CHAPTER XXIX.Danny“I think,” Danny said, “that Chad did it.”Sam lowered his brows, and turned those blue searchlights of his on her. “That is a bad beginning, my girl,” he said, kindly enough, though. “You don’t think that. Not for a minute. Better start over again.”“Uncle Sam,” she pleaded, “listen. You spoke about clearing everyone’s name, and about the honor of the Desert Moon. Chad’s confession does that—does all of it. Why not let well enough alone?”My own words; but I had not expected to hear them from Danny. The only reason for them seemed to be that Hubert Hand had frightened her with his case against John. Was she the sort of girl who would keep on loving John, and marry him, if she thought that he had killed her sister? I did not believe it.John said, “Danny!” And, knowing as little as I do about being loved, I knew that I should hate to have my sweetheart pronounce my name with a pinch of horror, and a pinch of anger, and a big dash of bewilderment, as John had pronounced hers.Sam said, “Somebody else suggested that to-day, Danny. I told them that there was no question of well enough while the man who had murdered your sister was going about alive, and while his helper was keeping his secret on the Desert Moon.”“You said that?” Danny questioned, and gave us all another severe shock by accenting the pronoun.“I said that, yes.” Sam showed signs of rising dander. “And I thought that you, if anyone, more than anyone, would agree with me.”“Only,” she answered, “I should rather let a guilty person go free, escape, than to persecute an innocent person.”“No innocent person is going to be persecuted on the Desert Moon,” Sam said, “and no guilty one is going to escape, either. You’re going to be a good, sensible girl, too, and answer a few questions I want to ask you.“First thing I want to know is, what was it that you girls were hunting for, all the time, here on the ranch?”“We had been told,” Danny answered, “that there was a very large sum of money hidden here on this place. We came to get it. That is—Gaby did. I mean—before we left the continent I knew that I wanted to stay here, for a long time. I cared much more about staying here, and keeping Gaby here, than I cared about finding the money. Really, I—I hoped not to find the money. The people with whom I had been living in England had broken up their home there. I had no home. That is how I happened to be in Switzerland, with Gaby. I——”She broke down, and hid her face in her hands. We all sat, quietly, and waited.With her face still covered she appealed to Sam. “Uncle, I can’t tell all this, to-day, I can’t. I loved Gaby. I did love her. If she were alive—— But she isn’t. Please, please don’t force me to go on with this.”“You’ve got me wrong, Danny,” Sam said, “I didn’t expect you to tell about all of your past lives, and that. But this stuff now about money hidden here. Could it have any bearing on the murder?”She shook her head. “I think not. Not possibly. There was no money here, anyway, as it turned out. That is—if Gaby told me the truth about anything. I thought that she did. But now—she spoke of keeping fear and dread from me, in her last note to me. I—— I can’t talk of this, to-day, I tell you!”“See here, dad,” John spoke up, “Danny isn’t fit to go through with this to-day. I think she has told me everything she has to tell. She told me most of it this morning. I’ve got it straight. How about allowing me to go on with it?”“Do you think any of it might have a bearing on the murder?”“Yes, I think it might.”Sam banged on the table with his fist. “By God,” he roared, “what kind of people have I got to deal with? Not five minutes ago, you sat right there and swore that you had told everything you know. Couldn’t even begin. Couldn’t think of a thing to say. No suspicion. No hints of any kind, except a slur at a dead boy. Now you come out with this. By the Lord, Hand, you may be a better man than I think you are——”Danny’s voice cut in like scissors slithering through taffeta silk. “Be careful, there,” she said. I remembered the way she had brushed the beaded bag. Something cold went trailing down my backbone. It was time, and past, I thought, for me to take a hand.“Sam,” I said, “what’s become of all your fine talk about us not acting like yelping dogs, and swallowing our pride, and helping out, and so on? I told you, when you started this, that it was a fool piece of business. You, nor nobody, can force truth out of folks. You’re kind of back on your quotations, or you’d remember the one about leading a horse to water. How do you think anyone is ever going to get any place with you pounding and shouting and blaspheming around all the while? If you think the fact that John wouldn’t betray Danny’s confidence to satisfy a crazy whim of yours makes him out a murderer, you’ve got less sense at sixty-five than you had when you were born. The best thing you can do, is to follow your advice to me, and be quiet. John’s ready to talk now, if you’ll keep still and give him half a chance.”I have never yet seen the man who wouldn’t quiet down, mild as mush, when a sensible woman took it on herself to give him a good scolding. The strongest man will drop before a good, strong volley of woman’s words, the same as he would before a shooting squad.