The House of Intrigue/Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AS I stood there staring past the head of Wendy Washburn I called out the one word of "Bud!"
But that white-faced man who had come back so suddenly to the world of the living paid scant attention to me. He didn't even look at me.
"Stand up!" he barked out at Wendy Washburn as the latter, startled by my gaping face, twisted interrogatively about in his chair. I noticed that the automatic no longer wavered, but was leveled directly at the other man's head. And the look in Bud Griswold's eyes still frightened me.
"Bud, don't shoot!" I gasped out, as Wendy Washburn rose to his feet and stood with his back against the table. Even then, for all the blind ferocity on his face, I felt sorry for Bud. There seemed something so unreasoning and animal-like about that face. It was childish. It was pathetic. And stronger even than the terror that was tingling through my body was the sudden surge of pity for this man who had always misunderstood life as the living had misunderstood him.
Then my wits came back to me, and I pushed my way in between the two men so coldly eying each other.
"Bud!" I cried out. But he refused to look at me.
"Well, what d' you want?" was his none too gentle reply.
"Bud, they told me you were dead," I went on, desperately intent on distracting him from any wild end which he might have in view.
"I was as good as dead, I guess," he retorted, with a movement for me to step aside. But I stayed where I was.
"What are you doing here?" I demanded.
He stared at me with a look of hostility in his haggard eye.
"That's a question I want you to answer," he retorted.
I realized as I stared back at him, that it takes time to digest a mental shock. I still found it hard to think of him as a flesh-and-blood human being. For over two years the habit of accepting him as dead had been fixing itself in my mind. And it wasn't easy to break a habit as fixed as that.
"Then that woman lied to me!" I called out to him.
"What woman?" he evaded. But his eye no longer seemed able to meet mine.
"Copperhead Kate," I said, and into that name I threw all the scorn I could command. For I hated her now, more than ever. And for the first time in my life I saw a hang-dog expression on Bud Griswold's face. He looked like a sheep-killer on the morning after. And he knew that look was there. He tried to hide it by shuffling to one side, on the pretense of more directly confronting Wendy Washburn, who all this time was standing silent and studious behind me.
"Then it was that woman who worked the ropes for your pardon, or your parole, or your commutation, or whatever it was?" I declared, with the double-edged spear-head of jealousy cutting my soul in two. And there was excuse enough, I suddenly saw, for all those vague old suspicions which had once yelped in my heart like hunting-dogs in an express-car.
"I didn't come here to talk about that woman," was Bud's unexpectedly blunt retort.
"Then what did you come for?" I demanded.
My eye followed him as he backed away from me. There seemed something almost symbolic in that movement of his.
"I want that club-bag," he said, pointing to the satchel which stood half under the edge of the table-cloth.
"Why?" I asked. I tried to be calm, but all the while I had that odd sickening feeling, just under the corset-cover, which comes to people when they feel their first earthquake, when they learn for the first time that the one solid thing on which they had depended is no longer worthy of that dependence.
"You know why as well as I do," was his sullen-toned answer.
"Then you and that woman are working together!" I cried out at him, hoping against hope that he would be able to deny it.
"Well, what about you and this man here?" scoffed Bud. "Aren't you working with him?"
"Am I?" I demanded, swinging about on Wendy Washburn. His face was a little paler than usual, but outwardly he was quite calm. "Am I?" I repeated. But he declined to answer that question.
"Supposing the three of us sit down and talk this over," he quietly suggested.
"I didn't come here for any afternoon-tea séance," announced Bud. "I want that bag, and I want everything that's in it!"
A second great wave of pity for that white-faced man with the automatic pistol in his hand swept through me. I don't know exactly what it was, or why it was, but I felt so sorry for Bud Griswold as he stood there that I could have leaned on his shoulder and cried like a baby.
It wasn't so much that he was taking something away from me which I couldn't define, that he was roughly obliterating me from his existence, that he was humiliating me before the one man whose scorn would always be doubly hard to bear. It was more that he was humiliating himself, denuding his poor pathetic figure of its last shred of dignity, robbing himself of every hope for the future.
I wondered, as I stood staring at him, if for the first time in my life I was seeing him in his true light; if, during the last two or three years, I had indeed learned to look on him and his kind, and all they stood for, as I had never been able to look on them before. And I felt a sudden lump in my throat as I stood there asking myself these questions.
