THE LION’S SHARE

“Yes,” he said quietly, “you are right, it is blood.” Page [99]

THE LION’S SHARE

By
OCTAVE THANET
Author of
The Man of the Hour, Stories of a Western Town
The Missionary Sheriff
A Book of True Lovers, etc.

With Illustrations by
E. M. ASHE

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1907
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

October

ROBERT DRUMMOND COMPANY, PRINTERS, NEW YORK

CONTENTS

Serene, indifferent to fate,

Thou sittest by the Western gate,

Thou seest the white seas fold their tents,

Oh, warder of two continents.

Thou drawest all things small and great

To thee beside the Western gate.

THE LION’S SHARE

CHAPTER I
THE MAN WITH THE MOLES

The first time that Colonel Rupert Winter saw Cary Mercer was under circumstances calculated to fix the incident firmly in his memory. In the year 1903, home from the Philippines on furlough, and preparing to return to a task big enough to attract him in spite of its exile and hardships, he had visited the son of a friend at Harvard. They were walking through the corridors of one of the private dormitories where the boy roomed. Rather grimly the soldier’s eyes were noting marble wainscoting and tiled floors, and contrasting this academic environment with his own at West Point. A caustic comment rose to his lips, but it was not uttered, for he heard the sharp bark of a pistol, followed by a thud, and a crackle as of breaking glass.

“Do you fellows amuse yourselves shooting up the dormitory?” said he. The boy halted; he had gone white.

“It came from Mercer’s room!” he cried, and ran across the corridor to a door with the usual labeling of two visiting cards. The door was not locked. Entering, they passed into a vestibule, thence through another door which stood open. For many a day after the colonel could see just how the slender young figure looked, the shoulders in a huddle on the study table, one arm swinging nerveless; beside him, on the floor, a revolver and a broken glass bottle. The latter must have made the crackling sound. Some dark red liquid, soaking the open sheets of a newspaper, filled the room with the pungent odor of alcohol. Only the top of the lad’s head showed—a curly, silky, dark brown head; but even before the colonel lifted it he had seen a few thick drops matting the brown curls. He laid the head back gently and his hand slipped to the boy’s wrist.

“No use, Ralph,” he said in the subdued tones that the voice takes unconsciously in the presence of death.

“And Endy was going to help him,” almost sobbed Ralph. “He told me he would. Oh, why couldn’t he have trusted his friends!”

The colonel was looking at the newspaper—“Was it money?” said he; for a glance at the dabbled sheet had brought him the headings of the stock quotations: “Another Sharp Break in Stocks. New Low Records.” It had been money. Later, after what needed to be done was over, after doctors and officers of the law were gone, Colonel Winter heard the wretched story. A young, reckless, fatally attractive Southerner, rich friends, college societies, joyous times; nothing really wicked or vicious, only a surrender to youth and friendship and pleasure, and then the day of reckoning—duns, college warnings, the menace of black disgrace. The young fellow was an orphan, with no near kindred save one brother much older than he. The brother was reputed to be rich, according to Southern standards, and young Mercer, who had just come into a modest patrimony of his own, invested in his brother’s ventures. As to the character of these ventures, whether flimsy or substantial, the colonel’s informants were absolutely ignorant. All they knew of the elder Mercer was that he was often in New York and had “a lot to do with Wall Street.” He wasn’t a broker; no, he was trying to raise money to hang on to some big properties that he had; and the stocks seemed to be going at remarkable rates just now, the bottom dropping out of the market. If a certain stock of the Mercers’—they didn’t know the name—could be kept above twenty-seven he would pull through. Colonel Winter made no comment, but he remembered that when he had studied the morning’s stock-market pages for himself, he had noted “bad slump in the Southern steels,” and “Tidewater on the toboggan slide; off three to four points, declining from twenty-seven and a fraction to twenty-three.”

“Another victim of the Wall Street pirates,” was the colonel’s silent judgment on the tragedy. “Lucky for her his mother’s dead.”

The next morning he had returned and had gone to his young friend’s rooms.

The boy was still full of the horror of the day before. Mercer’s brother was in Cambridge, he said—arrived that morning from New York. “Endy is going to fetch him round to get him out of the reporters’ way sometime this evening; maybe there’s something I can do”—this in explanation of his declining to dine with the colonel. As the two entered the rooms, Winter was a little in advance, and caught the first glimpse of a man sitting in a big mission arm-chair, his head sunk on his breast. So absorbed was this man in his own distempered musings that the new-comers’ approach did not arouse him. He sat with knitted brows and clenched hands, staring into vacancy; his rigid and pallid features set in a ghastly intensity of thought. There was suffering in the look; but there was more: the colonel, who had been living among the serpent passions of the Orient, knew deadly anger when he saw it; it was branded on the face before him. Involuntarily he fell back; he felt as if he had blundered in on a naked soul. Noiselessly he slipped out of the range of vision. He spoke loudly, halting to ask some question about the rooms; this made a moment’s pause.

It was sufficient; in the study they found a quiet, calm, although rather haggard-looking man, who greeted Winter’s companion courteously, with a Southern accent, and a very good manner. He was presented to the colonel as Mr. Mercer. He would have excused himself, professing that he was just going, but the colonel took the words out of his mouth: “Ralph, here, has a cigar for me—that is all I came for; see you at the Touraine, Ralph, to-morrow for luncheon, then.” He did not see the man again; neither did he see Ralph, although he made good, so far as in him lay, his fiction of an engagement at the Touraine. But Ralph could not come; and Winter had lunched, instead, with an old friend at his club, and had watched, through a stately Georgian window, the shifting greenery of the Common in an east wind.

All through the luncheon the soldier’s mind kept swerving from the talk in hand to Cary Mercer’s face. Yet he never expected to see it again. Three years later he did see it; and this second encounter, of which, by the way, Mercer was unconscious, was the beginning of an absorbing chapter in his life. A short space of time that chapter occupied; yet into it crowded mystery, peril, a wonderful and awful spectacle, the keenest happiness and the cruelest anxiety. Let his days be ever so many, the series of events which followed Mercer’s reappearance will not be blurred by succeeding experiences; their vivid and haunting pictures will burn through commoner and later happenings as an electric torch flares through layers of mist.

Nothing, however, could promise adventure less than the dull and chilly late March evening when the chapter began. Nor could any one be less on the lookout for adventure, or even interest, than was Rupert Winter. In truth, he was listless and depressed.

When he alighted from his cab in the great court of the Rock Island Station he found Haley, his old orderly, with a hand on the door-hasp. Haley’s military stoicism of demeanor could not quite conceal a certain agitation—at least not from the colonel’s shrewd eye, used to catch the moods of his soldiers. He strangled a kind of sigh. “Doesn’t like it much more than I,” thought Rupert Winter. “This is mighty kind of you, Haley,” he said.

“Yes, sor,” answered Haley, saluting. The colonel grinned feebly. Haley, busy repelling a youthful porter, did not notice the grin; he strode ahead with the colonel’s world-scarred hand-luggage, found an empty settee beside one of the square-tiled columns of the waiting-room and disposed his burden on the iron-railed seat next the corner one, which he reserved for the colonel.

“The train ain’t in yet, Colonel,” said he. “I’ll be telling you—”

“No, Haley,” interrupted the colonel, whose lip twitched a little; and he looked aside; “best say good-by now; don’t wait. The fact is, I’m thinking of too many things you and I have gone through together.” He held out his hand; Haley, with a stony expression, gazed past it and saluted, while he repeated: “Yes, sor; I’ll be back to take the bags whin the train’s made up.” Whereupon he wheeled and made off with speed.

“Just the same damned obstinate way he’s always had,” chuckled the colonel to himself. Nevertheless, something ached in his throat as he frowned and winked.

“Oh, get a brace on you, you played-out old sport!” he muttered. “The game’s on the last four cards and you haven’t established your suit; you’ll have to sit back and watch the other fellows play!” But his dreary thoughts persisted. Rupert was a colonel in the regular army of the United States. He had been brevetted a brigadier-general after the Spanish War, and had commanded, not only a brigade, but a division at one critical time in the Philippines; but for reasons probably known to the little knot of politicians who “hung it up,” although incomprehensible to most Americans, Congress had failed to pass the bill giving the wearers of brevet titles the right to keep their hard-won and empty honors; wherefore General Winter had declined to Colonel Winter.

He had more substantial troubles, including a wound which would probably make him limp through life and possibly retire him from service at fifty. It had given him a six months’ sick leave (which he had not wanted), and after spending a month on the Atlantic coast, he was going for the spring to the Pacific. Haley, whose own term of service had expired, had not reënlisted, but had followed him, Mrs. Haley and the baby uncomplainingly bringing up the rear. It was not fair to Haley nor to Mrs. Haley, the colonel felt. He had told Haley so; he had found a good situation for the man, and he had added the deed for a little house in the suburbs of Chicago.

If Haley wouldn’t reënlist—there never was a better soldier since he had downed a foolish young hankering for wild times and whisky—if he wouldn’t go back to the army, where he belonged, let him settle down, take up the honest carpenter’s trade that he had abandoned, be a good citizen and marry little Nora to some classmate in the high school, who might make a fortune and build her a Colonial mansion, should the Colonial still obtain in the twentieth century.

The colonel had spread a grand prospect before Haley, who listened unresponsively, a dumb pain in his wide blue Irish eyes. The colonel hated it; but, somehow, he hated worse the limp look of Haley’s back as he watched it dwindle down Michigan Avenue.

