McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business. I never
liked it, and since the strange case of the man in lower ten, I have been a bit
squeamish. Given a case like that, where you can build up a network of clues
that absolutely incriminate three entirely different people, only one of whom
can be guilty, and your faith in circumstantial evidence dies of overcrowding.
I never see a shivering, white-faced wretch in the prisoners’ dock that I
do not hark back with shuddering horror to the strange events on the Pullman
car Ontario, between Washington and Pittsburg, on the night of September ninth,
last.
McKnight could tell the story a great deal better than I, although he can not
spell three consecutive words correctly. But, while he has imagination and
humor, he is lazy.
“It didn’t happen to me, anyhow,” he protested, when I put it
up to him. “And nobody cares for second-hand thrills. Besides, you want
the unvarnished and ungarnished truth, and I’m no hand for that.
I’m a lawyer.”
So am I, although there have been times when my assumption in that particular
has been disputed. I am unmarried, and just old enough to dance with the
grown-up little sisters of the girls I used to know. I am fond of outdoors,
prefer horses to the aforesaid grown-up little sisters, am without sentiment
(am crossed out and was substituted.—Ed.) and completely
ruled and frequently routed by my housekeeper, an elderly widow.
In fact, of all the men of my acquaintance, I was probably the most prosaic,
the least adventurous, the one man in a hundred who would be likely to go
without a deviation from the normal through the orderly procession of the
seasons, summer suits to winter flannels, golf to bridge.
So it was a queer freak of the demons of chance to perch on my unsusceptible
thirty-year-old chest, tie me up with a crime, ticket me with a love affair,
and start me on that sensational and not always respectable journey that ended
so surprisingly less than three weeks later in the firm’s private office.
It had been the most remarkable period of my life. I would neither give it up
nor live it again under any inducement, and yet all that I lost was some twenty
yards off my drive!
It was really McKnight’s turn to make the next journey. I had a
tournament at Chevy Chase for Saturday, and a short yacht cruise planned for
Sunday, and when a man has been grinding at statute law for a week, he needs
relaxation. But McKnight begged off. It was not the first time he had shirked
that summer in order to run down to Richmond, and I was surly about it. But
this time he had a new excuse. “I wouldn’t be able to look after
the business if I did go,” he said. He has a sort of wide-eyed frankness
that makes one ashamed to doubt him. “I’m always car sick crossing
the mountains. It’s a fact, Lollie. See-sawing over the peaks does it.
Why, crossing the Alleghany Mountains has the Gulf Stream to Bermuda beaten to
a frazzle.”
So I gave him up finally and went home to pack. He came later in the evening
with his machine, the Cannonball, to take me to the station, and he brought the
forged notes in the Bronson case.
“Guard them with your life,” he warned me. “They are more
precious than honor. Sew them in your chest protector, or wherever people keep
valuables. I never keep any. I’ll not be happy until I see Gentleman Andy
doing the lockstep.”
He sat down on my clean collars, found my cigarettes and struck a match on the
mahogany bed post with one movement.
“Where’s the Pirate?” he demanded. The Pirate is my
housekeeper, Mrs. Klopton, a very worthy woman, so labeled—and
libeled—because of a ferocious pair of eyes and what McKnight called a
bucaneering nose. I quietly closed the door into the hall.
“Keep your voice down, Richey,” I said. “She is looking for
the evening paper to see if it is going to rain. She has my raincoat and an
umbrella waiting in the hall.”
The collars being damaged beyond repair, he left them and went to the window.
He stood there for some time, staring at the blackness that represented the
wall of the house next door.
“It’s raining now,” he said over his shoulder, and closed the
window and the shutters. Something in his voice made me glance up, but he was
watching me, his hands idly in his pockets.
“Who lives next door?” he inquired in a perfunctory tone, after a
pause. I was packing my razor.
“House is empty,” I returned absently. “If the landlord would
put it in some sort of shape—”
“Did you put those notes in your pocket?” he broke in.
“Yes.” I was impatient. “Along with my certificates of
registration, baptism and vaccination. Whoever wants them will have to steal my
coat to get them.”
“Well, I would move them, if I were you. Somebody in the next house was
confoundedly anxious to see where you put them. Somebody right at that window
opposite.”
I scoffed at the idea, but nevertheless I moved the papers, putting them in my
traveling-bag, well down at the bottom. McKnight watched me uneasily.
“I have a hunch that you are going to have trouble,” he said, as I
locked the alligator bag. “Darned if I like starting anything important
on Friday.”
