It is no part of my purpose to burden this narrative with the story of the development of our mine. Let it be sufficient to say that it speedily proved to be one of the most phenomenal "producers" among the later discoveries in the Cripple Creek district. The stories of such spectacular successes have been made commonplace by the newspapers, and that of the "Little Clean-Up" would—if I should give the real name of our bonanza—be remembered and recognized by many who saw it grow by leaps and bounds from a mere prospect hole to a second "Gold Coin."
To summarize briefly. Within a month we had settled down to business and were incorporated, with Barrett as president, and Gifford, who chose his own job, resident manager and superintendent. The secretary-treasurership, combined under one office head, fell to me. With a modern mining plant in operation, the sinking and driving paused only at the hours of shift-changing; and after we began shipping in quantity our bank balances grew like so many juggler's roses—this though we had to spend money like water in the various lawsuits which sprang up from day to day.
Many of these suits were based upon cross-claims—contentions that we were overlapping other properties—and most of these we were able to compromise by buying off the litigants. By this means we acquired the entire area of the original triangle. When the news of our strike reached Nebraska, the owners of the Mary Mattock sought to break their sale to us on the ground that we had stacked the cards against them. But our lawyers were too shrewd to be caught in such a flimsy net as this. At Benedict's suggestion we drove a drainage tunnel on the purchased property and unwatered the three shafts which the Nebraskans had sunk; an expedient which enabled us to prove to the satisfaction of the courts that the Mary Mattock, at the time of its abandonment by its original owners, was nothing more than a series of prospect holes, and that the property was valueless save for a dumping ground.
Through all these bickerings and compromisings the Lawrenceburg fight held on, giving us the most trouble and costing the most money. Blackwell proved himself to be a scrapper of sorts, leaving no expedient untried in his attempts to tie us up and put us out of business. Shortly after we began developing in earnest, he put a shaft-sinking force on the nearest of the Lawrenceburg upper claims on the hillside above us, hoping, as we supposed, to flood us out by tapping one of the numerous underground water bodies with which the region abounds and turning it loose on us. At least, we could imagine no other reason for the move, since the growing dump at this upper working was entirely barren of ore, and remained so.
On our own part we were able to get back at Blackwell only in small ways. When he tried to shut us out of our wagon road right-of-way in the gulch, we beat him in the courts and made him pay damages for obstructing us. Later, when his upper dump began to encroach upon our ground, we sued him again and got more damages, with a peremptory order from the court to vacate.
Still later we took Phineas Everton away from him. The assayer had had some disagreement with Blackwell, the nature of which was not explained, but which I, for one, could easily understand, and Everton, apologetic now for his early suspicion of us, had told Barrett that he was open to a proposal. The proposal was promptly made and we installed Everton as our assayer and expert in the town offices, fitting up a laboratory for him which lacked nothing that money could buy in the way of furnishings and equipment.
Consequent upon this change, Barrett and I both saw more of the Evertons. They took a small house in town and Polly welcomed us both, making no distinction, so far as I could determine, between the president and the secretary-treasurer. Barrett's attitude toward Polly puzzled me not a little. He was a frequent visitor in the cottage on the hill, but he rarely went without asking me to go along. If he were really Mary Everton's lover, he was certainly going about his love-making most moderately, I concluded.
I like to remember that I was loyal to him at this time in spite of the puzzlement. It is perhaps needless to say that these cottage visits had done their worst for me and I was hopelessly in love with the sweet-faced, honest-hearted young woman who had grown out of the brown-eyed little girl of the Glendale school-days. Nevertheless, I was still able to recognize the barrier which my conviction, imprisonment and escape, together with the ever-present peril of recapture, interposed; also I was able to recognize Barrett's prior claim, and the fact that he could leave wife and children the priceless heritage of a good name and a clean record—as I could not.
Touching this matter of peril, the period of our beginnings as a corporation was not without its alarms. Twice I had seen Kellow at a distance, and once I had stood beside him at the hotel counter where he had been examining the registered list of names at a moment when I, all unconscious of his presence until I was elbowing him, had stopped in passing to ask a question of the clerk. That near-encounter showed me that I was neither better nor worse than the man who had stood, loaded weapon in hand, on the sidewalk in the heart of a June night, coldly deliberating upon the advisability of committing a murder. I was conscious of a decent hope that Kellow wouldn't look up and recognize me—as he did not—but coincident with the hope the homicidal devil was whispering me to be ready with the pistol, without which I never went abroad any more, even to cross the street from my rooms to the office. And I was ready.
This mania, which seemed fated to seize me at any moment when my liberty was threatened, added another stone to the barrier of good resolutions which I had builded in behalf of my loyalty to Barrett and a more or less chivalrous consideration for Mary Everton and her future peace of mind. If the ex-convict might not venture, the potential man-slayer was at a still greater disadvantage.
I recall, as vividly as if it were yesterday, how the first small breach was made in this barrier of good resolutions. Barrett and I were in Denver together, joining forces in our regular monthly fight with the smelter pirates. We had been to the theater and were smoking bedtime cigars in the mezzanine lounge of the Brown Palace. I have forgotten the name of the play we had seen, and even the plot of it; all that I recollect is that it turned upon the well-worn theme of loyalty in love.
Barrett seldom talked of himself or his past, even to me; and I was closer to him, I think, than anyone else in the West. But the play seemed to have touched some hidden spring. Almost before I knew it he was telling me of his college days, and of his assured future at that time as the only son of a well-to-do New England manufacturer.
