Top-Notch Magazine/Volume 14/Number 5/The Sights They Missed
The Sights They
Missed
By
Albert Payson Terhune
(A COMPLETE NOVEL)
TIVERTON stepped back just in time to score a clean miss for a whizzing automobile. And in so doing he backed so close to a trolley car that was rounding the Twenty-third Street curve into Broadway that he began an involuntary forward jump—one that landed him a few feet from the sidewalk, close to a large object that was long and low and wide and pale green. In appearance it was something between an auto truck and a royal barge; a sort of circus float on pneumatic wheels.
Tiverton would not have given the thing a second glance—a sight-seeing bus being no novelty to him, after three hustling years in New York—but for two faces whose gaze he chanced to catch fixed on himself as he looked upward. The observing faces belonged to two people sitting each on the end of one of the bus' five seats—on the end nearest Tiverton.
One of the two watching passengers was a man; the other, in the seat directly in front of him, a woman. The man's face was of a deathly white hue; a long black mustache split it transversely. The woman's cheeks were flushed, radiantly bright by contrast to the man's, and her eyes were still big and startled at what she seemed to consider Tiverton's narrow escape, from injury, or worse. The man, on the contrary, was laughing at the auto dodger's mishap; and the laugh gave Tiverton an acute sense of having made himself ridiculous by his self-preservative jump backward and forward. He was aware of a growing desire to punch the laugher's white face.
But a second look at the girl turned the current of his thoughts from anger to frank admiration. She was still looking at him, neither boldly nor coyly, but with a dawning quiet interest that seemed to appraise and to approve his deep chest and thick shoulders as well as his square-jawed, erect head. It evidently occurred to her that her gaze might be open to misconstruction; for she shifted her glance and, turning half around, said something to the grinning man behind her. The latter answered with a total lack of surprise that argued acquaintance.
Arthur Tiverton was aware once more of a little gust of anger somewhere in the recesses of his brain. It was preposterous that there could be anything in common between so altogether lovely a girl and that laughing death's-head of a fellow! And yet
The seat next to the girl, as Tiverton could see, was vacant. An impulse possessed him. Hurrying around to the ticket seller he laid down a dollar bill and bought a seat for the bus' forthcoming trip. Then he turned back to the vehicle and prepared to take the vacant seat alongside the girl. It was all a matter of impulse. Tiverton had no intention whatever of scraping acquaintanceship. It was not his way to pursue unknown women with attentions. But, having an hour or more to kill in as painless a fashion as possible, he had suddenly decided that the time could not be slain in any other way half so pleasantly as in sitting where, unobtrusively, he could look now and then .at the prettiest girl he had ever seen.
His ruse, if unworthy, met with the failure it merited. For, just as he was about to mount the footboard, two men and two women, who had bought tickets a half minute ahead of him, filed solemnly into the four vacant places in the seat which the girl had hitherto occupied alone.
Tiverton thought of taking a place in the seat just &hind—the one whose far end was occupied by the white-faced man. But alongside the latter sat three other men, all fairly well dressed and with an indescribably “out-of-town” air. And as Tiverton moved toward the fifth place it was preëmpted by a stout woman in black carrying a bulky umbrella.
He was half minded to give up his silly scheme of riding on the same bus with the girl, now that he could not sit where he could see her; besides he had learned from the sign that the bus was bound for a tour of the downtown business section—a part of the city where he himself worked every day from nine to five. But he had bought his ticket. He would at least be on the same bus with the girl. And perhaps he might yet maneuver to catch a glimpse or two of her during the journey.
As he stood, uncertain, the bus was fast filling. Nearly every seat was taken. Half ashamed of his folly, Tiverton moved toward what seemed to him the most desirable of the few places still unoccupied—that next to the chauffeur. It was in the seat just in front of where the girl sat. He made his way thither, and as he sat down he glanced back as though merely seeking to size up his fellow passengers on the five rows of seats.
Again his simple ruse failed. The girl was still sitting sideways, her shoulders to him, talking with the white-faced man. Tiverton could not see her face at all, except for one pink ear and a quarter segment of cheek. But he saw something else that mildly puzzled him. Her position brought into Tiverton's line of vision part of the figure of the man with whom she was chatting; and the man's fingers were absently toying with a bit of paper. At a twist that he gave to it Tiverton could see that the paper appeared to be a ten-dollar bill. No, a slight flourish of the yellow-backed slip showed him that his guess was not quite correct. It was not a whole bank note that the man was manipulating. It was only half of a ten-dollar bill. From the man's handling of it Tiverton could almost fancy he was making signals or trying to attract some unseen person's attention.
EVEN as Arthur looked the girl pointed toward the bill and said something. Again the man laughed, made a reply, and stuffed the bisected piece of currency into his vest pocket.
A slight jar and the bus was in motion. The chauffeur piloted it deftly into its proper position in the sluggish stream of downtown traffic. The announcer—a large, bored-looking functionary—rose from his lounging position against the dashboard and, lifting his short megaphone, faced the passengers.
It was a scene Tiverton had witnessed a hundred times—usually with the smile of amusement that New Yorkers are apt to bestow on the out-of-town visitors who choose this way of getting a comprehensive idea of the city. But it was his first experience as part of the spectacle.
“Great old burg, hey?” remarked the chauffeur gruffly, under cover of the announcer's megaphoned speech.
“Yes,” returned Tiverton, amused at the other's apparent belief that this passenger, too, was an out-of-towner who must be entertained.
“Beats Paris or London or Chicago or Denver, folks tell me,” pursued the chauffeur. “There's even one or two folks that's so enthoosiastic they declare, right out in meetin', that it beats North Wilbr'm, Mass.”
“What's that?” asked Tiverton, all attention. It startled him somewhat that a stranger could have hit upon the name of his home village seemingly by sheer accident. He looked for the first time at the chauffeur. The latter was leaning in an absorbed manner over his wheel. Under the low-drawn cap Tiverton caught an impression of fiery red hair, freckled skin, and a combative profile.
“What in blazes do you know about North Wilbraham?” he asked.
“Well,” drawled the chauffeur, “I remember readin' a lot of stories in the New York papers about three years ago that began something like 'Extry! Latest War News from North Wilbr'm! Arthur Tiverton Starts To-day for New York to Make John D. Look Like a Piker!'”
The chauffeur turned a grinning face of welcome toward his passenger as he spoke, and ended his mock quotation by sticking out a gauntleted hand.
“Hello, Art!” he exclaimed.
“Denny! Good old Denny Cross!” responded Tiverton, meeting the outstretched hand with a hearty pressure. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“Savin' twenty-five lives,” answered Cross. “If you don't believe me I'll be glad to prove it by letting this Noah's Ark run into a trolley car or climb up the side of a skyscraper.”
“But”
“That's the answer to Foolish Question Seven Hundred and Eleven. What did I look as if I was doing? Pickin' roses along the subway tracks? I'm a rubberneck buggy's pilot. I've been on this job, man and boy, for pretty near two months. And, till you swarmed up onto the quarter-deck a few minutes ago, I hadn't seen an old-home face in five years. Gee, but it's good to see you, Art! The folks wrote to me, three years back, that you'd come to New York. And I've been looking for you. But in this village there's apt to be quite a lot of faces sauntering along Main Street or at the post office or around the grocery store. So somehow I missed you.”
“To think of our running across each other here!” cried Tiverton. “I mustn't lose sight of you again. Drop in at my place some evening. Here's my address.” He handed the chauffeur a card. “Don't forget. We'll have dinner and go to a show and talk over North Wilbraham.”
“H'm!” muttered Denny, trying, New Englandlike, to mask gratification under ungraciousness. “You're all togged up like ready money. I guess you'd be ashamed to be seen with a yap like me tagging along after you.”
“Drop it!” said Tiverton. “I guess you've forgotten how I used to duck you in the Scantic when you got too fresh back in the days when we were kids. Well, you're none too big to be ducked now if you talk that way.”
“Why, you big bluff!” bristled Denny. “You never saw the day you could duck me. But we'll let it go at that. I was only thinkin' you'd be ashamed to be seen with me. I might 'a' known better.”
“You certainly might. How has New York used you?”
“It's let me live. For two years as a subway guard, for three more as a taxi shover. Then came the strike, and—well, I got this job.”
“Like it?”
“Sure. I like anything; only some things more'n others. And Sam Tubbs—that's the leather lung-man chap megaphoning—least of all. He's sure a gloom, even at his best. And I've been brought up too careful to tell you what he is at his worst.”
“These sight-seeing busses do a pretty good business, don't they?”
Without a pause for breath, or cracking a smile, Denny delivered himself as follows:
“With our specially constructed automobiles of large carrying capacity all interesting parts of New York may actually be seen between sunset and sundown and at a lower rate than would be possible by private vehicle. Passengers are taken whirling through the streets, wonder after wonder piled upon their bewildered gaze, while expert guides and lecturers eloocidate in detail each point under observation. Previously, strangers in New York, lacking knowledge of how to reach points of interest, have had fatiguing and arduous experience. But now, by using our”
“Help!” cried Tiverton. “For Heaven's sake, Denny, what has happened to your brain?”
“I learned that by heart from one of our booklets,” explained the driver. “I know more of it—plenty. Want to hear”
“No! Leave it to the announcer. What”
“See that little chap crossing the street over there?” cut in Denny. “Pal of mine. Born and bred in Doyers Street. In the heart of Chinatown. Lived there till he was forty. Then moved up to Greenwich Village. Next day he planks down a dollar to ride on a 'seeing Chinatown' tour of ours.”
