CHAPTER XVITHE REAL EDWIN KEATCHAM
One Sunday after Mrs. Melville Winter and Archie came to Casa Fuerte, Mr. Keatcham sent for the colonel. There was nothing unusual in such a summons. From the beginning of his illness he had shown a curious, inexpressive desire for the soldier’s company. He would have him sit in the room, although too weak to talk to him, supposing he wished to talk, which was not at all sure. “I like-to-see-him-just-sitting-there,” he faltered to his nurse, “can’t-he-read-or-play-solitaire-like-the-old-lady?”
Sometimes Winter would be conscious that the feeble creature in the bed, with the bluish-white face, was staring at him. Whether the glassy eyes beheld his figure or went beyond him to unfinished colossal schemes that might change the fate of a continent, or drifted backward to the poverty-stricken home, the ferocious toil and the unending self-denial of Keatcham’s youth on the Pacificslope, the dim gaze gave no clue. All that was apparent was that it was always on Winter, as he curled his legs under his chair, wrote or knitted his brow over rows of playing-cards.
At the very first, Keatcham’s mind had wandered; he used to shrink from imaginary people who were in the room; he would try to talk to them, distressing himself painfully, for he was so weak that his nurses turned his head on the pillow; he would feebly motion them away. In such aberrations he would sometimes appeal, in a changed, thin, childish voice, to the obscure, toil-worn pioneer woman who had died while he was a lad. “Mother, Iwasa good boy; I always got up when you called me, didn’t I? I helped you iron when the other boys were playing—mother, please don’t let that old woman stay and cry here!” Or he would plead: “Mother, tell her, say,youtell her I didn’t know her son would kill himself—I couldn’t tell—he was a damn coward, anyhow—excuse me, mama, I didn’t mean to swear, but they make me so awful mad!” There was a girl who came, sometimes, from whose presence he shrank; a girl he had never seen; nor, indeed, had he ever known in the flesh any of the shapes which haunted him. They had lived; but neverhad his eyes fallen on them. Nevertheless, their presence was as real to him as that of the people about him whom he could hear and touch and see. It did not take Winter’s imagination long to piece out the explanation of these apparitions: they were specters of the characters in those dramas of ruthless conquest which Mercer had culled out of newspaper “stories” and affidavits and court reports and forced upon Keatcham’s attention. Miss Smith helped him to the solution, although her own ignorance of Mercer’s method was puzzling. “How did he ever know old Mrs. Ferris?” she said. “He called her Ferris and he talks about her funny dress—she always did wear a queer little basque and full skirt after all the world went into blouses—but how didheever come across her? They had a place on the James that had been in the family a hundred years and had to lose it on account of the Tidewater; and Nelson Ferris blew his brains out.”
“Don’t you know how?” asked the colonel. “Well, I’ll tell you my guess sometime. Who is the girl who seems to make him throw a fit so?”
“I’m not sure; I imagine it is poor Mabel Ray; there were two of them, sisters; they made money out of their Tidewater stock and went to NewYork to visit some kin; and they got scared when the stock fell and the dividends stopped; and they sold out at a great loss. They never did come back; they had persuaded all their kin to invest; and the stopping of the dividends made it difficult for some of the poor ones—Mabel said she couldn’t face her old aunts. She went on the stage in New York. She was very pretty; she wasn’t very strong. Anyway, you can imagine the end of the story. I saw her in the park last winter when Mrs. Winter was in New York; she turned her face away—poor Mabel!”
Through Janet Smith’s knowledge of her dead sister’s neighbors, Winter got a dozen pitiful records of the wreckage of the Tidewater. “Mighty interesting reading,” he thought grimly, “but hardly likely to make the man responsible for them stuck on himself!” Then he would look at the drawn face on the pillow and listen to the babblings of the boy who had had no childhood; and the frown would melt off his brow.
He did not always talk to his mother when his mind wandered; several times he addressed an invisible presence as “Helen” and “Dear” with an accent of tenderness very strange on those inflexible lips. When he talked to this phantasm he wasnever angry or distressed; his turgid scowl cleared; the austere lines chiseling his cheeks and brow faded; he looked years younger. But for the most part, it was to no unreal creature that he turned, but to Colonel Rupert Winter. He would address him with punctilious civility, but as one who was under some obligation to assist him, saying, for instance, “Colonel Winter, I must beg you not to let those persons in the room again. They annoy me. But you needn’t let Mercer know that. Please attend to it yourself, and get them away. Miss Smith says you will. Explain to them that when I get up I will investigate their claims. I’m too sick now!”
