Itwasn’t until the third lesson that Teddie, even through her self-immuring hunger for knowledge, began to doubt the wisdom of her arrangement with Raoul Uhlan. She began to dislike the perfume with which this master of the brush apparently anointed his person, just as she detected a growing tendency to emigrate from the realms of pure Art to the airier outlands of more personal issues. She was as clean of heart as she was clear of head, and she resented what began to dawn on her as the rather unnecessary physical nearness of the man as he corrected her drawing or pointed out her deficiencies in composition. But his knowledge was undeniable, and his criticisms were true. She was learning something. She was unquestionably getting somewhere. So she refused to see what she had no wish to see. She endured the uliginous oyster of self-esteem for the white pearl of knowledge that it harbored.
But on the day after the talk with her Uncle Chandler, when the next lesson was under way, a new disquiet crept through her. The man seemed to be forgetting himself. Instead of studying her over-scrambled color-effects he seemed intent on studying the much more bewitching lines of her forward-thrust chin and throat. Once, when he leaned closer, apparently by accident, she moved away, apparently without thought. It both puzzled and disturbed her, for she had not remained as oblivious as she pretended to his stare of open hunger. Yet the intentness of his gaze, as he attempted to lock glances with her, turned out to be a bullet destined forever to fall short of its target. He was, in fact, wasting his time on a Morse-code of the soul which had no distinct meaning to her. He was lavishing on her a slowly-perfected technique for which she had no fit and proper appreciation. Teddie, in fact, didn’t quite know what he was driving at.
It wasn’t until she realized, beyond all measure of doubt, that the repeated contact of his shoulder against hers was not accidental that a faint glow of revulsion, shot through with anger, awakened in her. But her inner citadels of fear remained uninvaded. She had nipped more than one amatory advance in the bud, in her time. With one brief look, long before that, she had blighted more than one incipient romance. Her scorn was like a saber, slender and steel-cold, and she could wield it with the impersonal young brutality of youth. And it had always been sufficient.
When he stood close behind her, as she still sat confronting her sketch, and, as he talked, placed his left hand on the shoulder of her blue canvas blouse, and then, leaning closer, caught in his big bony hand her small hand that held the pencil, to guide it along the line it seemed unable to follow, she told herself that he was merely intent on correcting her drawing. But a trouble, vague and small as the worry of a mouse behind midnight wainscotting, began to nibble at her heart. For that enclosing big hand was holding her own longer than need be, that small horripilating disturbance of her hair was something more than accidental. The small nibble of trouble grew into something disturbing, something almost momentous, something to be stopped without loss of time.
She got up sidewise from her chair, with a half-twist of the torso that was an inheritance from her basket-ball days. It freed her without obvious effort from all contact with the over-intimate leaning figure. She even retained possession of the crayon-pencil, which she put down beside her Nile-green brush-bowl after crossing the room to the blackwooded console between the two windows.
“I guess that will about do us for to-day, won’t it?” she said in her quiet and slightly reedy voice as she proceeded, with deluding grave impersonality, to open one of the windows.
But he crossed the room after her and stood close beside her at the window. He towered above her in his bigness like something taurine, alert and yet ponderously calm.
“Why are you afraid of me?” he asked, with his eyes on the gardenia-white oval of her cheek.
“I’m not,” she replied with a crisp small laugh like the stirring of chopped ice in a wine-cooler. “I’m not in the least afraid of you.”
A less obtuse man would have been chilled by the scorn in her voice. But Uhlan was too sure of his ground, his all too familiar ground, to heed side-issues.
“It’s you who makes me afraid of myself,” he murmured, stooping closer to her. He spoke quite collectedly, though his face was a shade paler than before.
“You said to-morrow at three, I believe,” she observed in an icily abstracted voice. That tone, she remembered, had always served its purpose. It was conclusive, coolly dismissive. For she still refused to dignify that approach with opposition. She declined to recognize it, much less to combat it.
“Did I?” he said in a genuinely abstracted whisper, for his mind was not on what he said or heard. His mind, indeed, was fixed on only one thing. And that was her utterly defenseless loveliness. The blackness of his pupils and the aquiline cruelty about the corner of his eyes frightened her even more than his pallor.
But she did not give way to panic, for to do so was not the custom of her kind. She fought down her sudden weak impulse to cry out, her equally absurd propulsion to flight, her even more ridiculous temptation to break the window-panes in front of her with her clenched fist and scream for help.
For she realized, even before he made a move, that he was impervious to the weapons that had always served her. He stood beyond the frontiers of those impulses and reactions in which she moved and had her being. The very laws of her world meant nothing to him. It was like waking up and finding a burglar in the house, a burglar who knew no law but force.
So she wheeled slowly about, with her head up, watching him. There was a blaze like something perilously close to hate in her slightly widened eyes, for she knew, now, what lay ahead of her. Instinct, in one flash, told her what lurked beside her path. And her inability to escape it, to confront it with what it ought to be confronted with, was maddening.
“You Hun!” she said in a passionate small moan of misery which he mistook for terror. “Oh, you Hun!”
He could afford to smile down at her, fortified by her loss of fortitude, warm with the winy ichors of mastery.
“You adorable kid!” he cried out, catching the hand which she reached out to the window-frame to steady herself with.
“Don’ttouchme!” she called out in a choking squeak of anger. And this time, as he swung her about, he laughed openly.
“You wonderful little wildcat!” he murmured, as he pinned her elbows close to her sides and drew her, smothered and helpless, in under the wing of his shoulder.
For a moment or two she fought with all that was left of her strength, writhing and twisting and panting, struggling to free her pinioned arms. Then she ceased, abruptly, devastated, not so much by her helplessness as by the ignominy of her efforts. She went limp in his arms as he forced back her head, and with his arm encircling her shoulders, kissed her on the mouth.
He stopped suddenly, perplexed by her passiveness, even suspecting for a moment that she might have fainted. But he found himself being surveyed with a tight-lipped and narrow-eyed intentness which shot a vague trouble through his triumph. He even let his arms drop, in bewilderment, though the drunkenness had not altogether gone out of his eyes.
She was wiping her mouth with her handkerchief, with a white look of loathing on her face. She was still mopping her lips as she crossed to the studio-door and swung it open.
“But I didn’t say I was going,” he demurred, frowning above his smile. He was sure of himself, sure of his mastery, sure of his technique.
“You are going,” she said, slowly and distinctly.
He stood there, as she repeated those three flat-toned words of hers, reviewing his technique, going back over it, for some undivulged imperfection. For it was plain that she piqued him. She more than piqued him; she disturbed him. But he refused to sacrifice his dignity for any such momentary timidity. It was familiar ground to him; each endearing move and maneuver was instinctive with him. Only the type was new. And novelty was not to be scoffed at.
