Moonlight (Kibbe Turner)/Part 1
JOHN SCHMAAR smiled. Passing by the rustic summer-house, he saw the figure of the girl near the edge of the cliff—a soft-colored silhouette against the softening sky of late afternoon; always fragile, always graceful, even now.
The smile died quickly—after the fashion of John Schmaar's smiles. He went toward her without speaking. And she, on her part, did not hear him—stood gazing intently downward, near but not too near; she saw the sheer descent into the great gray river.
“Hello, Aileen,” he said when he was just behind her. “What are you doing out here by your lonesome?”
All the time, of course, he had her dishonored check in his vest pocket, knew she was at the end of her resources.
She recoiled at his voice with a little cry—but not, he noticed, in the direction of danger. She swayed back from it, in fact, as if physically repelled.
“What do you see down there?” Schmaar asked, going out well beyond her, and looking down.
It was that place on John Schmaar's grounds which they called locally Lovers' Leap—one of the highest points on the Palisades of the Hudson. Looking over with still face, Schmaar himself felt the faintly sickening sensation of great height, the strange diminishment and inversion of familiar objects far underneath. A queer dark spot made by the head and shoulders of a man moved down the thread of a footpath. A rowboat carrying two similar dark specks spread behind it a triangular wake, tiny as a water-beetle in a little pool.
“Don't!” said Aileen Dulcifer, plucking at his arm from behind him. “It gives me the horrors—just to see you.”
“All right,” he assented, moving back readily enough. As a matter of fact, he had had to force himself more or less to do the thing. John Schmaar had lived pretty well those last few years; and he smoked more than he should, probably. Strong and healthy as he still was, there was occasionally a little vertigo that he experienced, and which naturally he thought of at a time like this.
But having done the thing and shown himself that he could, he drew back willingly enough now, and took the girl's arm. Her flesh, he noticed, shuddered in his fingers.
“What's the matter with you?” he asked.
“Oh, I can't bear it!” she answered.
“What?”
“That—that thought of falling,” she said, and put her hand up suddenly to her face, as if to shut it out.
“And yet you're out here looking it over,” went on Schmaar, gazing down at her as he led her back. “What's the idea?”
The trembling of the soft arm in his fingers grew more perceptible.
“Why think of it, if you don't have to?” he pursued.
“Oh, nothing—no reason at all,” she told him—and let her hands fall with a gesture of exhaustion. He led her along toward the fantastic old summer-house.
“Come over here, sister. Let's sit down and talk politics awhile,” he suggested.
She came willingly enough, as he knew she would. She was a pretty, slender, graceful thing—light as a moth, both physically and mentally. New York is full of them—the great national center for her species.
He pressed her arm reassuringly as they sat down in the romantic discomfort of the old summer-house.
“Now, what's troubling you?” he asked.
She looked back at him with the flushed face and slightly lifted upper lip of a grieving child.
“You know already, don't you?” she replied.
“Is it this?” He brought out her crumpled check from his pocket.
She nodded, and bowed her head in soft weeping.
“DON'T,” said Schmaar, laying his heavy hand on her shoulder. But she kept on—he watching her.
“Don't. It isn't so bad as that!” Schmaar said again. Then he sat there with impassive face, waiting till the rather gentle paroxysm of weeping should stop. She was attractive, he decided, even now. Her color was young and fresh enough to stand anything.
“I wish—I wish I were dead!” she said at last. “I would be now—if I weren't such a coward. I'd be dead now!”
“You? That's funny!” John Schmaar replied.
“I would!” she cried brokenly, pointing with an uncertain hand behind her in the general direction of Lovers' Leap. “I'd be down there—now. I've been thinking—thinking—thinking,” she stammered, half sobbing, “of nothing else!”
John Schmaar watched her with an amused smile. “You were going to step off, huh, into the moonlight—like the Indian maid?” he said, alluding to the legend of the place—that Lovers' Leap.
“You needn't laugh,” she replied, glancing up again with a rueful look, and moving away from him.
“Here—catch!” responded John Schmaar; and wadding up her check, he threw it at her.
It rolled across her lap and fell unheeded upon the floor of the old summer-house.
“What good will that do, now?” she cried, and bowed her head again in her soft weeping.
John Schmaar still watched her—took inventory, as he did with everyone, man or woman, with whom he had dealings. A fragile, exquisite thing, light as a hothouse flower in the hand of a buyer—and just about as costly for its weight. A thing made for money, as truly as an orchid.
She certainly was exquisite. No wonder that big Westerner—that Babe Gladden, as they called him—was so crazy over her. Thus his thoughts at that moment.
Schmaar let her cry for a while, then moved toward her again.
“What did it do?” he asked, as you would ask a child, amused at its small troubles. “Did it play too high? Was last week's bridge too strong?”
He knew, of course, that that last week-end's play had been disastrous to her. He would know, having made it so. And bridge losses at John Schmaar's week-ends were considerable to those of larger incomes than she had ever had.
“Was that it?” he persisted, laying his hand on her arm.
She shook her head violently, resisting his easy pressure to take down her hands from her eyes. Women were not the primary interest of John Schmaar; yet this does not mean he was insensible to their charms, nor that he was immune to the intimate appeal of a pretty woman—flushed, crying, helpless, alone. He felt the soft warmth of her arm under his palm. When she shook her head, the fragrance of her hair—the faint, costly fragrance of some individual perfume—came to his nostrils. The girl was a charmer—all that could be desired. The last of modern delicacies—rare, costly, exquisite—that money makes for men's delight! And if they come to you, fall into your hands, do you run from them?
“What is it, then, if it isn't that?” he kept on. And now, yielding finally, her hands sank into her lap.
“It's all gone,” she said. “All—practically everything I had!”
She brought her hands to her face again, and started shuddering. And again he let her alone, waiting till she should be over it, ready to talk sensibly.
“Right here she was captured. She knew she couldn't possibly get away. And she knew they would get him next—unless something was done.”
She was the daughter of a lawyer he had hired on occasion in the past, who had guided him in some of the earlier and more twisting financial paths he had trod—a man as much older than he, as he was older than the girl. Dying suddenly,—by a strange irony of fate without a will,—the lawyer had left a moderate fortune to his daughter, without restraint. Between times of travel, the varied restlessness and extravagances of youth, she had kept up the acquaintance of earlier days, had been more or less often a guest at the famous week-ends at John Schmaar's country place—under the special chaperonage of Schmaar's sister.
“All gone!” he said finally, in counterfeit surprise.
She nodded wearily, and took down her hands again at last, and sat staring at her feet—at the small green paper wad—her disregarded check—upon the ground.
Little by little it came out of her—the very common story of the woman spendthrift.
The story of the man—the boy spendthrift on Broadway—is as common and familiar throughout America as the older story of the time-famous prodigal of two thousand years ago. But the woman spendthrift, though less known, is not so very much less common. Drawn into the great city from every quarter of the United States, with fresh money in their hands to spend, thousands and tens of thousands each year leave it there—to the satisfaction of those who sell them the gossamers that it goes for—in the theaters, the tea-rooms, the rows of women's shops.
They build whole streets for the purveyors of feminine joys, those various trades in trifles, as profitable to the countless traders as that earlier deal with other fanciers of beads and gauds by which Manhattan was first acquired. And if the customer with the careless money is young and full of youth's desires, so much the faster will that money fly.
John Schmaar knew this little waster as he had known scores of others like her. A much-spoiled child, slightly trained, both father and mother dead, she was loose to wander down the most alluring paths of woman's life—unguarded and at her own sweet will. Like most of her kind, she had no acquaintances of consequence in New York, for her father had come to the city in his middle age. Her only social life was in the theaters and restaurants.
