Larry was far more deeply moved this time when Maggie drove away with Dick than on that former occasion when he had tried to play with adroitness upon her psychological reactions. Now he knew that her very world was shaken; that her soul was stunned and reeling; that she was fighting with all her strength for a brief outward composure.
He had loved her for months, but he had never so loved her as in this hour when all her artificial defenses had been battered down and she had been just a bewildered, agonized girl, with just the emotions and first thoughts that any other normal girl would have had under the same circumstances. His great desire had been to be with her, to comfort her, help her; but he realized that she had been correct in her instinct to be by herself for a while, to try to comprehend it all, to try to think her way out.
When Maggie was out of sight he excused himself from having tea, left Hunt and Miss Sherwood upon the veranda, and sought his study. But though he had neglected his work the whole day, he now gave it no attention. He sat at his desk and thought of Maggie: tried to think of what she was going to do. Her situation was so complicated with big elements which she would have to handle that he could not foretell just what her course would be. It was a terrific situation for a young woman, who was after all just a very young girl, to face alone. But there was nothing for him but to wait for news from her. And she had not said even that she would ever let him hear.
While he considered these matters he had risen and paced the room. Once he had paused at a French window which opened upon a side veranda, and had seen below him a few yards away Joe Ellison, whose interest in his flowers had established his workday from sunrise to sunset. Joe Ellison had been pulling tiny weeds that were daring to attempt to get a start in a rose-garden. Larry's mind had halted a moment upon Joe. Here at least was a contented man: one who, no matter what happened, would remain in ignorance of possibly great events which would intimately concern him. Then Larry had left the window and had returned to his thoughts of Maggie.
But Larry's thoughts were not to remain exclusively with Maggie for long. Shortly after six Judkins entered and announced that a man was at the door with a message. The man had refused to come in, saying he was only a messenger and was in a hurry; and had refused to give Judkins the message, saying that it was verbal. Thinking that some word had come from his grandmother, or possibly even from Maggie, Larry went out upon the veranda. Waiting for him was a nondescript man he did not know.
“Mr. Brandon, sir?” asked the man.
“Yes. You have a message for me?”
Before the man could reply, there came a shout from the shrubbery beyond the drive:
“Grab him, Smith! He's the man!”
Instantly Smith's steely arms were about Larry, pinning his elbows to his sides, and a man broke from the shrubbery and hurried toward the house. Instinctively Larry started to struggle, but he ceased as he recognized the man coming up the steps. It was Gavegan. Larry realized that he had been shrewdly trapped, that resistance would serve no end, and the next moment handcuffs were upon his wrists.
“Well, Brainard,” gloated Gavegan, “we've landed you at last!”
“So it seems, Gavegan.”
“You thought you was damned clever, but I guess you know now you ain't one, two, three!”
“Oh, I knew how clever you are, Gavegan,” Larry responded dryly, “and that you'd get me sooner or later if I hung around.”
As a matter of fact Larry's capture, which was as unspectacular as his escape had been strenuous, was the consequence of no cleverness at all. Larry had said to Barney Palmer the night before that he knew who Barney's sucker was; and Barney had passed this information along to Chief Barlow. “Follow every clue; luck may be with you and one of the clues may turn up what you want”:—this is in substance an unwritten rule of routine procedure which effects those magnificent police solutions which are presented as more mysterious than the original mystery—for it is well for the public to believe that its police officers are unfailingly more clever than its criminals. Barlow had done some routine thinking: if Larry Brainard knew Dick Sherwood was the sucker, then watching Dick Sherwood might possibly reveal the whereabouts of Larry Brainard. Barlow had passed this tip along to Gavegan. Gavegan had grumbled to himself that it was only a thousand to one shot; but luck had been with him, and his long shot had won.
Miss Sherwood, Hunt behind her, had been drawn by the sound of voices around to the side of the veranda where stood the four men. “What are you doing?” she now sharply demanded of Gavegan.
“Don't like to make any unpleasant scene, Miss Sherwood, but I've gotta tell you that this so-called Brandon is a well-known crook.” Gavegan enjoyed few things more than astounding people with unpleasant facts. “His real name is Brainard; he's done time, and now he's wanted by the New York police for a tough job he pulled.”
“I knew all that long ago,” said Miss Sherwood.
“Eh—what?” stammered Gavegan.
“Mr. Brainard told me all that the first time I saw him.”
“Hello, Gavegan,” said Hunt, stepping forward.
“Well, I'll be—if you ain't that crazy—” Again the ability to express himself coherently and with restraint failed Gavegan. “If you ain't that painter that lived down at the Duchess's!”
“Right, Gavegan—as a detective always should be. And Larry Brainard was then, and is now, my friend.”
Miss Sherwood again spoke up sharply. “Mr. Gavegan—if that is your name—you will please take those foolish things off Mr. Brainard's wrists.”
Gavegan had been cheated out of creating a sensation. That discomfiture perhaps made him even more dogged than he was by nature.
“Sorry, Miss, but he's charged with having committed a crime and is a fugitive from justice, and I can't.”
“I'll be his security. Take them off.”
“Sorry to refuse you again, Miss. But he's a dangerous man—got away once before. My orders is to take no risks that'll give him another chance for a get-away.”
