Chapter I: Walk Into a Parlor

Naturally I debated about opening the bag. She’d given me the key; she had told me to use it, “please!” to find her new toothbrush. But I didn’t open it for that. She had meant, I thought, that I should see what I was carrying. So at last I unlocked it and in the light of the little berth lamp I came upon her own intimate attire--a kimono, slippers and silk pajamas, ridiculous little lovely things; stockings, some more gossamer silk which probably was what Field’s advertise as an “envelope”, a mirror, a brush, a manicure set. There was the new toothbrush and “This Freedom”, and below the book, tied together, a pair of steel plates. After looking so far, I felt no harm in gazing further, especially at these.

One was engraved to print ten-dollar National Bank Notes; the other was good--or bad--for the denomination of a hundred. I’m no judge of engraving on steel but they looked like excellent plates to me.

I rewrapped them and brigaded them with “This Freedom” and shoved them back in the suit case, which I locked. I went to use the toothbrush and also to think about those plates. “Well, wasn’t that what you expected when you gave her your word?” I said to myself. The answer was that then I hadn’t the plates in my hand and I was talking to Doris.

Going to bed, I lay awake, mulling over all manner of doubts having to do with Doris and Jerry and Keeban, Christina, and with me. I did some practical speculating, too; I wondered whether old “Iron Age”, when he rendezvoused Doris’s luggage returned from Ashtabula, was going to note the omission of kimono, slippers, silk pajamas, envelope, mirror, brush and “This Freedom” from the normal equipment of a young lady of the day; I wondered if, missing them, he might feel strange suspicions of me, which even the memory of my cheese quotations would not allay. But evidently he did not.

I got to sleep; when I awoke, Doris’s suit case and those plates remained as they were. Nobody had disturbed them or me.

Breakfasting beside the Hudson, I propped before me the _New York Times_. It was innocent of knowledge of minor doings in the west, such as a sudden getaway with shooting near the Lake Shore station at Cleveland, but it played a special from Chicago on the front page.

Janvier, the counterfeiter, had been taken with two of his new plates. The _Times_ correspondent was feeling decidedly high up because of it. Trust New York to respond to word that the financial structure is just a bit more safe. Old Wally Bailey was gloriously bucked over the business too; he had himself interviewed in two places; first he certified that the plates, which had been captured, were the source of the highly deceptive and dangerous twenty and fifty-dollar false Federal Reserve notes recently put in circulation in great quantities; second he sounded the alarm that Janvier had completed, also, a couple of other plates, one for printing ten-dollar bills and one for striking off notes of one-hundred dollar denomination. The police had evidence that these plates existed but they had failed to find them.

For the best of reasons! I had them tied up with “This Freedom” underneath Doris’s lingerie.

I carried her suit case myself across to the Belmont where I took it to my room and then, after locking myself in, I gathered Janvier’s plates from it and carried them, in my pocket, up to our bank where I had a safe deposit box and I put them away there. Much happier in my head, I wired Fanneal and Company, Chicago, not to expect me at the desk that morning and dropped into our New York branch and pretended that business had brought me on.

Beans and butter never struck me so dull as upon this morning; and the only thrill I could squeeze from Philadelphia double daisies and Fond du Lac twins was the second-hand memory of yesterday. I kept ’phoning the Belmont inquiring for telegrams; but nothing came in for me.

What was happening in Cleveland? I wondered. Was Doris going back to Chicago, now that her father was taken; or would she stick to her plan to come on?

Vine--Keeban--was here, she said; Christina was here. So, if Jerry was anywhere, probably he also was here; and, if any of his old habits clung to him, he’d know I’d arrived, too. There is a column printed every day, you know, giving the news of arrivals of out-of-town buyers in every line of trade. My name, with New York address, was in the papers that afternoon. Jerry used to glance over the arrivals in our line.

I felt lonely as Crusoe that day, particularly when dinner time approached. I imagined I’d make myself better by drifting over to dine with some friends I’d met on Fifth. There was a daughter, there, about Doris’s age and size; a popular girl,--a deb of a couple of years’ standing. Sitting and smoking, I mean, rather.

I bored the poor dear. I always had, so why not now? She never flicked a stir in me. Not that she tried; she didn’t. That was it. “Well, old Steve, we’ll struggle through with the meal somehow!” Such was the sensation underlying the ennui; so, naturally, she made it mutual with me.