John Schmaar could see—as she stammered out her confused knowledge of the details of her disaster—this girl and her kind passing down the usual lighted path—through the jeweled fronts of theaters into the brightness and feminine rivalry of the great dancing-hotels, standing in a hundred shops, appraising fabrics with sensitive fingers, turning their heads like birds before a thousand mirrors—things not bad at all, just light—the lightest substance known to man. As certain of disaster as a cobweb in a flame!
ONE by one the city, in various ways, consumed them, them and their money. The hands of all men were grasping for them; somewhere, in some way or other, they were certainly gathered in. To John Schmaar there was no moral issue involved in dealing with them. Some one was sure to trap them. Why not he? Schmaar was not an idealist, and did not represent himself to be. Indeed, he had a well-known motto in his dealings with both men and women, which he quoted quite openly, in explanation of his different deals: “If they lay themselves open to be shot, shoot them!”
“Why—I didn't understand! I didn't even realize it,” the girl was saying with grieved wonder in her eyes, “until they told me at the bank—about this!” She indicated the paper on the floor.
“Didn't understand!” John Schmaar began, understanding very well indeed himself.
“Of course,” she explained, breaking in eagerly, “I knew in a way. That was why—one reason—I played so high—here—last week. But I didn't realize that it was all of it—not everything I had! Why, it's all gone—practically all!” she cried, suddenly turning the frightened stare of her great blue eyes into the eyes of John Schmaar.
“Why didn't you come to me?” he asked her.
“Oh, I don't know,” she replied uncomfortably, drawing away her hands, which he had taken again. They did that, of course, all of them. They never trusted him, quite—as they did, quite often, men just a little younger.
“Oh, you have no idea how it's been, since then!” she hurried on to say. “I've been crazy—frantic! I haven't known what to do!”
“All you had to do was to call me up on the telephone,” he reminded her, pressing her recaptured hand.
“What can you do? What can anybody do?” she cried, drawing away a second time. “It's gone. My money—all my pretty things in my room—my dresses, even. Some of those had to go—for money! Why, I couldn't even pay my rent now. And then, with all that, there wasn't enough even to meet that,” she cried, looking down at the ball of green paper by her expensively shod foot. “Oh, it's terrible. It's too dreadful. I can't stand it!”
She gave way again to weeping, and John Schmaar continued to watch her. Funny things, he thought. Absolutely artificial! The first sight of the world as it really is for most people throws them into violent hysterics.
“But that isn't the worst, either,” she said, sitting up.
“What is?” asked Schmaar, after a proper wait.
“Boarding-houses!” said the girl, and snatched her hand from him again to cover up her face.
“Boarding-houses!” he repeated.
She was eloquent on this subject; it had touched her soul.
“Yes—where I'll have to go. I've been looking all this past week, for a place to live in!”
“Don't be silly,” he told her
“Like caves,” she went on, disregarding him—shuddering. “Dark caves! Soft, smelly caves, and soft dead carpets on the floors, and those awful dark mirrors full of ghosts, as you come in!
“And heavy coarse lace curtains,” she went on with her dismal inventory. “And machine-made oil paintings on the walls. In one of them,” she said with growing horror, “there were stuffed birds, and a stuffed cat in the parlor. I almost put my hand on it, in the dusk, before I saw what it was!”
He let her stare ahead at nothing when she stopped. He had seen them before. Women! Soft, pretty, protected, the spoiled children of our time,—in cities like New York especially,—women created and kept for their own special pleasant uses, come suddenly, with hurt and wild surprise, face to face with the hard realities of life.
“And even then—that's doubtful!” she said “Even if I have enough to live on—to live on even in one of those places!”
She broke down again.
“Why don't you marry?” he suggested after a while—testingly.
“Marry?” she cried with a little flash of anger. “Whom do I know to marry—that could support me? Even if I wanted to marry any of them?”
There was a gleam of sense in that. The opportunities for a girl in just her circumstances for acquaintance with marriageable men is quite generally restricted to those not likely to be brilliant prospects.
“Of course your little affair with him will be through, after you go into the little details of our ruining him,—especially when he sees these things with your name on the back.”
“Oh, if I only had the courage,” she said—and pointed out again toward that Lovers' Leap, with the uncertain gesture of a child. “To do that!”
“Wild!” Schmaar told her. “Pretty wild!”
He recalled others. They talked that sort of stuff pretty easily—the more easily from their entire lack of knowledge of what they were talking about. Desperation was a familiar pose. They always posed—that was part of their equipment.
“Oh, I know,” she said wearily. “I couldn't do it. I'm not brave enough. I'm too much of a coward!”
“Why not? That's the best way to be,” he told her. They both went still then. Her hand lay perfectly limp now, in her lap, under his hand.
“You ought to have come here in the first place,” Schmaar told her again after a while.
“Well, I am here,” she answered listlessly after a wait. “I came.”
“You did just right,” he assured her, watching. “Just what you ought to have done in the first place.”
“I had to,” she told him. “I had to—get away. They were haunting me all the time—for the rent of my rooms.”
They were always prettier this way, he decided—a little excited. And this girl was certainly most pleasing. Even after all this crying, her face was as soft and fresh and dewy as a grieving child's.
“But now I'm here,” she asked monotonously, “what good will it do? What can I do?”
She was working out of her hysterics, he perceived.
“That's easy. You can let me straighten out your affairs, as you ought to have done in the first place.”
“Why, there's nothing left to straighten out,” she declared. “It's all gone, practically. There's probably not enough to pay my bills.”
“All right,” said Schmaar quite calmly. “I'll pay them then.”
“Pay my bills—why? How? What do you mean?”
He smiled, seeing her start, becoming excited.
“I wont do that. I wont!” she cried.
“Don't worry,” he said. “You'll do it when you hear what it is I want.”
“What is it? What do you want?” she asked, moving away from him.
“It's very simple,” said John Schmaar. “A pure matter of business. I want just about seven days of your time.”
“Seven days of my time!” she stammered, the pupils of her eyes dilating.
“Yes,” said Schmaar. “And it will be well worth the price to me.”
Watching, her, John Schmaar thought, from sheer contrast, of his own origin; of his own mother's life in that Western mining-camp—bearing children, working, left alone to face the grim realities of life, with five young ones tugging at her apron. Here, opposite, this other last extreme framed of diaphanous dresses, gleaming stockings, delicate shoes—this lovely useless thing, as strong and suitable for resistance to the real stress of life as cloth-of-gold to winter weather—sat waiting wide-eyed to hear her fate. Caught between him on one side, and her futile childish bluff at Lovers' Leap upon the other, she was as capable of anything beyond a pretty gesture at hardship or danger as any other fluffy indoor pet.
“It's a pure business arrangement,” he assured her.
But she still stared, puzzled, frightened, until he told her the first part of his plan.
“You remember that Westerner last week—that one from Montana—Gladden?” he reminded her then.
She nodded, still doubtful.
“I want him seven days more.”
“You want him here seven days more!” she repeated.
He told her then what he wanted—or as much as he decided necessary at that time.
“You know what I do—how I make my living—in a general way?” he asked.
“It's mining,” she answered, with the usual haziness of all women on business. “Isn't it? Something to do with mining?”
“Yes,” said John Schmaar briefly. “I finance them—get them money, when they need it, for machinery, and things like that for their mines,” he explained.
The girl nodded.
“There's a matter of financing on between this boy, this Gladden, and me,” he went on, “which means a lot of money to me, if it goes through.”
“Oh,” she said—sighing with sudden relief.