“But these seeing New York busses”
“Don't call, 'em that any more! 'Tisn't the monaker. 'Touring New York automobiles' is the name now. Folks got guyed for riding on 'em under the old name. So it was switched. These little five-seated-cars are too slow for me. I want a job in the pilot house of one of our eight-seaters. Then What's the matter?”
Tiverton had started in surprise. Denny saw his friend was no longer looking at him, but staring in wonder at Samuel Tubbs, the announcer. That worthy had just pointed out a particularly large and hideous skyscraper, and was intoning loudly:
“The Whitelawn Building! Erected in nineteen hundred and six. Celebrated as containing the palatial suite of offices of Cyrus Q. Buchanan, the mining king.”
“That's wrong!” declared Tiverton to the driver.
“No,” said Cross, “I'm flattering Tubbs when I say I hate him. But he's the best announcer we've got. He never makes mistakes. And he knows this route with his eyes shut. What gave you the idea he was mixed up?”
“Because,” answered Tiverton, “I happen to be Mr. Buchanan's private secretary. And his office isn't in the Whitelawn Building, or anywhere near it. This looks queer to me.”
TO Tiverton's bewilderment, Denny showed no surprise. “I knew there was something phony,” said the chauffeur. “I piped 'em for a second, before we started.”
As he did not specify who “'em” might be, Tiverton glanced back over the serried rows of passengers. He was just in time to witness a true case of “rubbernecking.” The white-faced man had half risen in his seat and was looking back at the Whitelawn Building, talking and gesticulating. The three rural-looking men at his side were following his words and the direction of his gaze with keen interest; so, Arthur noted, was the girl.
“What's the idea, I wonder?” said Tiverton, as he turned again to Denny.
“The idea,” returned Cross, “is that Sam Tubbs is so crooked he could hide behind a corkscrew. That's the main idea. The other end of it is that a man back yonder made Tubbs a mighty funny present a while ago, just before he took his seat. Tubbs and he were around at the far end of the car, and I suppose they thought no one could see. The starter didn't; but I did. It's a way I've got.”
“A present? Cash?”
“No, cash divided by two—one-half of a ten-dollar bill. Can't buy much with that But Tubbs seemed real tickled. I don't see the point; yet I'm wondering if that near-tip had anything to do with Sam's phony announcement just now.”
“Why should it? What's the connection?”
“I've been for weeks on the same bus with Sam, and I never heard him make a slip. I never saw him get a tip, either; touring-bus patrons don't often give 'em. So when I hear the slip and see the tip on the same ride, I put them together. What?”
Tiverton recalled the white-faced man's behavior when the bus was passing the Whitelawn Building; and Denny's mention of the torn bill recalled at once the similar section that had fluttered in the man's fingers.
“The fellow who gave your friend Tubbs the half bill was very pale, wasn't he—with a wild-West black mustache?” queried Tiverton.
“That's the chap! Mind readin', are you?”
“No; but I'm going to. This whole thing looks funny to me. I mean to find out if I can—wait a second. There's the Cogghall Building just in front. Cyrus Q. Buchanan's offices are there. I want to see if Tubbs will mention him among the Cogghall's tenants.”
“He's got to,” declared Denny. “He does, every time. Buchanan's the biggest face card in the Cogghall deck. And it's a deck with mighty few two-spots in it, at that. Listen!”
The announcer pointed to the building. Through his horn he droned a list of renowned financiers who had offices there. The list, as Tiverton recognized, was accurate save for one omission—it did not contain Cyrus Q. Buchanan's name. Arthur leaned nearer to Cross and spoke in a voice even lower than the low pitch in which their talk had been conducted.
“I'm going to find out the point of this joke,” said he, “if it takes me a week to do it. A week is all the time, I have, for Mr. Buchanan comes back from his Western trip a week from to-day. And when he's in town there's no loafing for his secretary.”
“If he keeps you so busy how do you happen to be eating up the busiest hour in the day on a low-power joy ride like this?”
“When he goes away he either takes me along or leaves me with only half work while he is gone, so that I may rest up and be ready to put in twenty-four hours on a stretch, if necessary, when he gets back. That's why I find myself with time on my hands, this week. I'm going to use up a lot of that time in digging out a fact or two in this queer puzzle. It's probably a trivial matter—a joke or something; but it brings in my employer's name. And his name has too big a face value to serve in a joke.”
“Likewise,” dreamily observed Denny Cross, looking anywhere rather than at his companion, “there was a girl—a mighty pretty girl, at that—who got on the bus with this white-faced chap's party. Not that you'd be at all int'rested in anything so trivial as that; for all you stared so admiring at her before you climbed aboard here. That wouldn't have anything to do with your follerin' up the joke.”
“If it's just the same to you, Denny,” said Tiverton pleasantly, though he reddened as he spoke, “we won't discuss girls we neither of us know. It isn't”
“That's right!” solemnly admitted Denny. “It isn't. It says so in a book I read once—a book all about folks who wore di'monds to breakfast and looked on a one-million-power plootocrat as a piker. But I'm not jumping over the bars in speaking, respectful-like, of that lady back there; for she isn't some one 'we neither of us know.' It's a lady I had the pleasure of workin' for more'n once last year. She remembers it. An' she was kind enough to nod to me, real pleasant, when she got aboard. Blest if I don't believe she'd have come over an' said 'Howdy' to me if she'd had a chance. There's nothing stuck up about her; there never is about the real first-class ones. It's only the second-raters that treat their work-folks like dogs.”
“You—you say you worked for her?” exclaimed Tiverton.
“Sure—in a way. She stopped for a month at the Idler—a little quiet apartment hotel up on the West Side—last year. My taxi was in the rank there. She liked my careful driving, she said. So she hired me pretty near every day. Once I got back a pocketbook one of the chauffeurs had swiped from her, and when she went away she slipped me a brace of iron men and thanked me for taking such nice care of her.”
“Who”
“I don't know. I take it she lives somewhere up State or out West, or maybe in Jersey, and just comes to the big town once a year or so. Seems to have enough cash to keep the wolf in the offing. Her name is Wesley—Miss Florida Wesley.”
The car was on its return trip from the Wall Street district; and as Denny spoke he steered it deftly into its harborage. The passengers descended awkwardly to earth. Among the first was Arthur Tiverton. Standing idly to one side, he watched the party of five headed by the white-faced man. As the man stepped down, he brushed past Tubbs, the announcer. The momentary contact was elaborately accidental. But Tiverton, watching from between half-closed eyes, saw a quick, furtive interchange of gestures—a double move that transferred from the passenger's hand to Tubbs' the neatly torn half of a ten-dollar bill.
Denny had come down from his seat at the steering wheel, and was glancing about him as though to find some one. Tiverton stepped up to him.
“Tubbs has the whole bill now,” said he.
“Yes,” said Denny, “I saw. It's an old trick. Paste the two halves together and the bill's as good as new. It's torn to make sure the job's done and to make sure of fair play on both sides. I saw it fail once, though. A taxi chauffeur that I knew got half of a five-dollar bill beforehand as a tip for driving a farmer all over the city. It was a half-day trip, and the chauffeur sure did his best to earn the rest of that five. At the end of the ride the farmer says to him: 'That 'ere half a bill ain't no use to you as it stands. I'll give ye ten cents and a seegar fer it.' But say. Art, did you catch what our snow-faced friend says to Tubbs as he handed out the second half?”
“No, I was too far away.”
“I wasn't. He whispers: 'To-morrow. Same time.' An'”
“I'm glad to see you again, Cross,” said some one at Denny's elbow, in a pleasant voice.
Both men turned. It was Miss Wesley who had made her way to the chauffeur's side.
“You are doing well here?” she went on.
“Yes'm. Thanks. Same to you!” sputtered the embarrassed but delighted Denny. “An'—please, would you think me fresh if I took the liberty to make you acquainted with an old schoolmate of mine? Mr. Arthur Tiverton, Miss Wesley.”
DENNY CROSS confessed later to Tiverton: “I know it was a bone-head play to introduce a side-kicker of mine to a dame of her class; but I was so fazed at her coming up to us, unexpectedlike, that I said the first thing that seemed to fit in.”
Though Miss Wesley looked somewhat taken aback at the unexpected introduction, she inclined her pretty head in civil acknowledgment of Tiverton's bow. Then she nodded a good-by to Denny and turned away, just as the white-faced man with his three rural-looking companions bore down upon her.
The man said something to her that Tiverton could not catch. But he heard her reply in a clear voice:
“Thank you, Mr. Devereux; but I think I'll take a street car up to Thirty-fourth Street. I have some shopping to do.”
They melted away in the Broadway and crosstown crowd.
“Devereux,” repeated Tiverton, half aloud.
“Fancy monaker,” said Cross. “Puts it all over a name like Tubbs, no? Well, I've got to hustle. I s'pose you meant what you said 'bout my dropping in on you at your rooms?”
“Of course I did. It'll be good to have an old-time chat with you. By the bye, are you sure it was 'to-morrow' that Devereux whispered to your friend Tubbs?”
“Dead sure. Why?”
“Because,” said Tiverton, “I'm going to be here at the same time to-morrow on the chance that some other 'mistake' will be made by the announcer—a mistake possibly like that of to-day. It may be none of my business, but unraveling even a silly little mystery like this is mildly amusing. Save me a seat beside you if you can; in case the 'to-morrow' should mean an appointment like this afternoon's. Good-by.”
