Chapter I (2)

"Lifesavers, sir," they answered, without knowing just what else to say.

Pearson grunted. "Women and children last, eh," he went on, "so that's the lifesavers' code. Steady now, lift her in carefully. Now I can swim to shore." He did, but they stood carefully by, making sure he was safe. Twice, in their eagerness for him, they nearly tipped over the canoe, but finally the brave little craft rose bravely on top of a breaker, and before they knew it, they were all upon the beach, and another page of Ravenswood romances had been turned. Another link in the golden chain that the little cupids were making, had been forged, and once more the mysterious triumvirate had come to the front.

"Plays her cards mighty well anyhow," whispered the eighteen year old wiseacres at the Inn, as the girl and Pearson drove back in his car, after this episode.

"Who is he anyway?" asked one of them.

"Nobody knows," replied the other. And therein, like Mrs. Ingraham, they spoke the truth.

Once more that estimable lady found herself under the necessity of reproving her headstrong young daughter, but the girl suddenly and unaccountably was defiant.

"Mother," she said, in a tone of voice that was new and unaccustomed, "don't you think that perhaps I am the best judge of my actions, after all?"

"Leave the girl alone," Ingraham, the banker, said to his wife that night. "She's not going to marry this young chap, and from the conversation I've had with him, he knows New York banks from A to Z. I've got to get a line of credit, and I've got to get it right away, my dear, or there's going to be trouble out in Cleveland. This chap can give me pointers, and I need pointers just now, as badly as our bank needs money." He slumped down into a chair and wiped his brow. "My, but I'm tired," he said, "I've been all over New York to get what I want. I've tackled every big bank but the Tri-State Trust, and to-morrow I'm going to tackle that."

The next day he left the Inn at eight a.m. just as Pearson, in his low racer, pulled out of the garage.

"Hold on there," cried Pearson, "don't take that stage. Where are you bound for, Mr. Ingraham?"

"New York," said Ingraham, "where are you?"

"I'll take you up," replied the younger man, "I'm going to make a flying trip myself."

That afternoon, Ingraham, the banker, more fatigued than ever, strode into his wife's room at the Inn.

"By George," he said, "I couldn't see anybody at the Tri-State Trust. They're all upside down there, probably due to this confounded thief of a teller that robbed them. Everybody tells you that the Tri-State Trust is as sound as a dollar, but it acts like a chicken with its head cut off. Couldn't get hold of anybody that could do me any good and--" He stopped suddenly. "What's the matter," he exclaimed. Grouped around a couch were two figures, a man and a woman. The man was Crocheron, M.D., and the woman was the banker's daughter Helen. Propped up with many pillows was the banker's wife, wheezing her very worst.

"Father," said Helen, "I think we'll have to go back to Cleveland at once, mother has never been as bad as this, have you, mother?"

Her mother admitted it between gasps, and also asserted without hesitation that Dr. Crocheron had seemingly fallen far short of success.

Crocheron was wringing his hands. "I don't know what more I can do for you, Mrs. Ingraham." he said, "I've applied all the known remedies, and you know this is a thing that can't be cured and must be endured."

Helen Ingraham held up her hand. "Wait a minute," she exclaimed, "somebody told me of a remedy, a real remedy. I think we ought to try it."

"Who told you?" inquired Crocheron.

"Mr. Pearson," she faltered.

"That's the first time I ever knew he was a specialist," exclaimed the doctor.

"Pearson," echoed her father, "why, he's in New York, he took me up this morning in his car, left me at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, and went up town. Maybe he's gone for good."

"No, he hasn't," returned his daughter, with an air of very positive assurance.

For an instant the sufferer on the couch forgot her asthma. "How do you know, my dear?" she asked her daughter.

Her daughter did not reply, for at that instant there was a knock upon the door. Ingraham stepped to the door, opened it, held a whispered consultation, and then came back into the room. "It's the man we were talking about," he said, "and he wants to talk to you."

"To me?" asked Helen.

"No," returned her father, "to your mother. Wants to see her right away."

Helen's face flushed. "Perhaps," she suddenly exclaimed, "he's got Aunt Charlotte's cure."

"Aunt Charlotte," exclaimed her mother, "you have no Aunt Charlotte."

"This is his Aunt Charlotte," corrected, the girl, "not mine."

Ingraham once more opened the door and Pearson entered. He was still pale, though the sun had made some inroads on his pallor. He still had that air of weariness. He strode to the bedside. "Mrs. Ingraham," he said, "I've brought you something that will cure you, if you'll consent to try it."

Dr. Crocheron frowned with professional disdain. "What new remedy is this, Mr. Pearson?" he inquired.

"That," returned the young man, "is something I shall divulge only to Mrs. Ingraham. May I see her alone?"

"Certainly," said Mrs. Ingraham, who was willing to submit to any experiment, to go through anything to relieve her suffering.

"Certainly," echoed Helen.

The doctor and the banker looked at each other in amazement, but Pearson with a considerable display of executive ability and self-possession, stood at the door and politely bowed everybody out. Then he locked the door, took a small packet from his breast pocket, and sat down by the bedside.

"Mrs. Ingraham," he began, "my Aunt Charlotte--"

Fifteen minutes later a young man stepped into the center of a small group of people clustered upon one of the many balconies' that clung to the Inn. "She's very much better," he announced smilingly.

Helen pressed forward and touched his arm. "Did she take the remedy?" she asked.