“Go on, John,” I said, seeing that Sam had dropped, and wanting John to get a start before Sam had had time to pick himself up, and dust off, and ask Danny what she had meant by hissing at him to be careful.“Shall I, Danny?” John asked. She nodded.“It isn’t any too pleasant, even for me,” John began, “but the straight of it is, that while Danny, for years, was a companion to this lady in England, Gaby was running around over Europe with a darned rotten lot of associates. On the face of things, she was an actress; leading lady with a company that traveled all over the country—over several countries—giving plays. That seemed to be mostly a blind, though, for her real occupation, which was leading lady with a crew of blackmailers. Danny doesn’t admit it, but I think there is no doubt but that she had a lover named Lewis Bauermont—something like that. He was leading man in the theatrical company, manager of it, and also of the blackmailing gang.“About six months before Danny wrote here, the lady, whom Danny had been serving as a companion, died. It left Danny at loose ends. She had stayed there more for love than for money. She had next to no money saved. Gaby wrote that she could give her a small part in her company. Danny joined her in France. She had been there a couple of weeks, when the company went on the rocks. Danny thought it was done purposely, since one of their blackmail victims was making it too hot for them.“Gabrielle and Danny went to Switzerland. This Lewis what’s-his-name——”“Bauermont.”“Bauermont, showed up there in a few days and hung around. He and Gaby got to quarreling all the time. Gaby, who had always had plenty of money, began to be short of funds.“Danny was as miserable as—well, as Danny would be in a mess like that. She remembered this place, and begged Gaby to come here, and rest a while, and get rid of this Bauermont, and the other hangers-on, and get ready to make a fresh start. You know, a clean start. Dan says Gaby had real ability as an actress; and that she could have easily found a position in some stock company in the United States. Gaby wouldn’t listen to Danny’s plan of coming here. But, once or twice, she used the idea as a threat to make this Bauermont bird come to terms. He wouldn’t come. Later, Gaby began to give him some of his own blackmailing medicine. I guess he was pretty keen to get rid of her. And her having talked about the Desert Moon gave him his idea.“He showed up one night with a letter from Canneziano, written from San Quentin. Bauermont was old enough, by the way, to have been Gaby’s father. He and Canneziano had been pals here in the United States; and had gotten together again, three years ago, when Bauermont had been over here for six months. The letter, which had been forwarded all over this country and half of Europe, said only that he was to leave prison on the fourth of July, and wanted to know where he could meet Bauermont shortly after that date. Probably all Canneziano wanted was to renew his old connections; but the letter was cryptic enough for Bauermont to make his story out of it.“A cock-and-bull yarn about how he and Canneziano had held up that Tonopah mail train, three years ago—the train that was carrying a big shipment of currency for the federal reserve bank. A hundred thousand dollars, wasn’t it? We all remember it, I guess. The robbers got away. Well, this Bauermont bird told the girls that he and Canneziano had been the robbers.“It seems he made a pretty fair story out of it—how he and Canneziano had decided that every bank in the country would have the numbers of the bills by morning, and how they’d agreed to cache them in some safe place for a rather long time. They’d thought it best, too, to part company. So Bauermont went on to Salt Lake, and Canneziano, since we were handy, came and hid the money here on the ranch.”Sam interrupted. “Like hell he did!”“No, of course he didn’t, dad. I’m giving you Bauermont’s story, that’s all. According to him Canneziano hid the money here. He was to have joined Bauermont in Salt Lake, but he got scared and went south instead, to ’Frisco. He’d been there only a few weeks, when he got pinched for running a gambling hall and sent up for three years.“Bauermont went to see him after he was in prison. He told Bauermont that he had hidden the money here, all right; but he would not tell him where. He said it was safe, that no one could find it—not in a thousand years. That was all Bauermont could get out of him, except a promise to meet him, when he got out of prison, and come here with him to get the money.“You, anyone, can see that the whole story is as full of holes as a sieve. I don’t understand how Gaby ever fell for it. Danny will believe most anything anyone tells her. She is so honest herself, she thinks everyone else is honest. You can imagine how this plan, of coming here to get the money, went against the grain with her. But she was so desperate about Gaby, and the rottenness there, that she was willing to accept any plan to get Gaby away from it.”“I thought we could not find the money,” Danny supplemented. “Though John says I believe anything, someway I never did fully believe that story. I never believed anything, really, that Lewis said. It was the only chance I had to get Gaby away from there—and I took it, on the principle, you know, of solving one problem at a time.”