“The trouble is, I'm afraid now I may lose him. He's back from abroad—from France, and crazy to get back home. He's just homesick, really! But if I could keep him here over another week,—another week-end,—we'd have our business done.”
“Oh,” she said again—still more relieved, yet only dimly understanding.
“Whereas, if he gets away now, I don't know when I'll get him back, to tie up this—this contract.”
“Yes—but—” she began.
“You see, you understand.”
“But—where do I come in?” she asked him.
“That's simple. You are to keep him.”
“I?”
“That's right.”
“Why, I scarcely noticed him.”
“That's quite different from him,” Schmaar told her. “He scarcely took his eyes off you all the time. Don't worry about that,” he said, when she denied it. “I don't. All he needs is just one word from you. He's crazy about you—I know that!”
“Just that one time—that one evening!” she began to argue, but glad enough, of course, to believe it.
“That's enough,” said Schmaar. “It would be for any man!” he added as good measure.
“Don't be foolish,” she told him, the strained look leaving her face a little.
“That's my risk, anyway,” he told her.
“What is it you want me to do?”
“I want you to keep him over the next week-end here.”
“How?”
“Simple enough. Just ask him to stay. Pay him a little attention tonight and tomorrow. And at the end ask him to meet you here—next week-end.”
“And—that—that's all?” she asked, with a look of relief growing stronger in her face.
“All—for me!” he said. “Yes, but not for you!”
“Why—what does that mean?”
“After that,” John Schmaar suggested to her, “why not marry him?”
No—no! She never would. She wouldn't. She couldn't sell herself!
“Oh, piffle!” said John Schmaar. “That's old stuff.”
Oh, no. She couldn't think of it. She couldn't do that.
“Well, I just made the suggestion,” said John Schmaar.
HE had to smile at the next thing—her next remark.
“Besides—if—I wanted to,” she said, consenting to consider it for a minute, “it's all too ridiculous!”
“What's ridiculous?” asked John Schmaar, watching her closely.
“What you say. About his being crazy about me. Nobody could be—now. Why, I'm shabby—positively shabby. All my decent gowns have gone. I haven't a rag!”
“Well, that's all provided for, isn't it?” said Schmaar, keeping his face straight.
“Provided for! How?”
“By me.”
Oh, no! She couldn't think of it.
“How much will it be?” John Schmaar asked her, taking out his check-book. “You can pay me when you're married to him,” he assured her, laughing,
She couldn't do that—she couldn't sell herself. She couldn't marry him—even if there were any possibility of truth in what he said—which there wasn't.
“You wont have to sell yourself, maybe,” he said, looking up—and perceiving her eyes fastened hungrily on the check-book.
Why—what did he mean, she wanted to know again. But her eyes were less frightened now, A dimple was back playing in the smooth cheek.
“He's rich,” he told her.
“Suppose he is.”
“He's a nice, clever boy at the same time.”
“Well?”
“You might fall in love with him yourself.”
She started smiling now.
“It has been done,” said John Schmaar.
SHE showed her white regular teeth in her first real smile. The prospect of ease, of luxury, of theaters, of dancing and shopping tours on the Avenue, the possible resurrection of her old life, all opened up before her again.
“Now, then, what will it take to straighten you out—start you on your way, sister?” he asked her.
She still held off. How could she pay him? When?
“Pay me when you're married,” he told her, waiting. “Or don't pay me at all. I'm not worrying about that—not if you can hold him here, until I put this deal through.”
And then he went on reminding her of his past relations, his obligations to her father—although of course these had been paid and well paid for years ago.
“Of course,” he told her then, “if you want to, you can help me along still more than by just keeping him here—in putting through this financing. Of course, there are always plenty who will knock me, if for nothing else than on my past record. It doesn't always help me along—the fact that I started out life as a professional gambler. I don't deny the fact as plenty of others do. That's one difference between me and a good many down there in Broad and Wall streets. But any boost would help. All I mean is,” he went on, seeing she only partly comprehended what he was saying, “if he should ask you, you might say I'm quite a crook. If you feel that way!”
“Feel that way!” she said, flushing. “After what you are doing for me—now.”
“Another thing,” he said, satisfied now that he had won her. “You'd better stay here with us for the present—with Miss Schmaar and me, while we straightening you out—your debts and things. And it will be better, too, for our little financial deal to keep him here!”
“If he ever comes here,” she said, smiling.
So finally he gave his check for fifteen hundred dollars.
While he was waving it to dry off the ink, he turned his head toward the west, in the direction of the main road, which passed by the house.
“Listen,” he said to her. “There he is now!”
Gladden the Westerner—Babe, they called him, because he was such a big thing—was coming up, on foot as usual, for exercise, singing that familiar song of his, fairly shouting it—full of life!
The girl flushed, snatched the check and started off in the direction of the house.
“I'll pay you back,” she called. “I'll certainly pay you back sometime!”
“You'll pay me back!” said John Schmaar to himself, watching her—with her new lease on life, hurrying to reach the house and her own room before Gladden should appear. He saw her vanish on the path through the trees and rhododendrons which screened the house.
He smiled. Matchmaking hadn't been exactly in his line before. Quite the contrary! But this thing should work out pretty certainly with the two of them—the girl and Gladden. He had him, it seemed to him—and her too, whichever way she jumped.
He stooped down and picked up the small green ball of paper—her check—from the floor of the summer-house, and put it back into his pocket. It was a pretty good stroke of business. You can't always kill two birds with one stone.
CHAPTER II
THAT copper mine John Schmaar was after was bigger even than he had at first thought. This Westerner, this Gladden who controlled it, had been abroad with the army, and after the war had stayed across, enjoying life in France, neglecting his business—as so many have done, especially the young ones, who think they have struck it rich at last. The first thing to do under such circumstances—as no one on earth knew better than John Schmaar—is to run out and play, and neither pay attention to your own business nor let anybody else pay attention to it for you.
So everybody's hand had been at Gladden's property in the years he had been away,—managers, labor unions, local banks,—all grabbing what they could grab. And now it needed money, a lot of it—much more than its owner had any idea of. John Schmaar thanked the gods of chance that he had got into it just when he had. If he hadn't, ten to one the thing might have dropped off into the hands of men who had no idea how rich it was.
Schmaar thanked himself no less gratefully for the other thing—this plan of his which kept the man from going home, the trick about the girl.
It was amusing—to watch the great boy fall for her, to see her work her own little game, each one equally unconscious of the surprise which was waiting for them at the end. John Schmaar, having worked it up, appreciated it, as he should.
He knew these Westerners down to the ground—quite naturally, having made his living out of them, first in the old days in his gambling-houses in the West, and later when he graduated into the greater game of financing their mines for them here on Broad Street. Rough and tough, good and bad and ugly, they were all alike—in the way they fell for women, delicate women, soft-voiced, well-dressed, well-mannered, frail, delicate things, like children, demanding protection and worship at the same time. For a dainty woman was a rare and unknown thing to these rough-necks—a thing to be; touched with care and viewed with wonder, like a lovely unknown flower.
Nowhere else in the world could there be a better creature for John Schmaar's vain purpose in this plan of his than Aileen Dulcifer. She was a flower, a costly hothouse flower—light as an orchid, lighter, prettier, even less substantial. A top flower on a top branch, but not essentially different, for all that, from any other hothouse bloom. Ten thousand of her kind blossomed every year in the great city, and glowed a few months or years in its night glitter, things not bad, not good—just as moral and unmoral as a hothouse flower, and bred out of the artificial life of a great city just as naturally.