The following morning, Tiverton was early at his employer's office in the Cogghall Building, and in a short time he wound up his routine business for the day. He was annoyed at himself for being unable to shake from his mind a hundred buzzing conjectures as to the meaning of the seemingly trifling Devereux-Tubbs mystery. He looked at it from a dozen different angles, but from none could he gain a viewpoint that satisfied him.
That any sane man should pay a touring automobile announcer ten dollars to say that a certain financier had. an office in a building half a mile north of that financier's actual Office, seemed an absurdity. But, remembering the giving of the halved bank note and Devereux's odd behavior when Tubbs made the announcement, he could come to no other conclusion than that the incident had some interesting significance.
Between moments of fruitless puzzling, Tiverton found himself indulging in the pleasanter, but equally futile, recreation of bringing back to his mental vision the face and the voice of Florida Wesley. He recalled also what Denny had said of her having stopped a year earlier at the Idler apartment hotel. He wondered whether she was staying there now. He supposed so, since out-of-town people have a way of making some one hotel their invariable headquarters when they are in New York.
Then Tiverton laughed at himself for a sentimental fool, for wasting so much thought on a girl whom he had seen but once, and who, in all human probability, he would never see again. Whereat, he went right on thinking about her, intermitting his roseate thoughts with further conjectures as to Devereux and Tubbs.
At half past twelve his office work was done; the rest of the day was his. He had planned to run down to Coney Island for an early-season swim and for dinner. But, with a grunt of self-contempt at his own folly, he found himself walking northward, in the direction of the Whitelawn Building.
Arrived at the garish front of that particularly aggressive skyscraper, he hesitated again; then turned in at the doorway. In the big entrance hall he glanced about till his eye fell on a square black slab in the wall with raised white letters. “Office Directory” was printed at the top of the slab, and beneath, in much smaller type, were the names and room numbers of the White-lawn's several hundred tenants.
Tiverton glanced along the list headed “B.” He knew perfectly well that Cyrus Q. Buchanan had no office in this building. But it occurred to him that some other man named Buchanan might have one, and that this might account for Tubbs' announcement; either that or some fly-by-night crook might have assumed the name of Cyrus Q. Buchanan for the purpose of fleecing the unwary. This, he realized, would be a dangerous trick and one almost certain of quick detection. No swindler was likely to risk it. Yet it was worth a look; if only to safeguard his employer's interests. But, as he had foreseen, no “Buchanan” appeared on the board. After a second look, Tiverton walked down the hall to where the uniformed elevator starter was standing.
“I'm looking,” explained Arthur, “for Mr. Buchanan's office—Cyrus Q. Buchanan's. I can't find it on the directory list, and”
“And you can't find it in the building,” snapped the starter, with scant courtesy. “Cyrus Q. Buchanan's got no office in the Whitelawn Building. I tell 'em all that. And some of 'em want to argue it out and prove to me I don't know who our own tenants are.”
“So I'm not the only one to bother you with such a fool question?” queried Arthur, the joy of the hunt quickening his pulses.
“No; two others in the last three days. But they looked like dressed-up rubes, and you don't. When I told one of 'em there was no Buchanan here he asked for Mr. Devereux's office.”
“Devereux?”
“Yes. Twelfth floor—twelve hundred and four to twelve hundred and seven. The rube went up there, and when he came back he gave me a wink and said he 'guessed I knew how to keep a secret,' whatever he may have meant by that.”
Tiverton drifted away from the loquacious starter and back to the directory. There, under the heading of “D” he read:
“Devereux, R. T. 1204-7.”
Arthur went across to an elevator labeled “Express to 11th Floor” and was shot upward. At the twelfth floor he alighted and made his way along the corridor until he faced a ground-glass door on which was lettered in gilt:
1204
R. T. DEVEREUX & CO.
Mining Properties.
To Room 1205 Tiverton went, and, opening the door, walked into a small and rather overfurnished waiting room. The only occupant there was an office boy who nodded drowsily over a corner desk.
“It must have been a great night,” remarked Tiverton cheerily. “Will you wake up long enough to tell me if the boss is in?”
The boy rose, blinking. “Friend of his?” he queried, visibly impressed by the intentional familiarity of Tiverton's manner.
“No,” Tiverton answered, laughing, “an enemy. Is he in?”
“He's out to lunch,” was the reply; “and he's got a date uptown in the afternoon, but”
“I know,” said Tiverton, “but he isn't due uptown till two. So”
“Oh, maybe he'll be back then before he goes up there.” The boy yawned. “If you're one of his crowd you can wait in the reception room in there, if you want to.”
“Thanks, I will,” said Arthur. “Pleasant dreams.”
He passed on into a large inner room, and the spring door swung shut behind him. He found himself in a showy apartment—half office, half lounging room—with doors opening out on either side. It was not Tiverton's first glimpse of such places, and he wasted no time in idle staring, but walked straight over to the flat-topped desk that stood between two windows.
The desk top's only contents were a dozen loose sheets of paper, a rack of envelopes, a silver inkstand, and some pens. It was the paper that interested Tiverton. He picked up the nearest sheet of it, and at the top read the strong black letter heading:
DEVEREUX & CO.,
Mining Properties.
R. T. Devereux. Cyrus Q. Buchanan.
Tiverton was not surprised. He understood the game now. It was not new in the financial district, and several of its former players were even then enjoying the State's hospitality at Sing Sing, Auburn, and Clinton.
He had often heard of the old scheme, on the part of some crook promoter, to pretend that a financier of note was the “company” or the silent partner in his concern; and by the conjuring power of such a name to reap a goodly shearing of wool from the lambs.
The necessary stationery involved merely the aid of a dishonest or ignorant engraver. The use of paper thus engraved, in the United States mails, had often set the government on the track of such crooks. But Tiverton knew that the mere presence of such stationery on a promoter's desk was no violation of law, so that it was safe for the rascals to leave it there for the purpose of impressing their intended victims. Nor was he astonished to see several stamped and postmarked enveloped flung with elaborate carelessness at one end of the desk, and all addressed “Cyrus Q. Buchanan, care of Devereux & Co., Whitelawn Building.”
It was a very pretty little booby trap as it stood—the whole place. Yet Tiverton marveled at the daring use of a name so high in the financial world as Buchanan's.
“A case of quick touch-and-go work,” Arthur decided; “a scheme with a sudden punch in it, and then a getaway. But what, in the name of all that's wonderful, has the rubberneck coach to do with it?”
He had seen all he needed to show him the misuse to which his employer's name had been put. It remained only to apprise Buchanan by telegraph, and to await the latter's action. Action, with Cyrus Q. Buchanan, was seldom long delayed, nor was it apt to be over gentle.
Tiverton turned from the desk between the two windows, and took a step toward the door. Then he halted, for the door opened and some one entered. The newcomer was Florida Wesley, the girl of the touring automobile. She came into the room a little way, caught sight of Tiverton silhouetted against the sunshine of the window, and paused. It was clear that with the strong light at his back she did not recognize him.
“Pardon me,” she said, “but Mr. Devereux is out, and probably won't be back before four o'clock at the earliest. If you are a client”
She checked herself, for, as she spoke, Tiverton moved forward. She saw his face, and recognition dawned in her own—recognition, and something that seemed to him akin to panic.
Nor was Tiverton as calm and nerve steady as was his wont. He was saying to himself in a sort of daze:
“She came in here as if she belonged; and she spoke to me as though she were one of the firm. A crook company for fleecing silly sheep. And Oh, a girl with eyes like those!”
MR. TIVERTON?” said the girl, hesitating, as if undecided whether to say more.
“It's good of you to remember me,” he said. “Are you waiting for Mr. Devereux, too?”
“Yes,” she answered uneasily. “The boy in the anteroom was asleep, so I came in. I thought he might be”
She stopped, perhaps remembering, as did Arthur, that she had just said Devereux was not likely to return until late afternoon. They looked uncomfortably at each other. Then Arthur, offering her a chair, said: “Do you mind if I wait with you?”
“Not at all,” she assured him, still apparently ill at ease. And she took the proffered chair.
“You are a friend of Mr. Devereux?” she asked suddenly.
“A friend of one of your far humbler admirers,” he answered evasively; “of Denny Cross.”
“He is a character, isn't he?” She laughed. “He was the best chauffeur at the hotel where I stopped last year, and he restored a stolen pocketbook to me.”
“He was the son of our farmer up at North Wilbraham,” said Tiverton, “and he and I played together as boys. I had lost track of him till yesterday.”
They drifted into pleasant talk on indifferent topics, and for half an hour or more they chatted, while the office boy snored softly at the anteroom desk outside. Tiverton found Miss Wesley altogether delightful. For the moment he quite forgot his suspicions of her. The two found each other wonderfully congenial. At the end of a half hour they felt almost like old acquaintances. It was with real regret that Arthur noted the passing of time, by the wall clock, and recalled his plan to be at the corner of Broadway and Twenty-third Street for the seeing New York bus' two-o'clock trip.
He rose, with something like a sigh on his lips, and held out his hand.
“It has been good to meet you,” he said simply. “I wonder if you will think I am impertinent if I ask leave to call. You see,” he blundered on, “I know so few people in New York, and you”
He stopped. She was looking at him—not in wonder or displeasure, but with an expression he could not quite fathom. It seemed to him almost one of sorrow.