“You have a congenital dislike to start anything on any old day,” I
retorted, still sore from my lost Saturday. “And if you knew the owner of
that house as I do you would know that if there was any one at that window he
is paying rent for the privilege.”
Mrs. Klopton rapped at the door and spoke discreetly from the hall.
“Did Mr. McKnight bring the evening paper?” she inquired.
“Sorry, but I didn’t, Mrs. Klopton,” McKnight called.
“The Cubs won, three to nothing.” He listened, grinning, as she
moved away with little irritated rustles of her black silk gown.
I finished my packing, changed my collar and was ready to go. Then very
cautiously we put out the light and opened the shutters. The window across was
merely a deeper black in the darkness. It was closed and dirty. And yet,
probably owing to Richey’s suggestion, I had an uneasy sensation of eyes
staring across at me. The next moment we were at the door, poised for flight.
“We’ll have to run for it,” I said in a whisper.
“She’s down there with a package of some sort, sandwiches probably.
And she’s threatened me with overshoes for a month. Ready now!”
I had a kaleidoscopic view of Mrs. Klopton in the lower hall, holding out an
armful of such traveling impedimenta as she deemed essential, while beside her,
Euphemia, the colored housemaid, grinned over a white-wrapped box.
“Awfully sorry—no time—back Sunday,” I panted over my
shoulder. Then the door closed and the car was moving away.
McKnight bent forward and stared at the façade of the empty house next door as
we passed. It was black, staring, mysterious, as empty buildings are apt to be.
“I’d like to hold a post-mortem on that corpse of a house,”
he said thoughtfully. “By George, I’ve a notion to get out and take
a look.”
“Somebody after the brass pipes,” I scoffed. “House has been
empty for a year.”
With one hand on the steering wheel McKnight held out the other for my
cigarette case. “Perhaps,” he said; “but I don’t see
what she would want with brass pipe.”
“A woman!” I laughed outright. “You have been looking too
hard at the picture in the back of your watch, that’s all. There’s
an experiment like that: if you stare long enough—”
But McKnight was growing sulky: he sat looking rigidly ahead, and he did not
speak again until he brought the Cannonball to a stop at the station. Even then
it was only a perfunctory remark. He went through the gate with me, and with
five minutes to spare, we lounged and smoked in the train shed. My mind had
slid away from my surroundings and had wandered to a polo pony that I
couldn’t afford and intended to buy anyhow. Then McKnight shook off his
taciturnity.
“For heaven’s sake, don’t look so martyred,” he burst
out; “I know you’ve done all the traveling this summer. I know
you’re missing a game to-morrow. But don’t be a patient mother;
confound it, I have to go to Richmond on Sunday. I—I want to see a
girl.”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” I observed politely. “Personally,
I wouldn’t change places with you. What’s her name—North?
South?”
“West,” he snapped. “Don’t try to be funny. And all I
have to say, Blakeley, is that if you ever fall in love I hope you make an
egregious ass of yourself.”
In view of what followed, this came rather close to prophecy.
The trip west was without incident. I played bridge with a furniture dealer
from Grand Rapids, a sales agent for a Pittsburg iron firm and a young
professor from an eastern college. I won three rubbers out of four, finished
what cigarettes McKnight had left me, and went to bed at one o’clock. It
was growing cooler, and the rain had ceased. Once, toward morning, I wakened
with a start, for no apparent reason, and sat bolt upright. I had an uneasy
feeling that some one had been looking at me, the same sensation I had
experienced earlier in the evening at the window. But I could feel the bag with
the notes, between me and the window, and with my arm thrown over it for
security, I lapsed again into slumber. Later, when I tried to piece together
the fragments of that journey, I remembered that my coat, which had been folded
and placed beyond my restless tossing, had been rescued in the morning from a
heterogeneous jumble of blankets, evening papers and cravat, had been shaken
out with profanity and donned with wrath. At the time, nothing occurred to me
but the necessity of writing to the Pullman Company and asking them if they
ever traveled in their own cars. I even formulated some of the letter.
“If they are built to scale, why not take a man of ordinary stature as
your unit?” I wrote mentally. “I can not fold together like the
traveling cup with which I drink your abominable water.”
I was more cheerful after I had had a cup of coffee in the Union Station. It
was too early to attend to business, and I lounged in the restaurant and hid
behind the morning papers. As I had expected, they had got hold of my visit and
its object. On the first page was a staring announcement that the forged papers
in the Bronson case had been brought to Pittsburg. Underneath, a telegram from
Washington stated that Lawrence Blakeley, of Blakeley and McKnight, had left
for Pittsburg the night before, and that, owing to the approaching trial of the
Bronson case and the illness of John Gilmore, the Pittsburg millionaire, who
was the chief witness for the prosecution, it was supposed that the visit was
intimately concerned with the trial.