John Schmaar smiled inwardly at the progress of the little game that proceeded incidental to his own—what the girl was trying to do, what she really was, and what that great boy thought she was, a creature she herself would never have dreamed of. But at any rate, amusing or not, it all served Schmaar's own purposes perfectly well. Gladden was no longer anxious to go home; he had forgotten that he had a home to go to, now that she looked at him and noticed that he was alive. He stayed over the next week-end, and the next. He would have been beside her constantly if she had let him. Almost any night he could be heard coming up the road to Schmaar's country house—walking always, for exercise!—and shouting that fool boy song of his, that worn-out stammering song about “Katy, Beautiful Katy,” that had held over with him from war-time, and seemed to express what was going on inside of him, and life in general, better than any other noise he could make.
THE girl was less obvious and open. She would be, from her experience. However, she played the game and held the pose that she had developed. Light and young and ornamental, rather secretive in her own small affairs, she let the man develop his own dreams of her. How far she had really gone with him Schmaar did not know. He had not asked her, and she had not told. But he felt fairly sure that she felt him to be secure—if from nothing else than the relief and cheerfulness of her manner. A dimple in the cheek of a girl can speak quite loudly at times. She was engaged to him by now, without doubt, Schmaar thought. But it was a surprise to him, the first} glimpse he had of how matters stood.
It was Sunday—late Sunday afternoon, one of those soft, warm days in October, blue overhead and russet underneath. They had all gone stale sitting around the house, and there were no card-games on till later; so they were all out on the lawn between that crazy old-time rustic summer-house, and that crazier Lovers' Leap, trying to kill the time.
Eloise Hunter, the lean one with the big eyes, who played up to the men so hard, was there that afternoon, as was a new man, a Captain Armitage, one of the stiff, silent kind who sit still and let the women talk to them—which this Hunter girl was always glad to do. Having quite a trick at that sort of thing, she was telling over again for his benefit the story of the Lovers' Leap, and the self-sacrificing Indian maid.
“Right here,” she said, rolling up her big eyes at him. “She stood right here where we are now. A hundred years ago—in the moonlight! I can imagine perfectly! I can see her now—can't you?”
Armitage didn't answer; he looked—probably not knowing quite how to take the girl's dramatics.
“She was captured, you understand,” she went on. “Absolutely! She knew she couldn't possibly get away. And she knew they would get him next—unless something was done, you understand!”
The Captain nodded silently. “The automatic hero,” John Schmaar called him—one of the kind who makes the motions of a man but never speaks. The war, Schmaar declared, had sent back a lot of them.
But the Hunter girl could speak for two, always. That was her specialty.
“Now, then,” she said, dragging him along, “the next thing is to understand the geography. It seems they used to go up and down from the Hudson then—the Indians—in regular paths just like our roads, through the breaks in the Palisades.”
“They had to,” said the big bouncing girl beside her—Billie Bannerman. “That's the only way they could go, naturally.”
She was always breaking in on one's climaxes.
“Yes,” said Eloise Hunter crisply, and pointed for her Captain. “There it was, right down there. You see?”
The automatic soldier nodded, as if a little dazed—still not knowing just how to take it all.
JOHN SCHMAAR watched them all from one side—heard the girl go on—half joking, half serious. How they loved to play with it, this man-and-woman stuff, even the most sophisticated of them!
“And it seems the Indians had their camps or villages where there was drinking water—at the mouth of a brook generally,” Eloise ran on, turning now a little to the south. “Come over here!” she called out, catching sight of Aileen Dulcifer and Gladden—together at one side as usual. “I'm telling history—stuff you ought to know.
“Right down there—down under where those two were standing,” she went on to her Captain, “was the Indian camp.”
“Where our hero lay,” chimed in the Bannerman girl again, “asleep!”
“All right,” said Gladden in his offhand Western way, coming over with Aileen. “Say he did.”
“What was his name?” inquired Billie Bannerman.
“Never mind his name. Say it was Uncas.”
“Or Wampum.”
“Yes—or something!” said the Hunter girl—not allowing herself to be interrupted for long. “So he was there. And to get to him, they had to go down there,” she said, pointing north again to the umber tree-tops on the slope to the little pass.
“Now, then,” she went on with tremolo stop out again, “she stood there this night—long, long ago!”
“In the moonlight!” interrupted the Bannerman girl maliciously.
“They held her prisoner,” dramatized Eloise, ignoring her. “In a few minutes they would go down there—around there. And then,” she said, and rolled her eyes again, “they would have him—destroy him!”
“I see.” The silent Captain spoke, finally.
“Shudder—shudder!” threw in the big Bannerman girl.
“What did she do?” asked the dark Hunter girl tragically. “I'll show you. Come here—all of you!” She moved out toward the Lovers' Leap; the others followed. “There!” she exclaimed, pointing. “She stood right there!”
“Our heroine, she means, the Indian maid,” said the Bannerman girl. “In the moonlight!”
“Yes,” said John Schmaar with a laugh. “Don't forget the moonlight.”
“Now, then, look here,” said the Hunter girl to the Captain, her special victim of the afternoon. “You never heard this before?”
“No,” said the soldier, moving a little nearer the edge of the cliff.
“Don't—not too near!” cried a voice at the back, the light voice of Aileen Dulcifer. John Schmaar glanced back with the rest, and knowing—as they could not know—what that place meant to her and her horror of it, he smiled.
No one but him and the Westerner seemed to pay much attention to Aileen's protest. The Hunter girl was proceeding with her dramatic exercises over the Indian maiden's feat.
“Look,” she said, clinging to the silent soldier for support and pointing down at the niche in the sheer brown cliff a little to one side and underneath the Leap. “Right there! She jumped to there. Right there! And then there! And then down!”
THEY were all gathered now quite close to the edge—all but the Dulcifer girl, who still held back.
“She jumped!” cried the Hunter girl suddenly. “She saved him!”
“And let me tell you,” the Bannerman girl put in, “another thing. She did it—she jumped. But the men, you notice, didn't jump much after her!”
That was her pose, bold and free—like a good many of her kind, too big and awkward to be kittenish. There have been more and more of them since the war, John Schmaar decided.
They looked down the sheer brown fall upon the jumble of boulders below, and the great blue river on beyond. It was ugly enough under the prettiest of conditions. A steamer was coming down from the north like a white toy on the blue crinkled water; the sound of its band floated up to them distinctly, but as if it were far, far away.
“It could be done,” said the big Gladden, stepping out on the edge, measuring the distance of the Indian maiden's first jump with his eye.
“I don't doubt you could do it,” declared the Hunter girl, with a slight stressing of the “you.”
John Schmaar stood back a little with the Bannerman girl. He hadn't cared to go out there on that rock much lately—not since he had been experiencing those touches of vertigo.
“Come away! Please!” He heard the light, child's voice of the Dulcifer girl behind him and turned. What a slight, frail, delicate, priceless thing she was, needing constant protection and reassurance, he thought.
“I don't doubt a man could do it,” the Hunter girl was going on, developing her best appeal.
“They didn't, you notice,” insisted the Bannerman girl. “It was the men who welched when the time came.”
“But it could be done, just the same,” insisted Gladden, still studying the cliff below. “It's not so much.”
“I could do it—myself!” announced Billie Bannerman, standing back and pretending to take a running start past John Schmaar, who caught her around the waist and held her, as she expected—without any very great struggle on her part to escape him.
“I you five hundred dollars I could do it,” she announced, “any time!”
“And it wouldn't be such a bad bet, at that,” Gladden backed her up.
“For a man!” stated the Hunter girl a third time.
“For anybody.”
“Only for this!” said Schmaar. And going out now where the Westerner was, on the rock itself,—forcing himself to,—he picked a rock and tossed it over the cliff. “Listen!” he commanded.