Thank God, she didn’t try to mix salad dressing at the table; so I kept my memory clear.

That night, when I returned to the hotel, I had a wire filed at Buffalo; three words, no signature: “Seediness yonder thus.”

You may suppose I had my Webster handy, and, counting my words up and down, made out “See you Thursday.”

That was to-morrow; so I had to figure out, during the night, what I was to say. You see, I had to bring her those plates and give them to her; but she had to give me a chance to argue her out of using them.

Lying in bed, many a good way of putting my point of view came to me. I got up several times and jotted them down; some I just talked over with myself. I made rather a night of it; never was more earnest over anything in my life. I looked to my talk with that girl as a sort of turning point in her life, and for me, if I could simply make her see matters straight. I was crazy over her; you’ve gathered that; and trusted her, too, or would trust her with anything but a counterfeit steel plate which her father had engraved. I figured I could make it so I could trust her with that, too.

About mid-morning, I got another wire; from Jersey City this: “Seven three chess omnivorus noose.”

No signature again; but the system, which Doris taught me in that vestibule, gave me the place and the time. Up five from seven made twelve; down three from three, zero. Up five from chess, first syllable “cher” down three from omnivorous, “on”; up one from noose, “noon.”

The telegram: “120 Cheron (Street) Noon.”

Cheron proved to be one of those streets, turned at several angles, down by Brooklyn Bridge.

I rehearsed all my talk, went to the vault and withdrew that pair of plates. I decided to make this meeting on foot, not in taxi, so I took the subway from Grand Central to the Bridge and emerged in that intriguing maze which radiates under the ramp of that old roadway suspended above East River.

Cheron Street showed itself on a corner full fifteen minutes before noon. It was a sunny bit of city that clear, winter day; it was one of those houses-and-stores streets with red-brick fronts, tall narrow windows and iron stairs and railings. Children romped about; hucksters were making sales to sets of the wisest buyers I ever saw. Price quotations floated to me and I wondered how they could work so close to cost.

I was trying to make the time pass more swiftly by turning attention to such trifles while I waited. For I would not call at No. 120 till noon.

Of course I’d located the number and looked it over several times. It was on one of the regular red brick fronts which owned windows cleaner than most of its neighbors. Nice, old-fashioned curtains, stiffly starched, showed their white patterns. It seemed a precise and prim abode, not over-populated.

During the minutes I watched, men, women and children went in and out of the doors on each side,--practical looking men, who might be mechanics engaged in car repairs at a garage around the corner; in ways which I’ve mentioned, the women proved they were frugal housewives; the play of the children added to the decent domesticity of the street.

There was absolutely nothing sinister in sight and nothing and nobody menacing like the dyke-keeper in Klangenberg’s delicatessen.

No one went in or out of Number 120; and I imagined it the abode of some aging, female relative of Doris; an aunt possibly, who might have been her guardian in some country town during Doris’s childhood and who now had moved to the city and who probably took support from the proceeds of Janvier’s plates but had nothing more to do with them.

When noon came, and Doris had not appeared, I realized that she must be waiting me within; and I went up and rang the bell.

An old woman admitted me, a nice-appearing, wrinkled and gray-haired thing.

“Come in,” she said to me immediately, before I could ask for anyone. Plainly I had been expected; and she motioned me into the prim, red-plush parlor with an ancient piano and crayon enlargements on the wall; and also faded, plush hangings in the door.

These were particularly important furnishings; for it was when I was stepping between them that I was hit on the head; and not by that old woman nor by any infirm or failing person. The hit was wholly vigorous and expert; and right at the base of the back of my head.

Of course, I realized all this afterwards; at the time, I knew nothing. I was walking into that prim, red-plush parlor quite strong and happy; I passed the portières and instantaneously I was “out.” I was also down but didn’t know it; I went “out” while still on my feet; but naturally, when I found myself again, I was on the floor.

XVII

CHIEFLY DEVOTED TO A GAS CALLED KX.

A good many persons of both sexes have put into writing the mental confusion usually concomitant to the process of “coming to.” The descriptions which I’ve happened to read were done by good writers, certainly; but the writers don’t impress me now as people who’d been personally hit on the head. At least, they lacked treatment under the hand of a pluperfect, postgraduate performer upon the _medulla oblongata_.