Conscious and free from fever, he was barely able to articulate, but when delirious fancies possessed him he could talk rapidly, in a good voice. Very soon it was clear that he was calmer for the colonel’s presence. Hence, the latter got into the habit of sitting in the room. He would request imaginary ruined and desperate beings to leave Keatcham in peace; he would gravely rise and close the door on their departure. He never was surprised nor at a loss; and his dramatic nerve never failed. Later, as the visions faded, a moody reserve wrapped the sick man. He lay motionless,evidently absorbed by thought. In one way he was what doctors call a very good patient. He obeyed all directions; he was not restless. But neither was he ever cheerful. Every day he asked for his pulse record and his temperature and his respiration. After a consultation with the doctor, Miss Smith gave them to him.
“It is against the rules,” grumbled the doctor, “but I suppose each patient has to make his own rules.” On the same theory he permitted the colonel’s visits.
Therefore, with no surprise, Winter received and obeyed the summons. Keatcham greeted him with his usual stiff courtesy.
“The doctor says I can have the—papers—will you pick out—the—one—day after I was stabbed.”
Miss Smith indicated a pile on a little table, placed ready at hand. “I kept them for him,” she said.
“Read about—the Midland,” commanded the faint, indomitable voice.
“Want the election and the newspaper sentiments?” asked the colonel; he gave it all, conscious the while of Janet Smith’s compassionate, perplexed, sorrowful eyes.
“Don’t skip!” Keatcham managed to articulate after a pause.
The colonel gave him a keen glance. “Want it straight, without a chaser?”
Keatcham closed his eyes and nodded.
The colonel read about the virtually unanimous election of Tracy; the astonishment of the outsiders among the supposed anti-Tracy element; the composed and impenetrable front of the men closest to Keatcham; the reticence and amiability of Tracy himself, in whose mien there could be detected no hint either of hostility or of added cordiality toward the men who had been expected “to drag his bleeding pride in the dust;” finally of the response of the stock-market in a phenomenal rise of Midland.
Keatcham listened with his undecipherable mask of attention; there was not so much as the flicker of an eyelid or the twitch of a muscle. All he said was: “Now, read if there is anything about the endowment of the new fellowships in some medical schools for experimental research.”
“Who gives the endowment?”
“Anonymous. In memory of Maria Warren Keatcham and Helen Bradford Keatcham. Find anything?”
The colonel found a great deal about it. The paper was full of this munificent gift, amounting to many millions of dollars and filling (with most carefully and wisely planned details) an almost absolute vacuum in the American scheme of education. The dignity and fame of the chairs and fellowships endowed were ample to tempt the best ability of the profession. The reader grew enthusiastic as he read.
“Why, it’s immense! And we have always needed it!” he exclaimed.
“There are some letters about it, there,”—Keatcham feebly motioned to a number of neatly opened, neatly assorted letters on a desk. “The doctor said I might have the letters read to me. Miss Smith got him to. For fear of exciting you, the doctors usually let you worry your head off because you don’t know about things. I’ve got to carry a few things through if it kills me. Don’t you see?”
“I see,” said the colonel, “you shall.”
The next time he saw the financier, although only a few days had elapsed, he was much stronger; he was able to breathe comfortably, he spoke with ease, in his ordinary voice; in fine, he looked his old self again, merely thinner and paler.Hardly was the colonel seated before he said without preface—Keatcham never made approaches to his subject, regarding conversational road-making as waste of brains for a busy man:
“Colonel, Miss Smith hasn’t time to be my nurse and secretary both. I won’t have one sent from New York; will you help her out?”
The colonel’s lips twitched; he was thinking that were Miss Smith working for Atkins, she couldn’t have a better chance to make a killing. “But I’ll bet my life she isn’t,” he added; “she may be trying to save his life, but she isn’t playing his game!”
He said aloud: “I will, Mr. Keatcham, if you will let me do it as part of the obligation of the situation; and there is no bally rot about compensation.”