He was smiling absently as he picked up his hat and gloves from the cherrywood table. And he stopped in front of her, still smiling, on his way out.
“Remember, wild-bird, that I am coming back to-morrow,” he said, arrested in spite of himself by the beauty of the white face with the luminous eyes. “To-morrow, at three!”
She did not look at him. She didn’t even bother to attempt to look through him.
“You are not coming back,” she quietly explained.
Already, she knew, all the doors of all the world were closed between them. The thing seemed so final, so irrefutably over and done with, that there was even a spurning touch of weariness in her tone. But he refused to be spurned.
“I am coming back,” he maintained, facing the eyes which refused to meet his, speaking more violently than he had at first intended to speak. “I am coming back again, as sure as that sun is shining on those housetops out there. I’m coming back, and I’m going to take you in my arms again. For I’m going to tame you, you crazy-hearted little stormy petrel, even though I have to break down that door of yours, and break down that pride of yours, to do it!”
She went whiter than ever as she stood there with her hand on the door-knob. She stood there for what seemed a very long time.
“To-morrow at three,” she repeated in her dead voice, with just the faintest trace of a shiver shaking her huddled figure. It was not altogether a question; it was not altogether an answer.
But it was enough for Uhlan, who passed with a dignity not untouched with triumph out through the open door. Yet Teddie’s shiver, as she stood staring after him, was the thoracic râle of her youth. And down on her protesting body, for the first time in her life, pressed a big flanged instrument with indented surfaces, like a pair of iron jaws from which she could not entirely free herself.
Theodora Lydia Lorillard Hayden, confronted by the first entirely sleepless night of her career, hugged her wounded pride to her breast and went pioneering. She lay on her narrow bed blazing new trails of thought. She turned and twisted and waited for morning, as torn in spirit as a Belgian villager over whom the iron hooves of war had trampled. For she found herself a victim of strange and violent reactions and her body a small but seething cauldron of bitterness.
The more she thought of Raoul Uhlan and his affront to her the more she hated him. The scene in her studio began to take on the distorted outlines of a nightmare, merging into something as disquieting as remembered dreams of being denuded. Even when the ordained reactions of nature demanded lassitude after tempest she found the incandescent coals of her hatred fanned by the thought of her helplessness. For it was for more than the mere indignities to her person that she hated the man. She hated him for crushing down with an over-brutal heel the egg-shell dream of her emancipation. She hated him for defiling her peace of mind, for undermining her faith in a care-free world which she had fought so hard to attain. He had done more than hurt her pride; he had shaken her temple of art down about her ears.
Teddie began to see, as she felt seismic undulations in what she had so foolishly accepted as bed-rock, that her home-life had perhaps stood for more than she imagined. It had meant not an accidental but an elaborately sustained dignity, a harboring seclusion, an achieved though cluttered-up spaciousness where the wheels of existence revolved on bearings so polished that one was apt to forget their power. And all this took her thoughts on to Ruby Reamer, the businesslike young girl of the studios from whom, without quite realizing it, she had learned so much. Beside the worldly-wise and sophisticated Ruby, Teddie remembered, she had more than once felt like a petted and pampered and slightly over-fed Pomeranian beside a quick-witted street-wanderer who’d only too early learned to forage for a living. And the question as to what Ruby might do in any such contingency led her to a calmer and colder assessment of her own resources.
But these, she found, were even more limited than she had imagined. There seemed no one to whom she could turn in her emergency, no one to whom she could look for any restoration of dignity without involving some still greater loss of dignity. And that one word of “dignity,” for all her untoward impulses of insurrection, was a very large word in the lexicon of Teddie’s life. She had been mauled and humiliated. She had been unthinkably misjudged and cheapened. And it was as much the insult to her intelligence as the hammer-blow to her pride which made her ache with the half-pagan hunger of rebellious youth for adequate atonement.
It wasn’t until daylight came that any possible plan of procedure presented itself. Then, as she paced her studio in the more lucid white light of morning, with the sheathed blade of her indignation still clanking at her heels, her eye fell on the crayon sketch of Gunboat Dorgan’s well muscled right arm.
She stopped short, arrested by a thought as new as though it had bloomed out of the cherrywood table beside her. Then she sat down in the velvet-draped armchair, letting this somewhat disturbing thought slip from her head to her heart, as it were, where it paced its silent parliaments of instinct until she had breakfasted. In leaving it thus to instinct she felt that she was leaving it to a conference of ancestral ghosts to argue over and fight out to a finish. But when that decision was once made she accepted it without questioning. Her only hope, she suddenly felt, lay in Gunboat Dorgan. Her only chance of balancing life’s ledger of violence rested with that East Side youth with the fore-shortened Celtic nose and the cauliflower ear. It was Gunboat Dorgan who could do for her what the situation demanded.
Her only way of getting in touch with young Dorgan, she remembered, was through Ruby Reamer. But Ruby’s telephone number had been left with her in case of need, and with impulse still making her movements crisp she went to the telephone and called up her model.
“Ruby,” she said in the most matter-of-fact tone of which she was capable, “can you tell me where I can find your friend, Mr. Dorgan?”
There was a ponderable space of silence.
“And what do you want with me friend Mr. Dorgan?” asked the voice over the wire, not without a slight saber-edge of suspicion.
Teddie entrenched herself behind a timely but guarding trill of laughter.
“It’s for something I can’t very well tell you,” she said, “something that I’ll be able to explain to you later on.”
And again a silence that was obviously meditative intervened.
“Of course I’ve never tried to butt in on Gunnie’s personal affairs,” announced a somewhat dignified Miss Reamer, remembering that the lady on the other end of the wire was much more attractive than anything she could fashion out of pastels. “But when Gunnie makes a date he’s never held himself above explainin’ it to me.”
Teddie fortified herself with a deep breath.
“Then suppose we leave the explaining to him, when he feels that the psychological moment has arrived,” she suggested. “So I’ll be obliged if you can tell me just where and how I might get in touch with Mr. Dorgan?”
“I guess maybe you’ll find him at the Aldine Athletic Club about this time any morning,” Ruby finally conceded, without any perceptible decrease of dignity. And with that the conference ended.
It took time, however, to get in touch with the gentleman in question. It was, in fact, three long hours before Gunboat had finished with his boxing-class at the Aldine Athletic Club, had taken his shower and his rub-down, and had apparelled himself in attire befitting a call on a rib, as he expressed it, who could bed her ponies down in bank-notes if she had a mind to. When he appeared before Teddie, accordingly, he did so in oxblood shoes and light tan gloves and a close-fitting “college” suit that translated him into anything but a knight of brawn.
