Lily A. Long

“ How do ideas come to us? I thought I was wholly absorbed in Jean, and was conscious merely of a desire to soothe and calm her by taking things naturally, but now something seemed to nudge my attention and to urge, "Don't you see what that means? Don't you see? Don't you see?"
I did see--in a flash. That locket! It had not been out of my locked desk until I gave it to Jean, except once,--the night of Barker's murder. ”

“ Whyte, significantly.
But Miss Thurston took up his challenge (which I guessed was flung out for that purpose) with a fervor that transformed her.
"Money cannot buy knowledge," she cried. "To know how to control another's soul may be wicked knowledge,--I believe it is,--but it is knowledge nevertheless, and it is not at the command of your millionaires. Money cannot buy any of the best things in the world. It cannot buy love or loyalty or faith--or knowledge."
"You talk like Ellison," said Whyte, with good-humored contempt. ”

“ I closed the door, not wishing to have Barker see me from the hall and turn back, and sat down by the desk under the gaslight to await his return. On the desk were a few circulars of the Western Land and Improvement Company which looked as though they had served the purpose of giving verisimilitude to Mr. Barker's office for a long time. I guessed the same theatrical and decorative mission in the display baskets of apples, sheaves of heavy-headed wheat, and samples of other grains and fruits which adorned the room--though somewhat dustily. ”

“ Miss Thurston rose as she spoke, and in spite of her kindly tone in regard to Gene, I could see that the important part of the interview was over when Clyde passed out of our conversation.
"Of course I should not admit anything else," I answered, and she departed, leaving me impressed anew with the important part which women play in the affairs of men. Truly, sentiments may be stronger than ropes, and emotions more devastating than floods. And the woman who is all tenderness and quivering watchfulness for one man will be as indifferent as Nature to the sufferings of another. ”

“ On that Monday,--that eventful and ever-to-be-remembered Monday,--I saw as I approached that Barney was holding forth in the spell-binding manner I knew, to another listener,--a young fellow, I thought at first. But as I came up, his listener emptied a chatelaine purse upon Barney's tray, and my surprised glance from the jingling shower of silver to the face of the impetuous donor showed me that it was a young girl,--a gallant, boyish-faced girl, whose eyes were shining into Barney's with the enthusiasm of a hero-worshipper. ”

“ Garney, do you know anything to Eugene Benbow's discredit?"
He looked at me with an intentness that I found was habitual with him, as though he weighed my words before he answered them.
"You don't mean trivial faults?"
"No. I mean anything serious."
He shook his head. "No. He is an exceptionally fine fellow in every way. High-spirited and honorable. I suppose his sensitiveness to his family honor, as he conceives it, may be called a fault, since it has unbalanced him to the extent of leading him into a crime." ”

“ Whyte, defensively. "Whenever he finds Gene here with Katherine, or finds that he has taken her out walking, or anything like that, he just stands and glowers."
"Perhaps he is jealous," said Whyte, with a subdued chuckle.
"He has no right to be jealous. If Katherine enjoys Gene's society, she has a perfect right to choose it. Not that there is anything of that sort between them! Katherine is not old enough to be Gene's mother, but she is older, and she would never allow anything of that sort to happen. Besides, if she had wanted Kenneth Clyde, she could have had him years ago." ”

“ Probably there is no man living who does not have some political ambition. Certainly Clyde had it. With his wide interest in public matters, his natural power over men, and his ancestry and associations, I knew that nothing but the shadow of fear at his elbow had kept him out of the political game, and I was therefore not surprised when, a few days after the Barker tragedy had ceased to occupy the upper right-hand corner of the first page of the newspapers, that space was given up to announcing that Kenneth Clyde had consented to accept the reform party's nomination. ”