The trouble with those descriptions is that they are too advanced and intricate. The subject generally is seized with some figurative image, which is quite all right from my experience; but whereas others seem to have come to consciousness through flights of fancy similar to stanzas in “Spoon River Anthology” or Carl Sandberg’s best, I woke up repeating to myself the simplest of verse. In fact:

“Will you walk into my parlor?
Said the spider to the fly;
It’s the prettiest little parlor,
That ever you did spy.”

The psycho-analyst says that the subconscious, which is always with us, working, never is actually foolish; it is interpretive, if you have the insight to understand it. Well, this was my subconscious expression. It was interpretive, true enough.

Now the spider, in my complex, was not that old woman; Doris was doing the spider in my dream.

Upon becoming aware that, though I lay on the edge of a red-plush parlor, I was not physically a fly, I felt over myself to find what was missing.

There should be something hard and heavy and extremely important under my coat in my right inside pocket. That region was soft and pliable now. Plates were lacking; that was it,--nice, new, counterfeit plates which I’d procured from under Doris Janvier’s lingerie in that Pullman on the Century and which I’d put in my pocket to return to her here at Number 120 Cheron Street with an idea of evangelizing her out of using them.

Phrases and periods from that talk I’d prepared for her came into my mind and mixed into the parade of other ideas which followed the spider-and-fly act. They gave me a laugh, anyway.

I lay, looked and listened. After a few minutes, I sat up. Apparently I had the house to myself. Also I had my watch and other personal possessions, everything except those plates.

I took a chance on rising; and still nobody disturbed me. Possibly I might have poked all over that house but I felt no overmastering impulse. The door and that street, on the other side of the pane with these nice, prim, old-fashioned curtains, looked very good to me. I got out and shut the door behind me. Over by the bridge I found a patrolman and asked him to take me to the nearest police station.

That was the place where I sketched to interested ears the essentials of what I’d done since leaving Chicago. I gave them all,--how I’d suspected her before she took the train, how I helped her get away at Cleveland; how I’d carried on the plates and went to return them, trusting to the patent leather platitudes I’d prepared to turn her to the paths of rectitude.

I gave them, with that last particularly, the laugh of their lives. They wanted to know if I actually expected she would meet me alone in a parlor to talk ethics with me.

They might have at least arrested me; but they didn’t even do that. They did detail an officer to accompany me; but he felt himself distinctly as one charged to keep me from further harm. They rushed a squad over to Number 120 Cheron Street, of course, and surrounded the house properly before closing in. But nobody, not even the old woman, was there. The house was empty and so eminently proper to all appearances that, for a while, a theory prevailed that I had invented my whole story.

Then they began hearing from Dibley and confirmed the first part; about two days later, there was plenty of proof of the rest. The prints from those missing Janvier plates began making their début at the banks all over New York; Philadelphia reported a few; soon Boston was heard from.

They were so good that some of the experts at the banks wired Washington for a check on serial numbers before throwing Janvier’s work out. Naturally, all this made me popular.

I didn’t care about returning home; I didn’t drop into our New York office. I stayed in my room, mostly, where old “Iron Age” Dibley, among others, visited me.

He informed me that Doris and George and Felice all completed their get-away at Cleveland; and he didn’t feel himself in the least to blame for that. No; he’d shifted any chagrin, which he might have felt, right on to me. Doris undoubtedly had come on afterwards, counting upon my chronic fatuity to respond to feeding by her telegrams; undoubtedly--to Dibley’s mind--she personally arranged the _medulla oblongata_ performance for me.

Of course, I’d felt that; but when old “Iron Age” got gloating over it, he cheered me into a question or two. Had she? Was I sure?

Well, I’d certainly indicated to the police that I was; and no one developed any further ideas upon the subject. Number 120 Cheron Street was deserted of Doris and her crowd as the Flamingo Feather after the ball. The issue of those new Janvier tens and hundreds seemed to shift to the south; Atlanta reported rather more than its share; Nashville and Memphis broke into the column of complaints and New Orleans was not overlooked.

I was about convinced that my friends of the Flamingo and Cheron Street had shifted base again when I received, through the mails at the hotel, a note in Jerry’s handwriting.