“Well,” John said, “that’s that. The letter Gaby got, a few days ago, was from this Bauermont. Danny could not read the code, but she has every reason to think that the copy Gaby read to her was genuine. In it he said that the whole thing, from start to finish, had been a put up job on Gaby. He and Canneziano had been in Denver at the time, had read all the accounts of the train robbery in the papers, and had kicked themselves to think that they hadn’t been smart enough to have pulled it off themselves. But they had not; had had no connection with the affair. The point of it was, that he had found another girl, was tired of Gaby, and wanted to ship her out of the way. Danny says the whole thing was an insult, from beginning to end; and that it seemed to have been written with no other motive than a desire to humiliate Gaby, twit her—laugh in her face.”“Sounds fishy to me,” Sam mused. “If this fellow wanted to be shed of her, seems as if the best thing he could have done was to keep his mouth shut, and keep her here, hunting the hidden treasure until the end of time.”“I think,” Danny answered, “that he thought Gaby might grow tired of searching, and return to him. Lewis knew that father was to be released, and that he and Gaby might meet at any time, and Gaby would then learn the truth. Lewis is mean and cruel. He wanted the zest—if you can possibly understand—of writing that cruel, wicked letter.”“See here,” Sam said. “Suppose, after writing it, he got scared of what he had done. Gaby, you know, was—well, she was a pretty violent girl. He might have thought it over, and decided that it would be a lot safer to have her clear out of the way. Or, more likely, before he ever wrote that letter, he might have made arrangements with some one of his gang over here to come up and put her out of the way, shortly after she’d got the letter——”“I move,” Hubert Hand interrupted, “that we all adjourn, and go to hunt for the secret staircase and the concealed passage-way.”“Trying to be funny?” Sam asked, with a bright blue glare.“Not at all. But the secret staircase is all that is lacking, isn’t it? We’ve begun with the buried treasure, we’ve got the motive, and the international band of organized criminals. Slick. All there. Romantic and thrilling as you please. Only, it is a long way from Switzerland to Nevada and the key in Mary’s pocket.”
“I think,” Danny said, “that Chad did it.”
Sam lowered his brows, and turned those blue searchlights of his on her. “That is a bad beginning, my girl,” he said, kindly enough, though. “You don’t think that. Not for a minute. Better start over again.”
“Uncle Sam,” she pleaded, “listen. You spoke about clearing everyone’s name, and about the honor of the Desert Moon. Chad’s confession does that—does all of it. Why not let well enough alone?”
My own words; but I had not expected to hear them from Danny. The only reason for them seemed to be that Hubert Hand had frightened her with his case against John. Was she the sort of girl who would keep on loving John, and marry him, if she thought that he had killed her sister? I did not believe it.
John said, “Danny!” And, knowing as little as I do about being loved, I knew that I should hate to have my sweetheart pronounce my name with a pinch of horror, and a pinch of anger, and a big dash of bewilderment, as John had pronounced hers.
Sam said, “Somebody else suggested that to-day, Danny. I told them that there was no question of well enough while the man who had murdered your sister was going about alive, and while his helper was keeping his secret on the Desert Moon.”
“You said that?” Danny questioned, and gave us all another severe shock by accenting the pronoun.
“I said that, yes.” Sam showed signs of rising dander. “And I thought that you, if anyone, more than anyone, would agree with me.”
“Only,” she answered, “I should rather let a guilty person go free, escape, than to persecute an innocent person.”
“No innocent person is going to be persecuted on the Desert Moon,” Sam said, “and no guilty one is going to escape, either. You’re going to be a good, sensible girl, too, and answer a few questions I want to ask you.
“First thing I want to know is, what was it that you girls were hunting for, all the time, here on the ranch?”
“We had been told,” Danny answered, “that there was a very large sum of money hidden here on this place. We came to get it. That is—Gaby did. I mean—before we left the continent I knew that I wanted to stay here, for a long time. I cared much more about staying here, and keeping Gaby here, than I cared about finding the money. Really, I—I hoped not to find the money. The people with whom I had been living in England had broken up their home there. I had no home. That is how I happened to be in Switzerland, with Gaby. I——”
She broke down, and hid her face in her hands. We all sat, quietly, and waited.
With her face still covered she appealed to Sam. “Uncle, I can’t tell all this, to-day, I can’t. I loved Gaby. I did love her. If she were alive—— But she isn’t. Please, please don’t force me to go on with this.”