“Yes,” she said at last. “Please come. I shall be very glad to see you.”
“Oh, thank you!” he exclaimed impulsively. “And when am I likely to find you home? May I call to-morrow evening—early? Is that too soon? Or have you an engagement?”
“No, I have no engagements for to-morrow evening. I shall be at home. I am stopping at”
“The Idler?” he asked.
His repetition of what Denny Cross had told him of her former New York headquarters produced a remarkable effect on the girl. The soft lights in her big eyes grew hard. And her full lips compressed, then parted as if for hasty speech. But she closed them again, and, after a long look of scrutiny, said coldly:
“Yes. I am at the Idler. Good afternoon.”
“To-morrow evening, then?” he rejoined, as he started for the door, marveling at the odd change in her manner.
“Yes,” said Miss Wesley, in a tired voice; “to-morrow evening.”
“Now,” mused Tiverton, as he rattled uptown on the subway, “what the deuce could I have said or done to make her look at me like that? It was al most as if I'd sworn at her. And—and why did she wait at Devereux's office after I left? She had said he probably wouldn't be back. Does she belong there? Did Providence bestow such eyes upon a girl who is the accomplice of a crook?”
At Twenty-third Street he left the subway, and went to the nearest telegraph office, where he wrote out a long message in cipher, which he dispatched to Buchanan. It explained the whole Devereux affair as far as he himself understood it, and asked for instructions. Then Tiverton made his way westward to the starting point of the sight-seeing automobiles. The telegrams had taken somewhat longer to write than he had expected, and on his arrival he found the “downtown-trip” bus almost full.
A single glance showed him R. T. Devereux at the extreme end of the third seat, as before—on the side that would be nearest to the Whitelawn Building on the southward journey. Next to Devereux and in conversation with him were three men. They were not the three he had talked with on the preceding day, but they bore the same general air of prosperity and of a rural tailor's handiwork.
Devereux, as he talked, was glancing furtively to left and right, as though in search of something or some one. As he caught sight of Tiverton it was plain from his expression that he had discovered the object of his covert search. His ashy face went a trifle ashier, his eyes narrowed to slits, and he followed every motion of the new arrival.
Tiverton affected to notice nothing of this, but went forward to the front seat, where Denny hailed him with a grin of welcome, and made room for him in the place next to the wheel.
“I was afraid you wouldn't make it,” said Cross. “Listen quick, now, before Sam Tubbs gets aboard; there won't be any time afterward for a private chin. We talked pretty soft yesterday, you and me. But Tubbs' ears are so sharp he could use 'em to shave with. He caught a word or two between megaphone spiels, and some time between yesterday and now he must 'a' got to thinking. For the minute Devereux shows up to-day Tubbs runs up to him with a line of whispered talk, and then they both rubbers at me. Keep the soft pedal on to-day. Cheese it! Here's Tubbs.”
The announcer climbed on, off went the bus, and Tubbs, megaphone to lips, began his “lecture.” Neither Tiverton nor Cross spoke, but they could note the announcer's occasional glance at them.
As the bus neared the Whitelawn Building Tiverton riveted his gaze on the announcer. The latter looked at him, then at Devereux, and, in a voice that shook, he repeated his speech of the previous day, naming among the well-known tenants of the building Cyrus Q. Buchanan.
Tiverton looked back over his shoulder at Devereux. The white-faced man was pointing out the building as before, and his three companions were evincing great interest in it. Devereux's eyes shifted from the skyscraper and met Arthur's. In them Tiverton could read both fear and hatred.
“He looks at me as if I were a melodrama hero, and he the heavy villain,” remarked Arthur to Denny, under cover of the badly rattled Tubbs' next announcement. “Why, I wonder?”
“Same reason Sam Tubbs is leery of you,” decided Cross. “They're up to something, and they're wise that you're tabbing their game. Tubbs is afraid you'll report him and get him fired, and maybe prosecuted, too! The other chap's game may be so crooked that it spells jail. So both of 'em have cause to shy at you.”
“I know what one of Devereux's games is,” said Arthur. “But he doesn't know I know that. This much is plain: He bribes Tubbs every day to tell a lie about the tenancy list of the Whitelawn Building. It remains to be seen exactly what use he makes of a sight-seeing bus man's misstatement. Whatever the scheme is, it's serious enough to scare them both to know I'm watching it.”
“And it's plainer still that you'd better look out for yourself,” said Cross. “It's dangerous enough to have such men sore on you; but when they're scared of you besides—well, they're apt to do things.”
AT an unpardonably early hour next evening Tiverton called at the little Idler Hotel on the upper West Side. He had not realized how early it was until, after sending up his name to Miss Wesley, and going into a little reception room off the foyer, he saw that the mantel clock registered ten minutes to eight.
Tiverton was still framing an apology for his unseasonable call, and comforting himself with the possibility that a girl from the country might be used to receiving visits so soon after dinner, when some one came into the room. Tiverton turned, and beheld not Florida Wesley, but a tall man in evening dress. And the man was R. T. Devereux. If that white-faced person of mystery had looked like a melodrama villain in the prosaic surroundings of a seeing New York bus, he looked now like a stage Russian prince in his severely faultless evening attire. Tiverton was forced into reluctant admiration of the man's aspect and bearing.
Becoming aware of Tiverton's presence in the room, Devereux drew himself up stiffly. Into his white face came again that look of fear, mingled with sharp malice. But, with rare self-control, he recovered his composure; so quickly, indeed, that a casual observer could not have noted on his face any expression save of bored indifference.
He glanced carelessly at Tiverton, then moved toward a chair at the far end of the reception room. But Arthur was not content to let the chance slip by.
“Mr. Devereux?” he said civilly.
Devereux rose from the chair in which he was just seating himself, and faced about. His features were unmoved. But Tiverton, thanks to long training in the school of Cyrus Q. Buchanan, was too shrewd to judge any trained man's emotions from the expression—or lack of expression—of the face. His glance went at once to the white-gloved hands that hung inert at Devereux's sides. He saw that the fists were clenched in nervous tension.
“Mr. Devereux,” he repeated. “May I introduce myself? I am”
“Mr. Arthur Tiverton,” interrupted Devereux, with cool and purposed insolence, “of nine-ninety-nine West Eighty-fifth Street. I know. So you can spare yourself the trouble of inventing an alias for my benefit.”
“I don't indulge in the luxury of an alias,” retorted Arthur, in perfect good humor, marveling none the less at the other's knowledge of his name and ad dress; “any more than I can afford to claim as my partner a man who does not even know me by sight. Both those little extravagances cost too much for a poor chap like myself. Criminal trials are so expensive—as perhaps experience has taught you?”
The tone of the daring query was quite civil, and Devereux met it without flinching.
“There is probably a point in what you say,” said he, “if only I could understand. I am not good at jokes.”
“Oh!” Arthur laughed. “All jokes have points. Even ten-dollar witticisms at the expense of sight-seeing auto passengers who are told that Cyrus Q. Buchanan occupies an office he has never even heard of.”
Devereux raised his eyebrows noncommittally.
“Does it cost more, Mr. Devereux,” went on Arthur, in the same tone of pleasant impersonality, “to have a fake letterhead engraved than a genuine one? I mean, does one have to tear a bill in two before the stationer will consent”
A swish of skirts at the door interrupted him. Florida Wesley came in. Arthur advanced, hand outstretched, toward her. It had occurred to him from the moment of Devereux's appearance on the scene that the man, like himself, was at the Idler to call on Miss Wesley. And, with a glow of battle in his veins, Tiverton resolved to “cut him out.” If it were to be a contest of assurance, of wit, of power to entertain, he was determined to monopolize the girl's attention.
She replied graciously, even cordially, to Tiverton's greeting. Then she turned to Devereux, who was bowing before her.
“I tried to get you on the phone,” said Devereux, “but you hadn't come in yet. I have a box for 'Robin Hood' at the Casino to-night—the revival you said yesterday you wanted to hear before you leave town. I wonder if you would care to go there with me?”
She hesitated. Before she could make answer, Tiverton said, with ready ease:
“It's too bad, Mr. Devereux. Miss Wesley was kind enough to say I might call this evening, and to stay at home for me. I was hoping. Miss Wesley, on the way here, that you might like to go with me to the Olympic Roof Garden. It opens to-night. And they say the show is better than most of its sort. So I came early to ask”
“I'm so sorry,” said Devereux. “I planned such a jolly evening for you, Miss Wesley. Perhaps another time, I may be luckier.”
The man's graceful withdrawal from the competiton made Tiverton half ashamed of his own aggressiveness. He felt instinctively that he was not shining by comparison with this well-mannered enemy of his. And he sought to make amends.
“If you'd care to see the show at the Casino, Miss Wesley,” said he, “I don't want for a minute to stand in the way of your having a good time. I can call another evening, and”
“If you really don't mind,” she said timidly.
It was the first time she had spoken, or had a chance to speak, since she had entered the room. Tiverton could not believe his ears. He had made the renunciatory offer out of the merest courtesy, and with not the faintest idea that she would accept it.
“If you are quite sure you don't mind, Mr. Tiverton,” she went on, in sweet apology, “I think I'll take you at your word. I do so much want to hear 'Robin Hood.' And this may be my last chance. I hear it is to be taken off in a day or two.”
“Why, of course. I”
“And since Mr. Devereux has gone to the trouble of getting a box for it,” she hurried on, still apologetically, “it would be a shame not to”
“Naturally,” agreed Tiverton, with the best grace he could summon up.