Miss Sherwood turned to Larry. “I'll go into town with you, and so will Mr. Hunt. I'll see that you get bail and a good lawyer.”
“Thank you, Miss Sherwood,” Larry said. “Gavegan, I guess we're ready to start.”
“Not just yet, Brainard. Sorry, Miss Sherwood, but we've got a search warrant for your place. We just want to have a look at the room Brainard used. No telling what kind of crooked stuff he's been up to. And to make the search warrant O.K. I had it issued in this county and brought along a county officer to serve it. Show it to the lady, Smith.”
“I have no desire to see it, Mr. Gavegan. I have more interest in watching you while you go through my things.” And giving Gavegan a look which made an unaccustomed flush run up that officer's thick neck and redden his square face, she led the way into Larry's study. “This is the room where Mr. Brainard works,” she said. “Through that door is his bedroom. Everything here except his clothing is my property. I shall hold you rigidly responsible for any disorder you may create or any damage you may do. Now you may go ahead.”
“Let's have all your keys, Brainard,” Gavegan choked out.
Larry handed them over. With Miss Sherwood, Hunt, and Larry looking silently on, the two men began their examination. They began with the papers on Larry's desk and in its drawers; and in all his life Gavegan had not been so considerate in a search as he now was with Miss Sherwood's blue eyes coldly upon him. They unlocked cabinets, scrutinized their contents, shook out books, examined the backs of pictures, took up rugs; then passed into Larry's bedroom. Miss Sherwood made no move to follow the officers into that more intimate apartment, and the other two watchers remained with her.
A minute passed. Then Gavegan reentered, a puzzled, half-triumphant look on his red face, holding out a square of paint-covered canvas.
“Found this thing in Brainard's chiffonier. What the he—I mean what's it doing out here?”
There was not an instant's doubt as to what the thing was. Larry started, and Hunt started, and Miss Sherwood started. But it was Miss Sherwood who first spoke.
“Why, it's a portrait of Miss Cameron, in costume! And painted by Mr. Hunt!” In amazement she turned first upon Larry and upon Hunt. “When did you ever paint her portrait, when you did not meet Miss Cameron till you met her here? And, Mr. Brainard, how do you come to possess Miss Cameron's portrait?”
It was Gavegan who spoke up promptly, and not either of the two suddenly discomfited men. And Gavegan instantly sensed in the situation a chance to get even for the humiliation his self-esteem had just suffered.
“Miss Cameron nothing! Her real name is Maggie Carlisle, and she used to live at a dump of a pawnshop down on the East Side run by Brainard's grandmother. Brainard knew her there, and so did Mr. Hunt.”
“But—but—” gasped Miss Sherwood—“she's been coming out here as Maggie Cameron!”
“I tell you your Maggie Cameron is Maggie Carlisle!” said Gavegan gloatingly. “I've known her for years. Her father is Old Jimmie Carlisle, a notorious crook. And she's mixed up right now with her father and some others in a crooked game. And Brainard here used to be sweet on her, and probably still is, and if he's been letting her come here, without telling you who she is—well, I guess you know the answer. Didn't I tell you, Miss, that give me a chance and I'd turn up something against this guy Brainard!”
Miss Sherwood's face was white, but set with grim accusation that was only waiting to pronounce swift judgment. “Mr. Hunt, is it true that Miss Cameron is this Maggie Carlisle the officer mentions, and that you knew it all the while?”
“Yes—” began the painter.
“Don't blame him, Miss Sherwood,” Larry interrupted. “He didn't tell you because I begged him not to as a favor to me. Blame me for everything.”
Her judgment upon Hunt was pronounced with cold finality, her eyes straight into Hunt's: “Whatever may have been Mr. Hunt's motives, I unalterably hold him to blame.”
She turned upon Larry. The face which he had only seen in gracious moods was as inflexibly stern as a prosecuting attorney's.
“We're going to go right to the bottom of this, Mr. Brainard. You too have known all along that this Miss Cameron was really the Maggie Carlisle this officer speaks of?”
“Yes.”
“And you have known all along that she was the daughter of this notorious criminal, Old Jimmie Carlisle?”
The impulse surged up in Larry to tell the newly learned truth about Maggie. But he remembered Maggie's injunction that the truth must never be known. He checked his revelation just in time.
“Yes.”
“And is it true that Maggie Carlisle is herself what is known as a crook?—or has had crooked inclinations or plans?”
“It's like this, Miss Sherwood—”
“A direct answer, please!”
“Yes.”
“And is it true, as this officer has suggested, that you were in love with her yourself?”
“Yes.”
“You are aware of my brother's infatuation for her? That he has asked her to marry him?”
“Yes.”
Her voice now sounded more terrible to Larry. “I took you in to give you a chance. And your repayment has been that, knowing all these things, you have kept silent and let me and my brother be imposed upon by a swindling operation. And who knows, since you admit that you love the girl, that you have not been a partner in the conspiracy from the first!”
“That's exactly the idea, Miss!” put in Gavegan.
Larry had foreseen many possible wrong turns which his plan might take, but he was appalled by the utter unexpectedness of the actual disaster. And yet he recognized that the evidence justified Miss Sherwood's judgment of him. It all made him seem an ingrate and a swindler.