“Very well,” said Keatcham. He did not hesitate; it was (as the colonel had already discovered) the rarest thing in the world for him to hesitate; he thought with astonishing rapidity; and he formulated his answer while his interlocutor talked; before the speech was over the answer was ready. Another trait of his had struck the soldier, namely, the laborious correctness of his speech; it was often formal and old-fashioned;Aunt Rebecca said that he talked like Daniel Webster’s speeches; but it had none of the homely and pungent savor one might expect from a man whose boyhood had scrambled through miners’ camps into a San Francisco stock office; who had never gone to school in his life by daylight; who had been mine superintendent, small speculator and small director in California until he became a big speculator and big railway controller in New York.
“You might begin on the morning mail,” Keatcham continued. “Let me sort them first.” He merely glanced at the inscriptions on the envelopes, opening and taking out one which he read rather carelessly, frowning a little before he placed it to one side.
A number of the letters concerned the endowments of the experimental chairs at the universities. Keatcham’s attention was not lightened by any ray of pleasure. Once he said: “That fellow has caught my idea,” and once: “That’s right,” but there was no animation in his voice, no interest in his pallid face. Stealing a furtive scrutiny of it, now and then, Rupert Winter was impressed with its mystical likeness to that of Cary Mercer. There was no physical similarity of color or feature;it was a likeness of the spirit rather than the flesh. The colonel’s eyes flashed.
“I have it!” he exclaimed within, “I have it; they are fanatics, both of them; Keatcham’s a fanatic of finance and Mercer is a fanatic of another sort; but fanatics they both are, ready to go any length for their principles or their ambitions or their revenge!J’ai trouvé le mot d’énigme, as Aunt Becky would say—I wonder what she’ll say to this sudden psychological splurge of mine.”
“The business hour is up,”—it was Miss Smith entering with a bowl on a white-covered tray; the sun glinted the lump of ice in the milk and the silver spoon was dazzling against the linen—“your biscuit and milk, Mr. Keatcham. Didn’t you have it when you were a boy?”
“I did, Miss Janet,”—and Keatcham actually smiled. “I used to think crackers and milk the nicest thing in the world.”
“That is because you never tasted corn pone and milk; but you are going to.”
“When you make it for me. I’m glad you’re such a good cook. It’s one of your ways I like. My mother was a very good cook. She could make better dishes out of almost nothing thanthese mongrel chefs can make with the whole world.”
“I reckon she could,” said Miss Smith; she was speaking sincerely.
“When my father didn’t strike pay dirt, my mother would open her bakery and make pies for the miners; she could make bread with potato yeast or ‘salt-emptins’—can you make salt-rising bread?”
“I can—shall I make you some, to-morrow?”
“I’d like it. My mother used to make more money than my father; sometimes when we children were low in clothes and dad owed a bigger lot of money than usual, we had a laundry at our house as well as a bakery. Yet, in spite of all the work, my mother found time to teach all of us; and she knew how to teach, too; for she was principal of a school when my father married her. She was a New Englander; so was he; but they went West. We’re forty-niners. I saw the place where our little cloth-and-board shack used to stand. After the big fire, you know. It burned us all up; we had saved a good deal and my mother had a nice bakery. She worked too hard; it killed her. Work and struggle and losing the children.”
“They died?” said Miss Janet.
“Diphtheria. They didn’t know anything about the disease then. We all had it; and my little sister and both my brothers died; but I’m tough. I lived. My mother fell into what they called a decline. I was making a little money then—I was sixteen; but I couldn’t keep her from working. Perhaps it made no difference; but it did make a difference her not having the—the right kind of food. Nobody knew anything about consumption then. I used to go out in the morning and be afraid I’d find her dead when I got back. One night I did.” He stopped abruptly, crimsoning up to his eyes—“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”
“I call that tough,”—as the colonel blurted out the words, he was conscious of a sense of repetition. When had he said those very same words before, to whom? Of all people in the world, to Cary Mercer. “Mighty tough,” murmured he softly.
“Yes,” said Keatcham, “it was.” He did not say anything more. Neither did the colonel. Keatcham obediently ate his milk and biscuit; and very shortly the colonel took his leave.
The next morning after an uneventful hour of sorting, reading and answering letters for MissSmith to copy on the traveling type-writer, Keatcham gave his new secretary a sharp sensation; he ordered in his quiet but peremptory fashion: “Now put that trash away; sit down; tell me all you know of Cary—real name is Cary Mercer, isn’t it?”
The colonel said it was; he asked him if he wanted everything.
“Everything. Straight. Without a chaser,” snapped Keatcham.