“Mr. Dorgan,” promptly began Teddie, with a quietness which was merely a mask to her inner excitement, “I’m in a very great difficulty and I’ve been wondering if you’d be willing to help me out of it.”
“What’s the trouble, lady?” asked Gunboat, a little stiff and embarrassed in his Sunday best as he gazed at her out of an honest but guarded eye. For the knights of the ring, in their own world and in their own way, have many advances of the softer sex to withstand and many blandishments of the rose-sheathed enemy to be wary of.
But Teddie was direct enough, once she was under way.
“I’ve just been insulted in this studio by a brute who calls himself a man, intolerably and atrociously insulted.”
Gunboat Dorgan’s face lost a little of its barricaded look. This was a matter which brought him back to earth again. And Teddie saw that nothing was to be gained by beating about the bush.
“And this man threatens to come here to-day and repeat that insult,” she went on. “And, to speak quite plainly, I want some one to protect me.”
Gunboat’s face brightened. He moistened a hard young lip with the point of his tongue as he stood gazing into clouded eyes for which lances would surely have been shattered at Ashley.
“Who’s the guy what’s been gettin’ fresh?” he demanded.
Teddie, looking very lovely in a tailored black suit with an Ophelia rose pinned to its front, did her best to resist all undue surrender to the lethal tides of sympathy.
“It’s a beast called Raoul Uhlan,” she announced, disturbed for a moment by the slenderness of her would-be champion. But it was only for a moment, for she remembered the flexed right arm Ruby Reamer had tried to caliper with her admiring fingers on the afternoon that the crayon-drawing had been made.
“That puddin’!” cried Gunboat, with a touch of ecstasy. “Why, that guy tried to pull the soft stuff with Ruby last winter, but nothin’ put me wise until it was six months too late.” He fell to pacing the studio-rug, as though it were a roped ring, with significant undulatory movement of the shoulders. “Say, lady, what d’ yuh want me to do to that cuff-shooter? Blot ’im out?”
There was a hard light in the pagan young eyes of the girl in black.
“Yes,” she announced, without hesitation.
“Then he’ll get his!” affirmed the other, just as promptly.
“I want you to give him a lesson that he’ll never, never forget,” she explained, a little paler than usual. “I want you to show him it isn’t safe to insult defenseless girls.”
“Oh, I’ll show ’im!” announced Gunboat, with his chin out and his heels well apart. “He’ll know something when I get through wit’ him. And he’ll have a map like a fried egg!”
“But I don’t want you to——”
“Leave that to me, lady,” interrupted her champion, sensing what he recognized as purely feminine compunctions. “Yuh’ve gotta know when to quit, in this business, the same as when to start. Just leave it to me, and I’ll do it, and do it right!”
“And what,” demanded Teddie in the most businesslike tone of which she was capable, “will you expect me to pay you for this?”
“Pay me?” repeated Gunboat Dorgan, wheeling about on her. “Who said anything about a purse in this bout? I’m not doin’ this for pay.”
“Then what are you doing it for?” asked the slightly perplexed Teddie.
“I’m doin’ it foryuh!” asserted Gunboat, leaning fraternally over the table-end.
“I’ve that little club-roadster of my own,” the entirely unpractical Teddie rather feebly suggested, feeling the appropriateness of some effort to depersonalize the issue. “It wouldn’t be pay, of course. But when you and Ruby settle down in your flat it would be nice for running out into the country in hot weather. You’d takethat, surely?”
Gunboat essayed a hand-movement of repudiation which he’d seen quite often in the movies. He was warmly conscious, in fact, of an appeasing touch of the theatrical in this knight-errantry that had bobbed so unexpectedly up at the tail end of a humdrum morning of dub-drilling and bag-punching.
“Noth-thing doin’!” he said with decision. “I get enough out of it when I see that stiff go to the mat. Yuh say he’s goin’ to horn in here at three o’clock. Well, I’ll breeze in at three-two, railroad time. And I’ll learn him to think twice before he flies that zooin’-bug around a girl who’s been born and bred a lady!”
And even Teddie, as she stood up and shook hands with her new-found champion, was troubled by a vague yet persistent touch of theatricality about the situation as a whole. But she had made her decision, and she intended to stick to it.
She watched Gunboat step to the door, with his hat in his hand, come to a stop, and then step back to the table-end.
“Say,” he said with a slightly self-conscious and not altogether heroic look on his face, “don’t say anything to—to Miss Reamer about this, lady, if yuh don’t mind. It’s not that I’ve got anything to hide. But yuh know what women are!”
And, with an even more fraternal nod of the head, he passed out through the door with his peculiarly light and panther-like tread, and was gone.
“Comein,” said Teddie, rather shakily.
The bronze Moorish knocker on her studio-door had sounded ominously through the quietness, and even that second wind of courage which had come to her at the eleventh hour seemed to vanish before a sudden and rather breathless sense of impending culmination, not unlike that which once thrilled her childish body when an asbestos stage-curtain rolled up.
For thirty tense minutes, indeed, Teddie had been doing her best to work on a sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight, slightly bewildered by the discovery that an ineradicable quaver in her fingers was giving uninvited Childe-Hassan vibrations to her lines. And now she had no need to look still again at her watch to become aware of the fact that it was exactly three minutes to three.
If her visitor was Raoul Uhlan, she remembered, that meant five full minutes before Gunboat Dorgan would arrive on the scene. It would be five full minutes, even though Gunboat should keep his word and be on time. It meant three hundred precious seconds, she reminded herself with an involuntary tremor, in which almost anything could happen.
Even before the door quietly opened, in fact, Teddie found herself failing to feel as valorous as she had expected. She hadn’t slept well, and she hadn’t eaten well, and the more she had thought over the melodrama which she was engineering into the dove-breasted days of her tranquillity the more disquieting the entire arrangement became to her. And her emotions were still playing tennis with her resolution, making her dread at one moment that her enemy might fail to appear and leaving her afraid the next moment that he might indeed return.
Then she abruptly realized that the question was already settled. For she knew, as she saw Raoul Uhlan step quietly into the studio and close the door behind him, that the die was cast, that it was already too late to evade that intimidating final issue. Yet her visitor, as he crossed smilingly to the table where she sat, carried less of the air of a cave-man than she had expected. There was a carnation in his button-hole and an air of relief touched with meekness on a face plainly more pallid than usual. He stood looking down a her with mournful and slightly reproving eyes.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” he murmured, as he put down his hat and gloves without letting his gaze for one moment wander from her face.