For the moment Larry was so overwhelmed that he made no attempt to speak. And since for once Gavegan was content merely to gloat over his triumph, there was stiff silence in the room until Miss Sherwood said in the cold voice of a judge after a jury has brought in a verdict of guilty:
“Of course, if you think there is anything you may say for yourself, Mr. Brainard, you now have the chance to say it.”
“I have much to say, but I can't blame you if you refuse to believe most of it,” Larry said desperately, fighting for what seemed his last chance. “I loved Maggie Carlisle. I believed she had splendid qualities. Only she was dominated by the twisted ideas Old Jimmie Carlisle had planted in her. I wanted to eradicate those twisted ideas, and make her good qualities her ruling ones. But she didn't believe in me. She thought me a soft-head, a police stool, a squealer. Then I had to disappear; you know all about that. Not till I had been with you for several weeks did I learn that she was being used in a swindling scheme against Dick.
“I did think of telling you or Dick. But my greatest interest was to awaken that better person I believed to be in her; and I knew that the certain result of my exposing her to you would be for me to lose the last bit of influence I had with her, and for her to pass right on to another enterprise of similar character. So the idea came to me that if I didn't expose her, but caused her to be received with every courtesy by her intended victims, the effect upon her would be that she would feel a revulsion for what she was doing and she would come to her best senses. I told this to Mr. Hunt; that's why he agreed not to give her away. And another point, though frankly this was not so important to me: it seemed to me that a good hard jolt might be just what was needed to make Dick take life more seriously, and I saw in this affair a chance for Dick to get just the jolt he needed.
“That's all, Miss Sherwood. Except that I have seen signs which make me believe that what I figured would happen to Maggie Carlisle have begun to happen to her.”
“Bunk!” snorted Gavegan.
“I know that part of what he says is true,” put in Hunt.
Miss Sherwood ignored Hunt and his remark. The look of controlled wrath which she held upon Larry did not change. Larry recognized that his statement had sounded most implausible. Miss Sherwood in her indignation considered only that her kindness had been betrayed, her hospitality outraged, and that those she had accepted as friends had sought to trick her family in the worst way she could conceive; and she spoke accordingly.
“If that is the best Mr. Brainard has to say for himself, Mr. Gavegan, you may take him with you, and without any interference from me. I ask only that you take him out of the house at once.”
With that she moved from the room, not looking again at either Hunt or Larry. For a brief space there was silence, while Gavegan let his triumph feed gloatingly upon the sight of his prisoner.
This brief silence was broken by a low, strange sound, like a human cry quickly repressed, that seemed to come from just outside the French windows.
“What was that?” Larry asked quickly.
“I didn't hear anything,” said Gavegan whose senses had been thoroughly concentrated upon his triumph.
“I did,” said Hunt. “On the veranda.”
“We'll see. Watch him—” to the county officer; and Gavegan followed Hunt to the French windows and looked out. “No one on the veranda, and no one in sight,” he reported. “You fellows must have been dreaming.”
He returned and faced Larry. “I guess you'll admit, Brainard, that I've got you for keeps this time.”
“Then suppose we be starting for Headquarters.” Larry responded.
Hunt moved to Larry's side. “I'll just trail along after you, Larry. Anyhow, this doesn't seem to be any place for me.”
A few minutes afterwards Larry was in a car beside Gavegan, speeding away from Cedar Crest toward the city. Larry's thoughts were the gloomiest he had entertained since he had come out of Sing Sing months before with his great dream. All that he had counted on had gone wrong. He was in the hands of the police, and he knew how hard the police would be. He had incurred the hostility of Miss Sherwood and had lost what had seemed a substantial opportunity to start his career as an honest man. The only item of his great plan in which he did not seem to have failed completely was Maggie. And he did not know what Maggie was going to do.
When Maggie drove away with Dick from Cedar Crest—this was an hour before Gavegan descended out of the blue upon Larry and two hours before he rode triumphantly away with his captive—she was the most dazed and disillusioned young creature who had ever set out confidently to conquer the world. Courage, confidence, quickness of wit, all the qualities on which she had prided herself, were now entirely gone, and she was just a white, limp figure that wanted to run away: a weak figure in which swirled thoughts almost too spasmodically powerful for so weakened a vessel not to be shattered under their wild strain: thoughts of her amazingly discovered real father—of how she was the very contradiction of her father's dream—of Larry—of the cunning Jimmie Carlisle whom till this day she had believed her father—of Barney Palmer.
So agitated was she with these gyrating thoughts that she was not conscious that Dick had stopped the car on the green roadside until he had taken her hand and had begun to speak. The happy, garrulous, unobservant Dick had not noticed anything out of the way with her more than a pallor which she had explained away as being due to nothing more than a bit of temporary dizziness. And so for the second time Dick now poured out his love to her and asked her to marry him.
“Don't, Dick—please!” she interrupted him. “I can't marry you! Never!”
“What!” cried the astounded Dick. “Maggie—why not?”
“I can't. That's final. And don't make me talk to you now, Dick—please! I cannot!”