"Those were the days when I didn't have a care in the world," he said. "My father was the typical American business man, intent upon piling up a fortune for my mother and sister and me. I couldn't see that he was wearing himself out in the effort to get ahead, and at the same time to give us all the luxuries as we went along; none of us could see it. His notion was to put me through the university, give me a year or so abroad, and then to take me into the business with him.… Don't let me bore you."
"You are not boring me," I said.
"Then there was the girl: that had been arranged for both of us, too, though we were carefully kept from suspecting it. I can't tell you what she was to me, Jimmie, but in a worldful of women she was the only one. She was in college, too, but we had our vacations together—at a little place on the Maine coast where her people and mine had cottages less than a stone's throw apart."
Barrett's cigar had gone out, but he seemed not to know it. His eyes were half-closed, and for the moment his strong clean-cut young face looked almost haggard. I let him take his own time. In such confidences it is only the sympathetic ear that is welcome; speech in any sort can scarcely be less than impertinent.
"I shall never forget our last summer together," he went on, after a bit. "It seemed as if everything conspired to make it memorable. We were both fond of canoeing and sailing and swimming; she could do all three better than most men. Then there were the moonlit nights on the beach when we sat together on the white sands and planned for the future, the future of clear skies, of ambitions working out their fulfilment in the passing years, the blessed after-while in which there were to be an ideal home and little children, and always and evermore the love that makes all things beautiful, all things possible.
"We planned it all out in those August days and moonlit nights. I had one more year in the university, and after that we were to be married and go to Europe together. No young fellow in this world ever had brighter prospects than I had on the day when I went back to college to begin my senior year, Jimmie." He paused for a moment and then went on with a deeper note in his voice. "The lights all went out, blink, between two days, as you might say. The treasurer of the company of which my father was the president became an embezzler, and the crash ruined us financially and practically killed my father—though the doctors called it heart failure. And I had been at home less than a month, trying to save something out of the wreck for my mother and sister, when I lost the girl."
"She couldn't stand the change in circumstances?" I offered.
"She was drowned in a yachting accident, and they never found her body."
"Oh, good heavens!" I exclaimed, suddenly and acutely distressed and remorseful for the cynical suggestion I had thrust in.
He shook his head slowly. "It came near smashing me, Jimmie. It seemed so unnecessary; so hideously out of tune with everything. I thought at the time that I should never get over it and be myself again, and I still think so, though the passing years have dulled the sharp edges of the hurt. There never was another girl like her, and there never will be another—for me."
"But you will marry, some day, Bob," I ventured.
"Possibly—quite probably. Sentiment, of the sort our fathers and mothers knew, has gone out of fashion, and the money chase has made new men and women of the present generation. But some of the old longings persist for a few of us. I want a home, Jimmie, and at least a few of the things that the word stands for. Some day I hope to be able to find a woman who will take what there is left of me and give me what she can in return. I shan't ask much because I can't give much."
"I guess you have already found her," I said, with a dull pain at my heart.
"Not Polly," he denied quickly. "I couldn't get my own consent to cheat a woman like Polly Everton. She has a right to demand the best that a man can give, and all of it. Besides, it doesn't lie altogether with me or my possible leanings, in Polly's case—as no man knows better than yourself."
"Oh, you are wrong there, entirely wrong!" I hastened to say. "Polly and I are the best of good friends—nothing more."
His smile was a deal more than half sad.
"If there is 'nothing more,' Jimmie, it is very pointedly your own fault," he returned. "I've been wondering what you are waiting for. You have been poking your head into the sand like a silly old ostrich, but you haven't fooled me—or Polly, either, I think—for a single minute. What's the obstacle?"
I was silent. Not even to so close a friend as Robert Barrett could I give the real reason why my lips were sealed and must remain so. He went on, after a time, good-naturedly ignoring my hesitancy.
"It was all right at first, of course; while we couldn't tell whether we had a mine or only a costly muddle of litigation. But it's different now. We are going to beat the Lawrenceburg people in the end, and apart from that, if we should split up right here and now, we've got an undivided surplus of—how much was it yesterday?—you've got the records."
"A little under a million."
"Call it nine hundred thousand to divide among the three of us. Your share of that would at least enable you and Polly to begin light house-keeping in a five-room flat, don't you think?"
What could I say? How could I tell him that he was opening a door for me that I could never enter; that by all the canons of decency and honor I should never seek to enter? In the mingled emotions of the moment there was a blind anger at the thought that he had unconsciously made my hard case infinitely harder by showing me that my loyalty to him was entirely needless.
"There are good reasons why I can't think of such a thing," I began; but when I would have gone on the words froze in my throat. Since the hour was nearly midnight, the mezzanine lounge was practically deserted. But as I choked up and stopped, a couple, a man and a woman who had come around from the other side of the gallery parlors, passed us on their way to the elevator alcove.
I hardly saw the man of the pair. A second after they had passed I could not have told whether he was black or white. That was because the woman, fair, richly gowned, statuesquely handsome and apparently in perfect health, was Agatha Geddis.
If I looked as stricken as I felt—and I doubtless did—Barrett had ample reason for assuming that I had been suddenly taken sick.
"Why, Jimmie, old man!" he exclaimed in instant concern; and then he took the half-burned cigar from between my fingers and threw it away, at the same time sending the floor boy scurrying after a drink for me.