“And you will call again?”
“Thank you!” he answered noncommittally. “It is good of you to ask me. I hope you'll enjoy the opera very much. Good night, Miss Wesley—Mr. Devereux.”
“Good night, Mr. Tiverton,” the latter called after the departing Arthur.
As he passed out Tiverton fancied that he heard a man's laugh—pleasant and well modulated, full of genuine amusement; and he made his way to the street in a white rage. He could not understand Florida Wesley's uncivil action in dismissing him for the sake of a much later invitation. She had not seemed to him the sort of girl to do so rude a thing, and her behavior puzzled him almost as keenly as it hurt him.
His brain hot with angry mortification, and his heart heavy with disillusion, Tiverton walked aimlessly from street to street for hours, rehearsing the scene at the Idler, and nursing his wrath and heartache. At last he steadied down to his normal state, and realized that the hour was late, and he was a mile or two from home. Quickening his pace, he trudged down West End Avenue to Eighty-fifth Street. Then he turned into the latter street—his footsteps echoing through its deserted width—and made for the house where he had his bachelor quarters.
A few doors away from his destination a man rose from behind an area railing, and, with some dimly seen weapon, struck heavily at Tiverton's head.
THE man had risen noiselessly from his hiding place; nor, in springing forward, had he made any sound. Like a dim-seen specter of the night he sprang and struck. So swift and silent were his advent and attack that they had taken Tiverton wholly by surprise; he had been walking rapidly, and had almost passed the area way when his assailant appeared. Yet instinctively he ducked to one side just as the blow fell. This half-unconscious shift, coupled with the uncertain light and the speed at which his victim had been walking, served to mar the thug's aim.
The blackjack struck glancingly. It caught and smashed Tiverton's stiff hat crown in its passage, but barely grazed his head. Arthur whirled, before the other could raise his arm for a second blow, and grappled him. But even as he did so two men who, unobserved by him, had walked close behind ever since he turned in from West End Avenue, threw themselves on him. None of the trio spoke. Nor did Tiverton cry for help. Thus, the voiceless struggle of the four, there on that half-lit pavement of the deserted side street, failed to attract, at first, any attention from the slumbering inmates of the adjoining houses or from such few people as chanced still to be abroad on either of the block's intersecting avenues.
If the first man had bungled through nervousness or miscalculation of distance, his two allies showed more precision. As Tiverton closed with the blackjack wielder, one of the other two caught him deftly by either arm, jerking him sharply backward. The first man, freed, swung his weapon once more in air, poising it for a second and more accurate blow.
Tiverton, the primal fight lust springing to life in every fiber, did not think of shouting for assistance; nor did he so much as realize that before such a cry could bring help, the trio might finish him and make good their escape. Instead, he flung himself with all his force forward and downward in one swift move of his whole muscular body. The maneuver was so quick, diametrically opposite in direction from that against which his two captors had braced themselves, that he broke momentarily free from their double grip, leaving part of a coat sleeve in the hands of one of them. And the blackjack blow whizzed harmless above him. At the same moment Tiverton caught the striker about the knees, drawing inward and putting all his force into a jerking upward heave. It was a simple “rough-house” trick he had learned as a boy at school. And it served.
Up went the tough's feet, and down came the rest of his body. He struck the pavement square on his shoulders and the back of his head. The impact knocked the breath out of him, and half stunned him. The blackjack flew from his hand. But before Tiverton could regain his feet the two others were upon him, bearing him down by sheer weight, cramping his movements—kicking, striking, gouging, employing every trick of the underworld street fighter. Their victim's activity and the uncertainty of the light prevented them from working with the wonted swift, deadly effect of their class. Moreover, in the scrimmage, Tiverton had become so “mixed up” with the fallen thug, who was trying to scramble to his feet, that they were hampered.
Tiverton dodged one blow, countered another, and hurled himself to one side just in time to avoid a heavy boot's swinging kick—which found sonorous lodgment in the ribs of his half-prostrate first assailant. He struck out, in intervals between blocking the showering blows, with fierce precision and with all the speed he could muster. Sometimes his fists encountered empty air. Oftener they thudded against clothing or flesh, with a numbing smash that gave him vague delight.
For less than thirty seconds this rough-and-tumble endured. Then, bruised and battered, Tiverton managed to stagger to his feet. He grappled with the nearer of his two upright antagonists, driving his left forearm under the latter's chin and at the same time hammering short-arm blows to his face. Both men now set upon him, showering blows with greater force than science at every part of his anatomy within reach. Hard pressed to counter and to duck, he yet was able to return with interest more than one of these blows. But at this juncture the tough whom Tiverton had first thrown feet upward, and whom his accomplice's ill-directed kick had further incapacitated, recovered his wits and his strength sufficiently at the same instant to reach forward from his semirecumbent posture and catch Tiverton's ankles.
Down came the man who was making such a brave fight against hopeless odds. Then one of his assailants stooped down, seized the blackjack, and, taking lightning aim, struck. As he did so, two things happened—a white-clad woman in an upper window of a house across the way began to scream “Murder!” to the accompaniment of upflinging windows and sleepy questions. And the blackjack wielder found himself caught around the neck from behind and jerked backward off his feet.
Tiverton, at the same time freeing his ankles from their imprisonment, jumped up. He was just in time to see his two fallen assailants getting shakily to their feet; while the third, in the tight grip of a new hand in the fray, was being carelessly and hastily deposited in a heap in the gutter.
From West End Avenue came running footsteps, punctuated by the recurrent beat of a police club on the pavement. And that sound was the elixir of life to the three toughs. The two who had regained their feet made off at a shambling run in the opposite direction from the oncoming patrolman. The man in the gutter scuttled along for a yard or so on all fours like a lame jack rabbit, then lurched up to a crouching position, and ran for his life in the wake of his fellows.
Tiverton made after the last fugitive, and the newcomer in turn made after him. As they reached the door of the house where Tiverton lived, the other man adroitly caught him by the arm and brought the pursuit to a sudden halt.
“In here!” said he. “Quick's the word!”
AT the restraining touch on his arm, Tiverton had pulled free, still too inflamed with battle to tell friend from foe, and eagerly ready to try conclusions with this possible fresh antagonist. But at sound of the other's voice his clenched fists relaxed.
“Denny!” he panted. “Denny Cross!”
“In here!” repeated Denny, dragging him forcibly up the short flight of brownstone steps into the vestibule. “Quick!”
“But”
“Cut out the buts. Do as I say, unless you want more trouble.”
He fairly hauled the tired man inside the vestibule, and closed the outer door after them, just as the patrolman trotted past in pursuit of his already vanishing triple quarry.
“Where's your keys?” asked Cross. “We're goin' up to your rooms before that cop stops running and comes back to listen to what the nightgown chorus from the windows has to say.”
With fingers that shook from reaction and overstrain, Tiverton drew out his bunch of keys. Denny took them from him, tried two or three in the inner door's keyhole, found the right one, and let them into the hall. Two minutes later they were in Tiverton's sitting room, and Denny had turned the electric key, flooding the place with light.
“Sit down there!” he said to his panting host. “I'm going to look you over for a list of the damages. So! Now, work all your joints one after the other. Never mind if some of them hurt. That won't mean much. I want to see if anything's broke. All in working order? Good! Now, draw a long, slow breath, if you can sidetrack the panting long enough. Hurt? Sure it doesn't? Good! That means no ribs smashed. I guess you've got what the hospital reports call 'abrasions and contusions, but no fractures or internal injuries.' That's French for 'paint scratched, but cylinders all right.' Now, get off what's left of your coat and vest and collar, and I'll wash some of that dust from your face. Gee, man! You sure played in luck! Not a black eye! But you've got a few dandy bruises on your arms and throat.”
As he talked, Denny was ministering to his friend with the quick skill of a prize-ring second—manipulating, fanning, sponging. Tiverton was content for a few minutes to submit to the kind ministrations of his friend. Then, with renewed vitality, curiosity came to the fore.
“How did you happen to get in on this holdup, Denny?” he asked.
“Holdup? Say, if you don't know a holdup from a smash-up, it's a pity I didn't give you a minute longer before I butted in. You'd have found out all about it by now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lots of folks get held up, in the course of the year, in these quiet side streets, late at night,” explained Denny. “And the guys that do the work generally make a get-away a good many jumps ahead of the cops. But they don't work it the way these lads did to-night. It's a come-up from behind, an arm around the neck, or a coat over the head, or a leveled gun; then a quick frisk and a fade; while the mark is still wondering what ran over him.”
“But”
“This was a smash-up party. When holdups find a man will fight—and can fight—they don't keep on slugging. They move out—if the street's as civilized as this one. No, son. These fellows were out to get you, not your cash or your ten-dollar watch and chain that you won at the raffle.”
“To kill me?” gasped Arthur, unbelieving.
“No; I guess not as bad as that. They'd 'a' used a knife or even taken a chance with a gun and an automobile skip if they'd wanted to kill you. But they most likely planned to give you a few days' or weeks' rest at a nice hospital, with a few broken bones or maybe a concussed brain or a cracked skull. Murder's too risky; the other way's a lot safer.”
“What object could any one have in”
“In getting you out of the way for a week or two, so that some game could be run off without your butting in?”
“Do you mean” cried Tiverton.
“I sure do; and then some.”
“Nonsense! We're not living in the Middle Ages.”
“Of course we ain't. Rubberneck coaches weren't hatched yet in the Middle Ages.”