“You’ve got me wrong, Danny,” Sam said, “I didn’t expect you to tell about all of your past lives, and that. But this stuff now about money hidden here. Could it have any bearing on the murder?”
She shook her head. “I think not. Not possibly. There was no money here, anyway, as it turned out. That is—if Gaby told me the truth about anything. I thought that she did. But now—she spoke of keeping fear and dread from me, in her last note to me. I—— I can’t talk of this, to-day, I tell you!”
“See here, dad,” John spoke up, “Danny isn’t fit to go through with this to-day. I think she has told me everything she has to tell. She told me most of it this morning. I’ve got it straight. How about allowing me to go on with it?”
“Do you think any of it might have a bearing on the murder?”
“Yes, I think it might.”
Sam banged on the table with his fist. “By God,” he roared, “what kind of people have I got to deal with? Not five minutes ago, you sat right there and swore that you had told everything you know. Couldn’t even begin. Couldn’t think of a thing to say. No suspicion. No hints of any kind, except a slur at a dead boy. Now you come out with this. By the Lord, Hand, you may be a better man than I think you are——”
Danny’s voice cut in like scissors slithering through taffeta silk. “Be careful, there,” she said. I remembered the way she had brushed the beaded bag. Something cold went trailing down my backbone. It was time, and past, I thought, for me to take a hand.
“Sam,” I said, “what’s become of all your fine talk about us not acting like yelping dogs, and swallowing our pride, and helping out, and so on? I told you, when you started this, that it was a fool piece of business. You, nor nobody, can force truth out of folks. You’re kind of back on your quotations, or you’d remember the one about leading a horse to water. How do you think anyone is ever going to get any place with you pounding and shouting and blaspheming around all the while? If you think the fact that John wouldn’t betray Danny’s confidence to satisfy a crazy whim of yours makes him out a murderer, you’ve got less sense at sixty-five than you had when you were born. The best thing you can do, is to follow your advice to me, and be quiet. John’s ready to talk now, if you’ll keep still and give him half a chance.”
I have never yet seen the man who wouldn’t quiet down, mild as mush, when a sensible woman took it on herself to give him a good scolding. The strongest man will drop before a good, strong volley of woman’s words, the same as he would before a shooting squad.
“Go on, John,” I said, seeing that Sam had dropped, and wanting John to get a start before Sam had had time to pick himself up, and dust off, and ask Danny what she had meant by hissing at him to be careful.
“Shall I, Danny?” John asked. She nodded.
“It isn’t any too pleasant, even for me,” John began, “but the straight of it is, that while Danny, for years, was a companion to this lady in England, Gaby was running around over Europe with a darned rotten lot of associates. On the face of things, she was an actress; leading lady with a company that traveled all over the country—over several countries—giving plays. That seemed to be mostly a blind, though, for her real occupation, which was leading lady with a crew of blackmailers. Danny doesn’t admit it, but I think there is no doubt but that she had a lover named Lewis Bauermont—something like that. He was leading man in the theatrical company, manager of it, and also of the blackmailing gang.
“About six months before Danny wrote here, the lady, whom Danny had been serving as a companion, died. It left Danny at loose ends. She had stayed there more for love than for money. She had next to no money saved. Gaby wrote that she could give her a small part in her company. Danny joined her in France. She had been there a couple of weeks, when the company went on the rocks. Danny thought it was done purposely, since one of their blackmail victims was making it too hot for them.
“Gabrielle and Danny went to Switzerland. This Lewis what’s-his-name——”
“Bauermont.”
“Bauermont, showed up there in a few days and hung around. He and Gaby got to quarreling all the time. Gaby, who had always had plenty of money, began to be short of funds.
“Danny was as miserable as—well, as Danny would be in a mess like that. She remembered this place, and begged Gaby to come here, and rest a while, and get rid of this Bauermont, and the other hangers-on, and get ready to make a fresh start. You know, a clean start. Dan says Gaby had real ability as an actress; and that she could have easily found a position in some stock company in the United States. Gaby wouldn’t listen to Danny’s plan of coming here. But, once or twice, she used the idea as a threat to make this Bauermont bird come to terms. He wouldn’t come. Later, Gaby began to give him some of his own blackmailing medicine. I guess he was pretty keen to get rid of her. And her having talked about the Desert Moon gave him his idea.