However, Mrs. Haley had been more satisfactory, if none the less bewildering. She seemed very grateful over the house and the three hundred dollars for its furnishing. A birthday present, he had termed it, with a flicker of humor because the day was his own birthday. His fiftieth birthday it happened to be, and it occurred to him that a man ought to do something a little notable on such an anniversary. This rounding of the half-century had attributes apart; it was no mere annual birthday; it marked the last vanishing flutter of the gilded draperies of youth; the withering of the garlands; the fading tinkle of the light music of hope. It should mark a man’s solid achievements. Once, not so long ago, Winter had believed that his fiftieth birthday would see wide and beneficent and far-reaching results in the province where he ruled. That dream was shattered. He was generous of nature, and he could have been content to behold another reap the fields which he had sown and tilled; it was the harvest, whether his or another’s, for which he worked; but his had been the bitter office to have to stand aside, with no right to protest, and see his work go to waste because his successor had a feeble brain and a pusillanimous caution in place of his own dogged will. For all these reasons, as well as others, the colonel found no zest in his fiftieth birthday; and his reverie drifted dismally from one somber reflection to another until it brought up at the latest wound to his heart—his favorite brother’s death.

There had been three Winter brothers—Rupert, Melville and Thomas. During the past year both Thomas Winter and his wife had died, leaving one child, a boy of fourteen, named Archibald after his father’s uncle. Rupert Winter and the boy’s great-aunt, the widow of the great-uncle for whom he had been named, were appointed joint guardians of the young Archie. To-night, in his jaded mood, he was assailed by reproaches because he had not seen more of his ward. Why, he hadn’t so much as looked the little chap up when he passed through Fairport—merely had sent him a letter and some truck from the Philippines; nice guardian he was! By a natural enough transition, his thoughts swerved to his own brief and not altogether happy married life. He thought of the graves in Arizona where he had left his wife and his two children, and his heart felt heavy. To escape musings which grew drearier every second, he cast his eyes about the motley crowd shuffling over the tiled floors or resting in the massive dark oaken seats. And it was then that he saw Cary Mercer. At first he did not recognize the face. He only gazed indifferently at two well-dressed men who sat some paces away from him in the shadow of a great tiled column similar to his own. There was this difference, it happened: the mission lantern with its electric bulbs above the two men was flashing brightly, and by some accident that above the colonel was dark. He could see the men, himself in the shadow.

The men were rather striking in appearance; they were evidently gentlemen; the taller one was young, well set-up, clean-shaven and quietly but most correctly dressed. His light brown hair showed a slight curl in its closely clipped locks; his gray-blue eyes had long lashes of brown darker than his hair; his teeth were very white, and there was a dimple in his cheek, plain when he smiled. Had his nose been straight he would have been as handsome as a Greek god, but the nose was only an ordinary American nose, rather too broad at the base; moreover, his jaw was a little too square for classic lines. Nevertheless, he was good to look upon, as well as strong and clean and wholesome, and when his gray-blue eyes strayed about the room the dimple dented his cheek and his white teeth gleamed in a kind of merry good-nature pleasant to see. But it was the other man who held the colonel’s eye. This man was double the young man’s age, or near that; he was shorter, although still of fair stature, and slim of build. His face was oval in contour and delicate of feature. Although he wore no glasses, his brow had the far pucker of a near-sighted man. There was a mole on his cheek-bone and another just below his ear. Both were small, rather than large, and in no sense disfiguring; but the colonel noted them absently, being in the habit of photographing a man in a glance. The face had beauty, distinction even, yet about it hung some association, sinister as a poison label.

“Now, where,” said the colonel to himself, “where have I seen that man?” Almost instantly the clue came to him. “By Jove, it’s the brother!” he exclaimed. Three years ago, and he had almost forgotten; but here was Cary Mercer—the name came to him after a little groping—here he was again; but who was the pleasant youngster with him? And what were they discussing with so little apparent and so much real earnestness?

One of the colonel’s physical gifts was an extraordinary acuteness of hearing. It passed the mark of a faculty and became a marvel. Part of this uncanny power was really due, not to hearing alone, but to an alliance with another sense, because Winter had learned the lip language in his youth; he heard with his eyes as well as his ears. This combination had made an unintentional and embarrassed eavesdropper out of an honest gentleman a number of times. To set off such evil tricks it had saved his life once on the plains and had rescued his whole command another time in the Philippines. While he studied the two faces a sentence from the younger man gripped his attention. It was: “I don’t mind the risk, but I hate taking such an old woman’s money.”

“She has a heap,” answered the other man carelessly; “besides—” He added something with averted head and in too low a voice to reach the listener unassisted. But it was convincing, evidently, since the young man’s face grew both grave and stern. He nodded, muttering: “Oh, I understand; I wasn’t backing water; I know we have lost the right to be squeamish. But I say, old chap, how long since Mrs. Winter has seen you? Would she recognize you?”

The colonel, who had been about to abandon his espionage as unbecoming a soldier and a gentleman, stowed away all his scruples at the mention of the name. He pricked up his ears and sharpened his eyes, but was careful lest they should catch his glance. The next sentence, owing to the speaker’s position, was inaudible and invisible; but he clearly caught the young man’s response:

“You’re sure they’ll be on this train?”

And he saw the interlocutor’s head nod.

“The boy’s with them?”

An inaudible reply, but another nod.

“And you’re sure of Miss Smith?”

This time the other’s profile was toward the listener, who heard the reply, “Plumb sure. I wish I were as sure of some other things. Have we settled everything? It is better not to be seen together.”

“Yes, I think you’ve put me wise on the main points. By the way, what is the penalty for kidnapping?”

Again an averted head and hiatus, followed by the younger man’s sparkling smile and exclamation: “Wow! Riskier than foot-ball—and even more fun!” Something further he added, but his arms hid his mouth as he thrust them into his greatcoat, preparing to move away. He went alone; and the other, after a moment’s gloomy meditation, gathered up coat and bag and followed. During that moment of arrested decision, however, his features had dropped into sinister lines which the colonel remembered.

“Dangerous customer, or I miss my guess,” mused the soldier, who knew the passions of men. “I wonder—they couldn’t mean my Aunt Rebecca? She’s old; she has millions of money—but she’s not on this train. And there’s no Miss Smith in our deck. I’m so used to plotting I go off on fake hikes! Probably I’m getting old and dotty. Mercer, poor fellow, may have his brain turned and be an anarchist or a bomb-thrower or a dirty kidnapper for revenge; but that boy’s a decent chap; I’ve licked too many second lieutenants into shape not to know something of youngsters.”

“By the way what is the penalty for kidnapping?” Page [16]

He pushed the idea away; or, rather, his own problems pushed it out of his mind, which went back to his ward and his single living brother. Melville had no children, only his wife’s daughters, who were both married—Melville having married a widow with a family, an estate and a mind of her own. Melville was a professor in a state university, a mild, learned man whom nature intended for science but whom his wife was determined to make into the president of the university.

“Even money which will win,” chuckled Rupert Winter to himself. “Millicent hasn’t much tact; but she has the perseverance of the saints. She married Mel; he doesn’t know, but she surely did. And she bosses him now. Well, I suppose Mel likes to be bossed; he never had any strenuous opinions except about the canals of Mars—Valgame dios!”

With a gasp the colonel sprang to his feet. There before him, in the flesh, was his sister-in-law. Her stately figure, her Roman profile, her gracefully gesticulating hand, which indicated the colonel’s position to her heavily laden attendant, a lad in blue—these he knew by heart just as he knew that her toilet for the journey would be in the latest mode, and that she would have the latest fashion of gait and mien. Millicent studied such things.

She waved her luggage into place—an excellent place—in the same breath dismissing the porter and instructing him when he must return. Then, but not until then, did she turn graciously to her brother-in-law.

“I hoped that I should find you, Bertie,” she said in a voice of such creamy richness that it was hard to credit the speaker with only three short trips to England. “Melville said you were to take this train; and I was so delighted, so relieved! I am in a most harassing predicament, my dear Bertie.”

“That’s bad,” murmured the colonel with sympathetic solicitude: “what’s the trouble? Couldn’t you get a section?”

“I have my reservations, but I don’t know whether I shall go to-night.”

“Maybe I’m stupid, Millicent, but I confess I don’t know what you mean.”

“Really, there’s no reason why you should, Bertie. That’s why I was so anxious to see you—in time, so that I might explain to you—might put you on your guard.”

“Yes?” the colonel submitted; he never hurried a woman.

“I’m going to visit dear Amy—you remember she was married two years ago and lives in Pasadena; she has a dear little baby and the loveliest home! It’s charming. And she was so delighted with your wedding gift, it was so original. Amy never did care for costly things; these simple, unique gifts always pleased her. Of course, my main object is to see the dear child, but I shall not go to-night unless Aunt Rebecca Winter is on the train. If for any reason she waits over until to-morrow I shall wait also.”

“Ah,” sighed the colonel very softly, not stirring a muscle of his politely attentive face; “and does Aunt Rebecca expect to go on the train?”

“They told me at the Pullman office that she had the drawing-room, the state-room and two sections. Of course, she has her maid with her and Archie—”

“Does he go, too?” the colonel asked, his eyes narrowing a little.

“Yes, she’s taking him to California; he doesn’t seem well enough, she thinks, to go to school, so he is to have a tutor out there. I’m a little afraid Aunt Rebecca mollycoddles the boy.”

“Aunt Rebecca never struck me as a molly-coddler. I always considered her a tolerably cynical old Spartan. But do you mean there is any doubt of their going? Awfully good of you to wait to see if they don’t go, but I’m sure Aunt Rebecca wouldn’t want you to sacrifice your section—”

Mrs. Melville lifted a shapely hand in a Delsartian gesture of arrest; her smiling words were the last the colonel had expected. “Hush, dear Bertie; Aunt Rebecca doesn’t know I am going. I don’t want her to know until we are on the train.”