“Steve: Here’s your chance,” I read. “Get to T. M. Teverson
at once and talk to him; or Sencort. Prevent any meeting in
Sencort Directors’ room. Make this absolutely sure. Examine pipe,
particularly. J.”

Jerry’s writing and his manner with me, beyond doubt. He was still alive then and, if that postmark meant anything, he was in New York City at ten o’clock last night.

Of course, I’d never seen Keeban’s writing. It might be identical with Jerry’s; Keeban might try this with me for some scheme of his own. But I didn’t think it. In the first place, this started with such an understanding of me.

“Steve: Here’s your chance!”

Now Jerry, alive and looking on at me from somewhere in New York, naturally would start with that thought for me. He’d be feeling, from the first moment I’d stuck with him after he was accused and when I continued to stick through that affair of the Scofields’, how I’d had a steady run of results against me. He’d have heard how, out of that Flamingo Feather ball, I’d gone deeper into disrepute; and he’d been thinking just that for me: “Here’s your chance, Steve.” He meant, of course, my chance to rehabilitate my reputation somewhat.

“Get to T. M. Teverson at once!” That meant to get to the big man of the moment in New York. Officially, he was first vice-president of the Sencort Trust; but unofficially he was a sort of financial vice-regent of Europe for the time being. You see, that was the instant of the particular crisis in international affairs when the Sencort Trust took the load, and “carried” two of the major powers, along with seven or eight of the minors, for the sake of the peace of the world and to postpone, for a while anyway, the rush of the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse over the rest of Europe.

Teverson personally was packing tremendous responsibilities; and naturally every one, whose impulse in difficulty is to slip out from under and loot and destroy, was keen to take a pot shot at him.

Jerry’s note must mean that he’d run on the trail of an especially capable plot which involved the employment of pipes running into the directors’ room at the Sencort Trust. Suggestive, that mention of pipes; and he had emphasized the need to see Teverson at once.

I had the note just after breakfast; and the _Times_ this morning told that Lord Strathon, for England, and F. L. Géroud, for France, were arriving on the _Majestic_ for immediate conference with the Sencort committee about loans and reparations. That meeting, this morning, undoubtedly was booked for the directors’ room at the Sencort Trust,--a big bag, sure enough, for whoever was going gunning through the pipes this morning.

I’d no time to lose, so I rushed to Wall Street and up in the old Trust Building to Teverson’s office. He was down meeting the _Majestic_, which was just docking; so I sent in my card to Sencort.

Now I knew the old man slightly; he had, among a thousand other flyers, his venture in beans, netting himself something too. Also, Fanneal and Company had supplied on some foreign-food contracts he’d financed; so I was sure he’d know my name.

He did; he sent out word he couldn’t see me and told the girl to explain that he was expecting Lord Strathon and M. Géroud momentarily.

“Tell him that’s why I have to see him now,” I urged the girl.

She brought out word that the Sencort Trust would not let the contracts on the supplies to be bought with proceeds of the new loans; and, if they did, I’d have to see him later.

I said to that girl, “You read the papers?”

Of course she did; and, when I asked, she granted that she’d seen considerable mention of me, recently.

“That’s good,” I said. “Will you ask Mr. Sencort if he has, too? And, if he has, assure him I’ve called on nothing connected with my usual business, but something else of direct importance to him.”

“Rising out of your--” she hesitated and then said--“your counterfeiter’s connection, Mr. Fanneal?”

“Rising from it,” I told her, “but not stopping there. Now I leave it to you to get me in to see Mr. Sencort.”

I saw, by this time, she was curious, if not a little impressed. It’s queer how a short and conspicuously unsuccessful connection with crime produces an effect which a lifetime in a creditable business can not do,--at least not the bean business. That girl disappeared and when she was back again, it was to ask me into Mr. Sencort’s office.

The old man was at his desk and alone, and I saw at once that the girl had gone the distance for me with him; I had much to make good, so I went to it immediately.

“I’ve come to ask you not to have any meetings in your directors’ room to-day.”

Of course he asked why; and I told him, “I’ve word, which I feel sure is reliable, that there is a plot against your meeting.”

“Hmm!” said Sencort, evidently disappointed. “Much obliged for your trouble.”

Plainly, he wasn’t interested.