His face, so fresh and happy the moment before, became gray and lined with pain. But he silently swung the car back into the road.
She forgot him utterly in what was happening within her. As they rode on, she forced herself to think of what she should do. She saw herself as the victim of much, and as guilty of much. And then inspiration came upon her, or perhaps it was merely a high frenzy of desperation, and she saw that the responsibility for the whole situation was upon her alone; she saw it as her duty, the role assigned her, to try to untangle alone this tangled situation, to try to measure out justice to every one.
First of all, as she had told Larry, her father's dream of her must remain unbroken. Whatever she did, she must do nothing that might possibly be a sharp blow to the conception of his daughter which were the roots and trunk and flowering branches of his present happiness.. .. And then came a real inspiration! She would, in time, make herself into the girl he believed her—make his dream the truth! She would get rid of Old Jimmie and Barney—would cut loose from everything pertaining to her former life—would disappear and live for a year or two in the kind of environment in which he believed he had placed her—and would reappear and claim him for her father! And for his own sake, he should never know the truth. Two years more and he should have the actuality, where he now had only the dream!
But before she was free to enter upon this plan, before she could vanish out of the knowledge of all who had known her, there was a great duty to Larry Brainard which she must discharge. He was hunted by the police, he was hunted by his former pals. And he was in his predicament fundamentally because of her. Therefore, it was her foremost duty to clear Larry Brainard.
Yes, she would do that first! Somehow!...
She was considering this problem of how she was to clear Larry, who had tried to awaken her, who had shielded her, who loved her, when Dick slowed his car down in front of the Grantham and helped her out. As he said a subdued good-bye and was stepping back into his car, an impulse surged up into her—an impulse of this different Maggie whose birth was being attended by such bewildering emotions and decisions.
“Dick, won't you please come up for just a little while?”
Three minutes later they were in her sitting-room. Cap in hand Dick awaited her words in the misery of silence. Her look was drawn, but direct.
“Back in the road, Dick, you asked me why I couldn't marry you. I asked you up here to tell you.”
“Yes?” he queried dully.
“One reason is that, though I like you, I don't like you that way. The more important reason to you is that I am a fraud.”
“A fraud!” he exclaimed incredulously.
It had come to her, as she was leaving the car, that the place to start her new life was to start right, or quit right, with Dick. “A fraud,” she repeated—“an impostor. There is no Maggie Cameron. I am born of no good family from the West. I have no money. I have always lived in New York—most of the time down on the East Side. I used to work in a Fifth Avenue millinery shop. Till three months ago I sold cigarettes in one of the big hotels.”
“What of that!” cried Dick.
“That is the nicest part of what I have to tell you,” she continued relentlessly. “My supposed relatives, Jimmie Carlisle and Barney Palmer, are no relatives at all, but are two clever confidence men. I have been in with them, working on a scheme they have framed. Everything I have seemed to be, everything I have done, even this expensive apartment, have all been parts of that scheme. The idea of that scheme was to swindle some rich man out of a lot of money—through my playing on his susceptibilities.”
“Maggie!” he gasped.
“More concretely, the idea was to trick some rich man into falling in love with me, to get him to propose, then to have me confess that I was already married, but to a man who would give me a divorce if he were paid enough. The rich man would then drive a bargain with my supposed husband, pay over a lot of money—after which Barney, Old Jimmie, and I would disappear with our profits.”
“Maggie!” he repeated, stupefied with his incredulous amazement. But the unflinching gaze she held upon him convinced him she was speaking the truth. “Then, if that was your game, why are you telling me now? Why didn't you say 'yes' when I proposed a week ago? I would have fallen for the game; you would have succeeded.”
Not till that moment did Maggie realize the full truth; not till then did she realize the solid influence Larry Brainard had been in the background of her life all these months.
“I didn't go through with it because of Larry Brainard.”
“Larry Brainard!” His astonishment increased. “You know Larry Brainard, then?”
“I've known him for several years.”
“And you've been coming out, and he's been pretending not to know you! Of course I knew what Larry Brainard has been. But is he in this, too?”
“No. He's exactly what you think him. From the start he's been trying to keep me out of this. He was behind my coming to your house; he's told me so. His reason for getting me there was his belief that my being treated by you and your sister as I was would make me ashamed of myself and make me want to quit what I was doing. And I think—I think he was right—partly.”
“And Larry—he's the reason you're telling me now?”
“I think so. But there are other reasons.” Making a clean breast of things though she was, she felt she dared not trust Dick with the secret of her father. “I—I wanted to clear things up as far as I was responsible. That's one reason I'm telling you. There was the chance you might sometime find out that Larry had known me and suspect him; I wanted you to know the truth of what he'd really done. And I wanted to tell you the truth about myself, so you'd despise and forget me, instead of perhaps carrying around romantic delusions about me after I've gone. And there's another reason. I'd like to tell you—for you've been everything that's fine to me—if it won't offend you.”
“Go on,” he said huskily.
“Barney Palmer picked you out as the victim—you didn't know you were being picked out—because he said that you were an easy mark. That you took things for exactly what they pretended to be, and didn't care what you did with your money. That you never would settle down into a responsible person. I'm telling you all this, Dick, because I don't want you to be what Barney said.”