“Oh, I see, a surprise?” But he did not see; and, with a quiet intentness, he watched the color raddle Mrs. Melville’s smooth cheeks.

“Hardly,” returned the lady. “The truth is, Bertie, Melville and I are worried about Aunt Rebecca. She, we fear, has fallen under the influence of a most plausible adventuress; I suppose you have heard of her companion, Miss Smith?”

“Can’t say I have exactly,” said the colonel placidly, but his eyes narrowed again. “Who is the lady?”

“I thought—I am sure Melville must have written you. But— Oh, yes, he wrote yesterday to Boston. Well, Bertie, Miss Smith is a Southerner; she says she is a South Carolinian, but Aunt Rebecca picked her up in Washington, where she was with a kind of cousin of ours who was half crazy. Miss Smith took care of her and she died”—she fixed a darkling eye on the soldier—“she died and she left Miss Smith money.”

“Much?”

“A few thousands. That is how Aunt Rebecca met her, and she pulled the wool over auntie’s eyes, and they came back together. She’s awfully clever.”

“Young? Pretty?”

“Oh, dear, no. And she’s nearer forty than thirty. Just the designing age for a woman when she’s still wanting to marry some one but beginning to be afraid that she can’t. Then such creatures always try to get money. If they can’t marry it, and there’s no man to set their caps for, they try to wheedle it out of some poor fool woman!” Millicent was in earnest, there was no doubt of that; the sure sign was her unconscious return to the direct expressions of her early life in the Middle West.

“And you think Miss Smith is trying to influence Aunt Rebecca?”

“Of course she is; and Aunt Rebecca is eighty, Rupert. And often while people of her age show no other sign of weakening intellect, they are not well regulated in their affections; they take fancies to people and get doting and clinging. She is getting to depend on Miss Smith. Really, that woman has more influence with her than all the rest of us together. She won’t hear a word against her. Why! when I tried to suggest how little we knew about Miss Smith and that it would be better not to trust her too entirely, she positively resented it. Of course I used tact, too. I was so hurt, so surprised!” Mrs. Millicent was plainly aggrieved.

The colonel, who had his own opinion of the tact of his brother’s wife, was not so surprised; but he made an inarticulate sound which might pass for sympathy.

“We’ve been worried a good deal,” pursued Mrs. Melville, “about the way Aunt Rebecca has acted. She wouldn’t stay in Fairport, where we could have some influence over her. She was always going south or going to the sea-shore or going somewhere. Sometimes I suspect Miss Smith made her, to keep her away from us, you know.”

“Well, as long as I have known Aunt Rebecca—anyhow, ever since Uncle Archibald died—she has been restless and flying about.”

“Not as she is now. And then she only had her maid—”

“Oh, yes, Randall; she’s faithful as they make ’em. What does she say about Miss Smith?”

“Bertie, she’s won over Randall. Randall swears by her. Oh, she’s deep!”

“Seems to be. But—excuse me—what’s your game, Millicent? How do you mean to protect our aged kinswoman and, incidentally, of course, the Winter fortune?”

“I shall watch, Bertie; I shall be on my guard every waking hour. That deluded old woman is in more danger, perhaps, than you dream.”

“As how?”

“Miss Smith”—her voice sank portentously—“was a trained nurse.”

“What harm does that do—unless you think she would know too much about poisons?” The colonel laughed.

“It’s no laughing matter, Bertie. Rebecca is so rich and this other woman is so poor, and, in my estimation, so ambitious. I make no insinuations, I only say she needs watching.”

“You may be right about that,” said the colonel thoughtfully. “There is Haley and the boy for your bags!”

The boy picked up the big dress-suit case, the smaller dress-suit case and the hat case, he grabbed the bundle of cloaks, the case of umbrellas, and the lizard-skin bag. Dubiously he eyed the colonel’s luggage, as he tried to disengage a finger.

“Niver moind, young feller,” called Haley, peremptorily whisking away the nearest piece, “I’ll help you a bit with yours, instead; you’ve a load, sure!”

Mrs. Melville explained in an undertone: “I take all the hand-luggage I possibly can; the over-weight charges are wicked!”

“Haley, they won’t let you inside without a ticket,” objected the colonel. But Haley, unheeding, strode on ahead of the staggering youth.

“I have an English bath-tub, locked, of course, and packed with things, but he has put that in the car,” said Mrs. Melville.

“Certainly,” said the colonel absently; he was thinking: Mrs. Winter, the boy, Miss Smith—how ridiculously complete! Decidedly something will bear watching.

CHAPTER II
AUNT REBECCA

No sooner was Mrs. Melville ushered into her section than the colonel went through the train. He was not so suspicious as he told himself he might have been, with such a dovetailing of circumstances into his accidentally captured information; he couldn’t yet read villainy on that college lad’s frank face. But no reason, therefore, to neglect precautions. “Hope the best of men and prepare for the worst,” was the old campaigner’s motto.

A walk through the cars showed him no signs of the two men. It was a tolerably complete inspection, too. There was only one drawing-room or state-room of which he did not manage to get a glimpse—the closed room being the property of a very great financial magnate, whose private car was waiting for him in Denver. His door was fast, and the click of the type-writer announced the tireless industry of our rulers.

But if he did not find the college boy or the man with the moles he did get a surprise for his walk; namely, the sight of the family of Haley, and Haley himself beside their trig, battered luggage, in a section of the car next his own. Mrs. Haley turned a guilty red, while Haley essayed a stolid demeanor.

“What does this mean?” demanded the colonel.

“Haley felt he would have to go with you, Colonel,” replied Mrs. Haley, who had timid, wide, blue eyes and the voice of a bird, but a courage under her panic, as birds have, too, when their nests are in peril. “We’ve rinted the house to a good man with grown-up children, and Haley can get a job if you won’t want him.”

“Yis, sor,” mumbled Haley. He was standing at attention, as was his wife, the toddling Nora being held in the posture of respect on the plush seat.

“And I suppose you took the furniture money to buy tickets?”

“Yis, sor.”

“And you’re bound to go with me?”

“Yis, sor,” said Haley.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Sergeant,” said the colonel; but he was glad at the heart of him for this mutinous loyalty.

“Yis, sor,” said Haley.

“Well, since you are here, I engage you from to-day, you understand.”

“Yis, sor,” said Haley. Mrs. Haley whimpered a blessing; but the only change in the soldier was that his military stolidity became natural and real instead of forced.

“Sit down on this seat over here with me and I’ll tell you what I want. You fraud, letting me say good-by to you—”

“I didn’t want to take the liberty, sor, but you made me shake hands. I was afraid you’d catch on, sor. ’Tis a weight off me moind, sor.”

“I dare say. You always have your way with me, you old mule. Now listen; I want you to be on the watch for two men”—thereupon the colonel described his men, laying special stress on the moles on the face of one, and the other’s dimple.

Having set Haley his tasks, he went back to his car in better spirits.

By this time the train was moving. He had seen his kinswoman and her party enter; and he found the object of Mrs. Melville’s darksome warnings sitting with a slender lad in the main body of the car. Aunt Rebecca was in the drawing-room, her maid with her. Mrs. Melville, who had already revealed her presence, sat across the aisle. She presented the colonel at once.

Miss Smith did not look formidable; she looked “nice,” thought the colonel. She was of medium height; she was obviously plump, although well proportioned; her presence had an effect of radiant cleanliness, her eyes were so luminous and her teeth so fine and her white shirt-waist so immaculate. There was about her a certain soft illumination of cheerfulness, and at the same time a restful repose; she moved in a leisurely fashion and she sat perfectly still. “I never saw any one who looked less of an adventuress,” Winter was thinking, as he bowed. Then swiftly his glance went to the lad, a pale young fellow with hazel eyes and a long slim hand which felt cold.

The boy made a little inarticulate sound in his throat and blushed when Colonel Winter addressed him. But he looked the brighter for the blush. It was not a plain face; rather an interesting one in spite of its listlessness and its sickly pallor; its oval was purely cut, the delicate mouth was closed firmly enough, and the hazel eyes with their long lashes would be beautiful were they not so veiled.

“He has the Winter mouth, at least,” noted the colonel. He felt a novel throb at his heart. Had his own boy lived, the baby that died when it was born, he would be only a year older than Archie. At least, this boy was of his own blood. Without father or mother, but not alone in the world; and, if any danger menaced, not without defenders. The depression which had enveloped him lifted as mist before the sun, burned away by the mere thought of possible difficulties. “We will see if any one swindles you out of your share,” said Rupert Winter, compressing the Winter mouth more firmly, “or if those gentlemanly kidnappers mean you.”

His ebbing suspicion of the boy’s companion revived; he would be on his guard, all right.

“Aunt Rebecca wants to see you,” Mrs. Melville suggested. “She is in the drawing-room with her solitaire.”

“Still playing Penelope’s Web?”

“Oh, she always comes back to it. But she plays bridge, too; Rupert, I hear your game is a wonder. Archie’s been learning, so he could play with you.”

“Good for Archie!”—he shot a glance and a smile at the lad’s reddening face—“we’ll have a game.”

“Lord, I wish he didn’t look quite so ladylike,” he was grumbling within, as he dutifully made his way to his aunt’s presence.

The electric lights flooded the flimsy railway table on which were spread rows of small-sized cards. An elderly lady of quality was musing over the pasteboard rows. A lady of quality—that was distinctly the phrase to catch one’s fancy at the first glimpse of Mrs. Winter. Not an aged lady, either, for even at eighty that elegantly moulded, slim figure, that abundance of silvery hair—parted in the middle and growing thickly on each side in nature’s own fashion, which art can not counterfeit, as well as softly puffed and massed above—that exquisitely colored and textured skin, strangely smooth for her years, with tiny wrinkles of humor, to be sure, about the eyes, but with cheeks and skin unmarred; that fine, firmly carved profile, those black eyebrows and lashes and still brilliant dark eyes; most of all that erect, alert, dainty carriage, gave no impression of age; but they all, and their accessories of toilet and manner, and a little prim touch of an older, more reticent day in both dress and bearing, recalled the last century phrase.