I couldn't touch the whiskey when it came; and I was still trying to persuade Barrett that I wasn't sick when he walked me to the elevator. Wanting only to be free, I still had to let him go all the way with me to the door of my room. But the moment he was gone I hurried out again and descended to the lobby.
The night clerk knew me; or if he didn't, he knew the Little Clean-Up; and he was quite willing to talk. Miss Geddis was only temporarily a guest of the house, he told me. She was with a party of friends from the East, but her Denver home was with Mrs. Altberg, a widow and a prominent society woman. Yes, Miss Geddis was quite well known in social circles; she was reputed to be wealthy, and the clerk understood that she had originally come to Colorado for her health.
Under the stimulus of a particularly good gift cigar the man behind the register grew more confidential. Miss Geddis had always impressed him as being a woman with a history. It was not generally known, he said, but there was a whisper that she had come perilously near getting herself dragged into the lime-light as co-respondent in a certain high-life divorce case. The clerk did not vouch for this, but he did know that she had been seen often and openly in public with the man in the case, since the granting of the divorce.
I didn't sleep very well that night, as may be imagined; and the following day I should certainly have taken the first train for Cripple Creek if business had permitted. But business would not permit. There was an accumulated difference of some fifteen thousand dollars in ore values between us and the smelter people, and I was obliged to stay on with Barrett and help wrangle for our side in the discrepancy dispute.
At dinner time that evening I managed to elude Barrett, and upon going to the lobby desk for my mail, found a violet-scented envelope addressed to "Mr. James Bertrand" in a handwriting that I remembered only too well.
To anyone looking over my shoulder the enclosed note might have read as a casual and friendly greeting from an old acquaintance. But for me it spelled out death and destruction.
"Dear 'Bert," it ran. "I am not going to scold you for not speaking to me last night in the mezzanine parlor; nor for changing your name; nor for growing a beard. But if you should call this evening between eight and nine at Mrs. Altberg's house on the Boulevard, you will find me at home and more than willing to listen to your apologies and explanations."AGATHA."
My appetite for dinner had gone glimmering when I sat at the most secluded table the cafe afforded and went through the motions of eating. Not for a single instant did I mistake the purport of Agatha Geddis's note. It was not a friendly invitation; it was a veiled command. If it should be disobeyed, I made sure that not all the money in the Little Clean-Up's treasury could save me from going back to the home State as a recaptured felon.
Eight o'clock found me descending from a cab at the door of a rather dissipated looking mansion in the northern suburb. A servant admitted me, but I had to wait alone for a quarter of an hour or more in the stuffy and rather tawdry luxury of a great drawing-room. After a time I realized that Agatha was making me wait purposely in a refinement of cruelty, knowing well what torments I must be enduring.
When the suspense ended and she came into the room I saw at a glance that she was the same woman as of old; beautiful, alluring, but infinitely more sophisticated. Her charm now, as in girlhood, was chiefly the charm of physical perfection; but it was not entirely without its appeal when she made me sit beside her on the heavily carved mock-antique sofa.
"I didn't know certainly whether you would come or not," was the way she began on me, and if the tone was conventional I knew well enough what lay beneath it. "Old times are old times, but——"
She was merely playing with me as a cat plays with a mouse, but I could neither fight nor run until she gave me an opening.
"Of course you knew I would come; why shouldn't I?" I asked, striving for some outward appearance of self-possession.
"I'm sure I don't think of any reason, if you don't," she countered. "Did you know I was in Denver?"
"Not in Denver, no. But I heard, some time ago, that you had come to Colorado for your health."
"It seems absolutely ridiculous, doesn't it?—to look at me now. But really, I was very ill three years ago; and even now I can't go back home and stay for any length of time. You haven't been back, have you, since your—since you——"
"No; I haven't been back."
She was rolling her filmy little lace handkerchief into a shapeless ball, and if I hadn't known her so well I might have fancied she was embarrassed.
"I can't endure to think of that dreadful time four years ago—it is four years, isn't it?" she sighed; then with a swift glance of the man-melting eyes: "You hate me savagely, don't you, Bert?—you've been hating me all these years."
"No," I said, and it was the truth, up to that time. I knew that the feeling I had been entertaining for her had nothing in it so robust as hatred. There was no especial need for palliating her offense—far less, indeed, than I knew at that moment; yet I did it, saying, "You did what you thought you had to do; possibly it was what your father made you do—I don't know."
She was silent for a moment before she began again by asking me what made me change my name.
"My name isn't Herbert," I explained; "it never was. I think you must know that I was christened 'James Bertrand,' after my father."
"I didn't know it," she denied, adding: "but you have dropped the Weyburn?"
"Naturally."
Again there was a little interval of silence, and as before, she was the first to break it.
"So you are one of the owners of the famous Little Clean-Up? Are you very rich, Bertie?—you see, I can't give up the old name, all at once."
"No; I am not rich—as riches are counted nowadays."
"But you are going to be in just a little while," she put in, following the confident assertion with a query that came as suddenly as a stiletto stab: "Who is the girl, Bertie?"
"What girl?"'
"The girl you are going to marry. I saw her with you at the Broadway one night three weeks ago; I sat right behind you. She doesn't 'pretty' very much, to my way of thinking."
Once again I felt the murder nerve twittering. This woman with a mocking voice and a heart of stone knew everything; I was as certain of it as if I could have seen into the plotting brain behind the long-lashed eyes. I knew now why she hadn't glanced aside at me as she passed on the way to the elevators in the Brown Palace the previous evening. She had discovered me long before. At whatever cost, I must know how long before.