The colonel gave it to him. He began with his own acquaintance; he told about Phil Mercer; he did not slur a detail; neither did he underscore one; Keatcham got the uncolored facts. He heard them impassively, making only one comment: “A great deal of damage would be saved in this world if youngsters could be shut up until they had sense enough not to fool with firearms.” When Winter came to Mercer’s own exposition of his motives and his design if successful in his raid on the kings of the market, Keatcham grunted; at the end he breathed a noiseless jet of a sigh. “You don’t think Mercer is at all”—he tapped the side of the head.
“No more than you are.”
“Or you?”
“Oh, well,” the colonel jested, “we all have a prejudice in favor of our own sanity. What I meant was that Mercer is a bit of a fanatic; his hard luck has—well, prejudiced him—”
Keatcham’s cold, firm lips straightened into his peculiar smile, which was rather of perception than of humor.
One might say of him—Aunt Rebecca Winter did say of him—that he saw the incongruous, which makes up for humor, but he never enjoyed it; possibly it was only another factor in his contempt of mankind.
“Colonel,” said Keatcham, “do you think Wall Street is a den of thieves?”
“I do,” said the colonel promptly. “I should like to take a machine gun or two and clean you all out.”
Keatcham did not smile; he blinked his eyes and nodded. “I presume a good many people share your opinion of us.”
“Millions,” replied the colonel.
Again Keatcham nodded. “I thought so,” said he. “Of course you are all off; Wall Street is as necessary to the commonwealth as the pores to your skin; they don’t make the poison in the system any more than the pores do; they only let itescape. And I suppose you think that big financiers who control the trusts and the railways and—”
“Us,” the colonel struck in, “well?”
“You think we are thieves and liars and murderers and despots?”
“All of that,” said the colonel placidly; “also fools.”
“You certainly don’t mince your words.”
“You don’t want me to. What use would my opinion be in a one-thousandth attenuation? You’re no homeopath; and whatever else you may be, you’re no coward.”
“Yet, you think I surrendered to Mercer? You think I did it because I was afraid he would kill me? I suppose he would have killed me if I hadn’t, eh?”
“He can speak for himself about that; he seems—well, an earnest sort of man. But I don’t think you gave in because you were afraid, if that is what you mean. You are no more afraid than he was! You wanted to live, probably; you had big things on hand. The Midland was only a trump in the game; you could win the odd trick with something else; you let the Midland go.”
“Pretty close,”—Keatcham really smiled—“butthere is a good deal more of it. I was shut up with the results of my—my work. He did it very cleverly. I had nothing to distract me. There were the big type-written pages about the foolish people who had lost their money, in some cases really through my course, mostly because they got scared and let go and were wiped out when, if they had had confidence in me and held on, they would be very much better off, now. But they didn’t, and they were ruined and they starved and took their boys out of college and mortgaged their confounded homes that had been in their families ever since Adam; and the old people died of broken hearts and the girls went wrong and some of the idiotic quitters killed themselves—it was not the kind of crowd you would want shut up with you in the dark! I was shut up with them. He had some sort of way of switching off the lights from the outside. I never saw a face or heard a voice. I would have to sit there in the dark after he thought I had read enough to occupy my mind. It—was unpleasant. Perhaps you suppose that brought me round to his way of thinking?”
The colonel meditated. “I’ll tell you honestly,” he said after a pause, “I was of that opinion, orsomething of the kind, until I talked your case over with my aunt—”
“The old dame is not a fool; what did she say?”
“She said no, he didn’t convert you; but he convinced you how other people looked at your methods. You couldn’t get round the fact that a majority of your countrymen think your type of financier is worse than smallpox, and more contagious.”
“Oh, she put it that way, did she? I wish she would write a prospectus for me. Well, you think she was nearer right than you?”
“I thinkyoudo; I myself think it was a little of both. You’ve got a heart and a conscience originally, though they have got pretty well tanned out in the weather; you didn’t want to be sorry for those people, but you are. They have bothered you a lot; but it has bothered you more to think that instead of going down the ages as a colossal benefactor and empire builder, you are hung up on the hook to see where you’re at; and where youwillbe if the people get thoroughly aroused. You all are building bigger balloons when it ought to be you for the cyclone cellar! Butyouare different. You can see ahead. I give you credit for seeing.”