I said, “You’ll not meet in that room this morning?”

He was looking at papers on his desk. “Why not? I’ve had it examined. I’ve been warned before, Fanneal; so we’ve already taken precautions. These threats never amount to anything. Much obliged to you, however.”

“You’ve examined the pipes in that room?” I asked.

“Pipes?” he repeated. There’s always something about definiteness which claims the attention. He pressed a button on his desk.

The girl, who had got me in, reappeared. “Ask Reed and Weston whether they’ve particularly examined the pipes in the directors’ room,” he said; and when the girl was gone, he nodded to me. “Sit down, Fanneal.”

Some one rang him on the ’phone, just then; and when he was through talking, the girl gave word: “Not particularly, Mr. Sencort. They’re going over them now.”

Again she left us alone.

“Rather rotten situation in Europe,” I commented conversationally.

“Hmm,” Sencort grunted, chewing his cigar, with as little interest in my reactions on the European trouble as in my warning to him. He gave me the impression that, having read about my performance with those counterfeit plates, he was willing to refresh his memory upon the sort of citizen who did that sort of thing.

His girl reentered and reported, “Mr. Teverson is here with Lord Strathon and M. Géroud, sir.”

Sencort nodded. “Heard from Reed?”

“He’s outside, sir.”

“Send him in.”

Reed proved to be a tall, keen-looking chap, evidently alert and undoubtedly dependable. He was one of the bank detectives, not in uniform.

“We’ve gone over the whole room again, sir; and also the rooms adjoining. Everything is in order,” he reported.

“Particularly the pipes?” Sencort asked.

“There’s nothing wrong with the pipes, sir.”

“Very well,” Sencort dismissed him; and then he looked at me. “Much obliged, Fanneal,” he thanked me again.

Of course, he was dismissing me, but I held my ground. “The warning which reached me, Mr. Sencort, did not advise mere examination of the room,” I insisted. “It said to prevent its use. I must urge you, whatever you think, not to meet in that room.”

“Fanneal, if I governed my movements according to cautions of well-meaning friends, I’d have put myself and family and friends in a steel safe thirty years ago. Reed says that room is clear; it is on the fifth floor, so attack from the street is impossible. Here’s Teverson now.”

Another hint for me, but I stuck, and just then Teverson came in to see what was so absorbing in here, and old Sencort, in explaining why he was preferring a chat with me to a conference with M. Géroud and Lord Strathon at that hour, of course dragged in the mad idea I’d brought along. But Teverson wasn’t amused by it at all.

“Reed and Weston have both examined the room,” Sencort repeated, “and found all in order.”

“All was in order over at Ed Costrelman’s the other night, not only before but after the--the occurrence,” Teverson mentioned in a thoughtful sort of brooding manner which sparked up old Sencort.

“What occurrence?” he came back loudly; of course Teverson had the door shut after him.

“Good Lord,” said Teverson, “didn’t you know that Ed Costrelman’s dead?”

“Certainly,” said Sencort. “I also know that his butler is dead and most of his party was sick but have recovered; from something wrong in the wine or vermuth. What has that to do with us? We’re not serving liqueur at directors’ meeting.”

“It wasn’t in the wine or vermuth,” Teverson came back calmly. “It wasn’t in the food either; everything they’d drunk or tasted has been analyzed. Everything, I tell you, was in order.”

“What was it, then?” Sencort went at him, still with more impatience than interest. “Simultaneous, group indigestion?”

“A poison, a definite, lethal agent, reached Costrelman and the butler--Swan--in fatal amount and the rest in less quantity. The post-mortem on Ed and Swan was completed this morning; there was definite, characteristic destruction of motor nerve centers.”

“Characteristic of what?” This was old Sencort--yielding, pliable nature, he had, you see--at Teverson again.

“A cheerful little chemical composition which the infernal-machine and poison squad of the secret service call KX.”

“What?”

“In your school days, how did you designate algebraically an unknown quantity?” Teverson asked old Sencort, evidently knowing that the way to handle the old boy was by going to the good old Socratic.

“By the later letters of the alphabet,” Sencort grunted.