I looked around apprehensively. There were no reporters yet in sight, and
thankful to have escaped notice I paid for my breakfast and left. At the
cab-stand I chose the least dilapidated hansom I could find, and giving the
driver the address of the Gilmore residence, in the East end, I got in.
I was just in time. As the cab turned and rolled off, a slim young man in a
straw hat separated himself from a little group of men and hurried toward us.
“Hey! Wait a minute there!” he called, breaking into a trot.
But the cabby did not hear, or perhaps did not care to. We jogged comfortably
along, to my relief, leaving the young man far behind. I avoid reporters on
principle, having learned long ago that I am an easy mark for a clever
interviewer.
It was perhaps nine o’clock when I left the station. Our way was along
the boulevard which hugged the side of one of the city’s great hills. Far
below, to the left, lay the railroad tracks and the seventy times seven looming
stacks of the mills. The white mist of the river, the grays and blacks of the
smoke blended into a half-revealing haze, dotted here and there with fire. It
was unlovely, tremendous. Whistler might have painted it with its pathos, its
majesty, but he would have missed what made it infinitely suggestive—the
rattle and roar of iron on iron, the rumble of wheels, the throbbing beat,
against the ears, of fire and heat and brawn welding prosperity.
Something of this I voiced to the grim old millionaire who was responsible for
at least part of it. He was propped up in bed in his East end home, listening
to the market reports read by a nurse, and he smiled a little at my enthusiasm.
“I can’t see much beauty in it myself,” he said. “But
it’s our badge of prosperity. The full dinner pail here means a nose that
looks like a flue. Pittsburg without smoke wouldn’t be Pittsburg, any
more than New York without prohibition would be New York. Sit down for a few
minutes, Mr. Blakeley. Now, Miss Gardner, Westinghouse Electric.”
The nurse resumed her reading in a monotonous voice. She read literally and
without understanding, using initials and abbreviations as they came. But the
shrewd old man followed her easily. Once, however, he stopped her.
“D-o is ditto,” he said gently, “not do.”
As the nurse droned along, I found myself looking curiously at a photograph in
a silver frame on the bed-side table. It was the picture of a girl in white,
with her hands clasped loosely before her. Against the dark background her
figure stood out slim and young. Perhaps it was the rather grim environment,
possibly it was my mood, but although as a general thing photographs of young
girls make no appeal to me, this one did. I found my eyes straying back to it.
By a little finesse I even made out the name written across the corner,
“Alison.”
Mr. Gilmore lay back among his pillows and listened to the nurse’s
listless voice. But he was watching me from under his heavy eyebrows, for when
the reading was over, and we were alone, he indicated the picture with a
gesture.
“I keep it there to remind myself that I am an old man,” he said.
“That is my granddaughter, Alison West.”
I expressed the customary polite surprise, at which, finding me responsive, he
told me his age with a chuckle of pride. More surprise, this time genuine. From
that we went to what he ate for breakfast and did not eat for luncheon, and
then to his reserve power, which at sixty-five becomes a matter for thought.
And so, in a wide circle, back to where we started, the picture.
“Father was a rascal,” John Gilmore said, picking up the frame.
“The happiest day of my life was when I knew he was safely dead in bed
and not hanged. If the child had looked like him, I—well, she
doesn’t. She’s a Gilmore, every inch. Supposed to look like
me.”
“Very noticeably,” I agreed soberly.
I had produced the notes by that time, and replacing the picture Mr. Gilmore
gathered his spectacles from beside it. He went over the four notes
methodically, examining each carefully and putting it down before he picked up
the next. Then he leaned back and took off his glasses.
“They’re not so bad,” he said thoughtfully. “Not so
bad. But I never saw them before. That’s my unofficial signature. I am
inclined to think—” he was speaking partly to
himself—“to think that he has got hold of a letter of mine,
probably to Alison. Bronson was a friend of her rapscallion of a father.”
I took Mr. Gilmore’s deposition and put it into my traveling-bag with the
forged notes. When I saw them again, almost three weeks later, they were
unrecognizable, a mass of charred paper on a copper ashtray. In the interval
other and bigger things had happened: the Bronson forgery case had shrunk
beside the greater and more imminent mystery of the man in lower ten. And
Alison West had come into the story and into my life.