“I’m not,” asserted Teddie, quite bravely, as she rose to her feet. But there was a tremor in her voice, for his meekness, she already realized, was merely a mask. And inapposite as it may have been, he impressed her as being pathetic, as pathetic as a ponderous and full-blooded ruminant of the herd already marked for slaughter by the butcher’s appraising eye.
“But you’re pale,” said Uhlan with all thevox tremolostops pulled out. And she was able to wonder how often he had fluttered the dove-cotes of feminine emotion with those intimately lowered yet vibrant chest-tones of his. Her mind leapt to the conclusion, even before he placed one hand on her shoulder, that he was serenely sure of himself. Yet his sheer effrontery, his immeasurable vanity, tended to stabilize her when she stood most in need of such adjustment. She shook the appropriating hand from her blouse-shoulder and fell back a few steps, eying him intently. For she was swept by a sudden and belated impulse to save him from himself, to warn him off from the dead-fall into which he was so stupidly blundering.
“There’s just one thing I want to say to you, that Imustsay to you,” she told him, still in the grip of that forlorn impulse to escape from it all while escape was yet possible. But he advanced confidently, step by step, as she retreated.
“What’s the use of wasting words?” he softly inquired.
“But they won’t be wasted,” cried the girl.
“Everything that keeps me from remembering will be wasted!”
“Remembering what?”
“That you waited in for me! Everything but that will be wasted,” he reminded her. “At first I was afraid, terribly afraid, that you wouldn’t be here when I came. But you knew that I was coming, and you stayed! And that’s all I want to know.”
“Do you know why I stayed?” she demanded, whiter than ever, stunned by the colossal egotism that could assume so much.
“Yes—for this,” was his reply as he took possession of the two barricading arms in their loose-sleeved blouse.
She tried to gasp out a desperate “Wait!” but he smothered the cry on her lips. It was not a scream that she gave voice to, when she could catch her breath, but more a moan of hate tangled up with horror.
And it was at that precise moment that Gunboat Dorgan stepped into the room.
Teddie’s persecutor, with one quick glance over his shoulder, saw the intruder. He saw the younger man in the natty high-belted sophomoric-looking suit that gave him the beguiling air of a stripling, saw him standing there, studiously arrested, appraisingly alert, with anticipation as sweet to his palate as a chocolate-drop is sweet to the tongue of a street urchin.
“And what doyouwant?” demanded Uhlan, with one appropriative arm still grasping the girl in the paint-smudged smock.
“I want yuh,” announced Gunboat Dorgan, shedding his coat with one and only one miraculously rapid movement of the arms.
The big portrait-painter slowly released his hold. His face hardened. Then he looked sharply at Teddie. Then he looked even more sharply at the audacious youth who had so significantly kicked a chair away from the center of the room.
“What does all this mean?” he demanded, drawing himself up, for Gunboat Dorgan was already advancing toward him.
“It means I’m going to pound this zooin’-bug out o’ your fat carcase,” cried the smaller man, with exultation in his kindling Celtic eyes.
And Teddie, overcome by what she knew to be so imminent, tried to call out “Stop!” tried to say “No, no; it’s too——”
But she was too late.
For the second time in one day Raoul Uhlan was guilty of a grave error in judgment. He decided to show the Celtic intruder in shirt-sleeves that he intended to pursue his own paths without the intervention of others. He decided to show this diminutive intruder that a man of his dimensions and determination wasn’t to be trifled with. But something altogether unexpected seemed to intervene. That decision, in some way, evaporated under sudden and unlooked-for thuds of pain, thuds which, in the haze that enveloped him, he found it hard to account for. He was, in fact, suddenly subjected to many experiences which were hard to account for, the principal one being a misty wonder as to why an opponent so insignificant to the eye could be so explosive in his movements, so devastating in his fore-shortened arm-strokes.
Not that the big-framed artist didn’t resist, and resist to the last of his strength. But the thing became loathsome to the girl, who no longer stood aside in a cold and impersonal fury. For the nose above the once airy mustache bled prodigiously and left tell-tale maculations on the studio-floor. The easel went down with a crash, and gasps and grunts became odiously labored. The dazed big frame staggered back and wabbled against the table, and Teddie, realizing that she had trifled with darker and deeper currents than she had dreamed, felt a good deal like a murderess, and could stand it no more. She was a trifle faint and sick and uncertain in the knee-joints.
“Oh, take him away, take him away!” she pleaded childishly, with her hands held over her face to shut out the horror of it all.
And the triumphant Gunboat Dorgan took him away, an inert and unprotesting hulk that was anything but good to look upon, a disheveled somnambulist with a right eye that was already beginning to close.
Gunboat took the vanquished one to the stairway, and started him down, and then flung his hat and gloves after him.
When the youth with the cauliflower ear stepped back into the studio and closed the door he already seemed to have himself well in hand. He was flushed and a little warm, but outwardly unruffled. He put on his coat and came and stood over Teddie where she sat limp and white, staring down at the overturned easel. And he in turn stood staring down at her, with his head a little to one side.
“Yuh’re a thoroughbred,” he averred with unqualified admiration. “Yuh’re a thoroughbred, and I’m for yuh, lady, to the last jab!”
Whereupon Teddie, who felt tragically alone in the world, began to cry.
“Hully gee, don’t do that,” implored her protector, genuinely disturbed.
But Teddie, oblivious of his presence, sat there with the tears welling from her eyes. She wept without sound or movement, with her face buried in her hands.
“Why, your gink’s canned f’r yuh, f’r good,” he explained as he made a roughly gentle effort to draw her hands away from her wet face.
“Oh, please go away,” said the weak-voiced girl, with a revulsion of feeling which left utter solitude the only thing to be desired.
But Gunboat Dorgan had experienced his own revulsions of feeling. And he was flushed now with something more than victory.
“Say, Ruby’s all right,” he confidentially acknowledged. “But this sure puts her in the discard. And what’s more, I’m glad things broke the way they did. I’m mighty glad it wasmeyou got to put this thing straight. And——”
“I want to be alone,” moaned Teddie through her tear-wet fingers.
“Of course yuh do,” acknowledged her new-found knight. “And yuh will be. But if I’m goin’ to hit those Long Island resorts in a li’l club-roadster when the hot weather comes, I’d like to think it’s goin’ to bewit’ yuh!”
And before she quite realized what he meant Gunboat Dorgan had caught her up and kissed her on the tear-stained cheek.
“Y’ understand don’t yuh!” he said, laughing a little triumphantly at the stricken light which came into her eyes.
She stood up, dizzy, gathering her breath to say what she had to say. But he pushed her back gently into her chair, with a smile that was both a little shy and a little proprietary. Then he slipped out of the room with his light and panther-like step, leaving her with the bed-rock of existence no longer merely undulating, but fallen utterly away.