“Have you ever considered,” said Keatcham slowly, “that in spite of the iniquitous greed of the men you are condemning, in spite of their oppression of the people, the prosperity of the country is unparalleled? How do you explain it?”
“Crops,” said the colonel; “the crops were too big for you.”
“You might giveusa little credit—your aunt does. She was here to-day; she is a manufacturer and she comprehended that the methods of business can not be revolutionized without somebody’s getting hurt. Yet, on the whole, the change might be immensely advantageous. Now, why, in a nutshell, do you condemn us?”
“You’re after the opinion of the average man, are you?”
“I suppose so, the high average.”
The colonel crossed his legs and uncrossed them again; he looked straight into the other’s eyes; his own narrowed with thought.
“I’ll tell you,” said he. “I don’t know much about the Street or high finance or industrial development. I’m a plain soldier; I’m not a manufacturer and I’m not a speculator. I understand perfectly that you can’t have great changes without somebody’s getting hurt in the shuffle. Itis beyond me to decide whether the new industrial arrangements with the stock-jobber on top instead of the manufacturer will make for better or for worse—but I know this; it is against the fundamental law to do evil that good may come. And you fellows in Wall Street, when, to get rich quick, you lie about stocks in order to buy cheap and then lie another way to sell dear; when you make a panic out of whole cloth, as you did in 1903, because, having made about all you can out of things going up, you want to make all you can out of them going down; when you play foot-ball with great railway properties and insurance properties, because you are as willing to rob the dead as the living; when you do all that, and when your imitators, who haven’t so much brains or so much decency as you, whentheybuy up legislatures and city councils; andtheirimitators run the Black Hand business and hold people up who have money and are not strong enough, they think, to hunt them down—why, not being a philosopher but just a plain soldier, I call it bad,rottenbad. What’s more, I can tell you the American people won’t stand for it.”
“You think they can help themselves?”
“I know they can. You fellows are big, butyou won’t last over night if the American people get really aroused. And they are stirring in their sleep and kicking off the bed-clothes.”
“Yet you ought to belong to the conservatives.”
“I do. That’s why the situation is dangerous. You as an old San Franciscan ought to remember how conservative was that celebrated Vigilance Committee. It is when the long-suffering, pusillanimous, conservative element gets fighting mad that something is doing.”
“Maybe,” muttered Keatcham thoughtfully. “I believe we can manage for you better than you can for yourselves; but when the brakes are broken good driving can’t stop the machine; all the chauffeur can do is to keep the middle of the road. I like to be beaten as little as any of them; but I’m not a fool. Winter, you are used to accomplishing things; what is your notion of the secret?”
“Knowing when to stop exhausting trumps, I reckon—but you don’t play cards.”
“It is the same old game whatever you play,” said the railway king. He did not pursue the discussion; his questions, Winter had found, invariably had a purpose, and that purpose was never argument. He lay back on the big leathercushions of the lounge, his long, lean fingers drumming on the table beside him and an odd smile playing about the corners of his mouth; his next speech dived into new waters. He said: “Have those men from New York got Atkins, yet?”
“They couldn’t find him,” answered the colonel. “I have been having him shadowed, on my own idea—I think he stabbed you, though I have no proof of it; I take it you have proof of your matter.”
“Plenty,” said Keatcham. “I was going to send him to the pen in self-defense. It isn’t safe for me to have it creep out that my secretary made a fortune selling my secrets. Besides, I don’t want to be killed. You say they can’t find him?”
“Seems to have gone to Japan—”
“Seems? What do you mean?”
“I am not sure. He was booked for a steamer; and a man under his name, of his build and color, did actually sail on the boat,” announced the colonel blandly.
“Hmn! He’s right here in San Francisco; read that note.”
Winter read the note, written on Palace Hotelnote-paper, in a sharp, scrawling, Italian hand. The contents were sufficiently startling.
Dear friend Hoping this find you well. Why do you disregard a true Warning? We did write you afore once for say you give that money or we shal be unfortunately compel to kill you quick. No? You laff. God knows we got have that twenty-five thousan dol. Yes. And now because of such great expence it is fifty thousan you shall pay. We did not mean kill you dead only show you for sure there is no place so secret you can Hide no place so strong can defend you. Be Warn. You come with $50000.00 in $100 bills. You go or send Mr. Mercer to the Red Hat; ask for Louis. Say to Louis For the Black Hand. Louis will say For the Black Hand. You follow him. No harm will come to you. You will be forgive all heretobefores. Elseways you must die April 15-20.This is sure. You have felt our dagger the other is worse.You well wishing Fren,The Black Hand.