“ As a young fellow he had clearly been rather too handsome. That any man with so much of the "beauty of the devil" had been marked by the stars for a tumultuous career was most obvious. There was spiritual tragedy in every lineament. On the other hand, there was no deviltry in the seriously handsome face of the man of to-day. You did not even think first of his good looks, the deeper significance of character had so come to the surface. Certainly, the shadow under which Clyde had lived had fostered the best in him. ”

“ The man who left the house was not you."
"Who was it?" he asked, very low.
"It was the man who had your latchkey to the library door. It was the man who picked up the De Senectute which you had been reading and passed it on to Chapman the next day. It was the man who knew how to hypnotize you in your sleep and make your brain believe what he wished it to believe. It was the man who had just shot Barker from his inner office and who impressed upon your dormant brain the scene he had just been through and made you believe you had acted his part in it. It was Allen Garney." ”

“ The police are very close on his heels. I confess it looks dubious that he will get very far."
Jean laughed out suddenly and clapped her hands together.
"Why, of course he will escape! After they have come to know about each other!" she exclaimed. "Nothing else would be possible, now!"
Whyte and I exchanged glances. As a matter of fact, we would all like to live in a rose-colored world, where things would happen of necessity as they do in properly constructed fairy tales, but it takes the confidence of a Jean to announce such faith in the face of unsympathetic Experience. ”

“ When a girl has no mother and is, besides, as wilful as Jean is,--and she is wilful, Katherine, although I admit she is charming about it, and I should be in love with her myself if I were a man,--the sooner such a girl is married to a steady young man, the better."
"Is the steady young man Mr. Garney?" I asked. The annoyance with which I had observed his prostration before Jean probably betrayed itself in my voice, for Miss Thurston looked up to answer reassuringly. ”

“ It is one of the hardest things in the world for a man to be lost in this world of rapid communication. His description has been wired all over the country. The police in every city in the land will have their eyes open. Sooner or later--and the chances are that it will be sooner--some one will tap him on the shoulder and say, 'You're wanted, Mr. Clyde.' And he'll forget himself and answer to the name. They all do it. ”

“ I examined the glass door between the two rooms and sat down in the chair which had been drawn up near it, in the inner office. It commanded a full view of the outer office; and the curtain which fell over the glass made the fact that one pane was broken unnoticeable. Here the assassin sat and watched me, and here he had sat when Barker entered. I paused a moment to be thankful that the light in the outer office had been good!
Beside the chair, in a waste-basket, was the heap of apple parings I had noticed. ”

“ I didn't get Clyde and I couldn't attract Central's attention after the first response, though I shook the receiver and made remarks. Then suddenly, across the silence, out of space and into space, a man's voice spoke with passion:
"But Barker is dead, I tell you! You are free! Now will you marry me?"
And then again the buzzing silence of the "dead" wires!
Talk about the benefits of modern inventions! They don't come without their compensating disadvantages. I hung to that telephone till Central finally woke up and sleepily inquired if I were "waiting." ”

“ My name is Jean Benbow, and it is so nearly the same as Gene's because we are twins, but really his name is Eugene, and when he does something to make himself famous I suppose they will call him that. Well, after the soldier, and I wish I had had fifty times as much to give him, though that makes a sum that I simply can't do in my head,--not that it matters, because he didn't get it,--I remembered that I was going to get a birthday present for Gene, but I didn't remember, you see, that I hadn't any money. I don't think money is a nice thing to have on your mind, anyway. ”

“ I said doubtfully. "But hypnotism seems to me devil's work, both for the hypnotizer and the victim. Think of Jordan, and look at Garney. Aside from his crimes, the man is somehow abnormal. He has the look of a haunted man. He faints like a woman when he is discovered. No, no hypnotism for me, thank you. But in any event, your action in reimbursing poor old Jordan does you credit."
He waved that aside. "What I should like to know," he said, changing the subject, "is how Gene became involved in this affair. If Garney shot Barker, why did Gene say he did? He isn't as fond of Garney as all that. ”