A soft gray bunch of chinchilla fur lay where she had slipped it on her soft gray skirts; one hand rested in the fur—her left hand—and on the third finger were the only rings which she wore, a band of gold, worn by sixty years, and a wonderful ruby, wherein (at least such was Rupert’s phantasy) a writhing flame was held captive by its guard of diamond icicles. The same rings admired by her nephew ever since he was a cadet—just the same smiling, inscrutable, high-bred, unchanging old dame!

“Good evening, Aunt Rebecca; not a day older!” said the colonel.

“Good evening, Bertie,” returned the lady, extending a hand over the cards; “excuse my not rising to greet you; I might joggle the cards. Of course I’m not a day older; I don’t dare to grow older at my age! Sit down. I’m extremely glad to see you; I’ve a heap to talk to you about. Do you mind if I run this game through first?”

The colonel didn’t mind. He raised the proffered hand to his lips; such homage seemed quite the most natural act in the world with Mrs. Winter. And he unobtrusively edged his own lean and wiry person into the vacant seat opposite her.

“How far are you going?” said she, after a few moves of the cards.

“My ticket says Los Angeles; but it had to say something, so I chose Los Angeles for luck; I’m an irresponsible tramp now, you know; and I may drop off almost anywhere. You are for southern California, aren’t you?”

“Eventually; but we shall stop at San Francisco for two or three weeks.”

“Do you mind if I stop off with you? I want to get acquainted with my ward,” said the colonel.

“That’s a good idea, Bertie.”

“He seems rather out of sorts; you aren’t worried about—well, tuberculosis or that sort of thing?”

“I am worried about just that sort of thing; although the doctor says nothing organic at all is the matter with him; but he is too melancholy for a boy; he needs rousing; losing his father and mother in one year, you know, and he was devoted to them. I can’t quite make him out, Bertie; he hasn’t the Winter temperament. I suppose he has a legal right to his mother’s nature; but it is very annoying. It makes him so much harder to understand—not that she wasn’t a good woman who made Tom happy; but she wasn’t a Winter. However, Janet has brightened him up considerably—you’ve seen Janet—Miss Smith? What do you think of her?”

Winter said honestly that she was very nice-looking and that she looked right capable; he fell into the idiom of his youth sometimes when with a Southerner.

“She is,” said Aunt Rebecca.

“Where did you find her?” asked the colonel carelessly, inspecting the cards.

Aunt Rebecca smiled. “I thought Millicent would have given you all the particulars. She was nurse, secretary, companion and diet cook to Cousin Angela Nelson; when she died I got her. Lucky for me.”

“So I should judge,” commented the colonel politely.

“I presume Millicent has told you that she is an adventuress and after my money and a heap more stuff. If she hasn’t she will. Get a notion once in Millicent’s head and a surgical operation is necessary to dislodge it! Janet is the only mortal person who could live with poor Cousin Angela, who had enough real diseases to kill her and enough imaginary ones to kill anybody who lived with her! Janet made her comfortable, would not stand everything on earth from her—though she did stand a heap—and really cared for her. When she died Cousin Angela left her some money; not very much, but a few thousands. She would have left her more, but Janet wouldn’t let her. She left some to some old servants, who surely deserved it for living with her, some to charities and the rest to her sisters, who hadn’t put a foot inside the house for fifteen years, but naturally resented her not giving them everything. I reckon they filled Millicent up with their notions.” She pushed the outspread cards together.

“You had several moves left,” said the colonel.

“Four. But then, I was finished. Bertie, you play bridge, of course; and I used to hear of your whist triumphs; how did you happen to take to whist?”

“To fill up the time, I reckon. I began it years ago. Now a soldier’s life is a great deal more varied, because a man will be shifted around and get a show of the different kinds of service. And there are the exams, and the Philippines—oh, plenty of diversions. But in the old days a man in the line was billed for an awfully stupid time. I didn’t care to take to drink; and I couldn’t read as you do if I’d had books, which I hadn’t, so I took to playing cards. I played skat and poker and whist, and of late years I’ve played bridge. Millicent plays?”

“Millicent is a celebrated player. She was a great duplicate-whist player, you know. To see Millicent in her glory, one should play duplicate with her. I’m only a chump player; my sole object is to win tricks.”

“What else should it be?”

Aunt Rebecca smiled upon him. “To give information to your partner. The main object of the celebrated American-leads system is signaling information to your partner. Incidentally, one tells the adversaries, as well as one’s partner, which, however, doesn’t count really as much as you might think; for most people don’t notice what their partners play very much, and don’t notice what their adversaries play at all. Millicent is always so busy indicating things to her partner and watching for his signals and his indications that you can run a cross ruff in on her without her suspecting. She asked me once if she didn’t play an intelligible game, and I told her she did; a babe in arms could understand it. She didn’t seem quite pleased.”

“How about Archie? Can he play a good game?”

“Very fair for a boy of fourteen; he was fond of whist until his troubles came,” said Mrs. Winter, with a faint clouding of her keen gaze. “Since then he hasn’t taken much interest in anything. Janet has brightened him up more than any one; and when he heard you were coming that did rouse him. You are one of his heroes. He’s that sort of a boy,” she added, with a tinge of impatience in her soft Southern voice. As if to divert her thoughts, she began deftly moving the cards before her. Her hands showed the blue veins more prominently than they show in young hands. This was their only surrender to time; they were shapely and white, and the slim fingers were as straight as when the beaux of Fairfax County would have ridden all day for a chance to kiss them.

The colonel watched the great ruby wink and glow. The ruby was a part of his memories of his aunt; she had always worn it. He remembered it, when she used to come and visit him at the hotel at West Point, dazzling impartially officers, professors, cadets and hotel waiters. Was that almost forty years ago? Well, thirty-four, anyhow! She had been very good, very generous to all the young Winters, then. Indeed, although she never quite forgave him for not marrying the wife of her selecting, she had always been kind and generous to Rupert; yet, somehow, while he had admired and found a humorous joy in his Aunt Rebecca, he wondered if he had ever loved her. She was both beautiful and brilliant when she was young, a Southern belle, a Northern society leader; her life was full of conquests; her footsteps, which had wandered over the world, had left a phosphorescent wake of admiration. She had always been a personage. She was a power in Washington after the war; they had found her uniquely delightful in royal courts long before Americans were the fashion; she had been of importance in New York, and they had loved her epigrams in Boston; now, in her old age, she held a veritable little court of her own in the provincial Western city which had been her husband’s home. He went to Congress from Fairport; he had made a fortune there, and when he died, many years ago, in Egypt, back to his Western home, with dogged determination and lavish expenditures of both money and wit, his widow had brought him to rest. The most intense and solemn experience of a woman she had missed, for no children had come to them, but her husband had been her lover so long as he lived, and she had loved him. She had known great men; she had lived through wonderful events; and often her hand had been on those secret levers which move vast forces. She had been in tragedies, if an inviolable coolness of head, perhaps of heart, had shielded her from being of them. The husband of her youth, the nearest of her blood, the friends of her middle life—all had gone into the dark; yet here she sat, with her smooth skin and her still lustrous eyes and her fragrant hands, keenly smiling over her solitaire. The colonel wondered if he could ever reconcile himself with such philosophy to his own narrowed and emptied life; she was older than he, yet she could still find a zest in existence. All the great passions gone; all the big interests; and still her clever mind was working, happy, possibly, in its mere exercise, disdaining the stake, she who had had every success. What a vitality! He looked at her, puzzling. Her complexity bewildered him, he not being of a complex nature himself. As he looked, suddenly he found himself questioning why her face, in its revival of youthful smoothness and tint, recalled some other face, recently studied by him—a face that had worn an absolutely different expression; having the same delicate aquiline nose, the same oval contour, the same wide brows—who? who? queried the colonel. Then he nodded. Of course; it was the man with the moles, the brother. He looked enough like Mrs. Winter to be her kinsman. At once he put his guess to the test. “Aunt Becky,” said he, “have you any kin I don’t know about?”

“I reckon not. I’m an awfully kinless old party,” said she serenely. “I was a Winter, born as well as married, and so you and Mel and Archie are double kin to me. I was an only child, so I haven’t anything closer than third or fourth cousins, down in Virginia and Boston.”

“Have you, by chance, any cousin, near or far, named Mercer?”

Resting her finger-tips on the cards, Aunt Rebecca seemed to let her mind search amid Virginian and Massachusetts genealogical tables. “Why, certainly,” she answered after a pause, “there was General Philemon Mercer—Confederate army, you know—and his son, Sam Nelson; Phil was my own cousin and Sam Nelson my second, and Sam Nelson’s sons would be my third, wouldn’t they? Phil and Sam are both dead, and Winnie Lee, the daughter, is dead, and poor Phil—the grandson, you know—poor boy, he shot himself while at Harvard; but his brother Cary is alive.”

“Do you know him?”

“Never saw him but once or twice. He has very good manners.”

“Is he rich?”

“He was, but after he had spent his youth working with incredible industry and a great deal of ability to build up a steel business and had put it into a little combination—not a big trust, just a genuine corporation—some of the financial princes wanted it for a club—to knock down bigger game, I reckon—and proceeded to cheapen the stock in order to control it. Cary held on desperately, bought more than he could hold, mortgaged everything else; but they were too big for him to fight. It was in 1903, you know, when they had an alleged financial panic, and scared the banks. Cary went to the wall, and Phil with him, and poor Phil killed himself. Afterward Cary’s wife died; he surely did have a mean time. And, to tell you the truth, Bertie, I think there has been a little kink in Cary’s mind ever since.”