"Bud," I began, with a quaver in my voice which I couldn't control, "I want to talk to you. I've got to talk to you. You're trying to do something you'll be sorry for, something you can't help being sorry for, all your life. This whole thing's too tangled for me to explain it to you here. But I want you to believe in me. I want you to know that I'm being sincere with you. If you take that stuff you're—you're going to spoil my life. And I know you don't want to do that."
He looked at me, with his deep-sunken eyes, but there was a glitter in them which I had never seen there before.
"I guess I'm not the zany who can do any spoiling along that line," he retorted. He said it roughly, but I thought, in my blindness, he was doing that only to hide his real feeling.
"But it could have been yours, Bud," I told him, trying in vain to keep my voice steady. "And I want you to believe every word I say when I tell you it can be yours still. I'll go with you, Bud, wherever you say, wherever you want, if you'll only do what I'm asking you!"
There was a movement from the man behind me. But I was not, at the moment, interested in that man. I was too intently watching Bud Griswold's face. I was looking for something, but I looked in vain.
"Nix on that reform stuff," he said, and his own voice was a little unsteady as he said it. "Let me tell you something. I tried that game, and it wouldn't go down. I tried that after I got out. I hit Chicago and stumbled into the Pacific Garden Mission there, where old Harry Monroe used to hold out for all the jail-birds like me. Well, I tried the dope. I hit the trial, and got drunk on oratory the same as other down-and-outers get drunk on gin. But they couldn't do the Billy-Sunday trick with me, for they couldn't show me how to live on big talk. And I've got to live. And I only know one way of doing it!"
"But is it living?" I asked him.
"Well, whatever you want to call it, it's about all I'm going to get," was Bud's ungracious retort. "And I guess we've wasted enough time on this spiel about our souls. I'm not worrying about the hereafter. What I want is something that's going to keep me more comfortable right here on earth!"
I had never before heard Bud talk in that strain, and it was a shock to me. It worried me even more than the ugly-looking automatic which he still kept poised in front of him.
"And where are you going to get it?" I asked,
even while I felt the hopelessness of trying to argue with him.
"What's in that club-bag there will do me a considerable time," he announced. His flippancy hurt me even more than his sullenness. It felt like the flick of a whip-lash in the face. It startled me into a sort of desperation.
"Bud, if you give me that automatic I'll go with you, wherever you want," I told him, as I stepped closer to his side.
But as I advanced he backed slowly away.
"Not on your life!" he said with grim deliberation.
"You mean you don't want me?" I cried.
"I mean I don't fall for any trick like that!"
"Then you don't trust me?" I demanded. "You're through with me? You don't even want me to go with you?"
He shook his head.
"You couldn't come if you wanted to," he said with a derisive bark of a laugh.
"Why couldn't I?"
"This guy here wouldn't let you," he explained, with a pistol-wave in the direction of Wendy Washburn.
"What has that man got to do with me?" I demanded.
Bud laughed out loud, with his deep-set eyes fixed on the other man.
"Why, that guy went mushy on you over two years ago!" was the half-sneering but altogether unexpected reply that came from Bud Griswold's unhappy lips. "That man's in love with you!"
I turned slowly about and stared at Wendy Washburn. But his face was a mask.
"That's not true!" I gasped.
"Then who'd you 'spose coughed up for all that convent life of yours?" inquired the white- faced man with the automatic. "You don't suppose I had heel enough for that, do you, when I couldn't even come across with enough to buy off those Michigan cops and keep out of Jackson?"
I looked from one man to the other. It was too much for me to believe.
"But this man is a bigger crook than you are," I tried to explain to Bud.
"Only he seems to do a neater line of work," was Bud's sneering comment. "And if you knew more about this house you're in, you'd be a little wiser about what I mean by that!"
Before I had time to say more he pushed me to one side and stepped in closer to Wendy Washburn. The end of the automatic-barrel was within two feet of where a slender gold and platinum watch-chain crossed Wendy's vest-front.
"No talk from you, now: not a word!" Bud said to him, with a savagery which was as unexpected as the movement itself. "All I want from you, remember, is this bag!" He stooped and caught up the club-bag from the floor, placing it on the breakfast-table close beside the coffee-pot. I could see his left hand fumbling with the catches as he kept his eye on Wendy Washburn.
Then he suddenly stopped short.
"Back up against that wall," he bruskly commanded.
There was nothing for the other man to do but fall slowly back until his heels clumped against the wainscoating.