Dick slumped into a chair, at last beaten down by this cumulative revelation. He buried his face in his hands and his panting breath was convulsive with unuttered sobs. Maggie looked down upon the young boy, with pity, remorse, and an increasing recognition of the wide-spread suffering she had wrought.
“To think that this has all been horrible make-believe!” he at last groaned. “That all the while I've been looked on as just a young fool who would always remain a fool!”
Maggie, in her sense of guilt, was helpless to make any reply that would soften his agony; and for a space neither spoke.
Presently Dick stood suddenly up. His face was still marked by suffering, but somehow it seemed to have grown older without losing its youth. There was a new blaze of determination in the direct look he held on Maggie.
“You say you have never loved me?” he demanded.
She shook her head. “But I've told you that I've always liked you.”
“Larry Brainard's doing what he has kept on doing for you—that means that he loves you, doesn't it?” he pressed on.
“He has told me so.”
“And you love him?”
“What difference does that make?—since I am going away as soon as I get everything I'm wholly or partly responsible for cleared up.”
“If Larry Brainard has known you for a long while, then how about Barney Palmer and Jimmie Carlisle?”
“They've known me as long, or longer.”
“Then you must have all known each other?”
“Yes. Years ago Larry worked with Barney and Jimmie Carlisle.”
“What was the attitude of those two toward Larry, when he was trying to balk them by making you give up the plan?”
“They hated him. They are the cause—especially Barney—of all of Larry's trouble with the police and with the old crowd he's quit. To try to clear Larry, that's the most important thing I'm going to try to do.”
“And that's where you've got to let me help you!” Dick cried with sudden energy. “Larry's been a mighty good friend to me—he's tried to head me right—and I owe him a lot. And I'd like a chance to show that Barney Palmer I'm not going to keep on being the eternal fool he sized me up to be!”
Maggie was startled by this swift transformation. “Why—why, Dick!” she breathed.
“What's your plan to clear Larry?”
“I hadn't got so far as to have a clear plan. I had only just realized that there had to be a plan. But since they have set the police on Larry, it came to me that the idea behind any plan would be for the police to really capture Barney and Jimmie Carlisle—get them out of Larry's way.”
“That's it!” Dick Sherwood had a mind which, given an interesting stimulus, could work swiftly; and it worked swiftly now. “They were planning to trim me. Let's use that plan you outlined to me—use it to-night. You can tell them some story which will make immediate action seem necessary and we'll all get together this evening. I'll play my part all right—don't you worry about me! I'll come with a roll of money that I'll dig up somewhere, and it'll be marked money. When it's passed—bingo!—a couple of detectives that we'll have planted to watch the proceedings will step right up and nab the two!”
She was taken aback by the very idea of him, the victim, after her confession, throwing his lot in with her. “Why, Dick”—she stammered—“to think of you offering to do such a thing!”
“I owe that much to Larry Brainard,” he declared. “And—and I owe that much to your desire to help set him straight. Well, what about my plan?”
Since he seemed eager to lend himself to it, it seemed to her altogether wonderful, and she told him so. They discussed details for several minutes, for there was much to be done and it had all to be done most adroitly. It was agreed that he should come at ten o'clock, when the stage would all be set.
As he was leaving to attend to his part of the play, a precautionary idea flashed upon Maggie.
“Better telephone me just before you come. Something may have happened to change our plans.”
“All right—I'll telephone. Just keep your nerve.”
With that he hurried out. At about the time he left, Larry was leaving Cedar Crest in handcuffs beside the burly and triumphant Gavegan, and believing that the power he had sought to exercise was now effectually at an end. He was out of it. In his despondency it was not granted him to see that the greatest thing which he could do was already done; that he had set in motion all the machinery of what had taken place and what was about to take place; that all the figures in the action of the further drama of that night were to act as they were to do primarily because of promptings which came from him.
Dick's departure left Maggie to think alone upon an intricate and possibly dangerous interplay of characters in which she had cast herself for the chief role, which might prove a sacrificial role for her. She quickly perceived that Dick's plan, clever as it might be, would bring about, in the dubious event of its success, only one of the several happenings which had to come to pass if she were to clear her slate before her disappearance.
Dick's plan was good; but it would only get rid of Barney and Old Jimmie. It would only rid Larry of such danger as they represented; it would only be revenge upon them for the evil they had done. And, after all, revenge helped a man forward but very little. There would still remain, even in the event of the success of Dick's plan, the constant danger to Larry from the police hunt, instigated by Chief Barlow's vindictive determination to send Larry back to prison for his refusal to be a stool-pigeon; and the constant danger from his one-time friends who were hunting him down with deadly hatred as a squealer.
Somehow, if she were to set things right for Larry, she had to maneuver that night's happenings in such a way as to eliminate forever Barlow's persecutions, and eliminate forever the danger to Larry from his friends' and their hirelings' desire for vengeance upon a supposed traitor.