They just heard it—a faint tinkle on the stones below.
“If you did happen to miss!” he remarked briefly.
“Only you wouldn't jingle so. It would sound softer,” said the Bannerman girl.
“Stop! Please don't!” cried Aileen Dulcifer from behind them. They looked back to see her holding her fingers in her ears. The Bannerman girl laughed, and the rest smiled. The two men out on Lovers' Leap—the burly John Schmaar and the big, light, curly-headed Westerner, still stood there.
“COME away! You must!” cried Aileen Dulcifer. And all at once she ran out to the edge of the Leap and pulled them both back with her! There was a surprise for Schmaar—the first real hint he had of what had happened to her.
“You're different from Papoosa, the Indian maid, or whatever her name was,” the Bannerman girl went blundering on. “You won't take a chance for any man.”
“You notice that's just what she did do,” the Westerner answered, “for two men.”
“I don't know whether it's a two or one,” the Bannerman girl replied; and all laughed, for of course there had been a good deal of ragging of the Dulcifer girl about Gladden. She flushed, Schmaar saw, watching her.
“But anyhow,” said Miss Hunter, feeling the spotlight shifting a little too much from herself. “she saved him!”
“And incidentally herself,” added the hearty, care-free Bannerman girl.
“Yes, certainly,” said Eloise Hunter, rolling tragic eyes. “She saved herself from worse than death!”
“And afterwards, don't forget,” the big one went on, “they all came up from underneath in the moonlight, and killed their enemies, with her leading!”
“Through the moonlight,” said Schmaar, breaking in once more.
“I believe it,” said Billie Bannerman, turning and directing her talk at him now. “I believe every word of the story, especially that part about the men not jumping after her! You do too—you believe it, don't you?” she said to Schmaar. “It's history, isn't it? It's all true? You ought to know it. You own it. What do you think?”
“Sure, it's true! That isn't what worries me,” Schmaar answered. Till now he had kept still, watching Aileen,—especially since that last move of hers,—studying her. It had been a surprise to him, her darting out there after what he knew about how she felt concerning it. He couldn't imagine one of those light, self-centered, pretty little cowards taking a chance for anything alive—unless it were, perhaps, herself.
“That doesn't worry me,” he told the Bannerman girl.
“What does? What does worry you?” she asked.
“I wish I'd bought something more exclusive, that's all, when I laid out my money here,' Schmaar replied. “Some more select feature! When you buy a story for your place, you want a new one. And I never yet went into any country where they had hills fifty feet high,” he told them, “and didn't have one or two Lovers' Leaps. That's the easiest thing lovers did in the old days—leaping. They were busy all over every moonlight night, leaping off into the moonshine from Lovers' Leaps—in squads.”
The big Bannerman girl kept hammering away at him.
“So you don't believe in love?” she inquired, looking up into his eyes.
“I never was very strong on the moonlight stuff,” he told her. He had never cared for her kind; a little of such slapstick work on the part of women went a long way with him.
“And you've never believed in women! You've never idealized women, have you?” she insisted.
“Love them, sure!” said Schmaar. “But I would never yell for one to save me in a shipwreck.”
“You think we're cowards, don't you?” she asked.
“Why not?” he said, watching her.
AND then they all fell to talking about men and women and cowardice. It was the usual man-and-woman talk of an idle Sunday afternoon, mostly, of course, about the women—the men, as always, glad to speculate about the women; the women, as usual, not much displeased at being speculated about. John Schmaar started them off with the argument that women were cowards naturally.
“It's simple enough,” he told them, half in earnest. “That's the way God made 'em. They don't look like battle-ships, many of 'em,” he said, passing the big Bannerman girl a glance. “Do they? And if that's the idea God has about them, why fly in His face? We like them soft and clinging and needing us—that is, every natural-minded man does. We like 'em to be pretty little cowards.”
“Oh, you males! You ferocious males!” cried the Hunter girl to the automatic Captain, who responded with a jerky smile.
“What do you think?” inquired Billie Bannerman, turning to Gladden.
“I think he's got that wrong,” he answered her. “I don't think women are cowards—by any means.”
“It's no different from anything else,” Schmaar argued. “All men and all women are cowards, sometime, if they know where they're wise—or they wouldn't keep on living! The time comes when everybody's got to step out of the way—if he isn't a fool—just on the same principle that everybody has his price sometime. And it's no different with women. The only difference is that women are weaker and go first.”
He could see the Westerner scowling at him in disagreement before the Hunter girl broke in.
“That's strange talk, Mr. Schmaar from you!” she stated, turning her eyes from Armitage to him.
“Why?” Schmaar asked.
“You! I never thought you were afraid of anything. I thought you had the reputation of never backing down—on anything!”
“Maybe it's all a bluff; you can't tell!” he told her.
“I'd hate to be the one,” she contributed, “to call you what you just called yourself.”
“What's that?”
“A coward.”
“I'd hate to have you,” he replied, his teeth shutting down unconsciously on the word. And they all laughed at him, for they all knew of course what his reputation was, in spite of what he had just been saying.
“Or anybody,” he added, smiling and arguing himself out of where she had left him, “who was weaker than I was!”
And he went on—started up by that laugh at him, and gave them a little more idea of what he believed about life and men and women and cowardice.
“It's the biggest thing in the world—cowardice,” he declared. “I mean it. It's fear, that's all, put into action. And fear's the one thing that drives the world on—that keeps us jumping day after day to save ourselves from starving to death or from being eaten alive. It drives every living thing, from the worm that's squirming out of the way of the early bird, to the soldier that's running away in battle The principle of the thing is clear enough, it seems to me. The strong eats the weak; and the weak gets out of the way.”
“What a horrible idea of life, isn't it?” exclaimed Eloise Hunter, turning her faithful eyes to the mechanical officer at her side, who nodded just perceptibly.
{{di|S}C}HMAAR could see that what he was saying didn't please the Westerner much. But what did he care now what Gladden thought? He rather enjoyed roughing him.
Aileen Dulcifer, looking at them both moved a little uneasily and started to say something, but Billie Bannerman, as usual, got in ahead of her.
“What do you think about that, Mr. Gladden?” she asked.
“I don't think a great deal of it, if you ask me,” the Westerner said, reddening a little.
“I don't, either,” the silent Captain agreed, speaking up at last.
“I didn't make them myself—the rules of that game,” Schmaar told them. “Nature did. Her rule is simple enough—let the weakest get out of the way.”
“Meaning women?” suggested Billie Bannerman.
“Why not?”
“Of course!” echoed the Hunter girl. Aileen Dulcifer said nothing, but looked flushed and interested, like an excited child.
“What do you think about that one?” the Bannerman girl went on, dragging in the Westerner. “What he says about women being always cowards?”
“I think,” he replied, growing still redder, the way his kind do when they start to speak, “just the opposite! I think a good woman is the bravest thing in all the world!”
“Hear! Hear!” cried the Bannerman girl, clapping her hands.
JOHN SCHMAAR smiled. “Here it comes!” he thought. And then he turned and watched Aileen, his attention taken by the look on her face—the way she sat and watched the Westerner with her lips apart as he proceeded.
“A good woman, you understand!” Gladden was saying. “A good woman, I believe, is the bravest thing on earth!”
“In the moonlight, you mean,” said Schmaar, touching him up a little.
“Keep still, you!” called the Bannerman girl. “Go ahead,” she urged Gladden, pleased with herself for what she had started. Schmaar glanced again at Aileen Dulcifer to see how she took it.
“I believe it for the same reason he believes the other,” said Gladden, looking over at Schmaar. “Because it's nature. Because they can't help it. It's in them—in every good, natural woman!”