"Now stay there!" was Bud's order, as he placed the automatic close beside the club-bag on the edge of the table. It was so placed, however, that his hand could fall on it at a moment's notice. He intended to make sure of the contents of that bag, and it was plain that with only one free hand he had been unable to manage the catches. He could not afford to look down at them, for his eye, all the time, was bent on the silent man against the wall.
So intently was he watching that man, in fact, that I saw my chance, and took it. I weighed it all over, with a frantic sort of deliberation, and then I got busy. I was able to creep up behind the man with the bag quite unobserved. I even reached out my hand and had my fingers clamped about the butt of that heavy and ugly-looking firearm before Bud had any knowledge of my intentions. And then it was too late. For I had the gun in my hand and had dodged back from the table before he could so much as lift a finger to interfere with me.
But he didn't even try to follow me. He blinked down at the opened bag, for a moment, and then he deliberately snapped it shut again. Then he stood blinking across the room at me. It wasn't antagonism I saw on his face. It wasn't even resentment. It was more a quiet and unemotional determination which disturbed me more than the blackest outburst of anger could have done. It made me in some way afraid of that sunken-eyed man with the club-bag in his hand.
"What are you going to do?" I demanded, holding the automatic up in front of me.
"Do you really want to know?" he inquired, as he turned his head and looked back at me slightly over his shoulder, for he had already rounded the table.
"Yes, I want to know," I said, and my own voice sounded as thin as a seventh carbon-copy. For all the while I was puzzling that empty head of mine as to what the cause of this new-found fortitude of Bud's could be.
"I'm going out through that door," slowly asserted the man with the club-bag. "I'm going out through that door, and out of this house, and you're not going to stop me!"
"Why can't I?" I demanded. Without even being conscious of the act I raised the pistol on a level with my eye.
"Wait!" pleaded Wendy Washburn from where he stood against the wall.
"Why can't I?" I repeated with my eye on the man with the bag.
"Because," retorted Bud with his one-sided smile, "if you remembered me and the way I work a little better, you'd know I never went into a job with a loaded gun, in all my life. It's too risky."
I looked down at the heavy automatic. I sprung open the clip-chamber and found it as empty as a last year's bird's-nest.
"It may be empty," said a voice behind me as I looked up just in time to see Bud, with the club-bag in his hand, pass out through the hall door, "but this one isn't, and you two high-brow Robin Hoods would've found it out, if you'd made one move to stop that man!"
It was a woman's voice, and the owner of that voice stepped in through the inner door opposite the hall at the same moment that I swung about and stared at her. It wasn't the revolver in this interloper's hand that made me gape at her with such stupid and empty eyes. It was the discovery that the woman was Copperhead Kate herself.
"Stop her!" was my foolish and frantic cry to Wendy Washburn as that woman with the snaky green eyes and the revolver in her hand strode insolently across the room to the other door.
"Try it!" challenged Copperhead Kate. "Try it—and the next clothes you put on won't come from me; they'll come from an undertaker!"
"Stop her!" I repeated in a gurgle as she passed out into the hall.
"What's the use?" quietly inquired my Hero- Man, "Since they insist on traveling together, why not humor their whim?"
"But don't you see what this means?" I somewhat shrilly and somewhat desperately demanded.
"It means that their journey can't possibly be as long as they anticipate," was Wendy Washburn's quiet-toned reply, "for there's a cordon of plain-clothes men about this place and not a soul can leave the grounds without them knowing it!"
I stared at him, wide-eyed and wondering.
"Then what's going to happen to you?" I demanded.
He laughed a little.
"To me?" he asked. "To be perfectly frank, if you'll excuse my absence, I think I'd better slip out and made sure those men are on their jobs. For I had 'em put there, and when you're paying for a thing, you know, it's always better to get it done!"
I stood there, trying in vain to marshal my tangled impressions into some sort of order.
"Wait a minute," I called out to my Hero-Man as he reached the door. "Did you know there was a man coming out to this house to-day for the particular purpose of killing you?"
"That's interesting," he acknowledged with a twinkle in his eye. "And it would be equally interesting, I imagine, to know his name."
"His name is Pinky McClone!"
"I never heard of any such man in all my life," he solemnly averred.
"But you will," I warned him.
"Quite likely," he acknowledged, with a smile, "for we seem to be having more visitors than we ever expected!"
"We have!" I agreed to his vanishing back, as he hurried down the shadowy hallway. For I had suddenly remembered about the mysterious woman in the cream and gold room up-stairs. And I had also remembered about the pearl-handled revolver which I had left up-stairs under my pillow.