“That is the X in the name of this; it means they haven’t an iota of information on one ingredient, except by its effect; by K, they mean they can halfway guess at the other; it seems to be the masterpiece of an Austrian chemist known as Stenewisc who hides himself most successfully somewhere on the East Side here. If he’d been born in the Borgias’ time, he’d have been Lucretia’s favorite; for his stuff killed Costrelman and Swan and almost killed half a dozen more without giving the slightest warning till the physical seizure came, and without leaving an external trace.”

“Poison to kill has to get into one,” Sencort came back, not giving up yet. “If it wasn’t in the food or in the drink, where was it?”

“What,” returned Teverson, sticking to the Socratic, “goes into one’s body beside food and drink?”

“Air’s all I can think of.”

“All I can,” Teverson admitted. “And, with that in mind, I believe I’ll have a look around our directors’ room myself, if you’ll hold, up our meeting for a few minutes.”

“Damn foolishness,” acceded Sencort graciously.

“Pipes were what I was particularly warned against,” I said to Teverson.

“Come along,” he invited me; so I went with him to the fifth floor, passed Weston and Reed on guard outside to see that nobody carted in time bombs since they’d last reported the room clear, and we stepped into the regular, long-tabled, black-walnut panelled mausoleum sort of room which directors picked for their deliberations a generation or so ago.

There it was, with two windows to the street and both closed; it was winter, you see, and Sencort wasn’t the only near octogenarian to rally round that walnut. It had electric lights and nothing else but a steam radiator, carpet and chairs and five old etchings on the walls. Everything was clear; nothing was wrong in the drawers or under the tables or chairs or even under the carpet. Reed had carefully tested the radiators and steam pipes. They were absolutely in order.

But I kept poking about the room and, behind an etching, I found the capped head of an old gas pipe which evidently brought illuminating gas to the room in the days before electric lighting.

It was capped, I say, and looked quite all right, but I happened to put my fingers behind the cap. Then I called Teverson; and he felt, and called Reed.

“What do you think of _that_?” he asked.

_That_ was a slot--rather a series of slots--cut through the pipe behind the cap on the right wall. You couldn’t see them from the front; you hardly could see them when you pressed cheek to the wall but you could feel them top, bottom and sides of the pipe cut through, leaving just enough metal to hold the cap in place; and freshly cut; for the edges were sharp to your fingers and shining to your eyes. But of course every scrap and shaving of the metal had been cleaned away. The pipe behind the cap back of an etching on the opposite wall was exactly like this.

“It was to come that way, I guess,” I said carefully to Teverson.

“Was?” he repeated as carefully. “What makes you think it isn’t yet to come? Not in the middle of our meeting now, but to whoever is here, which means you and me.” But he did not move away; instead, he walked to the window and stood there looking down. I glanced down too and into Wall Street and got a glimpse of that part which seemed particularly to bear a message for us this morning--that strip between Morgan’s offices and the sub-treasury where people were peacefully passing and feeling absolutely secure that summer noon, not so long ago, when without warning at all that infernal no-one-yet-knows-what went off and did what nobody about Wall Street will ever forget.

Of course, what had strewed the street had been gathered up and the pavement repaired and flushed and swept and the buildings restored long ago; yet this neighborhood wasn’t precisely the best spot to disregard a threat of terrorism,--especially when you’ve found ancestral gas pipes freshly chiselled for no use you wish to put them to.

“We’ve expected trouble from radicals about this stage in our foreign financing, Fanneal,” Teverson said to me. “We’ve guarded Géroud and Strathon from the minute they passed quarantine; we’ve double-guarded these premises with special men who are watching every stranger who comes in to-day; we’ve taken every precaution--or thought we had. That’s why Sencort was so sure nothing could happen.”

He stepped nearer to the window and I realized that he was not standing there merely to think, but he was intentionally showing himself to convince any watcher that the room was occupied. He turned about and went on, “No one knows where the other ends of these pipes are now; of course they haven’t been used for decades. They might stop anywhere or they might have been led on indefinitely. If what killed Costrelman came through the air--and it seems certain it did--and if those pipes are conveyors for more of it, they could have pumped it in and nobody suspected till somebody fell over; it might be coming now on us. Do you feel any movement of air from that pipe?”

“I can’t be sure,” I said.