“Did you hold any of Cary’s stock?” He was piecing his puzzle together.

“Yes, but my stock was all paid for, and I held on to it; now it is over par and paying dividends. Oh, the property was all right, had it been kept in honest hands and run for itself. The trouble with Cary was that in order to keep control of the property he bought a lot of shares on margins, and when they began to run downhill, he was obliged to borrow money on his actual holdings to protect his fictitious ones. The stock went so low that he was wiped out. He wouldn’t take my advice earlier in the game; and I knew that it would only be losing money to lend it to him, later—still, sometimes I have been rather sorry I didn’t. Would I better try the spade, Bertie, or the diamond?”

The colonel advised the spade. He wondered whether he should repeat to his aunt the few sentences which he had overheard from Mercer and his companion; but a belief that old age worries easily, added to his natural man’s disinclination to attack the feminine nerves, tipped the scales against frankness. So, instead, he began to talk about Archie; what was he like? was he fond of athletics? or was he a bookish lad? Aunt Rebecca reported that he had liked riding and golf; but he was not very rugged, and since his father’s death he had seemed listless to a degree. “But he is better now,” she added with a trace of eagerness quite foreign to her usual manner. “Janet Smith has roused him up; and what do you suppose she has done? But really, you are the cause.”

“I?” queried the colonel.

“Just you. Archie, Janet argued, is the kind of nature that must have some one to be devoted to.”

“And has he taken a fancy to her? Or to you?”

Aunt Rebecca’s eyes dulled a little and her delicate lips were twisted by a smile which had more wistfulness than humor in it. “I’m not a lovable person; anyhow, he does not love easily. We are on terms of the highest respect, even admiration, but we haven’t got so far as friendship, far less comradeship. Janet is different. But I don’t mean Janet; she has grown absurdly fond of him; and I think he’s fond of her; but what she did was to make him fond of you. You, General Rupert Winter; why, that boy could pass an examination on your exploits and not miss a question. Janet and he have a scrap-book with every printed word about you, I do believe. And she has been amazingly shrewd. We didn’t know how to get the youngster back to his sports while he was out of school; and, in fact, an old woman like me is rather bewildered by such a young creature, anyhow; but Janet rode with him; you are a remarkable rider; I helped there, because I remembered some anecdotes about you at West Point—”

“But, my dear Aunt—”

“Don’t interrupt, Bertie, it’s a distinctly American habit. And we read in the papers that you had learned that Japanese trick fighting—jiu-jitsu—and were a wonder—”

“I’m not, I assure you; that beast of a newspaper man—”

“Never mind, if you are not a wonder, you’ll have to be; you can take lessons in Los Angeles; there are quantities of Japs there. Why, even in Chicago, Janet picked up one, and we imported him, and Archie took lessons, and practises every day. There’s a book in my bag, in the rack there, a very interesting book; Janet and I have both read it so we could talk to Archie. You would better skim it over a little if you really aren’t an expert, enough so you can talk jiu-jitsu, anyhow; we can’t be destroying Archie’s ideals until he gets a better appetite.”

“Well, upon my word!” breathed the colonel. “Do you expect me to be a fake hero? I never took more than two lessons in my life. That reporter interviewed my teacher, who was killed in the Japanese War, by the way; he went to the army after my second lesson. He didn’t know any English beyond ‘yes’ and ‘if you please’; and he used them both on the reporter, who let his own fancy go up like a balloon. Well, where is the book?”

He found it easily; and with a couple of volumes of another kidney, over which he grinned.

“The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Leavenworth Case! I’ve read them, too,” he said; “they’re great! And do you still like detective stories? You would have made a grand sleuth yourself, Aunt Becky.” Again he had half a mind to speak of the occurrence at the station; again he checked the impulse. “I remember,” he added, “that you used to hold strenuous opinions.”

“You mean my thinking that the reason crimes escape discovery is not that criminals are so bright, but that detectives in general are so particularly stupid? Oh, yes, I think that still. So does Sir Conan Doyle. And I have often wished I could measure my own wits, once, with a really fine criminal intellect. It would be worth the risk.”

“God forbid!” said the colonel hastily.

There came a tap on the door.

“Millicent!” groaned Aunt Rebecca. “I know the creaking of her stays. No, don’t stay, Bertie; go and get Janet and a rescue bridge party as quick as you can!”

“The original and only Aunt Rebecca,” thought the colonel at the door, smiling. But, somehow, the handsome old dame never had seemed so nearly human to him before.

CHAPTER III
THE TRAIN ROBBERS

When the colonel awoke next morning the train was running smoothly over the Iowa prairies, while low hills and brick factory chimneys announced Council Bluffs. The landscape was wide and monotonous; a sweep of illimitable cornfields in their winter disarray, or bleakly fresh from the plow, all painted with a palette holding only drabs and browns; here and there a dab of red in a barn or of white in windmill or house; but these livelier tints so scattered that they were no more than pin spots on the picture. The very sky was as dimly colored as the earth, lighter, yet of no brighter hue than the fog which smoked up from the ground. Later in the spring this same landscape would be of a delicate and charming beauty; in summer or autumn it would make the beholder’s pulses throb with its glorious fertility; but on a blurred March morning it was as dreary as the reveries of an aging man who has failed.

Nevertheless, Rupert Winter’s first conscious sensation was not depression, only a little tingle of interest and excitement, such as stings pleasantly one who rises to a prospect of conflict in which he has the confidence of his own strength. “By Jove!” he wondered, “whatever makes me feel so kiddish?”

His first impulse was to peep through his curtains into the car. It wore its early morning aspect of muffled berths and stuffy curtains, among which Miss Smith’s trig, carefully finished presence in a fresh white shirt-waist, attended by the pleasant whiffs of cologne water, gave the beholder a certain refreshing surprise. One hand (white and firm and beautifully cared for) held a wicker bottle, source of the pleasant whiffs; her sleek back braids were coiled about her comely head, and the hair grew very prettily in a blunted point on the creamy nape of her neck. It was really dark brown hair, but it looked black against the whiteness of her skin. She had very capable-looking shoulders, the colonel noted, and a flat back; perhaps she wasn’t pretty, but in a long while he had not seen a more attractive-looking woman. She made him think of a Bonne Celine rose, somehow. He could hear her talking to some one behind the berth’s curtains. Could those doleful moans emerge from Archie? Could a Winter boy be whimpering about the jar of the train in that fashion? Immediately he was aware that the sufferer was Randall, for Miss Smith spoke: “Drink the tea, and lie down again, I’ll attend to Mrs. Winter. Don’t you worry!”

“Getting solid with Randall,” commented the colonel. “Which is she—kind-hearted, or an accomplished villainess? Well, it’s interesting, anyhow.”

By the time he had made his toilet the train was slacking speed ready to halt in Council Bluffs, and all his suspicions rushed on deck again at the sight of Miss Smith and Archie walking outside.

He joined them, and he had to admit that Miss Smith looked as pleased as Archie at his appearance. Nor did she send a single furtive glance, slanting or backward, while they walked in the crisp, clean air. Once the train had started and Miss Smith was in the drawing-room, breakfasting with Mrs. Winter and Archie, he politely attended Mrs. Millicent through the morning meal in the dining-car. It was so good a meal that he naturally, although illogically, thought better of Miss Smith’s prospects of innocence; and cheerily he sought Haley. He found him in the smoking compartment of the observation-car, having for companions no less personages than the magnate and a distinguished-looking New Englander, who, Rupert Winter made no doubt, was a Harvard professor of rank and renown among his learned kind. He knew the earmarks of the species. The New Englander’s pencil was flying over a little improvised pad of telegraph blanks, while he listened with absorbed interest to Haley’s rich Irish tones. There was a little sidewise lunge of Haley’s mouth, a faint twinkle of Haley’s frank and simple eyes which the colonel appraised at very nearly their real value. He knew that it isn’t in Irish-American nature to perceive a wide-open ear and not put something worth hearing into it. Besides, his sharp ears had brought him a key to the discourse, a sorrowful remark of the sergeant’s as he entered: “Yes, sor, thim wather torchures is terrible!”

He glanced suspiciously from one of Haley’s audience to the other. The newspaper cartoonist had pictured on all kinds of bodies of preying creatures, whether of the earth or air, the high brows, the round head, the delicate features, the thin cheeks, the straight line of the mouth, and the mild, inexpressive eyes of the man before him. He had been extolled as a far-sighted benefactor of the world, and execrated picturesquely as the king of pirates who would scuttle the business of his country without a qualm.

Winter, amid his own questionings and problems, could not help a scrutiny of a man whose power was greater than that of medieval kings. He sat consuming a cigarette, more between his fingers than his lips; and glancing under drooping eyelids from questioner to narrator. At the colonel’s entrance he looked up, as did Haley, who rose to his feet with an unconscious salute. “I’d be glad to spake wid youse a minnit, if I might, General,” said Haley, “about where I put your dress-shute case, sor.”

The colonel, of course, did not expect any remarks about a suit case when he got Haley by himself at the observation end of the car; but what he did get was of sufficient import to drive out of his mind a curt lecture about blackening the reputation of the army with lies about the Philippines. Haley had told him that he had seen the man with the two moles on his face jump out of his own car at Council Bluffs. He had simply stood on the platform, looking to right and left for a moment; then he had swung himself back on the car. Haley had watched him walk down the aisle and enter the drawing-room. He did not come out; Haley had found out that the drawing-room belonged to Edwin S. Keatcham, “the big railroad man, sor.”