“What have”
“What have touring New York autos got to do with your being beaten up? They've got this much to do with it.”
Denny pulled from his deep inner coat pocket an object from which the remnants of a wad of grimy cotton waste were still trailing.
“I picked this up,” said he. “I back-heeled the man who was just going to bounce it off your bean. He dropped it when he fell. I picked it up when we all began our little Marathon with the cop as scratch man.”
“It's a monkey wrench.”
“It was used as a blackjack. But as we came in I unwound most of the cotton from around it. If they'd wanted to croak you outright, they'd never have bundled it up at all. I to«k a good look at it as we came up the stairs. This wrench is an old acquaintance of mine. See?”
He pointed to a sort of trade-mark branded info the wood of the handle—a circle with several letters around it.
“That mark's on all the tools in our emergency kit on the benzine busies that take folks on seeing New York trips,” went on Denny. “It's the company's brand. Some one who has the right to go to one of our kits picked this toy for to-night's merry-making.”
“Tubbs!”
“Well, it's more likely Tubbs than the Czar of Ireland or the Mayor of Turkey. That is, unless you've been riding 'round on other cars than mine, giving 'lecturers' reason to be so scared of you that they want to put you out of commission for a while. Have you? If not, we're safe in placing a small bet that it's good old Mister Sam'l Tubbs, esquire. I warned you”
“Denny,” broke in Tiverton, “I haven't thanked you. But I do, from the bottom of my heart. If you hadn't happened to come along just when you did—and I still don't see how you did happen to—I'd have been”
“Happened, hey? Son, them things don't happen outside of stories and plays. I told you yesterday to look out. I told you it was more dangerous to have folks scared of you than sore on you. You wouldn't listen.”
“You were right.”
“It's a way I've got. I come around here to see you to-night, after supper—just as you asked me to—to have a North Wilbr'm chat. And”
“I'm sorry I wasn't home. I”
“You weren't far from it. As I came up to this house you were just leaving it. And it struck me how dead easy it would be for anybody to knock you in the head from behind. So I trailed along. You went to a hotel. Pretty soon out you came, looking like you'd lost nineteen dollars, and had a toothache to boot. You were so rattled you almost got run over by a dozen taxis. I saw you weren't fit to be left at large. So, just for the fun of it, I kept on trailing.”
“But why didn't you come up and speak to me?”
“Why should I? You looked about as friendly as a convention of hornets. I kept on. And a nice fool walk you led me. I was for giving it up once or twice. But I got curious so I didn't quit. At last you hit up the pace, and somehow I lost you. But you seemed to be heading for home here. So I took a chance, and came to Eighty-fifth Street. I got to the corner just in time to see you in the middle of that mix-up. The whole thing couldn't have lasted two minutes. But I kind of wish I'd been two minutes earlier.”
“Denny Cross! You spent a whole evening, after a hard day's work, acting as bodyguard to me, to save me from being hurt?”
“Well, if you like to put it that way You see, we're both from North Wilbr'm, and”
“Denny, you're white clear down to the ground. I won't try to thank you any more, because I don't know the right words; but I think you know how grateful I am.”
“Aw, can it!” muttered Denny. “And after this keep out of mischief. Quit butting in on crooked folks' games.”
“I can't. I'm going to see this thing to a finish. I've got to. The fight is only just beginning. Tubbs and the others are nothing more than Devereux's tools. He's the man I've got to fight. It's plain enough now. He must have set some one to follow me, the last time I left the sight-seeing car, for he knows my name and where I live. I found that out this evening. And he set these men to get me to-night. They w%re waiting for me to come home. It's all clear. And to-morrow—I'll have it out with him.”
“Artie,” drawled Denny Cross, “you're more kinds of a fool than I thought you were; but you're as many kinds of a man, too!”
WORK claimed Tiverton until nearly three o'clock the next afternoon; then, as he rose from his desk; a telegram was handed to him. It was from Cyrus Buchanan, and said, with characteristic terseness:
- Meet me at office, four p.m.
Tiverton had not expected his employer to return from the West for another three days, and on the strength of that belief he had invited Denny Cross to dine with him that evening. Before he and Denny had parted on the preceding night he had told Denny what he had learned concerning Devereux, omitting only all reference to Miss Wesley, and the chauffeur had been keenly interested.
Now Tiverton would probably have to spend his first evening of Buchanan's return in going over a quantity of piled-up correspondence. His first move was to call up Danny at the touring New York company's stand in Fifth Avenue. He was lucky enough to catch Denny just returning from the two-o'clock downtown trip.
“Too bad,” was Cross' comment on his news. “Better luck another evening. But it'll keep you out of mischief, maybe, to have your boss back. Now maybe you'll have to steer clear of Devereux for a while.”
“Not exactly,” said Tiverton, with a laugh. “I've nearly an hour on my hands before I'm due back here at four o'clock. And I'm going to run over to the Whitelawn Building.”
“What for?”
“To have a little friendly talk with R. T. Devereux. I've had it on my mind all day, but I've been too busy until now.”
“What the blazes are you going there for?” asked Cross in disgust. “Aren't you content with one beating up?”
“No; I'm still hungry. I'm going to have a settlement with R. T. Devereux, and find out what he means by hiring gorillas to attack me.”
“If you've got to be a plumb idiot,” grunted Cross, his voice rough and blurred across the telephone, “wait for me. I'm off for the day, and I'll come down and”
“Thank you, old man. But I haven't time. I'm due back here to meet Mr. Buchanan at four sharp, and he's not the sort to be kept waiting. I've barely time now to get up there in a hurry, and have my settlement with Brother Devereux. Thank you just as much; and good-by.”
He forestalled a rising storm of protests from Denny by hanging up the receiver. Ten minutes later he was at the Whitelawn Building. As he walked down the gilt-and-onyx hall of the skyscraper toward the line of elevators, he saw ahead of him a graceful figure in a tailored suit. He recognized Florida Wesley at a glance, even though her back was turned to him. Instinctively he quickened his pace. But before he had lessened by half the distance between them. Miss Wesley had entered an express elevator, and was shot upward in it.
There was no other express ready to start, and Tiverton was forced to take a drearily slow local that stopped at almost every floor between the first and the twelfth; he had ample time to consider the impulse that had prompted him to try to overtake the girl. He remembered her rudeness of the evening before, and his resolve to see no more of her. And at the thought, he was glad he had not caught up with her. He even berated himself for courting the first humiliation at her hands.
Then came reaction and a more worthy thought. He had been wrong in suspecting Florida of any connection with Devereux's swindling schemes. Ever since last night he had realized that a man does not treat his business partner or his confederate with the formal courtesy shown by Devereux toward Miss Wesley in that brief three-cornered interview at the Idler. Her behavior toward him then, and his toward her, had been that of two people whose acquaintanceship is still in the earlier stage. Therefore, Tiverton concluded, her visits to this office were unquestionably on business. What business? She lived up State somewhere. Presumably, as she stopped at the high-priced Idler during her stays in New York, and made daily use of taxicabs, she was a woman of means. Tiverton knew that on the gullibility of well-to-do single women the swindler often thrives.
In a flash the whole matter was clear to Tiverton—Miss Wesley's calls at the office, Devereux's attentions to her, and all. He was “roping” her into one of his swindling schemes; a scheme to rob her of such funds as the crook might cajole her into putting into some wildcat venture or raw fake. At once, on this reflection, Tiverton's mortification and his grievance against Florida Wesley vanished. He forgot the slight she had put upon him. He forgot everything except that an innocent girl whom he cared for was about to become the victim of a cheat; was about to be defrauded perhaps of her livelihood, to fatten the bank account of a thief.
Before his slow-moving car reached the twelfth floor his purpose in going to Devereux's office had shifted. He would leave the settlement of his personal account with Devereux till an other time. To-day he would merely demand an interview with Florida, and would tell her of the trap into which she had been lured. To Devereux's face, if need be, he would tell how she was being victimized and defrauded, and what sort of concern “R. T. Devereux & Co.” really was. Full of his resolution, he left the elevator, and hastened down the hall, to Suite 1204-1207. Entering the waiting room, he accosted the office boy, who this time chanced to be quite wide awake.
“I want to see Miss Wesley—the lady who just came in here,” said he.
The boy eyed him, perplexed; then slouched into a room to the left of the inner reception room—a room marked “Mr. Devereux, Private.”
Tiverton judged that the boy had gone to notify his employer; and as he preferred to see Florida in person before Devereux could interfere, he took a step toward the reception room. As he did so, the boy issued from the private office.
“Miss Wesley's in there,” he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the office's direction. He resumed his seat at the desk.
Tiverton crossed to the private office, and, as the boy had left its door ajar, entered without knocking. The room had but one occupant. Devereux was standing in the middle of it, visibly flustered.
“What do you want?” he demanded nervously.
“I want to speak with Miss Wesley,” replied Tiverton; “at another time with you, but just now with her. The boy said she was in here.”
“I told him to say so,” said Devereux, glancing guiltily over his shoulder to the closed door of what was evidently an inner room, and lowering his voice a little. "What do you want of her?”
“That is my affair. Please tell her that”
“Not so loud!” muttered Devereux, with another scared glance at the door of the inner room. “She—she isn't here.”