Maggie thought rapidly, elaborating on Dick's plan. But what Maggie did was not so much the result of sober thought as of the inspiration of a desperate, hardly pressed young woman; but then, after all, what we call inspiration is only thought geared to an incredibly high speed. First of all, she got rid of that slow-witted, awesome supernumerary, Miss Grierson, who might completely upset the delicate action of the stage by a dignified entrance at the wrong moment and with the wrong cue. Next she called up Chief Barlow at Police Headquarters. Fortunately for her Barlow was still in; for an acrimonious dispute, then in progress and taking much space in the public prints, between him and the District Attorney's office was keeping him late at his desk despite the most autocratic and pleasant of all demands, those of his dinner hour. To him Maggie gave a false name, and told him that she had most important information to communicate at once; to which he growled back that she could give it if she came down at once.
Next she called up Barney, who had been waiting near a telephone in expectation of news of the result of her second visit to the home of Dick Sherwood. To Barney she said that she had the greatest possible news—news which would require immediate action—and that he should be at her suite at nine o'clock prepared to play his part at once in the big proposition that had just developed, and that he should get word to Old Jimmie to follow him in a few minutes.
Within fifteen minutes a taxicab had whirled her down to Police Headquarters and she was in the office where three months earlier Larry had been grilled after his refusal of the license to steal and cheat on the condition that he become a police stool. Barlow, who was alone in the room, looked up with a scowl from a secret report he had secured of the activities of detectives in the District Attorney's office. Although Maggie was pretty and stylishly dressed, Barlow did not rise nor did he remove the big cigar he had been viciously gnawing. It is the tradition of the Police Department, the most thoroughly respected article of its religion, that a woman who is seen in Police Headquarters cannot by any possibility be a lady.
“Well, what's on your chest?” he grunted, not even asking her to be seated.
It was suddenly Maggie's impulse—sprung perhaps out of unconscious memory of what Larry had suffered—to inflict upon herself the uttermost humiliation. So she said:
“I've come here to offer myself as a stool-pigeon.”
“What's that?” Barlow exclaimed, startled. It was not often that a swell lady—who of course couldn't be a swell (he did not know who Maggie was)—voluntarily walked into his office with such a proposition.
“I can give you some real information about a big game that's being worked up. In fact, I can arrange for you to be present when the game is pulled off, and you can make the arrests.”
“Who are the people?” he asked brusquely.
Maggie knew it would be fatal to mention Barney or Old Jimmie, if that story about Barlow's protection contained any truth. Again inspiration, or incredibly swift thinking, came to her aid, and with sure touch she twanged one of Barlow's rawest and most responsive nerves.
“Larry Brainard is behind it all. He's been doing a lot of things on the quiet these last few months. Here is where you can get his whole crowd.”
“Larry Brainard!”
Maggie did not yet know what had befallen Larry, and Gavegan had neglected to telephone his Chief of the arrest. Even had Gavegan done so, the large and vague manner in which Maggie had stated the situation would have stirred Barlow's curiosity.
“All right. I'll put a couple of my good men on the case. Where shall I send 'em?”
“A couple of your good men won't do. I want only one of your good men—and that man is yourself.”
“Me!” growled Barlow. “What kind of floor-walker d'you think I am? I'm too busy!”
“Too busy to take personal charge, and get personal credit, for one of the biggest cases that ever went through this office?”
Maggie had sought only to excite his vanity. But unknowingly she had also appealed to something else in him: his very deep concern in the hostile activities of the District Attorney's office. If this girl told the truth, then here might be his chance to display such devotion to duty as to turn up some such sensational case as would make this investigation from the District Attorney's office seem to the public an unholy persecution and make the chagrined District Attorney, who was very sensitive to public opinion, think it wiser to drop the whole matter.
“How do I know you're not trying to string me?—or get me out of the way of something bigger?—or hand me the double-cross?”
“I shall be there all the time, and if you don't like the way the thing develops you can arrest me. I suppose you've got some kind of law, with a stiff punishment attached, about conspiracy against an officer.”
“Well—give me all the dope, and tell me where I'm to come,” he yielded ungraciously.
“I've told you all I am going to tell. All the important 'dope' you'll get first-hand by being present when the thing happens. The place to come is the Hotel Grantham—room eleven-forty-two—at eight-thirty sharp.”
To this Barlow grudgingly agreed. He might have exulted inwardly, but he would have shown no outer graciousness if a committee of citizens had handed him a reward of a million dollars and an engrossed testimonial to his unprecedented services. Barlow did not know how to thank any one.
Five minutes after she left Headquarters Maggie was in the back room of the Duchess's pawnshop, which her rapid planning had fixed upon as the next station at which she should stop. She did not waste a moment in coming to the point with the Duchess.
“Red Hannigan is really the most important of Larry's old friends who are out to get him, isn't he?” she asked.
“Yes—in a way. I mean among those who honestly think Larry has turned stool and squealer. He trusted Larry more than any one else—and now he hates Larry more than any one else. Rather natural, since he was two months in the Tombs before he could get bail—because he thinks Larry squealed on him.”
“How's he stand with his crowd?”
“No one higher. They'd all take his word for anything.”
“Can you find him at once?” Maggie pursued breathlessly.
That was a trifling question to ask the Duchess; since all the news of her shadowy world came to her ears in some swift obscure manner.
“Yes. If it is necessary.”
“It's terribly necessary! If I can't get him, the whole thing may fail!”
“What thing?” demanded the Duchess.