Sincethinness of skin seems to stand an immediate though unhappy corollary to blueness of blood, Theodora Lydia Lorillard Hayden, being an aristocrat, even if one under protest, found herself without that indurated armor which protects her humbler fellow-beings from the buffets and shocks of fate. So her spirit still winced at the thought of what she had passed through. Her body still alternately flushed with indignation and chilled with a tangle of fears. Something, she knew, was about to happen, was bound to happen. Yet what this was she had neither the power nor the inclination to fathom. She merely waited, sure only of the recurring waves of desolation which beat upon her soul. She even struggled to escape from this denuding loneliness, the next morning, by trying to lose herself in her work. But so small and trivial did that work now stand to her that it seemed like trying to bury her bruised and burning body in a bird-bath.
Yet by both temperament and habit, she was averse to passivity. She hated the thought of sitting back in vague but enveloping apprehension of the unknown. She reached a point, in fact, where she would have been willing to see the blue deliver its bolt, where she would have welcomed, for the sheer relief of action, the end of that deluding interregnum of silence.
She started nervously, none the less, when her telephone bell broke the silence, an hour later, for that shrill of sound suddenly translated itself into something as ominous as the starting-gong of undefined combat. She even hesitated, for a moment, as to whether or not she would answer that call. But besides being tired of silence and indecision she was a person of habitual promptitude in movement. So temperament in the end asserted itself. With a deep breath, she took the receiver from its hook and answered the call.
“This is William Shotwell, the senior member of the firm of Shotwell, Attridge and Bannister, speaking,” a suave and dignified voice announced over the wire, once she had acknowledged her identity. “And I’ve been wondering, Miss Hayden, if it would be convenient for you to drop down to my office some time this afternoon for a short conference?”
“And what would the nature and object of that conference be?” inquired Teddie, as coolly as she was able.
“That, I’m afraid, is a matter it would be inexpedient to discuss over the telephone,” was the none too tranquillizing response. “But I might mention that the client whose interests I am compelled to look after in this case is Mr. Raoul Uhlan, the well-known portrait-painter.”
A cold chill crept slowly up through Teddie’s body.
“I really don’t think it would be possible for me to come down to your office,” she said in an exceptionally controlled voice. She was going to add “Either this afternoon or any other afternoon,” but instinct told her to suppress the impulse.
“In that case,” continued the persistently suave voice, “perhaps it would be advisable for me to run up to see you, so that there may be no undue loss of time.”
Teddie wavered, for all too recent events had been combining to test the metal of her emancipation. Yet disturbed as she may have been, she was not without still undrained reservoirs of courage.
“Yes, that might be better,” she finally admitted.
“I shall be up within an hour,” was the crisp ultimatum with which the brief colloquy was concluded.
And Teddie, reverting to her pretense of working, felt more than ever alone in the world. Life seemed emptier than on the day she had learned her curate had married the Chautauqua singer, emptier even than that black day when the butler, acting under orders from above-stairs, had drowned her mongrel pup for merely eating the tapestry off a library Chesterfield. And her new environment, as she stared about the high-ceilinged studio, seemed to stand as bald as that denuded Chesterfield had stood, as destitute of padded graces and relieving softnesses, an empty and ugly skeleton, a thing of obtruding bones quite barren of comfort.
It accordingly relieved Teddie not a little, when Mr. William Shotwell arrived, to find him quite urbane and fatherly, although he did seem to survey her somewhat bald-looking studio with a momentary frown of perplexity. Then, removing hispince-nez, he was at pains to remind her that he had met that estimable lady, her mother, during his activities as an officer of the Cooperative Social Settlement Society, and had dined with her equally estimable father three years before at the annual banquet of the Astronomical Club, and stood in no way ignorant of the position and prestige which her family might claim both in the Tuxedo colony and the City itself. He appeared so reluctant to come to the point, in fact, that the none-too-patient Teddie was compelled to prod him on a bit. And even then he seemed to hesitate so long that Teddie, with a sinking heart, began to wonder if Raoul Uhlan had passed away from his injuries and she was about to be indicted as a murderess.
Seeing that sharp look of distress in her eyes, the attorney for the plaintiff became more urbane than ever, and protested that from the first he had advocated adjustment of some sort, a quiet and respectable settlement out of court that would cast no reflection on a family as prominent as hers and would obviate, of course, a distressing and perhaps humiliating campaign of publicity.
“I’ll be greatly obliged,” cried Teddie, shouldered over the brink of patience, “if you’ll tell me just what you’re driving at.”
“I’m driving at this,” responded William Shotwell, with a slight evaporation of urbanity and a corresponding hardening of face-lines: “my client, Raoul Uhlan, is now under the care of a doctor, under the care oftwodoctors, I might add, as the result of an assault which he sustained in this studio some twenty-four hours ago.”
“Oh!” said Teddie, with the quite familiar feeling of a miscreant being called up for reproof.
“That assault was condoned, and, I am given to understand, was personally instigated and abetted by you, Miss Hayden,” continued the enemy. “Mr. Uhlan is not only a gentleman of high social and professional standing, but is to-day one of the best-paid portrait-painters in America. Through the injuries which he sustained in this assault, I find, he is unable to execute a commission for the portrait of one of Pittsburgh’s most prominent millionaires, before the latter sails for Europe. And through that, I regret to inform you, he has sustained a direct loss of exactly twelve thousand dollars.”
A tempered sigh of relief escaped Teddie. She had expected something much worse, something much more difficult of adjustment.
“Well, if that’s all that’s worrying him,” she remarked, “I’ll be quite willing to make his loss good to him.”
The aged attorney, as he sat massaging his bony knuckles, saw that the picking was good. So he could afford to become fatherly again.
“I may as well be frank with you, Miss Hayden, and make it clear from the outset that involved with this claim is one for a corresponding amount based on the personal injuries which Mr. Uhlan has received, injuries which, so far as medical science seems able to determine, give every promise of proving permanent. And there is a further claim of one thousand dollars for costs and medical services, which establishes the total claims at a round figure of twenty-five thousand dollars.”
Teddie, who had sat watching him with rather solemn eyes, somewhat startled the sedate William Shotwell by a brief but scornful laugh.
“So that was rather an expensive thump on the nose, wasn’t it?” she observed, with the last of her meekness taking wing. For it began to dawn on her, ignorant as she was of the meaning of money, just what they were trying to do to her.
“I am not prepared to disagree with you,” admitted her enemy, not without acerbity.
“And did he tell you just what he was doing when he got that thump on the nose?” demanded Teddie, with slowly rising indignation.