"You saw me last night, and three weeks ago at the theater," I said. "How long have you known that I was in Colorado?"
"Ever since you came, I think," she returned quietly. "I was a member of a private-car party up at Cripple Creek about that time—with some of the Midland officials and their friends, you know. Our car was taken out over a new branch line they were building at that time, and I saw you standing beside the track. Perhaps I shouldn't have recognized you if I hadn't been thinking so pointedly of you. The home newspapers had told of your es—of your leaving the State; and I was naturally—er—well, I was thinking about you, as I say."
I saw that I was completely in her power. She knew, better than anyone else on earth, save and excepting only her father, that I was an innocent man. But she also knew that I had broken my parole.
"What do you want of me, Agatha?" I asked; and I had to wet my lips before I could say it.
"Supposing we say that I am asking only a little, common, ordinary friendliness, Bertie—just for the sake of the old days, and to show that you don't bear malice. I'm like other women; I get horribly bored and lonesome sometimes for somebody to talk to—somebody who knows, and for whom I don't have to wear a mask. The other girl doesn't live here, does she?"
"No."
"That's better. When you come to Denver, you must let me see you now and then; just for old sake's sake. You come up quite often, don't you? But I know you do; I see your name in the arrivals quite frequently."
I formed a swift resolve not to come as often in the future as I had in the past, but I did not tell her so.
"You'll come to see me when you're in town," she went on. "I'll try to learn to call you 'Jimmie,' and when we meet people, I'll promise to introduce you as the Mr. Bertrand, of Cripple Creek and the Little Clean-Up. Does that make you feel better?"
It made me feel as if I should like to lock my fingers around her fair pillar-like throat. I have said that I did not hate her. But one may kill without hatred in self-defense. Short of cold-blooded murder, however, there was nothing I could do—nothing anyone could do. Beyond this, she went on chatting easily and lightly of the old times in Glendale and the people we had both known, rallying me now and then upon my unresponsiveness. At my leave-taking, which was a full hour later, she went with me to the hall, helped me into my overcoat, and gave me another of the breath-taking shocks.
"There was a time, once, when you really thought you were in love with me, wasn't there, Bertie?" she asked sweetly.
Again I told her the simple truth. "There was a time; yes. It was when I was still young enough to carry your books back and forth on the way to and from the old school."
"But you got bravely over it, after awhile?"
"Yes; I got over it after I grew up."
She laughed softly.
"Don't you know that is a frightfully dangerous thing to say to a woman—to any woman, Bertie?"
"It is the honest thing to say to you."
"I suppose it is. Yet there are some things a woman likes better than honesty. Perhaps you haven't been making love to the Cripple Creek girl long enough to find that out. But it is so, and it always will be so."
It was at the outer door opening that she gave me the final stab.
"I am taking your business excuse at its face value to-night and letting you go. But the next time you come you mustn't have any business; at least, nothing more important than entertaining me—and that is important. Just jot that down in your little vest-pocket memorandum, and don't allow yourself to forget it for a single moment; not even while you are making love to Little Brown-Eyes. Good-night."
The old-fashioned preachers used to describe a terrifying hell in which fire and brimstone and all manner of physical torments awaited the impenitent. I was brought up to believe implicitly in such a hell, but the puerility of it as compared with the refined tortures which I endured that winter can never be set forth in any words of mine.
With a desire keener than the hunger of the famishing for respectability and the privilege of living open-eyed and honestly before all men, I was forced, from the night of that first visit to Agatha Geddis, to lead a wretched, fear-frozen, double existence. On my return to Cripple Creek after the interview which I have just detailed, I swore roundly that I would stop going to the Everton's; that, come what might, Polly should never be dragged into the horrible morass of degradation which I saw clearly, even at that bare beginning, was waiting to engulf me.
But at best, a man is only a man, human in his desires, human in his powers of resistance; and a man in love can rarely be a complete master of circumstances. Though I had been holding back, both for Barrett's sake and because of my own wretched handicap, it soon became apparent that I had gone too far to be able to retreat with honor; that Polly Everton's name had already been coupled with mine in the gossip of the great gold camp; and that—if what Barrett had said were true—Polly herself had to be considered.
So the double life began and continued. In Cripple Creek I was Mary Everton's lover; in Denver I was Agatha Geddis's bondman and slave. Oftener and oftener, as the winter progressed, the business of the mine took me to the capital; and Agatha never let me escape. One time it would be a theater party, at which I would be obliged to meet her friends; people who, as I soon learned, were of the ultra fast set. At another it would be a driving party to some out-of-town resort with the same, or a worse, crowd; midnight banquetings, with champagne in the finger-bowls, cocktails to go before and after, and quite likely some daring young woman to show us a new dance, with the cleared dinner-table for a stage. Many times I tried to dodge; to slip into Denver on the necessary business errand and out again before the newspapers could publish my arrival. It was no use. That woman's ingenuity, prescience, intuition—whatever it may be called, was simply devilish. Before I could turn around, my summons would find me, and I had to obey or take the consequences.