“It might all sound impossibly foolish!” cried the excited, desperate Maggie. “You might tell me so—and discourage me—and I simply must go ahead! I feel rather like—like a juggler who's trying for the first time to keep a lot of new things going in the air all at once. But I think there's a chance that I may succeed! I'll tell you just one thing. It all has to do with Larry. I think I may help Larry.”
“I'll get Red Hannigan,” the Duchess said briefly. “What do you want with him?”
“Have him come to the Hotel Grantham—room eleven-forty-two—at eight-fifteen sharp!”
“He'll be there,” said the Duchess.
There followed a swirling taxi-ride back to the Grantham, and a rapid change into her most fetching evening gown (she had not even a thought of dinner) to play her bold part in the drama which she was excitedly writing in her mind and for which she had just engaged her cast. She was on fire with terrible suspense: would the other actors play their parts as she intended they should?—would her complicated drama have the ending she was hoping for?
Had she been in a more composed, matter-of-fact state of mind, this play which she was staging would have seemed the crudest, most impossible melodrama—a thing both too absurd and too dangerous for her to risk. But Maggie was just then living through one of the highest periods of her life; she cared little what happened to her. And it is just such moods that transform and elevate what otherwise would be absurd to the nobly serious; that changes the impossible into the possible; just as an exalted mood or mind is, or was, the primary difference between Hamlet, or Macbeth, or Lear, and any of the forgotten Bowery melodramas of a generation now gone.
She had been dressed for perhaps ten nervous minutes when the bell rang. She admitted a slight, erect, well-dressed, middle-aged man with a lean, thin-lipped face and a cold, hard, conservative eye: a man of the type that you see by the dozens in the better hotels of New York, and seeing them you think, if you think of them at all, that here is the canny president of some fair-sized bank who will not let a client borrow a dollar beyond his established credit, or that here is the shrewd but unobtrusive power behind some great industry of the Middle West.
“I'm Hannigan,” he announced briefly. “I know you're Old Jimmie Carlisle's girl. The Duchess told me you wanted me on something big. What's the idea?”
“You want to get Larry Brainard, don't you?—or whoever it was that squealed on you?”
There was a momentary gleam in the hard, gray eyes. “I do.”
“That's why you're here. In a little over an hour, if you stay quiet in the background, you'll have what you want.”
“You've got a swell-looking lay-out here. What's going to be pulled off?”
“It's not what I might tell you that's going to help you. It's what you hear and see.”
“All right,” said the thin-lipped man. “I'll pass the questions, since the Duchess told me to do as you said. She's square, even if she does have a grandson who's a stool. I suppose I'm to be out of sight during whatever happens?”
“Yes.”
In the room there were two spacious closets, as is not infrequent in the better class of modern hotels; and it had been these two closets which had been the practical starting-point of Maggie's development of Dick Sherwood's proposition. To one of these she led Hannigan.
“You'll be out of sight here, and you'll get every word.”
He stepped inside, and she closed the door. Also she took the precaution of locking it. She wished Hannigan to hear, but she wished no such contretemps as Hannigan bursting forth and spoiling her play when it had reached only the middle of its necessary action.
Barlow came promptly at half-past eight. He brought news which for a few moments almost completely upset Maggie's delicately balanced structure.
“I know who you are now,” he said brusquely. “And part of your game's cold before you start.”
“Why?—What part?”
“Just after you left Headquarters Officer Gavegan showed up. He had this Larry Brainard in tow—had pinched him out on Long Island.”
This announcement staggered Maggie; for the moment made all her strenuous planning seem to have lost its purpose. In her normal condition she might either have given up or betrayed her real intent. But just now, in her super-excited state, in which she felt she was fighting desperately for others, she was acting far above her ordinary capacity; and she was making decisions so swift that they hardly seemed to proceed from conscious thought. So Barlow, vigilant watcher of faces that he was, saw nothing unusual in her expression or manner.
“What did you do with him?” she asked.
“Left him with Gavegan—and with Casey, who had just come in. Trailing with Brainard was a swell named Hunt, cussing mad. He was snorting around about being pals with most of the magistrates, and swore he'd have Brainard out on bail inside an hour. But what he does don't make any difference to me. Your proposition seems to me dead cold, since I've already got Brainard, and got him right. I wouldn't have bothered to have come here at all except for something you let drop about the pals he might have been working with these last few months.”
“That's exactly it,” she caught him up. “I never thought that you'd catch Larry Brainard here. How could I, when, if you know me as you say, you also know that he and I are in different camps—are fighting each other? What's going to happen here is something that will show you the people Larry Brainard's been mixed up with—that will turn up for you the people you want.”
“But what's going to happen?” Barlow demanded.
To this Maggie answered in much the same strain she had used with Hannigan a few minutes earlier. “I told you down at Headquarters that everything that's important you'll learn by being present when the thing actually happened. What I tell you doesn't count for much—it might not be true. It's what you see and hear for yourself when things begin to happen. You're to wait in here.” She led him to the second large closet and opened the door.
“See here,” he demanded, “are you framing something on me?”