“Come out now,” said Teverson, pulling at me absolutely unnecessarily; he didn’t have to put up any argument. “I may be a damn fool, as Sencort suggests, but then I’ve rather a longer life expectancy--away from slotted gas pipes--than he. Besides, I’m beginning to feel some of this is personal against me. I was invited to Costrelman’s dinner and was expected, though I didn’t get there.... Weston, get help at once and try to cover the places where these pipes may run to; they may be entirely outside the building, of course. Jump! Reed, post men here to see no one uses this room or room next to it to-day. Leave the electric lights burning as if the room was being used and send some one, on the run, to that animal store the other side of Broadway in a cellar, Thames Street, I think, and buy four or five guinea pigs; if he gets back with them in fifteen minutes, cover your head, hold your breath, and put them inside this door; close it. If he doesn’t get back that soon, don’t even go near the door. Wait here, Fanneal.” He left me in an office near by and himself rushed away.

“Now you tell me,” he went at me three minutes later, “how much you know about this?”

XVIII

DORIS APPEARS AND VANISHES.

I was a changed man, as you may imagine. Yesterday and up to this minute of this morning, I was the laugh of the locality. “F. P. A.” had put in a little paragraph about me; the librettists of the running revues also had tamped in a line or two of appropriate personal reference to the Chicago vendor of beans, with two nice, new money plates packed in his jeans.

It was music to me to hear any one address me as Teverson was doing.

“You know nearly all that I do,” I told him. “Maybe you’ve heard I’ve been in a little mix-up with counterfeiters and others recently. I got my tip out of that.”

“Who sent the tip?”

I shook my head; it was hopeless to go into the question of Jerry with him; and Teverson was not inclined to waste time impractically.

“Pipes!” he repeated. “They were going to use the pipes; that’s all you knew of their method?”

“That’s all.”

“What do you want to do now?” he asked me, almost deferentially. “Stay here?”

“I’d like to see this through, of course,” I said. “I’d like to know what happens to those guinea pigs.”

“Whatever you like,” he answered, and shook hands with me. I could see he was getting uneasy about Strathon and Géroud. He went out and I, having nothing to do but wait, wandered in the hall.

A door opened at the rear and showed an enclosed stairway lit by yellow electricity; a girl had come up the stairs and now was standing in the dimness of the hall.

During the second she showed herself in the lighted doorway, before the door closed again, I had a glimpse of her outline. She was little and trim; like Doris, I thought.

I stepped down by her and she went to the side of the hall and stood. Then I had the instinct to seize her; and there, in the quarter-light, I saw what I was feeling with my hands. She was Doris Janvier.

With the realization, my head seemed to hurt where I’d been hit; but my fingers held firm to her, giving her no chance to get away.

“What are you doing here?” I challenged.

She was quick! “I came up to see Mr. Teverson!” she said to me. “They wouldn’t let me see him downstairs. I heard he was up here!”

I half shook her. “You came up to see if they were meeting in the directors’ room. You’re the “wire” inside to-day! You came to see if everybody was placed! Well, nobody’ll be in that room but guinea pigs this morning. I don’t mind telling you, for you’ll not get back to tell them.”

“Oh!” she said. That was all, just then. “Oh!”

I kept hold of her, not knowing what else to do or say.

“Where are they?” I asked her, after a half-minute.

“Who?”

“Your crowd.”

She waited half a minute herself and then said, “I don’t know.”

“Never mind; we’ll find them. We’re following your pipes,” I assured her. I dragged her toward the front of the hall and had a better look at her.

“They’re not my pipes!” she denied.

“That’s true,” I admitted. “You found them in place; all you had to do was to make new openings.”

“Steve!” she said to me.

“Don’t try it,” I asked her.

I could see her face now,--her lips straight and thin, her eyes fixed on me, her forehead damp with those tiny drops of perspiration which you know are cold. She was wearing, not the same suit she’d had on the train; but one as smart, with fur collar and cuffs. She was the same neat little thing who had so completely fooled me; but she wouldn’t again.

“Steve!” she repeated my name. “I came here to find Mr. Teverson to warn him. Since he’s been warned, I don’t care.”

“I do!” I retorted and held her. She’d spoken as if I’d let her walk away.

Reed was back at the door of the directors’ room with little furry things in his hands. Somebody opened the door, he entered and came out quickly without the guinea pigs. He saw me and stepped up.

“Who’s this, Mr. Fanneal?” he asked me, respectfully enough, gazing at Doris.