“He was doing nothing, apparently, which demanded his—his being maimed for life,” the man of the law responded with dignity.
“He wasn’t maimed for life,” declared Teddie, with the last of her desolation gone, “but he got exactly what he deserved.”
“That, of course, is a matter not for us but for the courts to decide,” remarked William Shotwell, with a lugubrious shake of the head.
“Then what’s the use of us talking about it now?” demanded Teddie, with a glance at her unfinished sketch of the Macauley Mission by Moonlight.
“It was merely to save you pain,” remarked her benefactor as he rose from his chair.
“It seems rather an expensive anesthetic,” observed Teddie, “at twenty-five thousand dollars a whiff!”
“Am I to understand, then, that you intend to contest this claim?” demanded the man of law, taking up his hat.
Teddie swung about on him, with a little flush of anger on her magnolia-white cheeks. Then, for once in her life, discretion put a hand on the sleeve of impulse. About her rebellious young body she felt the phantasmal jaws of her Uncle Charlton’s waffle-iron coming closer and closer together.
“I must decline to enter into any discussion of the matter until I have seen my attorney,” she said with dignity. It was what was usually said, she remembered, at all such junctures.
“Then might I inquire just who your attorney is?” inquired William Shotwell.
And Teddie’s dignity, for a moment, betrayed serious evidences of collapsing. She had no attorney. She didn’t even know of any attorney. But she couldn’t afford to betray her isolation.
“You will hear from him in due time,” she said with what was plainly a valedictory smile, as she preceded her persecutor to the door.
But her persecutor exhibited no signs of taking his departure. Instead, he stepped closer, seeming to suffer some mysterious inward deliquescence as he studied her with a sympathetic if slightly watery eye.
“My dear girl,” he softly intoned, with one hand stretched out in her direction, “as a friend of your family—and I trust I may regard myself as such—but more as a friend of your own, I am compelled to say that I think you are taking the wrong course in this. I know whereof I speak. You are too young, too innocent, too—er—too sweet, to be dragged without knowing what you have to face into the brutalities and humiliations of litigation like this. Indeed, my child, I think too much of you, of your——”
“Good afternoon,” interrupted Teddie with that rising inflection which can make two innocent words so unmistakably dismissive. For Teddie was worried. For a moment or two, indeed, she felt terribly afraid that he was going to kiss her. And during the last day or so, she remembered, there had been altogether too much of that sort of thing. “Good afternoon,” she repeated withfrappédfinality, as she opened the door and swung it wide, with her back against the wall.
She stood there, even after he had bowed himself pompously out, with a frown of perplexity on her smooth young brow and a weight on her troubled young heart. She felt like a harried front-liner whose supports have failed to come up. She felt like a thirty-footer being pounded by a big and brutal Atlantic. She felt like a hothouse orchid that had been blown out of a coupelet window and was being trampled on by all the heels and run over by all the wheels of Fifth Avenue.
She was awakened from that little reverie of self-pity by the repeated shrill of her telephone bell. So she crossed wearily to her desk and took up the receiver.
“This is Ruby Reamer speakin’,” said the voice over its thread of metal, “and I guess I’ve got considerable speakin’ to do with you.”
“About what?” somewhat indifferently inquired Teddie.
“About my Gunnie,” was the prompt and shrill-noted reply. “I want ’o know just what call you’ve got to come between Gunboat and me after we’ve been going together for a year and a half! I want ’o know what right, just b’cause you’re rotten with money, you’ve got to turn a poor boy’s head and have him say the things that Gunnie’s just been sayin’ to me! I want——”
“Ruby,” interrupted Teddie, steadying herself, “you are saying things yourself that are utterly ridiculous. I haven’t either the intention or the desire to come in any way whatever between you and the young gentleman you speak of as Gunnie. I——”
“Then just why were you usin’ me,meof all people, to make a date with him not more than twenty-four hours ago?” demanded the irate voice over the wire. “And if there’s nothin’ tothat, just why is he runnin’ round in your car to-day?”
“In my car?” echoed Teddie.
“Yes, and bumpin’ into a Fifth Avenue bus with it and havin’ the ink sleuths from the canary-colored evenin’ papers comin’ and frightenin’ his poor old mother into a nervous breakdown?”
It took a little time for Teddie to digest this.
“But, my dear girl,” she finally explained, “your Gunnie has no more claim on that car of mine than he has on me.”
“Well, he thinks he has. And he’s so sure of it he’s even been advertisin’ that you know he has. And I’ve been goin’ with Gunnie long enough to realize that that boy never told a lie in his life.”
This declaration of faith in Gunboat Dorgan was followed by a moment or two of unbroken silence.
“Ruby,” finally called out the bewildered girl at the telephone, “I want you to come here. I want to see you. Imustsee you at once.”
“From the way things are breakin’,” clearly and coldly announced the lady on the other end of the wire, “I don’t think it’s me you want to see. You’d better do your talkin’ to my lawyer!”
“Ruby!” called the girl at the desk.
But the wire brought no answer to that repeated call, and Teddie hung up the receiver. She placed it slowly and carefully on its hook and sat staring at the cadmium tinted wall, with a look of helpless protest on her bewildered young face. And for the second time she found herself face to face with a forlorn and seemingly fruitless survey of her resources.
Once or twice, in her desperation, she was even tempted to pack up and scurry off to Hot Springs in the wake of her Uncle Chandler. But that, she remembered, would be more than cowardly. It would be foolish, for it would be nothing more than a momentary evasion of the inevitable. And besides being a sacrifice of dignity, it would stand as an advertisement of guilt.
Then out of a world that seemed as cold and empty as a glacial moraine came one faint glow of hope. On the gray sky-line of a Sahara of uncertainties appeared a tremulous palm-frond or two. For Teddie, in her misery, had suddenly taken thought of Gerald Rhindelander West. Gerry, she remembered with a gulp, was not only one of her own set, but also a corporation lawyer. It wouldn’t be easy to explain things to Gerry. It would, in fact, involve sacrifices of pride which made her wince without knowing it. But she had talked about having an attorney. And it was her duty to find one.
WhenTeddie made ready for her conference with Gerald Rhindelander West she did so with a particularity which might have surprised both her recently abandoned maid and the immediate members of her own family. She went forth to theterra incognitaof Nassau Street cuirassed in tailored and braided trimness and gauntleted in spotless kid with just the right array of wrinkles about her glove-tops. She was still further entrenched behind a four-skin scarf of blue-fox—which wasn’t blue at all—and a canteen muff to match, to say nothing of seven cyanitic-looking orchids which completed the color-scheme and fluttered demurely above her slightly fluttering heart.