“How can I, in a big hotel like this? And even if I were to try, you'd certainly make me pay for it later. Besides, you've got a gun. Please go in quick; I'm expecting the people here any minute. And don't make a sound that might arouse their suspicions and queer everything.”
He entered, and she closed the door. So carefully that he did not hear it, she locked the door; no more than in Hannigan's case did she want Barlow to come bungling into a scene before it had reached its climax.
All was now ready for the curtain to rise. Quivering all through she waited for Barney Palmer, whose entrance was to open her drama. She glanced at her wrist-watch which she had left upon the little lacquered writing-table. Ten minutes of nine. Ten more minutes to wait. She felt far more of sickening suspense than ever did any young playwright on the opening night of his first play. For she was more than merely playwright. In her desperate, overwrought determination Maggie had assumed for herself the super-mortal role of dea ex machina. And in those moments of tense waiting Maggie, who so feverishly loathed all she had been, was not at all sure whether she was going to succeed in her part of goddess from the machine.
At five minutes to nine there was a ring. She gave a little jump at the sound. That was Barney. Though generally when Barney came he used the latch-key which his assumed dear cousinship, and the argued possibility of their being out and thus causing him to wait around in discomfort, Miss Grierson's sense of propriety had unbent far enough to permit him to possess. The truth was, of course, that Barney had desired the key so that he might have most private conferences with Maggie, at any time necessity demanded, without the stolidly conscientious Miss Grierson ever knowing what had happened and being therefore unable to give dangerous testimony.
Maggie crossed and opened the door. But instead of Barney Palmer, it was Larry who stepped in. He quickly closed the door behind him.
“Larry!” she cried startled. “Why—why, I thought the police had you!”
“They did. But Hunt was with me, and he got hold of a magistrate who would have made Hunt a present of the Tombs and Police Headquarters if he had owned them.”
“Then you're out on bail?”
“Got out about ten minutes ago. Hunt didn't have any property he could put up as security, so he 'phoned my grandmother. She walked in with an armload of deeds. Why, she must own as much property in New York as the Astor Estate.”
“Larry, I'm so glad!” And then, remembering what, according to her plan, was due to begin to happen almost any moment, she exclaimed in dismay: “But, Larry, oh, why did you come here now!”
“I wanted to know—you understand—what you had decided to do after learning about your father. And I wanted to tell you that, after all my great boasts to you, I seem to have failed in every boast. Item one, the police have got me. Item two, since the police have got me, my old pals will also most likely get me. Item three, when I was arrested at Cedar Crest Miss Sherwood learned that I had known you all along and believes I was part of a conspiracy to clean out the family; so she chucked me—and I've lost what I believed my big chance to make good. So, you see, Maggie, it looks as if you were right when you predicted that I was going to fail in everything I said I was going to do.”
“Larry—Miss Sherwood believes that!” she breathed. And then she remembered again, and caught his arm with sudden energy. “Larry, you mustn't stay here!”
“Why not?”
Her answer was almost identical with one she had given the previous evening. “Because Barney Palmer may be here the next minute!”
His response was in sense also identical. “Then I'll stay right here. There's no one I want to see as much as Barney Palmer. And this time I'll have it out with him!”
Maggie was in consternation at this unexpected twist which was not in the brain-manuscript of her play at all—which indeed threatened to take her play right out of her hands. “Please go, Larry!” she cried desperately. “And please give me a chance! You'll spoil it all if you stay!”
“I'm going to stay right here,” was his grim response.
She realized there was no changing him. She glimpsed a closet door behind him, and caught at the chance of saving at least a fragment of her drama.
“Stay, then but, Larry, please give me a chance to do what I want to do! Please!” By this time she had dragged him across the room and had started to unlock the closet. “Just wait in here—and keep quiet! Please!”
He took the key from her fumbling hands, unlocked the door, and slipped the key into his pocket. “All right—I'll give you your chance,” he promised.
He stepped through the door and closed it upon himself, entombing himself in blackness. The next moment the glare of a pocket flash was in his face, blinding him.
“Larry Brainard!” gritted a low voice in the darkness.
Larry could see nothing, but there was no mistaking that voice. “Red Hannigan!” he exclaimed.
“Yes—you damned squealer! And I'm going to finish you off right here!”
The light clicked out, and a pair of lean hands almost closed on Larry's wind-pipe. But Larry caught the wrists of the older man in a grip the other could not break. There was a brief struggle in the blackness of the closet, then the slighter man stood still with his wrists manacled by Larry's hands.
“Evidently you haven't a gun on you, Red, or you, wouldn't have tried this,” Larry commented. “Anyhow, you couldn't have got away with killing in a big hotel, whether you had strangled me or shot me. I don't blame you for being sore at me, Red—only you've got me all wrong. But you and I are evidently here for the same purpose: to get next to something that's going to happen out in the room. What do you say, Red?—let's suspend hostilities for the present. You've got me where you can follow me, and you can get me any time.”
“You bet I'll get you!” declared Hannigan. And then after a few more words an armistice was agreed upon between the two men in the closet and silently, tensely, they stood in the dark awaiting whatever was to happen.
Outside Maggie, that amateur playwright who had tried so desperately to prearrange events, that inexperienced goddess from the machine, stood in a panic of fear and suspense the like of which she had never known.