Now and again I rebelled, even as the poorest worm will turn if it be sufficiently trodden upon; but that, too, was useless. My tormentor held me in a grip of steel. Worse than all, the dog's life she was leading me caused me to lose all sense of proportion. As a choice between two evils, a return to prison would have been far more endurable than this indefinite sentence of degradation Agatha Geddis was making me serve. But I could not see this: all I could see was that this woman had the power to make a total wreck of all that I had builded. The larger fact that I was myself the principal contributor to the wreck, helping it on by the time-serving course I was pursuing, did not lay hold of me.
One night, or rather early one morning, when I had taken her home from a road-house revel so shameful that the keeper of the place had practically turned us out, I asked her where all this was to end.
"Perhaps it will end when I have taught you how to make love to me again," she returned flippantly.
"And if I refuse to learn?"
Her smile was no longer alluring; it was mockingly triumphant.
"You can't keep it up indefinitely—with the Cripple Creek girl, I mean, Bertie"—she still called me "Bertie" or "Herbert" when we were alone together. "Sooner or later, she is going to find out what you are doing to her; and after that, the fireworks."
I shook my head. "It is hard to decide, sometimes, Agatha, whether you are a woman or merely a she-devil in woman's shape."
"Oh, I'm a woman—all woman."
"But the motive," I gritted. "If I had done you the greatest injury a woman could suffer—if you had a lifelong grudge to satisfy—you could hardly be more vindictively merciless."
Her smile at this was not pleasant to look upon.
"Somebody has said that the keenest pleasure in life is the pleasure of absolute possession. I own you, Bertie Weyburn, body and soul, and you know it. If you were a big enough man, you'd kill me: if you were big enough in another way, you'd defy me and take what is coming to you."
"And since I am not yet ready to become either a murderer or a martyr?"
"You will probably do the other remaining thing—marry me some day and give me a chance to teach you how to spend the money which, thus far, you don't seem to know what to do with."
"You have money enough of your own—or your father's," I retorted.
"I'd rather spend yours," she said coolly.
It was the oldimpasseat which we had arrived a dozen times before, only the wretched involvement seemed to be adding coil upon coil with the passing of time. I have often wondered if she really meant the marriage threat. At this distance in time it appears extremely doubtful. She may have had moments in which the steadily augmenting output of the Little Clean-Up tempted her, but this is only a surmise. And a little later I was to learn that during this very winter when she was dragging me bound and helpless at the end of her trail-rope, she was—but I need not anticipate.
"You have me bluffed to a standstill, but sometimes I wonder if it isn't only a bluff," I said, in reply to her remark that she'd rather spend my money than her father's. "What if I should tell you here and now that this is the end of It?—that you can't make a plaything of me any longer? What would you do?"
"There are a number of things I might do—to one who is so temptingly vulnerable as you are, Bertie. For one, I might send a wire to the sheriff of the home county, or to the warden of the penitentiary. Really, when I come to think of it, I'm not sure that I oughtn't to do it, anyway, on the score of public morals. Nobody would blame me; and some few would applaud."
"Morals!" I exploded. "You don't know the meaning of the word!"
"Maybe not," she rejoined lightly. "Not many women do. But sending the wire would be a rather crude way of bringing you to terms; especially since I know of at least one better way. I'm going to hazard a guess. You haven't told the Cripple Creek girl anything about your past?"
I was silent.
"I thought not," she went on smoothly. "With some women, perhaps with most women, it wouldn't make any great difference, one way or the other. So far as anybody out here knows to the contrary, you are a free man—and a rich one; and so long as you haven't committed bigamy or something of that sort, the average girl wouldn't care the snap of her finger. Up to a few days ago I thought the brown-eyed little thing you brought up here one night last fall to the theater was the average girl. But now I know better."
It had always seemed a sheer sacrilege to even mention Mary Everton in Agatha Geddis's presence. But this time I broke over.
"You know who she is?" I queried.
"I do now. And I know hermétiereven better than you do, Bertie, dear. She might go to her grave loving you to distraction, but she would never have an ex-convict for the father of her children—not if she knew it. It's in the Everton blood. Anybody who knew Phineas Everton as you and I did in the old school-days, ought to know exactly what to expect of his daughter."
I sat up quickly, and the lights in the high-swung drawing-room chandelier began to turn red for me.
"You devil! Do you mean to say that you would tell Polly Everton?" I burst out savagely.
"I'm not going to tell her because you are not going to drive me to it,"—this with a half-stifled yawn behind a faultless white hand that was just beginning to show the blue veining of bad hours and dissipation. Then: "Go back to your hotel and go to bed, Bertie. You'll wake up in a better frame of mind a few hours later, perhaps. Kiss me, and say good-night."
As I have confessed, I carried a gun in those days; had carried one ever since that memorable afternoon when I had dropped from the trolley-car in Cripple Creek to preface the opening of our business office by going first to a hardware shop for the purchase of a weapon. After leaving the Altberg house I dismissed the night-owl cab on the north bank of the river and crossed the Platte on the viaduct afoot.
Half-way over I stopped to look down into the winter-dry bed of the stream. There was one way out of the wretched labyrinth of shame and double-dealing into which my weakness and cowardice had led me. The weapon sagged heavily in my pocket as if it were a sentient thing trying in some dumb fashion to make its presence felt.
It was but a gripping of the pistol and a quick pull at the trigger, and I should be out of the labyrinth for good and all. I don't know why I didn't do it; why I hadn't done it long before—or rather, I do know. It was because, when the deciding moment came, I was always confronted by a vivid and soul-harrowing flash-light picture of Polly Everton's face as it would look when they should tell her.