“ Whyte had played a masterstroke. And that does not spell overweening conceit on my part, either! It required no special astuteness to read the concealed cryptogram in Mrs. Whyte's plans. I had had experience! So, unless I made a wild guess, had Miss Thurston. There could be no other explanation, consistent with my self-respect, of the cold dignity, the pointed iciness, that marked her manner toward me. She was a stately young woman by nature, but mere stateliness does not lead a young woman to fling out signs of "Keep off the grass" when a young man is introduced. ”

“ I said, oracularly.
"But if the facts are as I stated them,--an escape from justice after conviction, and nothing else,--then the man is still liable to the law, isn't he?"
"Probably," I said, with a shrug intended to intimate that the matter was of no special interest to me. "How did it turn out in your story?"
Burleigh looked at me sideways for a moment. Then he said, imperturbably, "Why, I believe he made the mistake of going into politics, and so the thing came out. He was hung--in the story. Politics is no place for a man who has a past that he doesn't want to have come out." ”

“ Clyde was in danger?"
"No specific reason," she said, with some hesitation. "But I felt that something overshadowed him. A woman knows things without reason, sometimes."
"And you told Eugene?"
"Yes. Partly I wanted to let him feel there was something he could do for me,--you understand. And partly, too, I wanted to enlist his interest for Mr. Clyde, if an opportunity should ever come up where he needed help that Eugene could give. You never can tell."
"You can't ordinarily," I admitted. "But at present poor Gene has put himself out of the way of doing a service for anyone. ”

“ How far, if at all, this affair of Diavolo might have a bearing upon the murder mystery was uppermost in my mind. Suppose Diavolo and his "hired man" had quarreled. Suppose they had quarreled to the death? It was, of course, quite probable that a man of Barker's type would have many enemies, but here I was dealing not with probabilities but with a fact, however small it might be. There had been, in the recent past, an intimate relation between Barker and a man who was capable of touring the country as a hypnotist, a man who concealed his identity,--Ha, a motive! ”

“ Right comes, it will be a different matter."
"She wouldn't have a word to throw to the rightest Mr. Right in the world just now," said Mr. Whyte. "She is taking Gene's trouble pretty hard. But that little Jean is a wonder! She will be a heart-wrecker all right."
"Now, Carroll, don't put any such ideas into her head. She is a mere child."
"She is Gene's twin," said Mr. Whyte, shrewdly. "If his devotion to Katherine is to be treated respectfully, you can't act as though Jean were just out of the kindergarten. I'll bet she has had a broader experience with love-affairs than Katherine has." ”

“ Do you think that I would let--anyone make so mad a choice?--dower her with such a life as I must live henceforward, dodging in the shadows, afraid of hearing my own name, an outlaw and a skulker? If I regard life for myself as of dubious value under such conditions, do you think I am so hopelessly mean as to ask anyone to share it with me? ”

“ Men don't go about confessing to crimes they have not committed,--unless there is some powerful reason for their belying themselves. If Eugene Benbow was lying, he had chosen his position well to escape detection. I could see that it would have been hard to defend him in the face of such circumstantial evidence as surrounded him, if he had been arrested on suspicion instead of on his own confession. ”

“ Here I was ready if necessary to go through fire and water--a certain amount of each, at any rate--to get a better knowledge of the frank-hearted girl whose enthusiasm had so touched me in the afternoon, and all that Fate asked was a cabman's fare and a few stern words delivered with an air! Fate is no bargainer worthy the name. ”

“ Not that I blame him. A jumping tooth is enough to upset even a wizard."
"How did it turn out?"
"Oh, he went to a dentist and had it out, and--"
Things danced before my eyes. I felt like shouting "Now hast thou delivered mine enemy into my hands." It seemed almost incredible that what I could hardly have dreamed of as a possibility could be the plain actual fact.
"Do you know what dentist he visited?" I asked, trying to speak casually.
"Oh, yes. Mr. Barker inquired at the office, and went with him. Diavolo was very careful about not being seen, and even then he wore a wig. ”