Schmaar's eyes now were off him entirely, watching the Dulcifer girl, understanding now how the situation stood!
“You take, if you ever hunt any,” the Westerner was explaining, “—you take a bear or a partridge or a sage-hen—or any bird. And you'll see which has the more courage—the male or the female, when there's anything at stake. You just take a partridge when they have their chicks running around—the way she'll try to fool you—to save them. It's wicked—that's all! But it's nature too, just nature!”
“Bully for you,” shouted the Bannerman girl, looking at John Schmaar out of the corner of her eyes, but he was looking at Aileen Dulcifer, who sat with eyes shining and her lips open. Schmaar understood now—and he had to smile a little, in spite of himself. He saw he had started something, with his scheme, for more than one. He was sorry, in a way; he hadn't thought it would go so far, with her. It was a kind of joke on him—a comeback from his own play.
“I tell you what I think,” the Westerner was going on, looking over at Schmaar now, trying to make it up with him. “I'm not much on the talky-talk, but I'll say this—about Mr. Schmaar's ideas. I think he has got it all right, but all wrong too.”
“How could that be?” the Hunter girl asked him, her eyes lingering wonderingly on Gladden's face. “All right, and all wrong!”
“HOW they love to play with it!” John Schmaar thought, watching them.
“He's just got it upside down, that's all, I think,” the Westerner explained. “The main thing in the world that drives it isn't cowardice. It's courage. That's all there is in the world of any consequence, anyhow, in my opinion.
“You know what we've always said in the West,” he proceeded, with all the women's eyes hanging on him. “All over America. The thing we all go by—the saying we've all operated on in this country.”
“What?” asked the Bannerman girl blankly.
“God hates a quitter. God hates a coward,” he replied. “That's my religion. About all I've got, but I believe that hard. And I believe it covers almost everything.”
He couldn't possibly stop now, and one reason, John Schmaar saw, was probably the way Aileen Dulcifer was gazing at him—drinking it all in, trying to memorize it, apparently.
“You take the war,” Gladden was saying. “There weren't many natural heroes you might say. At least, I didn't see any. But there was one thing it taught us all—one lesson we all had to learn before we got out.”
“What was that?” they asked him.
“That was,” he went on, staring now at a fixed distant point, the way ex-soldiers always do when they get to talking such stuff, “there's only one real test for a man, or a woman either.”
“What's that?” asked Aileen Dulcifer in a queer small voice; a kind of hoarse little whisper.
“That is what they'll do when the time comes,” the boy answered, staring back at her as if the two were alone together. “Whether they'll go through or not. Whether they'll take the last chance, make the last sacrifice, for the thing they care about! Like the flag—and that!” he concluded awkwardly.
To John Schmaar, knowing what he did about them both and where they were headed, it was delightful to see them, the girl especially, looking as if she were alone with the Westerner on a desert island, listening to something she must hear or die. You wouldn't have believed it, and yet Schmaar knew of course that they do get that way sometimes—her kind, at least.
“The lighter they are,” he said to himself, watching her, “the faster they burn!”
But it was funny, just the same, to watch this frank Westerner telling that little spendthrift what she would most likely do when the time came for heroic action.
And then, of course, the Bannerman girl piped up again.
“All right,” she called. “But what's the rest of it? Why are we women so much braver than the men? That's what I'm waiting to hear about.”
“Because it's nature that they should,” the Westerner replied finally. Because a woman isn't so strong physically, in the first place, not so strong as her—as her love. So she has to go farther, she has to take more chances—any chance! And she will. A woman, when she really cares, is the bravest thing in the world. A good woman, I mean, when she really—cares,” he said, stumbling along again to another sudden stop, but still looking back again into Aileen Dulcifer's eyes.
And John Schmaar, watching, saw her look away, with a long sigh, shaking her head as if she were sorry about something.
“Can you beat it?” he said to himself, watching her, knowing what she really was at heart—that little self-indulgent waster of time and money.
“All right, now. Fine! But when the money's gone, what then?” he said to himself, still watching her and thinking of the joke that was coming to her very soon now—out of a clear sky. He knew the kind. He ought to. He had seen a thousand of them to Gladden's one. He didn't have to theorize. He knew—just how they would act when that critical time came!
“What she'll do for you,” John Schmaar said to himself, “will surprise you—when she finds out your money's gone!” But aloud he said: “You say, and I say, any woman could make this jump here if she wanted to. You believe it, and I believe it. It isn't so hard to do for anybody that has nerve. We all agree on that.
“So, now, then,” said Schmaar, “just to prove we're right, just to add a little sporting interest to the proceeding—we've had quite a lot of assorted vocal moonshine here,” he added, watching Gladden, “—I'm going to give all of you girls a chance to demonstrate it—to make good as heroines. And make a little on the side! I'll just give a thousand dollars right now to the first girl that will take that jump. Not all of it, you understand, just the first jump, that easiest one in the lot, which we all admit could be done—where we can pull you up, after you've made it, or you can climb up yourself.
“Now, then,” he said when they stood there looking at him, “now, then, who's going to go first? Don't get killed in the crush. Oh, it's all right!” he said, turning and looking at the Bannerman girl, who stood there with her mouth open. “I mean it. I'll give it to the first heroine.”
“That wasn't the question,” said the Westerner, looking ugly.
“What was?” Schmaar asked him.
“It was whether they would do it if there was any good reason for it.”
“They have to be full of warm air and love, huh?” Schmaar said to him. “They have to be fed up with moonlight first. Well, you ought to know. You're an artist at feeding it to them—I'll say that,” he told him.
THEY all laughed then, and the Westerner flushed.
“So, then, girls,” said Schmaar, turning around, “just to show you I'm no piker and give you all the chance there is, I'll extend this offer. I'll make it permanent.”
He looked up as he said this. Over beyond, a little to the south, where the upper part of New York lay against the sky—that new part of the city—white in the late afternoon sun, he saw the moon, almost full—a faint, queer-shaped silver disk against the dead blue of the eastern sky.
“You're in luck, girls,” he said, pointing. “There's a good moon these nights. Go to it. Be a heroine on me. There's a thousand dollars in it. It's yours any time. And you can have all the advantage of all the moonlight in the world to inspire you.”
Schmaar smiled as he watched them looking up at it.
“They'll do it, too,” he said, glancing over at Gladden. “I know that, just from watching them when I made the proposition. They'll be off tonight or tomorrow night, or soon anyhow, making the jump in the moonlight—like the Indian maid! Am I right, or not?” he asked, turning to Aileen Dulcifer—as he remembered, naturally, afterwards!
“What did you say?” she answered him, as if she were waking up out of her sleep.
“You'll be waking up, for good, my little friend,” he said to himself, “—in a little while now.”
They split up after that—Gladden and Aileen Dulcifer going off together as usual. John Schmaar didn't have a chance with her alone until late that night. But after the bridge, when he had her a minute in a corner, he asked her, just to start the thing, if she were engaged to Gladden yet.
“Why?” she asked back, not giving him a direct answer.
“Don't—that's all,” he told her. “Not till I have a little talk with you.”
“Why?” she asked again. He could see then that she looked scared.
“I just wanted to give you a little tip first,” he told her. “Things have changed!”
And just then somebody else came up and shut them off.
But Schmaar had made up his mind. “About tomorrow,” he said to himself, watching her walking away, “we'll start turning off the moonlight. We'll all wake up.”
CHAPTER III
THERE was no special reason for waiting. The thing was ready to be concluded, so far as the mine was concerned. And it was just as well to start now, on the other thing, before the girl got in too deeply.