I imagine it is only in fiction that a man is able to live a double life successfully to the grand climax. I failed because the mounting fortunes of the Little Clean-Up, my share of which was as yet merely giving me money to squander on the extravagant whims and caprices of Agatha Geddis, were making all three of us, Gifford, Barrett and myself, marked men.
One incident of the marking timed itself in one of my trips to Denver. I had breakfasted at the Brown and was leaving my room-key with the clerk when I ran up against the plain-clothes man who had arrested me on the day of my arrival as a runaway. I should have passed him without recognition, as a matter of course, but he stopped and accosted me.
"Carson's my name," he said, offering me his hand and showing his concealed badge in one and the same motion. Then: "You'll excuse me for butting in, Mr. Bertrand, but there is something you ought to know. You've got a double kicking around here somewhere; a fellow who has swiped your name and looks just a little like you. He's a crook, all right, and we've got his thumb-print and his 'mug' in the headquarters records. I ran across his dope the other day in the blotter, and thought the next time I saw you I'd give you a tip. You never can tell what these slick 'aliases' 'll do. He might be following you up to get a graft out of you. That's done, every day, you know."
Naturally, there was nothing to do but to thank the purblind city detective, to press a bank-note into his hand, and to beg him to be on the lookout for this dangerous "double" of mine. But the incident served to show what the bonanza-fed publicity campaign was doing for us.
Gifford, grubbing in the various levels of the mine, had the most immunity; the newspaper reporters let him measurably alone. But neither Barrett nor I could dodge the spotlight. Every move we made was blazoned in type, and I lived in daily fear of the moment when some enterprising newspaper man would begin to make copy of the theater parties and road-house rides and midnight champagne suppers.
I knew that the blow had fallen one morning when Phineas Everton came unannounced into my private office and asked me to send the stenographer away. Thedébâclehad arrived, and I was no more ready to meet it than any other spendthrift of good repute caught red-handed would have been.
"I think you can guess pretty well what I have come to say, Bertrand," Everton said, after the door had closed behind the outgoing shorthand man. "I have been putting it off in the hope that your own sense of the fitness of things would come to the rescue. I may be old-fashioned and out of touch with the times and the manners of the new generation, but I can't forget that I am a father, or that common decency still has its demands."
Out of the depths of my humiliation there emerged, full-grown, a huge respect for this quiet-eyed ex-schoolmaster who, for the few of us who knew him, lived the life of a studious recluse among his technical mechanisms in the laboratory. He was a salaried man, and I was one of his three employers. That he was able to ignore completely the business relation was a mark of the man.
He waited for his reply but I had none to make. After a time he went on, without heat, but equally without regard for anything but the despicable fact.
"For quite a long time, if I am informed correctly, you have been associating in Denver with a set of people who, whatever else may be said about them, are not people with whom my daughter would care to associate. More than this, you have allowed your name to become coupled with that of a woman whose reputation, past and present, is not altogether of the best. Tell me if I am accusing you wrongfully."
"You are not," I admitted.
"I have been waiting and postponing this talk in the hope that you would realize that you are not doing Polly fair justice. Like most American fathers, I am not supposed to know how matters stand between you, and I deal only with the facts as they appear to an onlooker. The home has been open to you, and you have made such use of your welcome as to lead others to believe that you are Polly's lover."
"I am," I asserted.
"Ah," he said; "that clears the ground admirably. I like you, Bertrand, and I shall be glad to hear your defense, if you have any."
What could I say? Driven thus into a corner, I could only protest, rather incoherently, that I loved Polly, and that, in other circumstances, I should long since have asked her to be my wife.
"The 'circumstances' are connected with Miss Geddis?" he asked pointedly.
"Only incidentally. Considered for herself, Miss Geddis is a woman for whom any self-respecting man could have little regard."
For the first time in the interview the ex-schoolmaster's mild eyes grew hard.
"Then I am to infer that she has a hold of some sort upon you?"
"She has," I rejoined shortly.
"That simplifies matters still more," he averred, with as near an approach to severity as one of his characteristics could compass. "I don't wish to make or meddle to the extent of telling Polly what I have heard and what you have admitted. But in justice to her and to me, you should be man enough to stay away from the house and let Polly alone. Am I unreasonable?"
"Not in the least. You might go much farther and still be blameless. I have no valid excuse to offer, but if I should say that there are extenuating circumstances——"
He raised a thin hand in protest.
"Let us leave it at the point at which there will be the least ill-feeling," he cut in; and from that he switched without preface to a discussion of the varying ore values in a newly opened adit of the mine.
When he was gone I went into Barrett's room. As I have intimated, one of the troubles of mine-owning—if the mine be a producer—is to hold the smelter people in line. Like other Cripple Creek property owners, we had been up against the high costs of reduction almost from the first, and we were constantly sending test consignments of our ore to various smelters throughout the country, and even to Europe, in order to obtain checking data.
"About that car-load of Number Three ore we are sending to Falkenheim in California," I said to Barrett. "I'm going to break away and go with it if you have no objections."
Barrett looked up quickly.
"I think that is a wise move, Jimmie; a very wise move," he said gravely; and this meant that he, too, had been reading the Denver newspapers. Then he added: "We can get along all right without you, for awhile, and you may stay as long as you like. When will you go?"
"To-day; on the afternoon train."
"Straight west?—or by way of Denver?"
"Straight west, over the Midland, I guess."