“He showed up one night with a letter from Canneziano, written from San Quentin. Bauermont was old enough, by the way, to have been Gaby’s father. He and Canneziano had been pals here in the United States; and had gotten together again, three years ago, when Bauermont had been over here for six months. The letter, which had been forwarded all over this country and half of Europe, said only that he was to leave prison on the fourth of July, and wanted to know where he could meet Bauermont shortly after that date. Probably all Canneziano wanted was to renew his old connections; but the letter was cryptic enough for Bauermont to make his story out of it.
“A cock-and-bull yarn about how he and Canneziano had held up that Tonopah mail train, three years ago—the train that was carrying a big shipment of currency for the federal reserve bank. A hundred thousand dollars, wasn’t it? We all remember it, I guess. The robbers got away. Well, this Bauermont bird told the girls that he and Canneziano had been the robbers.
“It seems he made a pretty fair story out of it—how he and Canneziano had decided that every bank in the country would have the numbers of the bills by morning, and how they’d agreed to cache them in some safe place for a rather long time. They’d thought it best, too, to part company. So Bauermont went on to Salt Lake, and Canneziano, since we were handy, came and hid the money here on the ranch.”
Sam interrupted. “Like hell he did!”
“No, of course he didn’t, dad. I’m giving you Bauermont’s story, that’s all. According to him Canneziano hid the money here. He was to have joined Bauermont in Salt Lake, but he got scared and went south instead, to ’Frisco. He’d been there only a few weeks, when he got pinched for running a gambling hall and sent up for three years.
“Bauermont went to see him after he was in prison. He told Bauermont that he had hidden the money here, all right; but he would not tell him where. He said it was safe, that no one could find it—not in a thousand years. That was all Bauermont could get out of him, except a promise to meet him, when he got out of prison, and come here with him to get the money.
“You, anyone, can see that the whole story is as full of holes as a sieve. I don’t understand how Gaby ever fell for it. Danny will believe most anything anyone tells her. She is so honest herself, she thinks everyone else is honest. You can imagine how this plan, of coming here to get the money, went against the grain with her. But she was so desperate about Gaby, and the rottenness there, that she was willing to accept any plan to get Gaby away from it.”
“I thought we could not find the money,” Danny supplemented. “Though John says I believe anything, someway I never did fully believe that story. I never believed anything, really, that Lewis said. It was the only chance I had to get Gaby away from there—and I took it, on the principle, you know, of solving one problem at a time.”
“Well,” John said, “that’s that. The letter Gaby got, a few days ago, was from this Bauermont. Danny could not read the code, but she has every reason to think that the copy Gaby read to her was genuine. In it he said that the whole thing, from start to finish, had been a put up job on Gaby. He and Canneziano had been in Denver at the time, had read all the accounts of the train robbery in the papers, and had kicked themselves to think that they hadn’t been smart enough to have pulled it off themselves. But they had not; had had no connection with the affair. The point of it was, that he had found another girl, was tired of Gaby, and wanted to ship her out of the way. Danny says the whole thing was an insult, from beginning to end; and that it seemed to have been written with no other motive than a desire to humiliate Gaby, twit her—laugh in her face.”
“Sounds fishy to me,” Sam mused. “If this fellow wanted to be shed of her, seems as if the best thing he could have done was to keep his mouth shut, and keep her here, hunting the hidden treasure until the end of time.”
“I think,” Danny answered, “that he thought Gaby might grow tired of searching, and return to him. Lewis knew that father was to be released, and that he and Gaby might meet at any time, and Gaby would then learn the truth. Lewis is mean and cruel. He wanted the zest—if you can possibly understand—of writing that cruel, wicked letter.”
“See here,” Sam said. “Suppose, after writing it, he got scared of what he had done. Gaby, you know, was—well, she was a pretty violent girl. He might have thought it over, and decided that it would be a lot safer to have her clear out of the way. Or, more likely, before he ever wrote that letter, he might have made arrangements with some one of his gang over here to come up and put her out of the way, shortly after she’d got the letter——”
“I move,” Hubert Hand interrupted, “that we all adjourn, and go to hunt for the secret staircase and the concealed passage-way.”
“Trying to be funny?” Sam asked, with a bright blue glare.
“Not at all. But the secret staircase is all that is lacking, isn’t it? We’ve begun with the buried treasure, we’ve got the motive, and the international band of organized criminals. Slick. All there. Romantic and thrilling as you please. Only, it is a long way from Switzerland to Nevada and the key in Mary’s pocket.”