“I tried to turn it down. I didn’t want to lose his money, I didn’t know one horse from another. But he just laughed and kept patting me on the back. ‘A beginner for luck,’ he says. ‘Where’s your nerve, Al?’ Well, I picked that big Dercum colt that nobody had ever heard of, a five-to-one shot, an’ he romped in!
“I was a-limpin’ along the sea-path, a-proddin’ the gravel with my cane an’ a-talkin’ to my feet, same as if I was afraid the recollection would get away with me if I wasn’t careful. The girl didn’t say nothin’ and I went on.
“‘Harry wouldn’t touch the winnin’s; he picked out his fifty thousand and put me out of the room.’
“I limped on, talking to my feet.
“‘And it saved me two ways, for the thing I was agoin’ to do would have ruined me.’
“My voice got down pretty near in a whisper.
“‘I never saw Harry after that,’ I says, ‘until last night.’
“She stopped quick, an’ I went on a step or two.
“‘My father?’ she said.
“‘Yes,’ I says, not looking up, ‘Harry, just as he looked that morning in Louisville—only he was troubled.’
“Then I turned on her like I was makin’ a clean breast of it. I had the tears startin’ and the right choke-up, an’ it wasn’t all jury dope. I didn’t want that heavenly angel fouled over by little Westridge. It balled the heart out of me.
“‘Now, Missie,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to help me even this thing up. I don’t know nothin’ about your affairs—I don’t want to know. But you’ve got to take that same bunch of money and chance it on something.’
“She shook her head, and I had a bad hour. All along that sea-path, with the fog dodging in and out, I kept right at her; I never lost a step. I was old and rich; money was nothin’ to me. I didn’t have a soul in the world. I couldn’t take it with me, an’ I couldn’t face ‘Harry’ with the debt hanging over—‘Have a heart! have a heart!’ That was my line of dope. I was pleading for myself—an’ it was the only line that ever would have got her.
“‘But what should I do with the money?’ she said finally, in a sort of queer hesitation.
“‘I’ll tell you that to-night,’ I answered.”
The huge creature seemed to relax, as though there had been a vital tension in the mere memory of the thing.
“That cleaned up my end of it,” he continued, “and after dinner when it was getting a little dark, I limped over to the church. I had the last copy of the Financial Register in my hand. I stopped in the door. The church was closed and it was dark, but I didn’t need any light for the business I come on.
“‘Governor,’ I says, ‘the rest of this job’s up to you. I’m a-goin’ to open this magazine here in the dark and the first thing that’s advertised at the top of the page on the right-hand side is the thing I’m a-goin’ to tell her to put the coin on— Ready,’ I says, ‘go to it!’ and I folded back the page and went over to the hotel.” Again he paused.
“I got a jolt when I saw the page. It was some sort of Canadian gold mine, so fishy that the letters had scales on ’em. But I says to myself, ‘That’s the Governor’s business,’ an’ I cut it out, put it into an envelope with the draft, and left it at the desk for her.”
He paused.
“The next morning I slid out. Eight months later the plague struck me. I crippled into England, asked her to hide me while I died, and she put me here.”
“And the gold stock,” I said, “I suppose it turned her out a fortune?”
The energy came back for an instant into his voice.
“It was so rotten,” he replied, “that the Governor General of Canada summoned all the victims to meet with him for a conference in Montreal.”
At this moment I caught the sound of a motor entering the gates at some distance through the park. The huge paralytic also heard it, and his attention was no longer toward me. It was on the great coach-colored limousine drawing up at the end of the avenue of ancient beech trees.
I looked with him.
A girl helped out by footmen stepped down into the avenue, carpeted now with the yellow autumn leaves. Even at the distance it was impossible to mistake her; her charm, her beauty were the wonder of England. And on the instant, as in a flash of the eye, I recalled the painted picture hanging in the great house in Berkeley Square, the picture from which this creature’s mutilated photograph had been taken, the picture of a young girl, in an ancient chair, with no ornament but a bit of jade on a cord about her neck.
“It’s the young Duchess of Hurlingham,” I said.
The big creature beside me was struggling to rise, his voice in an excited flutter.
“Sure,” he said, “God Almighty didn’t throw me down. When she went up to that conference in Montreal, He had young Hurlingham on the spot—fine, straight, clean youngster as ever was born. It was love her at sight; an’ now”—he made a great gesture as though to include something without a visible limit—“she’s got all these places in England, an’ all that Standard Oil money that belonged to his mother’s people.”
The girl, radiant as a vision, was advancing on the carpet of golden beech leaves, and I hastened to put a final query, the thing I had come here to find out. I had given up the idea of an arrest. The man was dying.
“What did you do with the registered bonds that you got when you cracked the vault of the British Embassy in Washington the night before you went to Bar Harbor? They had Lord Dovedale’s name on them, and they could not be negotiated.”
The whole sagging body of the unsteady creature strained toward the advancing vision as toward an idol. His voice reached me, stuttering as with fatigue.
“That’s the stuff I put up with Westridge for the loan—go and take it away from him!”