This is what I said, and it is what I meant to do when I went back to my own office to set things in order for the long absence—for I fully meant it to be long. My office duties were not complicated, and the few things to be attended to were soon out of the way. One of the letters to be written was one that I did not dictate to the stenographer. It was to the Reverend John Whitley, enclosing a draft to be forwarded to my sister in Glendale. Ever since he had served me in the matter of returning Horace Barton's pocketbook, I had used him as an intermediary for communicating, money-wise, with my people. He had kept my secret, and was still keeping it.
The business affairs despatched, I crossed to the hotel to pack a couple of suit-cases. All these preliminary preparations included no word or line to Polly. I promised myself that I should write her when it was all over. The thing to be done now and first was to drop out as unostentatiously as possible. So ran the well-considered intention. But when I went down to an early luncheon there was a telegram awaiting me. It was from Agatha Geddis, and its wording was a curt mandate. "Expect you on afternoon train. Don't fail."
During the half-hour which remained before train-time I fought the wretched battle all over again, back and forth and up and down until my brain reeled. At the end there was a shifty compromise. I was still fully determined to drop out and go to California; at one stroke to break with Polly Everton, and to put myself beyond the reach of the woman with claws; but I weakly decided to go by way of Denver, taking the night train west from the capital city over the Union Pacific. It was a cowardly expedient, prompted wholly by the old, sharp-toothed fear of consequences if I should fall to obey the wire summons, and I knew it. I offer nothing in extenuation.
Agatha met me at the Denver Union Station, and at her suggestion we went together to dinner at the Brown Palace. I did not know until later why she had sent for me, or why she chose a particular table in the dining-room, or why she went to pieces—figuratively speaking—when, at the serving of the dessert, a note was handed her.
After that, I should have said that she had been drinking too much champagne, if I had not known better.
"I want you to go with me up to my suite, Bertie; I've moved to the hotel," she said hurriedly as we were leaving the dining-room.
If I went reluctantly it was not owing to any new-born squeamishness. Heaven knows, I had been compromised with her too many times to care greatly for anything that could be added now. In the sitting-room of her private suite she punched the light switch and came to sit on the arm of my chair. If she had put an arm around my neck, as she did now and then when the wine was in and what few scruples she had were pushed aside, I think I should have strangled her.
"You are going to be awfully sweet to me to-night, Bertie," she began, with honey on her tongue. "You are going to be my good angel. I need a lot of money, and I want you to be nice and get it for me."
"No," I refused briefly. "You've bled me enough."
"Just this one more time, Boy," she coaxed. "I've simplygotto have it, you know."
"Why don't you get it from your father?"
"He has quit," she said, with a toss of the shapely head. "Besides, you are so much easier."
"How much do you want, this time?"
She named a sum which was a fair measure of my entire checking account in the Cripple Creek bank; no small amount, this, though by agreement Gifford, Barrett and I had set aside a liberal portion of the mine earnings as undivided profits. When I hesitated, fairly staggered by the enormity of her demand, she added: "Don't tell me you haven't got it; I know you have. You don't spend anything except the little you dole out for me."
"If I have that much, I am not carrying it around with me."
"I didn't suppose you carried it in your pocket. But you are well known here in Denver, and you can get your checks cashed at any hour of the day or night, if you go to the right places. You've done it before."
I was desperate enough to be half crazed. Not content with making me lose the love of the one woman in the world, she was preparing to rob me like a merciless highwayman.
"Nothing for nothing, the world over," I said, between set teeth. "I mean to have the worth of my money, this time."
With a quick twist on the arm of the chair she leaned over and put her cheek against mine. "There are others," she laughed softly, "but there has never been a day or an hour when you couldn't make them wait, Bertie, dear." And then: "No; I haven't been drinking."
"You will give me what I want, if I will pay the price?" I demanded.
"You heard what I said," she whispered.
I made her sit up and tried to face her.
"This is what I want. Four years ago you and your father sent me to prison for a crime that I didn't commit. Go over to that table and write and sign me my clearance—tell the bald truth and sign your name to it—and you shall have your money."
In a flash she slipped from her place on the arm of the chair and stood before me transformed into a flaming incarnation of vindictive rage. In spite of the pace she had been keeping she was still very beautiful, and her anger served to heighten that physical charm which was the keynote of her power over men.
"Oh!" she panted; "sothatwas what you were willing to pay for! You want a bill of health so you can go back to that little hussy in Cripple Creek! Listen to me, Bert Weyburn: you've broken the last thread. I could kill you if you couldn't serve my turn better alive than dead!I want that money. If you don't bring it here to me by ten o'clock, the Denver police are going to find out that you, the wealthy third partner in the Little Clean-Up, are the man they photographed nearly a year ago, the man whose thumb-print they took, the man who is wanted as an escaped convict who has broken his parole—No, don't speak; let me finish. For the money you are going to bring me, I'll keep still—to the police. But for the slap you've just given me.… Did you ever read that line of Congreve's about a woman scorned? You've had your last little love-scene with Polly Everton!"
I'll tell it all. This time the murder demon proved too strong for me. It was a sheer madman who sprang at her out of the depths of the arm-chair and bent her back over the little oak writing-table with his hands at her throat. She was not womanly enough to scream; instead, she fought silently and with the strength and cunning of mortal fear. Even as my fingers clutched at her for the strangling hold she twisted herself free and put the breadth of the table between us; then I found myself looking into the muzzle of a small silver-mounted revolver.