Dear friend Hoping this find you well. Why do you disregard a true Warning? We did write you afore once for say you give that money or we shal be unfortunately compel to kill you quick. No? You laff. God knows we got have that twenty-five thousan dol. Yes. And now because of such great expence it is fifty thousan you shall pay. We did not mean kill you dead only show you for sure there is no place so secret you can Hide no place so strong can defend you. Be Warn. You come with $50000.00 in $100 bills. You go or send Mr. Mercer to the Red Hat; ask for Louis. Say to Louis For the Black Hand. Louis will say For the Black Hand. You follow him. No harm will come to you. You will be forgive all heretobefores. Elseways you must die April 15-20.This is sure. You have felt our dagger the other is worse.
You well wishing Fren,The Black Hand.
“Sounds like Atkins pretending to be a Dago,” said the colonel dryly. “I could do better myself.”
“Very likely,” said Keatcham.
“Does he mean business? What’s he after?”
“To get me out of the way. He knows he isn’t safe until I’m dead. Then he hasn’t been cleaned out, but he has lost a lot of money in this Midland business. The cipher he has is of no use to him, there, or in the other things which unluckily heknows about. With me dead and the cipher in his hands, he could have made millions; even without the cipher, if he knows I’m dead before the rest of the world, he ought to make at least a half-million. I think you will find that he has put everything he has on the chance. I told you he was slick. And unstable. What do you anticipate he will do? Straight, with no chaser, as you say.”
“Well, straight with no chaser, I should say a bomb was the meanest trick in sight, so, naturally, he will choose a bomb.”
“I agree with you. You say the house is patrolled?”
“The whole place. But we’ll put on a bigger force; I’ll see Birdsall at once. Atkins would have to hire his explosive talent, wouldn’t he?” questioned the colonel.
“Oh, he knows plenty of the under-world rascals; and besides, for a fellow of his habits, there is a big chance for loot. Mrs. Millicent Winter tells me that your aunt has valuable jewels with her. If she told me, she may have told other people, and Atkins may know. He will use other people, but he will come, too, in my opinion.”
“I see,” said the colonel; “to make sure they don’t foozle the bomb. But he’ll have his alibiready all right. Mr. Keatcham, did they send you a previous letter?”
“Oh, dear no; that’s only part of the game; makes a better story. So is using the hotel paper; if it throws suspicion on anybody it would be your party; you see Atkins knew Mercer had a grudge against me as well as him. He was counting on that. I rather wonder that he didn’t fix up some proof for you to find.”
“By Jove!” cried the colonel; “maybe he did.”
“And you didn’t find it?”
“Well, you see I was too busy with you; the others must have overlooked it. Hard on Atkins after he took so much trouble, wasn’t it?”
“I told you he was too subtle. But it is not wise to underrate him, or bombs either; we must get the women and those boys out of the house.”
“But how? You are not really acquainted with my aunt, Mrs. Rebecca Winter, I take it.”
“You think she wouldn’t go if there was any chance of danger?”
“You couldn’t fire her unless out of a cannon; but she would help get Archie away; Mrs. Melville and Miss Smith—”
“Well—ur—Miss Smith, I am afraid, will not be easy to manage; you see, she knows—”
“Knows? Did you tell her?” asked Colonel Winter anxiously.
“Well, not exactly. As the children say, it told itself. There has been a kind of an attempt, already. A box came, marked from a man I know in New York, properly labeled with express company’s labels. Miss Smith opened it; I could see her, because she was in the bath-room with the door open. There was another box inside, wrapped in white tissue paper. Very neatly. She examined that box with singular care and then she drew some water in the lavatory basin, half opened the box and put the whole thing under water in the basin. Then I thought it was time for me and I asked her if it was a bomb. Do you know that girl had sense enough not to try to deceive me? She saw that I had seen every move she had made. She said merely that it was safe under water. It was an ingenious little affair which had an electrical arrangement for touching off a spark when the lid of the box would be lifted.”
“Ah, yes. Thoughtful little plan to amuse an invalid by letting him open the box, himself, to see the nice surprises from New York. Very neat, indeed. What did you do with the box?”
“Nothing, so far. It only came about an hour ago.”
“Do you reckon some of the Black Hands are out on the street, rubbering to see if there are any signs of anything doing?”