“It doesn’t seem likely that he would be an accomplice of a kidnapper,” mused the colonel. “The man might have gone in there while he was out.”

“Sure, he might, sor; ’twas mesilf thinking that same; and I wint beyant to the observation-car, and there the ould gintleman was smoking.”

“And you stopped to tell yarns to that other gentleman instead of getting back and following—”

“No, sor, I beg your pardon, sor; I was kaping me eyes open and on him; for himsilf was in the observation-car where you are now, sor, until we come in, and thin he walked back, careless like, to his own car. Will I be afther following him?”

“Yes; don’t lose him.”

They did not lose him; they both saw him enter the drawing-room and almost immediately come out and sit down in one of the open sections.

“See if you can’t find out from the conductor where he is going,” the colonel proposed to Haley; and he frowned over his thoughts for a bad quarter of an hour at the window. The precipitate of all this mental ferment was a determination to stick close to the boy, saying nothing. He hoped that when they stopped over night at Salt Lake City, according to Aunt Rebecca’s plan, they might shake off the “brother’s” company. The day passed uneventfully. He played bridge with Mrs. Millicent and Miss Smith and Archie, while Aunt Rebecca kept up her French with one of Bentzon’s novels.

Afterward she said grimly to him: “I think you must have been converted out in the Philippines; you never so much as winced, that last hand; no, you sat there smiling over your ruin as sweetly as if you enjoyed it.”

The colonel smiled again. “Ah, but, you see, I did enjoy it; didn’t you notice the hand? No? Well, it was worth watching. It was the rubber game; they were twenty-four and we were twenty-six and we were on the seventh round; Miss Smith had made it hearts. She sat on my left, dummy on my right. Millicent had the lead. She had four little spades, a little club, the queen of hearts and a trey; dummy had the queen, the ten and the nine of spades, it had the king of hearts and three clubs with the jack at the top. I had a lovely diamond suit which I hadn’t had a chance to touch, top sequence, ace, king, queen; I had the jack of trumps and the jack of spades; and the queen and a little club. I hadn’t a lead, you understand; Millicent had taken five tricks and they had taken one; they needed six to win the game, we needed two; see? Well, Millicent hadn’t any diamonds to lead me, and unhappily she didn’t think to lead trumps through dummy, which would have made a world of difference. She led a club; dummy put on the jack. I knew Miss Smith had the ace and one low heart; no clubs, a lot of low diamonds, and she might or might not have a spade. I figured that she had the ace and a little one; if she would trump in with the little one, as ninety-nine out of a hundred women would have done, her ace and her partner’s king would fall together; or, at worst, he would have to trump her diamond lead, after she had led out her king of spades, and lead spades, which I could trump and bring in all my diamonds. Do you take in the situation?”

“You mean that Janet had the king of spades alone, the ace and the little trump and four worthless diamonds? I see. It is a chance for the grand coup; I reckon she played it.”

“She did!” cried the colonel with unction. “She slapped that ace on the trick, she modestly led her king of spades, gathered in my jack, then ‘she stole, she stole my child away,’ my little jack of trumps; it fell on dummy’s king, and dummy led out his spades and I had to see that whole diamond suit slaughtered. They made their six tricks, the game and the rubber; and I wanted to clap my hands over the neatness of it.”

“She is a good player,” agreed Aunt Rebecca, “and a very pleasant person. You remember the epitaph, don’t you, Bertie? ‘She was so pleasant.’ Yet Janet has had a heap of trouble; but, after all, happiness is not a condition but a temperament; I suppose Janet has the temperament. She’s a good loser, too; and she never takes advantage of the rules.”

“She certainly loves a straight game,” reflected the colonel. “I confess I don’t like the kind of woman that is always grabbing a trick if some one plays out of the wrong hand.”

He said something of the kind to Millicent, obtaining but scant sympathy in that quarter.

“She’s deep, Bertie; I told you that,” was the only reply, “but I’m watching. I have reason for my feeling.”

“Maybe you have been misinformed,” ventured her brother-in-law with proper meekness.

“Not at all,” retorted she sharply. “I happen to know that she worked against me with the Daughters.”

“Daughters,” the colonel repeated inanely, “your daughters?”

“Certainly not! The Daughters of the Revolution.”

“It’s a mighty fine society, that; did a lot during the Spanish War. And you are the state president, aren’t you?”

“No, Rupert,” returned Mrs. Melville with dignity, “I am no longer state regent. By methods that would shame the most hardened men politicians I was defeated; why! didn’t you read about it?”

“You know I only came back from the Philippines in February.”

“It was in all the Chicago papers. I was interviewed myself. I assure you the other candidates (there were two) tried the very lowest political methods. Melville said it was scandalous. There were at least three luncheons given against me. It wasn’t the congress, it was the lobby defeated me. And their methods! I would not believe that gentlewoman could stoop to such infamy of misrepresentation.” The colonel chewed his mustache; he felt for that reporter of the Chicago paper; he was evidently getting a phonographic record now; he made an inarticulate rumble of sympathy in his throat which was as the clucking of the driver to the mettled horse. Mrs. Melville gesticulated with Delsartian grace, as she poured forth her woes.

“They accused me of a domineering spirit; they said I was trying to set up a machine. I! I worked for them, many a time, half the night, at my desk; never was a letter unanswered; I did half the work of the corresponding secretary; yet at the crucial moment she betrayed me! I learned more in those two days of the petty jealousy, the pitiless malevolence of some women than I had known all my life before; but at the same time, to the faithful band of friends”—the colonel had the sensation of listening to the record again—“whose fidelity was proof against ridicule and cruel misrepresentation, I return a gratitude that will never wane. Rupert”—she turned herself in the seat and waved the open palm of her hand in a graceful and dramatic gesture, “—those women not only stooped to malignant falsehoods, they not only trampled parliamentary law underfoot, but they circulated through the hall a cartoon called the Making of the Slate. Of course, we had our quarters at a hotel, and after the evening meeting, after I had retired, in fact, a bell-boy brought me a message; it was necessary to have a meeting at once, to decide for the secretaryship, as we had found out Mrs. Ellennere was false. The ladies in the adjoining rooms and the others of us on the board who were loyal came into my chamber. Rupert, will you believe it, those women, had a grotesque picture of us, with faces cut out of the newspapers—of course, all our pictures were in the papers—and they had the audacity and the meanness to picture me in—in the garments of night!”

“That was pretty tough. But where does Miss Smith come in?”

“She was at the convention. She is a Daughter. I’ve always said we are too lax in our admissions.”

“Who drew the picture?”

“It may not be Miss Smith, but—she does draw. I’m sure that she worked against me; she covered up her footprints so that I have no proof; but I suspect her. She’s deep, Bertie, she’s deep. But she can’t hoodwink me. I’ll find her out.”

The colonel experienced the embarrassment that is the portion of a rash man trying to defend one woman against another; he retreated because he perceived defense was in vain; but he did not feel his growing opinion of Miss Smith’s innocence menaced by Mrs. Melville’s convictions.

She played too square a game for a kidnapper—and Smith was the commonest of names. No, there must be some explanation; Rupert Winter had lived too long not to distrust the plausible surface clue. “It is the improbable that always happens, and the impossible most of the time,” Aunt Rebecca had said once. He quite agreed with her whimsical phrase.

Nothing happened to arouse his suspicions that day. Haley reported that Cary Mercer was going on to San Francisco. The conductor did not know his name; he seemed to know Mr. Keatcham and was with him in his drawing-room most of the time. Had the great man a secretary with him? Yes, he seemed to have, a little fellow who had not much to say for himself, and jumped whenever his boss spoke to him. There was also a valet, an Englishman, who did not respond properly to conversational overtures. They were all going to get off at Denver.

Haley was not misinformed, as the colonel perceived with his own eyes—and he saw Cary Mercer bow in parting to the great man, who requited the low salute with a gruff nod. Here was an opportunity for a nearer glimpse of Mercer, possibly for that explanation in which Winter still had a lurking hope. He caught Mercer just in the car doorway, and politely greeted him: “Mr. Mercer, I think? You may not remember me, Colonel Winter. I met you in Cambridge, three years ago—”

It seemed a brutal thing to do, to recall a meeting under such circumstances; but if Mercer could give the explanation he would excuse him; it was better than suspecting an innocent man. But there was no opportunity for explanation. Mercer turned a blank and coldly suspicious face toward him. “I beg pahdon,” he said in his Southern way, “I think you have made a mistake in the person.”

“And are you not Mr. Cary Mercer?” The colonel felt the disagreeable resemblance of his own speeches to those made in newspaper stories by the gentleman who wishes his old friend to change a fifty-dollar bill or to engage in an amusing game with a thimble. Mercer saw it as well as he. “Try some one from the country,” he remarked with an unpleasant smile, brushing past, while the color mounted to the colonel’s tanned cheek. “The next time you meet me,” Rupert Winter vowed, “you’ll know me.”

A new porter had come on at Denver; a light brown, chubby, bald man with a face that radiated friendliness. He was filled with the desire for conversation, and he had worked on the road for eight years, hence could supplement Over the Range and the other guide-books with personal gossip. He showed marked deference to the colonel, which that unassuming and direct man could not quite fathom, until Archie enlightened him. Archie smiled, a queer, chewed-up smile which the colonel hailed with:

“Why are you making fun of me, young man?”

“It’s Lewis, the porter; he follows you round and listens to you in such an awestruck way.”

“But why?”

“Why, Sergeant Haley told him about you; and I told him a little, and he says he wishes you’d been on the train when they had the hold-ups. This is an awful road for hold-ups, he says. He’s been at five hold-ups.”

“And what does he advise?”