John Schmaar was curious to see how she would take her little surprise—the little awakening he had devised for her. It was going to be, he thought, quite a surprise—in every way.
He had watched her those past few weeks, watched her spending of his money, her absolute lack of power to keep it, when any new desire struck her. She was a spendthrift. And now suddenly she was coming up again before the bleak prospect of either no money to spend—or something else, some other arrangement.
He had no doubt, of course, of the final outcome of the affair. He knew the girl so much better than she knew herself. New York bred its great new crop of them every year. The idle, pleasure-hunting girl of the great city—not selfish, merely ignorant that anyone else was living on the planet; not bad, of course—nor good: just light. Little light desires, little fluttering fancies, small frail feminine appetites for little pleasures—with the morality of an orchid, the soul of a canary and just as bad and good as either.
They couldn't break away—and live, And after all, you must remember, young as they are and innocent-looking, they aren't entirely ignorant and unworldly—after that life they lead gadding and peering about the hotels and theaters and streets of New York. John Schmaar was curious to see just how this one would take the next move in his game.
So far as he was concerned, it was really no move at all now. All he had to do was to sit still and let her come to him.
IT was late that next afternoon before she got a chance to. They were playing bridge all Sunday night, going pretty strong; and they weren't satisfied to stop when it was time for the last ferry back to New York. So at Schmaar's suggestion they adjourned over to the next night. The two men agreed to come back again, and the girls all stayed on. So Aileen Dulcifer didn't have a chance at Schmaar alone, until he appeared late Monday afternoon a little before the other men.
But she came right down then, while the other women were dressing for dinner, and tackled Schmaar without any unnecessary delay as he sat there in his library alone—waiting for her to appear.
“What's happened?” she asked him, flushed and nervous.
“You tell me,” he answered, sitting back and looking at her with his stillest face.
He never saw her look better—so young and small and delicate. She was wearing gray, one of those dresses his money had bought for her, gray, sheer stuff, and those sleek gray silk stockings the women were all playing up so much. She looked lighter than gray thistledown that a breath would blow out of the room.
“What was it?” she said, almost panting, she was so excited. “What was it you wanted to tell me about yesterday? About Mr. Gladden?”
“You tell me first,” he said, standing her off again. “Are you engaged to him yet—or aren't you?”
“Why?” she asked, dodging him again
“Don't—that's all—if you aren't,” he told her.
“Why not?” she asked, her voice, he thought, a little shaky.
I don't want to see you get in bad—that's all,” he told her and stopped, letting that sink in.
“Get in bad?” she repeated after him.
“Yes.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he isn't going to pan out the way I thought, financially,” he told her. “He isn't a millionaire or anything like it. In fact, the way it looks now, he wont have but mighty little small change in his pockets when he gets through here.”
He watched her closely. The process of awakening was about to begin.
“Through!” she said after him. “Through what?”
“Through this financing that's going on.”
“Oh!” she cried, staring and stammering. “But—but—”
“I tell you this,” he said to her, “because we've been friends. We've worked the thing together. And I don't want to see you go wrong.”
He had her gasping now.
“Worked the thing together!” she echoed.
“Why, yes,” he said. “You remember it—your original idea. You were to keep him here—till I got my work done—this financing. And then you were going to marry him.”
She sat dumb now and wild-eyed. All gone! The whole dream gone glimmering!
“You didn't tell me what you did. You didn't take me into your confidence that much,” Schmaar told her, “whether you got engaged to him or not. But I'm telling you now, as your friend, if you haven't—don't.”
She sat staring a while longer, and broke out suddenly, in a kind of hoarse voice—the voice of a child.
“What's happened here?” she cried. “What's happened—to Mr. Gladden?”
“Nothing's happened,” he told her, “only this—only when this is through, when this deal comes out finally, he wont be just the thing for you to marry. You'll want somebody—from what I've seen of your bills—who can pay at least for your shoes and stockings.”
“What's happened?” she asked again, talking now faster and faster.
“Wait a minute!” Schmaar said, motioning to quiet her, “and I'll tell you.”
“What have you done?” she insisted.
“What have I done? You know, don't you?”
“I know!” she said, putting her hand up to her cheek.
“Certainly.”
“What have you done? What have you done to him? Have you cheated him—out of his money—out of his mine?”
“No,” said Schmaar, “I haven't cheated him. I didn't have to. He did it all himself. He is that kind—that neither attends to his business nor lets anybody else attend to it for him—and then hollers when it gets away from him! He was done long before I came along. He was dead ripe—that's all. And I was the one that came along and picked him—with your help!” he added.
“WITH my help!” she cried, her hand going to her face again.
“Why, yes,” Schmaar told her. “You know that.”
“And you've taken his money—his mine?”
“I'll have to, I guess,” Schmaar told her, “the way things look now. If he doesn't keep to his agreements,—and I myself don't see how he can,—with copper prices where they are now.”
“So—so—you'll take his mine—all his money! All he has!”
“That's the way it looks now,” he told her. “But don't worry. That needn't worry you. You wont suffer much—I'll see to that,” he said, starting on the other line.
“And you've ruined him!” she kept on, talking louder now. “You've ruined him!”
“Keep still,” he said, warning her of the other people in the house. “I've told you what I did,” he went on when she was quieter.
“But—but—you told me,” she said, going on in a lower voice, “—I thought all the time you were helping him—getting him money—financing him!”
“I thought so myself for a while,” said Schmaar, lying just a little. “But not now!”
“You—you've ruined him!” she repeated, losing control of herself a little more.
“Have it your own way,” said Schmaar. “I ruined him if you say so!”
SHE sat staring off into the distance for a while.
“And I—I helped you!” she said at last.
“Forget it,” said Schmaar. “Keep your voice down. Get back to earth.”
“I—I ruined him!” She repeated the word over and over again.
He calmly sat and watched her—waiting for her next move.
“You know what I'm going to do?” she asked finally.
“No—what?”
“I—I ruined him. And I'll—I'll save him!”
“Save him, huh?” said Schmaar. He had to smile to himself. She was going to save him—save him. “How?” he asked her, seeing of course where this had come from. “Like the Indian maid in the moonlight?”
“I'll tell him—I'll tell him—everything!”
“Everything?” said Schmaar, sitting watching her—putting the moves all up to her now. “What's that? What is 'everything?' Do you know?”
That obviously puzzled her.
“And there's the other thing,” suggested Schmaar, looking at her, bringing the thing down now to where she, herself, lived, “you'll maybe want to consider!”
“What is that?”
“Yourself. What you'll do after you tell him. Of course your little affair with him will be through, after you go into all the little details—of our ruining him! He wouldn't be so highly pleased, probably, that he would insist on marrying you.”
She didn't have much to say to that.
“Especially,” said Schmaar, going on, taking a check out of his pocket, “when he sees one or two of these things with your name on the back.”
That hit her pretty hard—as he knew it would.
“You wouldn't show those to him!” she said, starting up.
“Why wouldn't I?” he asked her. “If you started out attacking me? When I'm an enemy, I'm an enemy—don't forget that. When I'm a friend, I'm a friend!”
She stood up now, looking at him, beginning to see what she was up against.
“So let's be friends,” said Schmaar after a minute or so. “It will be a lot pleasanter for both of us.”
But she wasn't ready yet to listen. She didn't care. She would tell him—save him! She didn't care what became of her!
“You can starve to death, huh?” said Schmaar, watching her, knowing how much she knew about it, thinking of the money she had spent on herself during the past few years.
She would, yes. She didn't care—now—what became of her! She was going to save him! Save him? Schmaar had to smile, seeing what was driving her, how everything in her mind went back to that fool talk of yesterday, what that boy had told her about herself, how strong and brave and good she was—and self-sacrificing!