I didn’t reply and he answered himself. “Oh, it’s her who was asking for Mr. Teverson downstairs.”

“I’ll see to her,” I said to Reed, and I led her into a room which I found empty.

“Now you’d better tell me all you know,” I advised her.

“What’ll you do, if I don’t?”

“You’ll not get out of this!” I promised her. “Not out of this!”

Nothing yet had really happened in “this”; we’d discovered nothing actual but those slotted pipes. Not even the guinea pigs had been killed yet; but the certainty of the plot, which had convinced Teverson too, turned me sick when I thought of it. And this girl, whom I held, was in the scheme.

True, she had stopped, on a lower floor, to inquire for Teverson; but that proved nothing in her favor. I thought how I’d trusted her before and how I’d been hit on the back of the head when I went to that meeting place where I was to have my chance to argue with her, alone.

I held to her; and she gazed at me and I felt her breathing slowly and deeply. The little clock on the desk near us turned to eleven; and we both heard steps and talk in the hall.

“What are they doing?” she asked me.

I opened our door; and we both saw two men, whose figures looked like Weston and Reed. They had hooded affairs, of gas-mask pattern over their heads, and they were at the door of the directors’ room.

“Don’t go in!” Doris cried to them. “No mask’s any good! Don’t let them in!” she cried to me.

Apparently they did not hear and Doris jerked toward them. I held her and shoved her back of me. “Don’t go in, Reed!” I called and at that moment, though I did not know it, I must have let Doris go.

I was watching the men and calling to them again; they had the door open a little; now they dropped back, but they could look in.

“They’re dead,” said Reed’s voice.

“Sure,” said the other. Then I missed Doris; and when I saw her, she was at the top of the stairs where she had first appeared. She had the door open and she was standing in it, looking back; then she slammed it. I was after her, but she had too good a lead. On the third floor, she entered the Sencort offices and left me on the back stairs with a bolted door between us.

I beat upon it and shouted and then realized, too late, that my best chance was to go to the ground and head her off. Of course I never headed her; she was gone.

When I returned upstairs, Reed had ventilated the directors’ room by opening the windows from the outside ledge. He had taken out the four guinea pigs he had left penned on the top of the directors’ table. They were all dead without visible hurt or reason.

Teverson came out of his conference, which was being held on the third floor; and he turned the limp guinea pigs over thoughtfully.

“There’s only one reason those aren’t Strathon and Géroud and Sencort and me, Fanneal,” he said, looking at me. “You want to do one more big thing for us and against--them?” He moved his head toward the wall; I knew whom he meant.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Keep this all quiet. It’s asking something, I know.”

I guess I got red at that. He meant I’d played rather prominently as a goat and it was something to ask me to conceal the one thing I’d put through.

“It’s the only thing to do,” I agreed.

He gave me his hand again. “We’ll all know,” he said.

“How about the men you have tracing the pipes?” I asked.

“Nothing from them yet.”

And there was nothing until a good deal later, when they found that those old gas pipes had been extended into an unused basement room in the building to the left. When they entered this room, they found proof that recently it had been occupied; men had been doing things there with reference to the end of that extended gas pipe, but everybody had got away.

I kept quiet, of course; the Sencort people hushed their clerks. Lord Strathon, for England, and M. Géroud, for France, met with Sencort and Teverson and made their agreements as everybody read. Nobody read of that near success at gassing them dead as those guinea pigs which had been penned on their table.

Nobody knew, but the Sencort people and I and those who had slotted the pipes and killed the four guinea pigs from that next-door basement room.

“Get out of New York, Steve! Stay away!” said another note to me in Jerry’s handwriting.

It arrived the second day after the gassing of the guinea pigs and I was thinking it over, when walking on Park Avenue and, being far from my hotel, I gave in to a taxi driver who offered his cab at the curb.

“Belmont!” I told him; and he started in the right direction; then he swung to the east and was over Third Avenue. He was up an alley while I was rapping at his window.

I realized then and opened the door and jumped out while the cab was still moving; but I was near his destination. A gat was at my midriff before I’d stopped slipping in the muck underfoot; and as I looked into the faces of the gents surrounding me, I understood that, upon the rack of their club, my number to-day had arrived at the top.

XIX