“Oh, he says, hold up your hands and they won’t hurt you.”

“Well, I reckon his advice is sound,” laughed the colonel. “See you follow it, Archie.”

“Shall you hold up your hands, Uncle Bertie?” asked Archie.

“Much the wisest course; these fellows shoot.”

Archie looked disappointed. “I suppose so,” he sighed. “I’m afraid I’d want to, if they were pointing pistols at me. Lewis was on the train once when a man showed fight. He wouldn’t put up his hands, and the bandit plugged him, like a flash; he fell crosswise over the seat and the blood spurted across Lewis’ wrist; he said it was like a hot jet of water.”

The homely and bizarre horror of the picture had evidently struck home to Archie; he half shivered.

“Too much imagination,” grumbled the colonel to himself. “A Winter ought to take to fighting like a duck to water!” He betook himself to Miss Smith; and he was uneasily conscious that he was going to her for consoling. But he felt better after a little talk about Archie with her. Plainly she thought Archie had plenty of spirit; although, of course, he hadn’t told her about the bandits. The negro was “kidding” the passengers; and women shouldn’t be disturbed by such nonsense. The colonel had old-fashioned views of guarding his womankind from the harsh ways of the world. Curious, he reflected, what sense Miss Smith seemed to have; and how she understood things. He felt better acquainted with her than a year’s garrison intercourse would have made him with any other woman he knew.

That afternoon, they two sat watching the fantastic cliffs which took grotesque semblance of ruined castles crowning their barren hillsides; or of deserted amphitheaters left by some vanished race to crumble. They had talked of many things. She had told him of the sleepy old South Carolinian town where she was born, and the plantation and the distant cousin who was like her mother, and the hospital where she had been taught, and the married sister who had died. Such a narrow, laborious, innocent existence as she described! How cheerfully, too, she had shouldered her burdens! They talked of the South and of the Philippines; a little they talked of Archie and his sorrow and of the eternal problems that have troubled the soul of man since first death entered the world. As they talked, the colonel’s suspicions faded into grotesque shadows. “Millicent is ridiculous,” quoth he. Then he fell to wondering whether there had been a romance in Miss Smith’s past life. “Such a handsome woman would look high,” he sighed. Only twenty-four hours ago he had called Miss Smith “nice-looking,” with careless criticism. He was quite unconscious of his change of view. That night he felt lonely, of a sudden; the old wound in his heart ached; his future looked as bleak as the mountain-walled plains through which he was speeding. After a long time the train stopped with a jar and rattle, ending in a sudden shock. He raised the curtain to catch the flash of the electric lights at Glenwood. Out of the deep defile they glittered like diamonds in a pool of water. Why should he think of Miss Smith’s eyes? With an impatient sigh, he pulled down the curtain and turned over to sleep.

His thoughts drifted, floated, were submerged in a wavering procession of pictures; he was back in the Philippines; they had surprised the fort; how could that be when he was on guard? But they were there— He sat up in his berth. Instinctively he slipped the revolver out of his bag and held it in one hand, as he peeped through the crevice of the curtains. There was no motion, no sound of moving; but heads were emerging between the curtains in every direction; and Archie was standing, his hands shaking above his tumbled brown head and pale face. A man in a soft hat held two revolvers while another man was pounding on the drawing-room door, gruffly commanding those inside to come out. “No, we shall not come out,” responded Aunt Rebecca’s composed, well-bred accents, her neat enunciation not disturbed by a quiver. “If you want to kill an old woman, you will have to break down the door.”

“Let them alone, Shay, it takes too long; let’s finish here, first,” called the man with the revolver; “they’ll come soon enough when we want them. Here, young feller, fish out! Nobody’ll get hurt if you keep quiet; if you don’t you’ll get a dose like the man in number six, two years ago. Hustle, young feller!”

The colonel was eying every motion, every shifting from one foot to the other. Let them once get by Archie—

The boy handed over his pocket-book.

“Now your watch,” commanded the brigand; “take it, Shay!”

“Won’t you please let me keep that watch?” faltered Archie; “that was papa’s watch.”

The childish name from the tall lad made the robber laugh. “And mama’s little pet wants to keep it, does he? Well, he can’t. Get a move on you!”

The colonel had the sensation of an electric shock; as the second robber grabbed at the fob in the boy’s belt, Archie struck him with the edge of his open hand so swiftly and so fiercely under the jaw that he reeled back against his companion. The colonel’s surprise did not disturb the automatic aim of an old fighter of the plains; his revolver barked; and he sprang out, on the man he shot. “Get back in the berths, all of you,” he shouted; “give me a chance to shoot!”

The voice of the porter, whose hands had been turning up the lights not quite steadily, now pealed out with camp-meeting power, “Dat’s it; give de colonel a chance to do some killing!”

Both bandits were sprawling on the floor of the aisle, one limp and moaning; but the other got one hand up to shoot; only to have Archie kick the revolver out of it, while at the same instant an umbrella handle fell with a wicked whack on the man’s shoulder. The New England professor was out of his berth. He had been a baseball man in his own college days; his bat was a frail one, but he hit with a will; and a groan told of his success. Nevertheless, the fellow scrambled to his feet. Mrs. Melville was also out of her berth, thanks to which circumstance he was able to escape; as the colonel (who had grappled with the other man and prevented his rising) must needs have shot through his sister-in-law to hit the fleeing form.

Miss Smith was sitting beside Archie, holding the watch. Page [67]

“What’s the matter?” demanded Mrs. Melville, while the New Englander used an expression which, no doubt, as a good church-member, he regretted, later, and the colonel thundered: “All the women back into their berths. Don’t anybody shoot! You, professor, look after that fellow on the floor.” He was obeyed; instinctively, the master of the hour is obeyed. The porter came forward and helped the New Englander bind the prostrate outlaw, with two silk handkerchiefs and a pair of pajamas, guard mount being supplied by three men in very startling costumes; and a kind of seraglio audience behind the curtains of the berth being enacted by all the women in the car, only excepting Aunt Rebecca and Miss Smith. Aunt Rebecca, in her admirable traveling costume of a soft gray silk wrapper, looked as undisturbed as if midnight alarms were an every-night feature of journeys. Miss Smith’s black hair was loosely knotted; and her face looked pale, while her dark eyes shone. They all heard the colonel’s revolver; they all saw the two men who had met him at the car door spring off the platform into the dark. The robbers had horses waiting. The colonel got one shot; he saw the man fall over his horse’s neck; but the horse galloped on; and the night, beyond the little splash of light, swallowed them completely.

After the conductor and the engineer had both consulted him, and the express messenger had appeared, armed to the teeth, a little too late for the fray, but not too late for lucid argument, Winter made his way back to the car. Miss Smith was sitting beside Archie; she was holding the watch, which had played so important a part in the battle, up under the electric light to examine an inscription. The loose black sleeves of her blouse fell back, revealing her arms; they were white and softly rounded. She looked up; and the soldier felt the sudden rush of an emotion that he had not known for years; it caught at his throat almost like an invisible hand.

“Well, Archie,” he said foolishly, “good for jiu-jitsu!”

Archie flushed up to his eyes.

“Why didn’t you obey orders, young man, and hold up your hands?” said Colonel Rupert Winter. “You’re as bad as poor Haley, who is nearly weeping that he had no chance, but only broke away from Mrs. Haley in time to see the robbers make off.”

“I—I did at first; but I got so mad I forgot,” stammered Archie happily. “Afterward you were my superior officer and I had to do what you said.”

All the while he chaffed the boy, he was watching for that beautiful look in Janet Smith’s eyes; and wondering when he could get her off by herself to brag to her of the boy’s courage. When his chance at a few words did come he chuckled: “Regular fool Winter! I knew he would act in just that absurd, reckless way.” Then he caught the look he wanted; it surely was a lovely, womanly look; and it meant—what in thunder did it mean? As he puzzled, his pulses gave the same unaccountable, smothering leap; and he felt as the boy of twenty had felt, coming back from his first battle to his first love.

CHAPTER IV
THE VANISHING OF ARCHIE

“In my opinion,” said Aunt Rebecca, critically eying her new drawing-room on the train to San Francisco; “the object of our legal methods seems to be to defend the criminal. And a very efficient means to this end is to make it so uncomfortable and costly and inconvenient for any witness of a crime that he runs away rather than endure it. Here we have had to stay over so long in Salt Lake we nearly lost our drawing-room. But never mind, you got your man committed. Did you find out anything about his gang?”

The colonel shook his head. “No, he’s a tough country boy; he has the rural distrust of lawyers and of sweat-boxes. He does absolutely nothing but groan and swear, pretending his wound hurts him. But I’ve a notion there are bigger people back of him. It’s most awfully good of you, Aunt Rebecca, to stick to me this way.”

“Of course, I stick to you; I’m too old to be fickle. Did you ever know a Winter who wouldn’t stand by his friends? I belong to the old régime, Bertie; we had our faults—glaring ones, I dare say—but if we condoned sin too readily, we never condoned meanness; such a trick as that upstart Keatcham is doing would have been impossible to my contemporaries. You saw the morning papers; you know he means to eat up the Midland?”

“Yes, I know,” mused the colonel; “and turn Tracy, the president, down—the one who gave him his start on his bucaneering career. Tracy declines to be his tool, being, I understand, a very decent sort of man, who has always run his road for his stock-holders and not for the stock-market. A capital crime, that, in these days. So Keatcham has, somehow, by one trick or another, got enough directors since Baneleigh died to give him the control; though he couldn’t get enough of the stock; and now he means to grab the road to use for himself. Poor Tracy, who loves the road as a child, they say, will have to stand by and see it turned into a Wall Street foot-ball; and the equipment run down as fast as its reputation. I think I’m sorry for Tracy. Besides, it’s a bad lookout, the power of such fellows; men who are not captains of industry, not a little bit; only inspired gamblers. Yet they are running the country. I wonder where is the class that will save us.”