“And there's another thing also.” he told her then, “you don't want to forget entirely.”
She didn't answer.
“And that is—what's the use, anyhow? What good would it do anybody now, telling him, when it's all over? When the whole thing is done and closed up, so far as he is concerned?”
She didn't care—she didn't care! She'd tell him anyhow!
“Sit down,” said Schmaar finally, and reached over and took hold of her arm, where she stood in a kind of trance.
“Let's talk sense. Let's wake up. Let's turn off a little of the moonlight. Let's get back to earth..... That's right,” he said, when she minded him and sat down—still staring ahead at what he had just revealed to her.
“It's great stuff, I know,” he told her, “this moonlight. It's the finest thing in the world for a few minutes or a few months. But there is one great trouble—you can't eat it.”
She didn't answer—just sat staring at him, dumb.
“Now, listen,” he said to her. “Let's talk this over like friends. You don't want to make a mistake. You don't want to fool yourself. You're no heroine. You're no Indian maid—out to warn him, or die in the attempt!”
HE had to smile to himself, to think of it, watching her sitting there, staring, listening to him like a scared child,—in those fine expensive dresses, the best his money could buy her,—looking slighter and lighter and more costly than ever.
“You know what you are—or you ought to by this time. You're just a pretty spoiled kid—all New York, and nothing else. You're just fit to live in New York—and only a little part of that. The Arctic Circle begins at Fifty-ninth Street, so far as you are concerned, and the Pacific Ocean rolls away just west of Twelfth Avenue. It was all I could do to make you believe there was solid land over here in New Jersey. And if you started out of here with this man—if he'd have you, after what will come out now—”
“Have me!” she woke up long enough to say.
“Yes. How long do you think you'd live with him without money? I'd give you a month. You don't like money! No,” he went on, “you're made out of money—from the last shiny tip of your slipper to the top of that last new hair-dressing. You eat money, you drink money, you breathe money. You'd live without money just as long as a fish lives without water.
“Listen!” he commanded her, for she said nothing. “Let me ask you. Am I right? Don't you owe money right now—a lot of it? Haven't you overrun that drawing-account I gave you—from the first?”
That made her drop her eyes—somewhat.
“Sure,” said Schmaar. “I knew it. You can't help it, any more than breathing. I'm not kicking, either. As your friend, I'm not grudging you the money. All I'm asking you is what would happen—not if I asked you to repay what I have given you—but just what would happen if all of a sudden these checks of mine stopped—if I decided all at once to stop them!” He waited—letting that sink in.
That got to her; that awoke her, at last.
“So that's the way of it,” she said, half to herself. “So that's the way it is!”
“Yes,” said Schmaar, “that's it. I'm just advising you as a friend. You don't need money—no. You grow in it. So why not come down to earth, and do the simple natural thing—under the circumstances?”
What was that?
“Just keep those checks coming!” he told her. “As they have been.”
And then Schmaar told her how much he thought of her, and what he would settle on her—in good clean money right away. For he was crazy over her.
“Money!” she called after him. “Money!”
He let her go on then—put it up to her, too.
“So it's this way,” she said again. “You used me. I held him for you—while you robbed him. And now— it's gone—all his money. And he'll never marry me—when he knows! And I'll have to have more money, you think. Because I'm—what I am—and I'll have to! And then you'll buy me. You'll buy me,” she said, talking faster and louder, “with the money you've stolen from him!”
“Hush,” he said. “Keep your voice down.”
“Just as all these checks I've had—have been from him,” she said, a little lower. “His money you've taken!”
He said nothing—simply watched her.
“Money,” she ran on, “—blood-money! And he thinks I'll take it.”
“Hold up,” he warned her again. “Ease off.”
She lowered her voice.
“Oh, I could kill you!” she said—in a half-whisper.
That was better; he had heard that from them before. Right after that, they began to cry, usually—to break down, surrender. But she did not. She stared at him dry-eyed—and all at once he saw her start.
“If I did—that might do it!” she said, thinking aloud.
“Do what?”
“Save him—from you!”
“What?”
“If I should kill you,” she told him.
“It might, at that,” said Schmaar, smiling to see her mind go back again to her heroics. “If I happened to be dead, I might not bother him much—that's a fact.
“But how'll you do it?” he inquired, smiling at her—and she about as dangerous as a butterfly to a bulldog.
She didn't answer him, or move, even—simply watched him with sharp eyes, her mind, he could see, running around, to and fro in her little head, looking for some way out—to beat him.
“Look,” he said, keeping on and showing up that ridiculous stuff of the day before—that talk of the Westerner about women's courage, about the real test. “If you've got to kill me, why do it with your own hands? Why not do this: If you're doing all this for your Western friend, why not let him do his share of the killing? He has given you a lot of ideas already; maybe he might give you some more—on killing me.”
AND just then, looking over, he saw her, all of a sudden, give another start. It wasn't imagination. He saw it distinctly—saw her move just as distinctly as if she had suddenly seen some one or heard some one speaking.
“What is it?” he said. “What's struck you now?”
She looked at him a little while before she spoke. It seemed to him, watching, as if her whole face changed—became smaller and narrower.
“I might,” she said, speaking apparently to herself.
“Might what?” he asked, puzzled a little.
“Kill you—have a chance to—if you're what they say you are!” speaking very slowly.
“What's that?” he asked her, really puzzled now, for she seemed to have something definite in her mind.
“If you'll give me my chance. If your reputation is true!”
“What reputation?”
“That you're not a coward.”
“A coward, huh!” said Schmaar, smiling just a bit, to see how her mind went revolving back like a squirrel in a cage, to that fool talk of the afternoon before.
“If you'll always take any fair chance—as they say you will—with anybody! What they say your reputation has always been!”
“My reputation!” Schmaar repeated after her, knowing well enough what she I meant by that—as he should, having spent his life building up that reputation of never refusing to take a fair chance with any man.
“Yes,” she answered, fixing her eyes on his. “If you'll give me the same chance you would give a man.”
“What chance?”
“An even chance to kill you!”
Schmaar laughed aloud now. He had heard wild proposals from women before, when they were excited. But this one was a novelty! “What is this,” he asked, when he stopped finally—coughing. “A duel?”
“That's just what it is,” she answered, without a fraction of a smile.
“A duel!” he repeated, looking at her—not sure at first that he had got her meaning right.
She bowed her head.
“A duel with a woman! With you!” he said again—watching her, wondering how far they would go, when they got like this.
“If I can show you how to do it—a perfectly fair, equal way by which a woman may fight to kill each other?” she was asking him now.
“Am I crazy, or is she?” Schmaar was saying to himself. For he could see now that she was in earnest.
“A duel!” he repeated aloud. “Between a man and woman—on equal terms!”
“Absolutely,” she said, staring back. “If I show you how, will you do it? Will you give me—just the same chance you would have to give a man—or be called a coward!”
John Schmaar laughed again.
“Or be called a cow—”
“Never mind any more of that,” he broke in before she had finished the word.
“Will you do it? Will you give me the chance you would give a man—if I can show you how it may be done. Or are you a—”
“Go ahead—shoot,” said Schmaar, before she could get that word out again. “What's the idea? How do you work it?
“Will you do it?” she wanted to know first, staring at him.
“Sure,” he agreed, to humor her in her tense excitement. Of course she was just running wild for the minute. Thus he thought, having no idea she would spring the thing she did!
The next installment of this remarkable story by the author of “White Shoulders,” “Held in Trust,” “Red Friday” and other notable novels will appear in the forthcoming September issue of THE RED BOOK MAGAZINE.