“She is!” contradicted Tiverton, advancing. “She is in that room behind you. Let me go in there, or”
“This is my office,” weakly blustered Devereux, hurriedly backing against the door of the room toward which his guilty, furtive glances had been straying. “Get out of here! Miss Wesley is not”
Tiverton did not let him finish the sentence. His own time was short. He was not minded to waste any of it in arguing with a man who, he was convinced, was lying to him.
“She is in that room behind you!” he declared. “Move aside and let me get in there.”
“No!” expostulated Devereux, still guarding the door with his body. “I tell you there's no one in that room. You'll enter it at your peril. I”
He got no further. Arthur's outflung hand caught him by the chest, gripping both lapels of his coat at their juncture, and, with one swift wrench, threw him aside, clearing the door of the living obstacle that had stood trembling before it. Without waiting to see if Devereux would retaliate or even defend himself, Tiverton, in almost the same move, snatched open the heavy wooden door and sprang into the room. Before he could turn the door was slammed shut behind him. He heard the rattle of a lock, then the click of a bolt. At the same instant he realized that there was no one in the room but himself. He was locked in; as neatly caught as was ever hare in a poacher's trap.
TlVERTON stood stock-still a moment, staring about him, taking stock of his position and his surroundings. He was in one of those “inside rooms” common to many office suites—rooms usually devoted to storage or to files. There was but one window—about two feet square, and at a height of five feet from the concrete floor.
The only door was that through which he had passed. It had no ground-glass upper half; it was massive, thick-paneled, of a type that probably would withstand the assault of two or three men.
Tiverton understood on the instant the simple trick that had been played on him; and he was philosopher enough to smile grimly at thought of the ease wherewith he had succumbed to Devereux's ruse. Had his mind not been full of Florida Wesley and of his plans to save her from being swindled, he knew he must have detected at once the false note in the man's manner, and have known that so cool and practiced a sharper would not cringe and betray weak nervousness as Devereux had pretended to. He was trapped, and he felt that nothing was to be gained by fuming or fretting or by useless repining.
The next move was to get out. Wrapping his handkerchief round his right hand's knuckles for protection, he drew back his arm, and, putting his shoulder and every atom of his strength and weight behind the blow, he smote one of the long upper panels of the door. The net result of this move was to numb his right arm to the elbow. Next, taking as careful aim as if on the football field, he swung back his right leg, braced himself, and kicked with all his might at the short bottom panel. The impact of the kick resounded through the little room, but the door held as firm as the eternal hills. He had heard a bolt, as well as a key, when the door was fastened behind him by Devereux. Hence he knew nothing was to be gained through trying to snap the lock by the old device of driving his heel at the keyhole.
He stood moveless, trying to work out the next step. He was puzzled not only as to how he should get out, but why he had been locked in. He remembered Denny Cross and the attack uptown, and knew that this latest action of Devereux was only another move in that rascal's game.
His eye was attracted to a slip of paper that lay under the door just across the threshold. He had not noticed it thrust there. And he was very certain it had not been there when he came into the room.
“Must have been shoved under while I was too busy hammering the door to notice it,” he decided.
It was a folded scrap of note paper with a “Devereux & Co.” head. On it this was hastily scrawled in pencil:
- Don't be fool enough to try knocking the door down. You can't. If you'll behave yourself I'll send in a couple of hours or so to let you out.
There was no signature; the note needed none. But its contents served to increase tenfold Tiverton's bewilderment. But with a shrug of the shoulders, he gave up the riddle, and prepared to wait with what patience he might, since waiting was apparently the one thing left for him to do. Nothing was to be gained by losing his head or going into paroxysms of rage.
It occurred to him to shout, but he dismissed the thought. His voice probably would penetrate to the outer office of the suite, but scarcely to the main corridor beyond; and the man who had locked him in was not likely to permit any subordinate in the suite to let him out.
There was not a stick of furniture of any description in the little cubbyhole of a room. But the window sill was rather deep. The prisoner drew himself up to it, and looked out on the chance of attracting by his gestures somebody in one of the windows of the opposite building. But he found there was no “opposite building”; at least that the building just across the street from the Whitelawn was several stories lower, and that none of its windows commanded a view of his.
He opened the sliding window and looked out. The report of a cannon, much less a human voice, at that height, could not have penetrated the roar of lower Broadway. He dropped back to the floor and stood there.
“It's checkmate,” he admitted to himself. “I lose.”
He walked back and forth to relieve the tedium of standing. Then he read over the letters in his pockets. After which he went to the door and called:
“Devereux!”
There was no answer. No sound came from the adjoining “private office.” He remembered Buchanan's injunction to him to be at the financier's office promptly at four, and looked at his watch. The time now was four-five. He recalled Buchanan's intolerance of a tardy employee. There would be a scene. But at the moment this bothered him little. For, if ever man had a legitimate excuse for lateness, he assuredly was the man. He found two more letters in an inner pocket, and destroyed a little more time in their dry perusal.
Then a new reflection came to him. And with it fled his philosophic calm. While he was standing there inert, Florida Wesley was perhaps being cheated of her money. He had come thither, posthaste, to warn her. And he was doing nothing.
He went again to the window, drew himself up into its open casement, and looked out once more. The coping outside was perhaps eighteen inches in width. It was of corrugated stucco, and sloped slightly downward, to shed rain. The sight gave Tiverton a thrill of inspiration. Wriggling his shoulders obliquely through the narrow window until half his body was outside, he looked to right and to left.
The coping apparently ran the whole length of the building. The nearest window to his own was perhaps fifteen feet to the left of him. And that window, he calculated, spelled escape. He crawled wholly out, so that he sat in the open window of his cell, his feet resting on the coping. He looked down. Two hundred feet below Broadway hummed and throbbed. Its scurrying pedestrians, were little black beetles; its automobiles were rushing blurs; its trolley cars small rhomboids of motion. The sense of great height and its accompanying dizziness came over Tiverton. He shook off the feeling.
“I could walk for miles on an eighteen-inch plank laid on the ground,” he told himself, “even if the plank sloped a little, as this coping does. I could walk it forever, and not once lose my balance. Any one could. Well, there's not an atom of difference between walking a plank on the ground and a coping two hundred feet in the air. It's all in the imagination. It's a question of nerve and of simple pluck.”
He slowly brought himself to a standing posture on the ledge. Then, shutting out from his mind all thought of the sheer and awful drop to one side, and the two hundred feet of empty air that lay between him and the street below, he began to work toward the window that was his destination.
A stiff breeze was blowing at that height, and it tugged at him as with sentient fingers, seeking to destroy his doggedly maintained balance. With tight lips he choked back the unreasoning dread which so often attacks even the coolest man at such a dizzy elevation. He leaned inward against the wall, and in six steps he was at the window. He fumbled with the lower sash's thin top line.
AS usual, in upper stories of office buildings, the window was unlocked. It yielded to his upward pressure. He raised it an inch; then, stooping, put his fingers under the bottom of the sash and lifted it far enough to admit himself. He worked swiftly, lest any one within should seek to bar him from entering. In ten seconds from the time he reached the window he had stepped down into the room it lighted. It was empty. Also it was totally unfurnished, as had been his temporary prison. This struck Tiverton as strange. That two rooms in a single suite should be allowed to go to waste, where room rents were proverbially high, was incomprehensible. A smaller suite would have saved Devereux much money, and apparently would have served his purpose quite as well.
The only break in the four walls' blank space—except for a door—was made by a sound-proof telephone booth. This Tiverton supposed was a relic of some broker or bucket shop's occupancy of the suite. But a second glance showed him a telephone directory hanging on a nail outside the booth. The book's date was that of the current month.
“Why does Devereux do his telephoning in an unfurnished room instead of using the phone at his office desk?” wondered Tiverton.
Then a second oddity came to his notice. On the rather dusty floor were several darker squares and oblongs. He had seen newly vacated offices before, and knew the marks left on parts of floors whence desks, tables, and rugs have just been removed, and when the room has not yet been swept since such removal.
“He's planning a get-away!” Tiverton told himself. “He's moving out his furniture room by room. The suite most likely is an empty shell by now, with just an office or two left furnished to fool customers.”
He started for the door, tried it, and found it locked. This door, like the one of his cell, was of solid wood instead of having a glass upper half. Tiverton knew by recent experience the folly of trying to force such a structure.
He turned hastily to the telephone booth, whose door stood wide. As he crossed the room he was aware for the first time of the murmur of talking voices. He located the sound as coming through a thin partition wall to the right of the room in which he was now locked. Entering the booth, he closed the door behind him, and reached for the receiver. As he touched it, and before he could lift it from the hook, the telephone bell rang. He hesitated, then lifted the receiver, and said:
“Hello!”
“That you, Rolf?” came a somewhat excited voice from the other end of the line.
Tiverton puzzled for a fraction of a second. Then he recalled that among the decoy envelopes he had seen on the reception-room desk the day of his former visit to the office was one addressed to “Cyrus Q. Buchanan, or Rolf T. Devereux.”
“No,” he answered, anxious to use the telephone himself. “He's busy. Hang up, please.”
“I've got to speak to him,” came the excited voice. “Tell him to drop everything and jump to the phone.”
“If you want him in such a hurry,” said Arthur, resolved not to lose his chance of using the wire, and noting that the number on the instrument did not bear a party letter, “why don't you call him up on his other phone?”
“He told me not to trust the switchboard for private business; you know that, if you're with him,” was the retort. “He keeps this number for such calls.”
“I'll tell him you want to speak to him,” drawled Tiverton lazily. “Who shall I say?”
“Belden. Henry Belden. Quick!”