“I don’t know. I don’t admire the present century, Bertie. We had people of quality in my day; we have only people of culture in this. I confess I prefer the quality. They had robuster nerves and really asked less of people, although they may have appeared to ask more. We used to be contented with respect from our inferiors and courtesy from our equals—”

“And what from your betters, Aunt Rebecca?” drawled the colonel.

“We had no betters, Rupert; we were the best. I think partly it was our assurance of our position, which nobody else doubted any more than we, that kept us so mannerly. Nowadays, nobody has a real position. He may have wealth and a servile following, who expect to make something out of him, but he hasn’t position. The newspapers can make fun of him. The common people watch him drive by and never think of removing their caps. Nobody takes him seriously except his toadies and himself. And as for the sentiments of reverence and loyalty, very useful sentiments in running a world, they seem to have clean disappeared, except”—she smiled a half-reluctant smile—“except with youngsters like Archie, who would find it agreeable to be chopped into bits for you, and the women who have not lived in the world, like Janet, who makes a heroine out of me—upon my word, Bertie, je t’ai fait rougir!”

“Not at all,” said the colonel; “an illusion of the sunset; but what do you mean when you say people of quality required less than people of culture?”

“Oh, simply this; all we demanded was deference; but your cultivated gang wants admiration and submission, and will not let us possess our secret souls, even, in peace. And, then, the quality despised no one, but the cultivated despise every one. Ah, well—

‘Those good old times are past and gone,

I sigh for them in vain,—’

Janet, I wish Archie would fish his mandolin out and you would sing to me; I like to hear the songs of my youth. Not rag-time, or coon-songs, but dear old Foster’s melodies; Old Kentucky Home, and Massa’s in the Col’, Col’ Ground, and Nellie Was a Lady—what makes that so sad, I wonder?—‘Nellie was a lady, las’ night she died;’ it’s all in that single line; I think it is because it represents the pathetic idealization of love; Nellie was that black lover’s ideal of all that was lovely, and she was dead. Is the orchestra ready—and the choir? Yes, shut the door; we are for art’s sake only, not for the applause of the cold world in the car.”

Afterward, when he was angry over his own folly, his own blind, dogged, trustfulness against all the odds of evidence, Rupert Winter laid his weakness to that hour; to a woman’s sweet, untrained, tender voice singing the simple melodies of his youth. They sang one song after another while the sun sank lower and stained the western sky. Through the snow-sheds they could catch glimpses of a wild and strange nature; austere, yet not repelling; vistas of foot-hills bathed in the evening glow; rank on rank of firs, tall, straight, beautiful, not wind-tortured and maimed, like the woeful dwarfs of Colorado; and wonderful snow-capped mountain peaks, with violet shadows and glinting streaks of silver. Snow everywhere: on the hillsides; on the close thatch of the firs; on the ice-locked rivers; snow freshly fallen, softly tinted, infinitely, awesomely pure.

Presently they came out into a lumber country where the mills huddled in the hollows, over the streams. Huge fires were blazing on the river-banks. Their tawny red glare dyed the snow for a long distance, making entrancing tints of rose and yellow; and the dark green of the pines, against this background, looked strangely fresh. And then, without warning, they plunged into the dimness of another long wooden tunnel and emerged into lovely spring. The trees were in leaf, and not alone the trees; the undulating swells of pasture land and roadside by the mountains were covered with a tender verdure; and there were innumerable vines and low glossy shrubs with faintly colored flowers.

“This is like the South,” said Miss Smith.

Archie was devouring the scene. “Doesn’t it just somehow make you feel as if you couldn’t breathe, Miss Janet?” said he.

“Are you troubled with the high altitude?” asked Millicent anxiously; “I have prepared a little vial of spirits of ammonia; I’ll fetch it for you.”

The colonel had some ado to rescue Archie; but he was aided by the porter, who was now passing through the car proclaiming: “You all have seen Dutch Flat Mr. Bret Hahte wrote ’bout; nex’ station is Shady Run; and eve’ybody look and see the greates’ scenic ’traction of dis or any odder railroad, Cape Hohn!”

Instantly, Mrs. Melville fished her guide-book and began to read:

“‘There are few mountain passes more famous than that known to the world as Cape Horn. The approach to it is picturesque, the north fork of the American River raging and foaming in its rocky bed, fifteen hundred feet below and parallel with the track—’”

“Do you mind, Millicent, if we look instead of listen?” Aunt Rebecca interrupted, and Mrs. Melville lapsed into an injured muteness.

Truly, Cape Horn has a poignant grandeur that strikes speech from the lips. One can not look down that sheer height to the luminous ghost of a river below, without a thrill. If to pass along the cliff is a shivering experience, what must the actual execution of that stupendous bit of engineering have been to the workmen who hewed the road out of the rock, suspended over the abyss! Their dangling black figures seem to sway still as one swings around the curve.

Our travelers sat in silence, until the “Cape” was passed and again they could see their road-bed on the side. Then Mrs. Melville made a polite excuse for departure; she had promised a “Daughter” whom she had met at various “biennials” that she would have a little talk with her. Thus she escaped. They did not miss her. Hardly speaking, the four sat in the dimly lighted, tiny room, while mountains and fields and star-sown skies drifted by. Unconsciously, Archie drew closer to his uncle, and the older man threw an arm about the young shoulders. He looked up to meet Janet’s eyes shining and sweet, in the flash of a passing station light. Mrs. Winter smiled, her wise old smile.

With the next morning came another shift of scene; they were in the fertile valleys of California. At every turn the landscape became more softly tinted, more gracious. Aunt Rebecca was in the best of humor and announced herself as having the journey of her life. The golden green of the grain fields, the towering palms, the pepper-trees with their fascinating grace, the round tops of the live-oaks, the gloss of the orange groves, the calla-lily hedges and the heliotrope and geranium trees which climbed to the second story of the stucco houses, filled her with the enthusiasm of a child. She drank in the cries of the enterprising young liar who cried “Fresh figs,” months out of season, and she ate fruit, withered in cold storage, with a trustful zest. No less than three books about the flora of California came out of her bag. A certain vine called the Bougainvillea, she was trying to find, if only the cars would not go so fast; as for poinsettias, she certainly should raise her own for Christmas. She was learned in gardens and she discoursed with Miss Smith on the different kinds of trumpet-vine, and whether the white jasmine trailing among the gaudy clusters was of the same family as that jasmine which they knew in the pine forests. But she disparaged the roses; they looked shop-worn. The colonel watched her in amazement.

“Bertie, I make you think of that little dwarf of Dickens’, don’t I?” she cried. “Miss Muffins, Muggins? what was her name? You are expecting me to exclaim, ‘Ain’t I volatile?’ Thank Heaven, I am. I could always take an interest in trifles. It has been my salvation to cultivate an interest in trifles, Bertie; there are a great many more trifles than crises in life. Where has Janet gone? Oh, to give the porter the collodion for his cut thumb. People with troubles, big or little, are always making straight for Janet. Bertie, have you made your mind up about her?”

“Only that she is charming,” replied the colonel. He did not change color, but he was uneasily conscious that he winced, and that the shrewd old critic of life and manners perceived it. But she was mercifully blind to all appearance; she went on with the little frown of the solver of a psychological enigma. “Yes, Janet is charming; and why? She is the stillest creature. Have you noticed? Yet you never have the sense that she hasn’t answered you. She’s the best listener in the world; and there’s one thing about her unusual in most listeners—her eyes never grow vacant.”

Rupert had noticed; he called himself a doddering old donkey silently, because he had assumed that there was anything personal in the interest of those eyes when he had spoken. Of course not; it was her way with every one, even Millicent, no doubt. His aunt’s next words were lost, but a sentence caught his ear directly: “For all she’s so gentle, she has plenty of spirit. Bertie, did I ever tell you about the time our precious cousin threw our great-great-grandfather’s gold snuff-box at her? No? It was funny. She flew into one of her towering rages, and shrieking, ‘Take that!’ hurled the snuff-box at Janet. Janet wasn’t used to having things thrown at her. She caught the box, then she rang the bell. ‘Thank you very much,’ says Janet; and when old Aunt Phrosie came, she handed the snuff-box to her, saying it had just been given to her as a present. But she sent it that same day to one of the sisters. There was never anything else thrown at her, I can tell you.”

They found a wonderful sunset on the bay when San Francisco was reached. Still in her golden humor, as they rattled over the cobblestones of the picturesque streets to the Palace Hotel, Mrs. Winter told anecdotes of Robert Louis Stevenson, obtained from a friend who had known his mother. Mrs. Winter had chosen the Palace in preference to the St. Francis, to Mrs. Melville’s high disgust.

“She thinks it more typical,” sneered Millicent; “myself, I prefer cleanliness and comfort to types.”

Their rooms were waiting for them and two bell-boys ushered Mrs. Winter into her suite. Randall was lodged on the same floor, and Mrs. Melville, who was to spend a few days with her aunt on the latter’s invitation, was on a lower floor. The colonel had begged to have Archie next to him; and he examined the quarters with approbation. His own room was the last of the suite; to the right hand, between his room and Archie’s, was their bath; then the parlor of Mrs. Winter’s suite next her room and bath, and last, to the right, Miss Smith’s room.

Archie was sitting by the window looking out on the street; only the oval of his soft boyish cheek showed. The colonel went by him to the parlor beyond, where he encountered his aunt, her hands full of gay postal cards.

“Souvenirs de voyage,” she answered his glance; “I am going to post them.”

“Can’t I take them for you?”