For it wasn’t often that Teddie was as excited as she found herself that morning, just as it wasn’t often that she had turned to give ponderable thought to the question of armor-plate. But it loomed up before her as a serious matter, this commandeering of a clever young attorney to her side of the case, and she felt the need of not producing an unfavorable impression on Gerry.
Yet even after she had unearthed Gerry’s aerial office-suite in that seldom explored warren of industry known as Nassau Street, she found the attorney in question not quite so accessible as she had anticipated. For she was compelled to send in a card, and cool her heels in an outer room, and even after being admitted to the royal presence had to wait for a further minute or two while Gerry instructed an altogether unnecessarily attractive stenographer as to the procedure in manifolding a somewhat dignified array of documents.
He seemed still preoccupied, in fact, as he seated Teddie in a chair at his desk-end and absently took her muff and put it down and motioned away a secretarial-looking intruder and crisply asked just what he could do for her.
Teddie found it hard to begin. She made two false starts, in fact, before she was able to begin. And then she refused to be further intimidated by the paraded professional dignity of a person who’d once helped her paint zebra-stripes on a Jersey cow.
“Gerry, do you know Raoul Uhlan?” she found herself quite casually inquiring.
Gerry pondered the question for a moment. He was really thinking, all the time, how extraordinarily lovely Teddie could look in blue-fox.
“He’s a man whom I have the privilege of not knowing,” was Gerry’s retarded but none the less satisfactory reply. “Why do you ask?”
“Because he’s suing me for twenty-five thousand dollars,” was Teddie’s altogether unexpected announcement. Gerry, however, seemed determined to remain immobile.
“Not for breach of promise?” he asked, with an air of diffidence.
“No; it’s for what I suppose you’d call breach of the peace,” explained his client.
“What did you do?” inquired Gerry, with vivid but secret memories of the Nero incident.
“I had his nose thumped,” acknowledged Teddie with vigor.
“Why?” asked Gerry, wondering why his mind kept straying back to one-eyed Russian rats.
Teddie hesitated. It wasn’t an easy thing to talk about. That was a lesson she had already learned. But Gerry was different. He was one of her own world and one of her own set, and he’d look at the thing in the right way, in the only way.
“Why?” he repeated, secretly astounded by this new mood of humility in which he found Teddie Hayden immersed.
“Because he tried to kiss me,” acknowledged Teddie, meeting Gerry’s unwavering gaze.
“Fine!” said Gerry, as cool as a cucumber. “But who did the thumping?”
“A prize-fighter by the name of Dorgan—Gunboat Dorgan.”
“Better still,” calmly agreed her interlocutor, “for that implies it was a genuine professional thumping.”
“It was,” conceded Teddie. She was more than serious, she was even grim about it all. And if Gerry West had laughed at her, at any moment of that perilous mood, everything would have been over between them.
But Gerry was solemnity itself. “Go on!” he said, almost bruskly.
“Now Raoul Uhlan claims that he’s lost a valuable commission through—through what was done to him. And the young lady who’s interested in Gunboat Dorgan seems to think because I had him protect me in this way that I’ve interfered with her claim on this hero of hers.”
“In what way interfered with him?” demanded Gerry.
“That I’ve—that I’ve made love to him,” acknowledged the none too happy Theodora Lydia.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because she’s seeing her lawyer about it.”
“And this man Uhlan?”
“He sent his attorney, a man named Shotwell, to my studio to explain that because of his injuries he couldn’t paint his twelve-thousand-dollar portrait. I was quite willing to pay for that until old Shotwell put in another claim for twelve thousand dollars for damages in general and an extra thousand for himself.”
“So they’re all trying after a bite,” commented Gerry, studying his engagement-pad. “Now, tell me, Miss Hayden——”
“Don’t do that,” was Teddie’s sharp command.
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t call me Miss Hayden.”
“All right, Teddie,” acquiesced her counsel-at-law, without a break in his solemnity. “But the first thing you must tell me is just what you intend doing.”
“I don’t knowwhatto do. That’s why I came to see you. That’s what I’m willing to pay you for. But it’s not entirely unnatural, I think, to nurse a fixed aversion to be chased around the map by an army of reporters and subpœna-servers.”
“There are several things, of course, that we can do,” explained Gerry, quite unruffled by this unmasking of the guns of irony. “But before we go any further there’s a phase or two of the case I must understand. It was in your studio, you say, that this assault took place?”
“Ihatethat word!” interpolated Teddie.
“Well—er—this incident. Now, had you forbidden this man Uhlan entry, warned him away, and all that sort of thing?”
“No, he was coming there three times a week, to give me lessons,” explained Teddie.
“For which he was being duly paid?”
“No, nothing was ever said about his being paid,” she acknowledged. And Gerry’s increase of gravity didn’t altogether add to her happiness.
“And the day he got his thumping—why did he come to your studio on that occasion?”
For the second time Teddie hesitated. Life, after all, wasn’t so simple as she had once imagined it.
“He came to make love to me,” she finally admitted, not meeting Gerry’s eyes. “And I had Gunboat Dorgan there to give him what he deserved.”
Gerry wagged his head. He did so with what impressed Teddie as quite unnecessary solemnity.
“Now, about this man Dorgan: He knew exactly why he was doing what he did?”
“Of course!”
“And he expected to be duly paid for this—er—service he rendered you?” asked Gerry, seeming to persist in his determination that things should not be made too easy for her.
“No, he declined to have the matter of money come into it at all,” Teddie rather falteringly acknowledged.
“Then what was the understanding?”
“There was no understanding.”
“Then what did he do, when the thing was over?”
A silence fell between them.
“He kissed me,” slowly acknowledged truthful Teddie, flushing up to the tiptilted brim of her hat.
Gerry swung sharply about. He swung about and stared out of the skyscraper window.
“He had no reason, no excuse, for doing anything like that!” supplemented the tingling Teddie.
“Didn’t he, now!” silently soliloquized Gerry as he swung slowly back in his swivel-chair and sat staring at her. Then he added, aloud: “And what happened after that?”
“He presumed on his privileges to the extent of taking my car out of the garage and going joy-riding in it.”
“Without your knowledge and permission?”
“Entirely! And bumped into a street-bus and broke my lamps.”
“That’s much better,” Gerry surprised her by saying.
“Why?” asked Teddie, vaguely disturbed by her remembered failure to mention an offhanded proffer of this same car to this same knight with the cauliflower ear.
“Because we can settlehishash with a larceny action,” retorted Gerry. “But our biggest nut to crack, I imagine, will be Uhlan!”
“What can we do about him?” asked Teddie, with the faintest trace of a tremor in her voice.