“Perhaps; you might let Birdsall keep a watch for anything like that. But they hear, somehow; there is a leak somewhere in our establishment. It is not your aunt; she can hold her tongue as well as use it; the boy, Archie, does not know anything to tell—”
“He wouldn’t tell it if he did,” interrupted the colonel; and very concisely but with evident pride he gave Archie’s experience in the Chinese quarter.
Keatcham’s comment took the listener’s breath away; so far afield was it and so unlike his experience of the man; it was: “Winter, a son like that would be a good deal of a comfort, wouldn’t he?”
“Poor little chap!” said Winter. “He hasn’t any father to be proud of him—father and mother both dead.”
Keatcham eyed Winter thoughtfully a moment, then he said: “You’ve been married and lost children, your aunt says. That must be hard.But—did you ever read that poem of James Whitcomb Riley’s to his friend whose child was dead? It’s true what he says—they were better off than he ‘who had no child to die.’”
Rupert was looking away from the speaker with the instinctive embarrassment of a man who surprises the deeper feelings of another. He could see out of the window the lovely April garden and Janet Smith amid the almond blossoms. Only her shining black head and her white shoulders and bodice rose above the pink clusters. She looked up and nodded, seeing him; her face was a little pale, but she was smiling.
“I don’t know,” he said, “it’s hard enough either way for a man.”
“I never lost any children”—Keatcham’s tone was dry, still, but it had not quite the former desiccated quality—“but I was married, for a little while. If it’s as bad to lose your children as it is to lose the hope of having them, it must be hard. You lost your wife, too?”
“Yes,” said Rupert Winter.
At this moment he became conscious that Keatcham was avoiding his gaze in the very manner of his avoiding of Keatcham’s a moment ago; and it gave him a bewildering sensation.
“I wanted to marry my wife for seven years before we were married,” Keatcham continued in that carefully monotonous voice. “She was the daughter of the superintendent of the mine where I was working. I was only eighteen when I first saw her. I was twenty-five when we were married. She used to give me lessons; she was educated and accomplished. She did more than is easy telling, for me. Of course, her parents were opposed at first because they looked higher for her, but she brought them round by her patience and her sweetness and her faith in me. Six months after we were married, she had an accident which left her a helpless invalid in a wheeled chair, at the best; at the worst, suffering—you’ve known what it is to see anybody, whom you care for, in horrible pain and trying not to show it when you come near?”
“I have,” said Winter; “merry hell, isn’t it?”
“I have seen that expression,” said Keatcham; “I never recognized its peculiar appropriateness before. Yes, it is that. Yet, Winter, those two years she lived afterwards were the happiest of my whole life. She said, the last night she was with me, that they had been the happiest of hers.” The same flush which once before, when he hadseemed moved, had crept up to his temples, burned his hollow cheeks. He was holding the edge of the table with the tips of his fingers and the blood settled about the nails with the pressure of his grip. There was an intense moment during which Winter vainly struggled to think of something to say and looked more of his sympathy than he was aware; then: “Cary Mercer needn’t think that he has had all the hard times in the world!” said Keatcham in his usual toneless voice, relaxing his hold and leaning back on his pillows. The color ebbed away gradually from his face.
“I don’t wonder you didn’t marry again,” said Winter.
“You would not wonder if you had known Helen. She always understood. Of course, now, at sixty-one, I could buy a pretty, innocent, young girl who would do as her parents bade her, and cry her eyes out before the wedding, or a handsome and brilliant society woman with plenty of matrimonial experience—but I don’t want them. I should have to explain myself to them; I don’t know how to explain myself; you see I can’t half do it—”
“I reckon I understand a little.”
“I guess you do. You are different, too. Well,let’s get down to business, think up some way of getting the women out of the house; and get your sleuths after Atkins. It is ‘we get him, or he gets us!’”
The amateur secretary assented and prepared to go, for the valet was at the door, ready to relieve him; but opposite Keatcham, he paused a second, made a pretense of hunting for his hat, picked it up in his left hand and held out the right hand, saying, “Well, take care of yourself.”
Keatcham nodded; he shook the hand with a good firm pressure. “Much obliged, Winter,” said he.
“Well,” meditated the soldier as he went his way, “I never did think to take that financial bucaneer by the hand; but—it wasn’t the bucaneer, it was the real Edwin Keatcham.”