"You fool!" she gasped. "Do you think I would take any chances with you? If you should kill me, the axe would fall and find your neck, just the same! I put it in a letter to the chief of police. Get me that money before ten o'clock if you want me to stop the letter!"
I was beaten, this time not by fear of her or what she could do, but by the crushing loss I had suffered in those few mad moments. I had done the thing that no man may do and still claim that he has a single drop of gentle blood in his veins; I had laid my hands in violence upon a woman, and with murder in my heart.
Convinced now that there was no deeper depth of degradation to which I could sink, I set about the task she had given me, laboring through it like a man in a dream. To gather up such a huge sum of money after banking hours was well nigh impossible; but I compassed the end by chartering a cab and going to anybody and everybody who could by any possibility cash my checks, leaving a disgraceful trail of the bank paper in dives and gambling dens and night resorts without number—driven to this because all respectable sources were closed at that time in the evening.
Returning to the hotel only a few minutes before the critical hour, I went directly to her rooms, carrying the money in a small hand-bag that I had bought for the purpose. I found her waiting for me, gowned and hatted as if for a journey. She was standing before a mirror, dabbing her neck with a powder-puff—histronic to the last; she was showing me how she had to resort to this to cover up the marks of my assault. I have failed in my picture of her if I have not portrayed her as a woman of moods and lightning changes. There was no trace of the late volcanic outburst in her manner when she greeted me and handed me a sealed and stamped envelope addressed to the Denver chief of police.
"You got the money?" she said quietly. "I knew you would." And then with a sudden passion: "Oh, Bertie! if you weren't such a cold-blooded fish of a man!—but never mind; it's too late now."
I placed the small hand-bag on the table, pocketed the fateful letter, and backed toward the door. "If there is nothing else," I said.
"Oh, but there is!" she put in quickly. "I want you to get a cab and take me to the station. I'm leaving for California. Don't you want to go with me?"
"God forbid!" I exclaimed, and it came out of a full heart. Then I went down to order the cab.
She was curiously silent on the short drive down Seventeenth Street to the Union Station, sitting with the little hand-bag on her knees and breathing as they say the Australian pearl fishers breathe before taking the deep-sea dive. In the station she stood at a window in the women's room and waited while I purchased her ticket for San Francisco and paid for the sleeper section which had evidently been reserved some time in advance.
It is perhaps needless to say that I did not buy my own California ticket at the same time, though the train she was taking was the one I had planned to take. My journey could be postponed; and in the light of what had happened, and what was now happening, I was beginning to understand that my runaway trip to the Pacific Coast was no longer necessary, on one account, at least. But in any event, wild horses couldn't have dragged me aboard of the same train with Agatha Geddis.
She seemed strangely perturbed when I went to her with the tickets, and she made no move to leave the window.
"Your train is ready," I told her, as she thrust the ticket envelope into the bosom of her gown.
"Wait!" she commanded; then she turned back to the window which looked out upon the cab rank.
There were cabs coming and going constantly, and I didn't know until afterward what she saw that made her eyes light up and the blood surge into her cheeks.
"Now I'm ready," she announced quickly. "Put me on the sleeper."
I took her through the gates and at the gate-man's halting of us I saw that we were followed.
Our shadow was an alert, dapper young man who wore glasses, and I remembered having seen him, both at the ticket window and in the women's room. Outside of the gates he confirmed my suspicion by trailing us to the steps of the sleeping-car.
Even then I didn't suspect what was going on. While the sleeping-car conductor was examining the tickets and taking the section number I saw the young man with the spectacles making a hurried reconnaissance of the car by walking back and forth beside it and peering curiously in through the lighted windows. Then I missed him for a minute or two until he came running from the gates with a railroad ticket in his hand.
"I'm going to Cheyenne, and I want a berth in this car," he told the Pullman conductor, "They said they couldn't sell me one at the office—that you had the diagram."
The conductor looked over his list. "Nothing doing," he returned. "All sold out."
"That's all right," snapped the young man; "I'll take my chance sitting up." With that, he climbed aboard and disappeared in the car.
All this time we had been waiting for the conductor to return my companion's tickets. When he did so, I helped her up the steps. The air-brakes were sighing the starting signal, and she turned in the lighted vestibule and blew me a kiss.
"Good-by, Bertie, dear," I heard her say. "Be a good boy, and give my love to Little Brown-Eyes." Then, as if to prove the immortal saying that there is no such thing as ultimate total depravity in the human atom, she leaned over to whisper the parting word: "Make good with her if you can, and want to, Bertie: I didn't mean it when I said I'd spoil your chances. Good-night and good-by." And with that the train moved off and she was gone.
I slept late in my room at the hotel the next morning, waking with a vague sense of inexpressible relief, which was quickly followed by the emotions which may come to a man regaining consciousness after he has been sandbagged and robbed. At table in the breakfast-room the boy brought me a morning paper. On the first page, in screaming headlines, I saw the complete explanation of the mysteries of the previous evening. Agatha Geddis had eloped with a married man notably prominent in social and business circles. The newspaper had two reliable sources of information. The deserted wife had been interviewed, and the guilty pair had been followed on the train by a reporter.
I laid the paper aside and stared out of the breakfast-room window like a man awakening from a horrid dream. Once again the submerging wave of realization and relief rushed over me. Truly, I had been held up and robbed; had in fact innocently financed this city-shaking elopement. But, so far as Agatha Geddis's banishment from Denver and Colorado could accomplish it, I was once more a free man.