“There are quite a number of things we can do,” coolly explained her solemn-eyed counsellor. “I can have him put out of the Camperdown Club, for one thing, before the week-end. I can demand an impartial appraisement of his physical injuries. I can see Shotwell, this attorney of his, and accept service. I can even get after ’em for blackmail. And there are several other things I can do. But each and every one of them will result in exactly the end we are most anxious to obviate. By that I mean publicity, newspaper talk, the reporters you spoke of as chasing you all over the map. That’s the one thing, Teddie, we must not and shall not have!”
“No, we mustn’t have that!” echoed Teddie, mysteriously comforted by the masterfulness of this new-found sage who could achieve such a cool-headed and clear-eyed view of the entire tangled-up muddle. It took a load off her mind, to know that she had some one so adroit and dependable as Gerry to stand beside her in this fight against the forces of evil. She felt sorry, in fact, that she hadn’t come to Gerry in the first place. Then she felt rather glad in remembering that since she had come to him, she hadn’t come looking like a frump.
“So the best thing you can do, Teddie,” her new-found adviser was saying to her, “is to leave this entirely in my hands for a day or two. All I’m going to ask you to do is to keep mum, to sit tight. Before the week-end, I feel sure, we’ll have the whole thing straightened out. And, by the way, what’s the name and address of your prize-fighter’s lady-friend?”
He remained solemnity incarnate as he jotted Ruby Reamer’s name and address down on his scratch-pad.
“Has it occurred to you,” he said as he wrote, without looking up, “that this man Dorgan might have been the proper person for Uhlan to take action against?”
“I imagine he saw about all he wanted to of Dorgan,” announced Teddie, with the icicle-look once more in her eyes.
“But not all he wanted to ofyou?” questioned Gerry, pretending to ignore her eye-flash of indignation. It was not often that he’d enjoyed the luxury of finding Teddie Hayden on the defensive, and he intended to make the most of it. “It’s quite apparent he isn’t afraid ofyou!”
“I was hoping you could make him that way,” acknowledged Teddie. She said it quietly, but there was a barb in it which Gerry couldn’t quite overlook.
“Well, we’ll get him that way,” he announced with vigor, as he rose to his feet. “If it’s action they’re after, they’ll get all they want!”
A consciousness of clearing skies both elated and depressed the brooding-eyed Teddie. What Gerry was doing for her was being done merely in the way of a professional duty for which he would be duly paid. But they had been friends once, and she had treated him, she remembered, rather rottenly of late. She wanted to say something about that, make some effort to explain it away, yet she didn’t quite know how to get that belated mood of repentance into words.
So, as she rose from her chair, she didn’t even try to put it into words. She merely smiled softly and gratefully up into Gerry’s eyes as he stood beside her, with the magnolia-white of her cheeks tinging into pink as he stared back at her, with his jaw-muscles set and a quick look of pain on the face that still remained preoccupied.
“It’s—it’s awfully good of you, Gerry,” she said as she held out her hand to him.
“That’s how I make my living,” was Gerry’s unexpectedly brusk reply. But, apparently without knowing it, he still held her hand in his.
“It’s awfully, awfully good of you,” she repeated, as she reached with her free hand to restore the scarf which had slipped off her shoulder.
“It’s not a bit good of me,” he countered, almost harshly, as he put the scarf back where it belonged. And she would have been afraid of him, with that sudden black look in his eyes, if she hadn’t remembered that Gerald Rhindelander West was a gentleman, a man of her own world and her own way of looking at things. And she rather liked that touch ofcamaraderiewhich was expressing itself in the unconsidered big-brothery weight of his hand on her unaverted shoulder.
“I feel so—so safe with you,” she reassured him, with that misty look in her up-raised eyes which can seem so much like a sigh made visible. And it was beginning to be a luxury, she felt, to find somebody she could feel that way with.
“Well, you’re not!” he said in a voice that was almost a bark.
“Why do you mean I’m not?” she asked, perplexed, with a still more searching study of his face.
“I mean because——”
He did not finish. Instead, with his hand still on her shoulder, he stooped and kissed her.
Teddie recoiled three full steps, and stood with her arms straight at her sides and a black rage in her startled eyes. Gerry’s own hands had dropped to his side, and his head fell forward, for all the world like a chrysanthemum that needed watering.
“O-o-o-o-o-o!” gasped Teddie, with the most unmistakable accents of loathing and anger in her voice. “Areallmen like that?”
“Wait!” called out Gerry, unhappily, pleadingly.
But Teddie had no intention of waiting. She withered him with one short look of revulsion, of utter repudiation, wheeled about, and strode out of the office.
She went, leaving behind her a blue-fox canteen muff and a much bluer young attorney who for quite a number of minutes stood staring morose and motionless out over the East River. He contemplated that wharf-fringed waterway very much as though he should like to take a header down into it. Then, as he slowly and dejectedly turned about, his eye fell on the forgotten muff.
He crossed to his desk and took the furry pillow up in his hands, turning it over and over. He meditatively stroked the deep pelt, sniffed at it, started for the door, and just as suddenly stopped. Then he quietly removed two tennis racquets and a box of golf-balls wrapped in a llama-wool sweater-coat from the bottom drawer of his desk and into this same drawer carefully tucked away the blue-fox muff—after which he stood, irresolute and unmoving, for another full five minutes.
Then Gerry West, as though to make up for lost time, exploded into a sudden fury of movement. He punched the buzzer-button for his stenographer, jerked down the messenger-call lever and caught up the telephone directory with one hand while he possessed himself of the receiver with the other.
“I’ll show ’em,” he muttered darkly to himself, “I’ll show ’em they can’t pull that cave-man stuff around my home circle!”
And in half an hour’s time he had an ex-pool-roomer from a private detective agency busily shadowing Gunboat Dorgan, and another quiet-moving agent gathering what data he could as to the physical disabilities of Raoul Uhlan, and an expeditious clerk from the outer office confirming the address and movements of a certain Miss Ruby Reamer. Then, having started these wheels into motion, he hurriedly looked up a point or two of law, consulted his watch, and called up Louis Lipsett, ofThe Star, at the Press Club.
“Louis,” he said over the wire, “I’ve got a great news story for you.”
“Good!” promptly announced the other.
“Yes, it’s so good, in fact, that you’ve got to come and help me kill it in the bud.”
“Then let me add that what you want isn’t a reporter, but an undertaker,” retorted the unfeeling young White Hope of his over-saffroned daily.
“No, I want you, Louis, and I want you as quick as you can come,” Gerry coolly averred.
“But whyme?”
“Because you’re the only ink-coolie on this Island who’d keep your word if you once promised to. So come over here in a taxi and let me unload.”