Tiverton set down the receiver. It occurred to him that a little delay in arranging his own escape might be used to good purpose. He counted twenty, then lifted the receiver again. With as near an imitation as he could give of the marked rasp in Devereux's voice, and speaking low and hurriedly, as if in perturbation, he called:
“Hello, Harry! What's wrong?”
“You sound as though things weren't oversmooth at your own end,” was the answer. “Listen, Rolf! Don't fail on the clean-up this afternoon. And rush it. We're smashed if you don't. Buchanan got back to town half an hour ago—two days ahead of time. Rush things! If he ever gets wind of”
Tiverton drew in his breath sharply between his teeth, as if in dire consternation—a conservative noise, and one that saved the need of verbal reply.
“I didn't get the tip till a minute ago,” went on the speaker, “and I've let you know as soon as I could. I won't keep you. Chase back to the meeting. I suppose it's in full blast now, isn't it? I judge from your voice you're het up over it. Keep cool. It's a sure thing. And rush!”
With a grunt that might have expressed to his hearer almost anything except its utterer's identity, Tiverton hung up the receiver. Then, a few seconds later, giving the wire time to be cleared, he took it down again and called up Cyrus Q. Buchanan's private office. His employer answered him. In a dozen quick sentences Tiverton outlined the situation, and his own plight. To his wonder, the mining king showed no surprise, but said calmly;
“Stay where you are till I come.”
Tiverton left the phone booth, closing its door lest some new summons of the bell reach the next room. Then he went to the partition and stood there. For fifteen minutes he stood thus, two-thirds of the speech on its far side plainly audible to him.
Then a faint rattling noise caused him to turn. He looked around in time to see the door swing slowly open. On the threshold stood the burly, rugged figure of Mr. Buchanan. Tiverton was about to speak to his employer, but the latter, with a warning gesture, checked him and beckoned. Marveling, Arthur followed the mining king into the waiting room that opened into the main corridor, and out of the room in which Tiverton had been standing.
At the corner desk sat the office boy, vastly cowed and wide-eyed. Over him, a menacing sentry, stood Denny Cross. Buchanan held a bunch of office keys, with one of which he had evidently just unlocked the door of Tiverton's room. The turned-out pocket of the scared boy hinted how the keys had been obtained.
DENNY!” exclaimed Tiverton, scarcely above a whisper, in deference to Buchanan's wordless warning. “Glad to see you. But what the dickens are you doing here?”
“Butting in,” cheerily replied the chauffeur. “I got worried about you, Art, so I took a run down to your office. You didn't show up at four, so I got a message in to Mr. Buchanan. Just then you phoned him, and he let me come along. There's others coming, too,” he went on, with a delightful air of mystery. “He phoned 'em, too, but he wouldn't wait for 'em. So”
“Come on, Tiverton,” interrupted Buchanan. “From the voices I suppose they're in there?”
He nodded toward the door of the reception room, and added: “Cross, stay here and keep that boy from giving the alarm. Let in the others when they come, and get rid of any chance callers.”
“Sure,” said Denny, with a grin. “I'm one of your dandiest little doorkeepers; but I never thought I'd get a chance to hold down the job even for five minutes under the direct orders of Cyrus Q. Buchanan.”
“Come to my office to-morrow,” said Mr. Buchanan, with a grim smile at the pleasantry, “and I'll give you a better job. I like your type of man. Come along, Tiverton.”
“One moment, sir,” said Arthur. “While I was waiting for you I heard enough through the partition to give me the hang of the game, I think. It is the same old trick—using a big man's name to lure a group of rural investors into getting in on the ground floor of a company that doesn't exist, taking up shares, and paying outright for them. Devereux is holding the subscription meeting in there now. He'll cash a dozen big checks to-morrow when the banks open; and an hour later he'll be hard to find.”
“I think you're wrong,” said Mr. Buchanan. “He'll be one of the easiest men in New York to find. The Tombs' ledger will be the only directory any one will need to consult for his address. Come!”
He walked to the reception-room door, opened it quietly, and walked in, Tiverton at his heels. The spring on the door closed it behind them.
Twelve or fifteen persons were seated in the room facing the desk at which sat Devereux. Among them were Florida Wesley—the only woman present—and the men whom Tiverton had seen as Devereux's fellow passengers on the two trips aboard the sight seeing automobile. The others were of a like type—men whose looks bespoke prosperity, and whose bearing and mode of dress spoke rather of the village than of the city.
Devereux was speaking as the two newcomers entered. For the moment he did not see them, as he was facing obliquely away from the door.
“That, I think, is all,” he was saying. “As I said, I am sorry Mr. Buchanan is detained in the West longer than he expected to be, and cannot keep his appointment to attend our meeting. But as his letter, that I've just read, tells us, it is on our business that he is there, and to clinch the consolidation that will nearly treble the value of our stock. And now,” producing a packet, a typewritten list, and a fountain pen, “though it is a trifle informal, perhaps, I will receive your checks and issue the shares. Make them out to R. T. Devereux & Co., please. Not to me or to Mr. Buchanan. We”
“Why not to Mr. Buchanan?” cut in the mine king. “I like to get all the easy money I can.”
Every one turned. The up Staters frowned heavily at the intrusion. Florida Wesley started to her feet. Devereux sat moveless, tense, his eyes riveted on the newcomers. His face did not change a muscle. His self-control was superb.
“My old friend, Rolf Devereux,” purred Buchanan. “How are you? Still under your own name, I see? Well, that's one point in your favor, and. I'm afraid, the only one. We haven't met, I think, since I had to discharge you six years ago for taking a more than neighborly interest in our customers' accounts.”
Devereux made no reply. The herd of sheep, ripe for the shearing, looked from him to Buchanan, and back again in bewilderment.
“And now, it seems,” went on Buchanan genially, “we're re-partners, you and I, in a mining deal, eh? And I'm just in time to get my share of the profits in a mine commodiously situated on a fake map? Fine! But best of all is that touch of yours in having a sight-seeing auto lecturer announce to your clients that my office is here instead of in the Cogghall Building. That was a real stroke of genius, my friend. Genius! For no out-of-towner would doubt the announcement of a public servant like a seeing New York lecturer. He couldn't possibly be in on the plot. You couldn't safely put my name on your door or on the directory board; but a rubberneck-coach announcer served quite as well. And it clinched these people's belief in you. So you gave them free rides, and the lecturer gave them false information—and in return they were going to give you good money. Well played!”
“Who is this man?” angrily demanded a fat country banker with a short, gray chin beard. “What is he driving at?”
“He's trying to explain,” said Buchanan, laughing, “that Mr. Devereux is going to start in a few minutes for jail.”
“You are mistaken,” said Devereux coolly. “I must be caught before I can be jailed; and I've a fair start. Clear a way there, please.” He drew from a desk drawer a blue-barreled revolver, and, swinging to his feet, raised it. “Clear the way to the door!” he commanded.
Two investors dived under chairs. A third yelled “Police!”
“Drop that just where you are, Mr. Devereux,” said Florida Wesley, who stood a little to one side of the swindler. “Drop it, and don't shift your aim this way. If you do I'll get you first.”
Her voice was sweet and low-pitched. Yet as Devereux involuntarily shifted his gaze in her direction he let the weapon fall from his hand. Miss Wesley had taken unobtrusively from a hand bag at her wrist a small but very businesslike automatic pistol; and its muzzle was in an uncomfortably direct line with Devereux's head;
In her big eyes there was a quiet intensity of meaning that no one could mistake. Wherefore Devereux, whose own revolver muzzle was not leveled in her direction, but on those who had stood between him and the door, thought it wise to obey her modest request. He stood disarmed, helpless, staring at her.
“Miss Wesley!” he gasped, his monumental calm for once utterly deserting him.
“Yes,” she said, lowering her weapon, but still keeping him covered. “Miss Wesley—the girl from Cazenovia, Madison County, who came into her property last month, when she was twenty-one, and wrote a letter of inquiry about one of your circulars she chanced to see. Stand still, please, Mr. Devereux. Mr. Tiverton, may I trouble you to telephone for me to”
“Miss Wesley!” again gasped Devereux incredulously.
“Of the United States secret service—and incidentally at your own,” acknowledged the girl. “We have been at work over your doubtful use of the mails for some months, Mr. Devereux. And I think at last I have made the case complete. You would have been arrested by my associates anyway, as you left the building. But as they weren't to arrive for half an hour yet, I'll ask Mr. Tiverton to telephone to”
“It isn't necessary,” put in Mr. Buchanan, indicating two men that Denny Cross was ushering into the room. “Here are a couple of men I've had on this case. I phoned for them to come here just before I started. It is odd we both planned to make the arrest to-day. Miss Wesley, for to-morrow would have been too late. I judge so from the fact that Devereux locked up this secretary of mine, whom he seems to have taken for a secret-service man, and whom he wanted to keep from bringing down the law on him until he could get clear with the checks. There's your man, officers.”
“Yes,” said Miss Wesley to Tiverton, on their way uptown, “I did think you were one of his confederates, when I found you knew where I lived; and I tested the belief by seeing what you'd do when I broke an appointment with you and went to the theater with him. But your face when I accepted his invitation told me how wretchedly mistaken I'd been. And, oh, I was so sorry!”
“But this evening I may call?” said Tiverton.
“This evening,” she assented.
“And other evenings?”
“It is quite likely,” said Miss Wesley, and they both laughed.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1942, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 81 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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