He nodded. "She did," he answered, "though I'm convinced that it shocked her sense of the proprieties to a great extent."

"What the dickens did you give her?" queried Crocheron.

"That," said Pearson, "as I've already indicated, is her secret, and it shall be mine."

These four people sitting in the balcony did not observe three men, who casually strolled up and down in front of the Inn, nor did they observe that these three men stopped short, and that one of them pointed somewhat unconventionally toward a wide window of the Inn that faced the ocean.

"Jerusalem," said one of these three men to his two companions, "look at the old lady in that window. She certainly has all the earmarks of a dead game sport."

"That's a queer note," said the other. "I always thought she was a staid old proposition. She's the wife of that banker from the West."

"Well," said the third, "she certainly doesn't look like a staid old proposition now."

The three passed on, and Mrs. Ingraham, totally unconscious of their observation, but fully conscious that for the first time in many years she had become wholly comfortable, sat complacently in the open window and smoked one of Aunt Charlotte's long black medicinal cigars with the utmost nonchalance of manner.

V

"I tell you, the man's a thief." Ingraham, the Cleveland banker, strode nervously up and down the big rooms that composed his suite at the Ravenswood Inn. Before him, hanging on his words, sat his wife, still puffing on her fireside companion, one of Aunt Charlotte's Perfectos. His daughter Helen sat at a broad window gazing out at sea.

"A thief," echoed Mrs. Ingraham, "it can't be possible."

"I tell you it's true," went on the banker. "Haven't I been in his rooms dozens of times, smoking his cigars, drinking his old port and telling him stories; and haven't I seen that tell-tale Gladstone bag with the letters 'O.P.' painted on it; and yet, by George, he fooled me, even me. It never struck me until to-day that the man was an impostor, that he's a masquerader, and it's as clear as daylight now. This chap Pearson is the thieving teller of the Tri-State Trust."

He turned suddenly. Helen was coming toward him with blazing eyes.

"That isn't true," she said in a low voice, and yet some unusual confusion seemed to rest upon her. "It can't be true."

The old man stalked to a big closet in the room, threw open the door and pointed to a top shelf. "Your mother," he went on, "keeps every newspaper that she lays her hands upon. There's the bunch up there, every one of them since we landed here."

He disappeared into the closet and a grunt or two indicated some unusual exertion on his part. He came back in a moment, bearing a pile of newspapers a foot in height, and tossed them on the bed. Then he shook his finger at them. "Those sheets there," he exclaimed, his face reddening as he went on, "they will tell you--read them again. They'll show you that the very day this fellow came here--that that very day he got out of the Tombs--was let out on bail. Why was he so pale? What was the matter with him? Six weeks' confinement in the cooler, that's what's the matter with him. Follow the story down. You remember his going to New York a week ago with me, what did he go for?"

For answer his asthmatic wife held up her black cigars. "For these," she gasped gratefully.

"Not a bit of it," answered her husband. "Read your newspaper. He went up to plead to another indictment they had found against him; you can't tell me. Take an hour off and go through that bundle on the bed and you'll find that the Tri-State teller and this man Pearson are identical. I tell you," he repeated, "he's a thief."

"But his money," exclaimed the banker's wife. "He's made of money."

"Made of money," snorted the Cleveland banker, "of course he is. Didn't he get away with hundreds of thousands."

"But they wouldn't let him keep it," she returned.

"Wouldn't let him keep it," he repeated, "of course they wouldn't if they knew where he kept it, but in order to get it they've got to sue him and get a judgment--they've got to issue execution and they've got to find out where it is. That fellow only had to put up fifty thousand cash on the first indictment. They were afraid to let the public know that he had gotten away with more. Only fifty thousand out of all that cash, and he's got the rest except what that woman took away from him."

Helen Ingraham turned pale, but her eyes still flashed. "It's not true," she said, but her tone exhibited more hesitation than indignation this time.

"And there's his automobile, his racer, there's property that they can take," exclaimed Mrs. Ingraham. "Why don't they take that?"

"Ha," returned her husband, "he's probably got it in his wife's name, that's the reason. He's probably got everything fixed so that they can't get at it."

"His wife," echoed Helen stammering. "Has he got a wife?"

"I should think he had," retorted Ingraham. "Why don't you read the papers."

Helen drew herself up. For an instant she threw all uncertainty from her. "Father," she exclaimed, "you are totally mistaken. You don't know this man: if you really knew him you would understand that he is incapable of being a thief, incapable of anything that you have charged against him."

Ingraham smiled a supercilious smile. He knew that he could shatter all their doubts at one stroke and he had reserved this stroke until the last. His forefinger shot out toward his daughter as though to pin her with the force of his argument. "The old man's wrong, eh?" he demanded. "Well, then, just explain one thing to me, what in thunder do these three men mean, who follow him? Tell me that."

The stroke was an effective one. The argument was absolutely unanswerable. Helen sank into a seat at the window, her lips closed, her hands clasped, thinking.

Mrs. Ingraham, wheezing a bit at this startling conclusion, only puffed the harder on her cigar.

"These three men," went on Ingraham, "mean this and only this, that the District Attorney of New York County is not going to let this chap, who has put up less than one-third of what he stole as bail, get out of his clutches."

Mrs. Ingraham regained her composure. "Maybe he stole these antiseptic cigars," she cried. And added "I only hope he'll steal some more."

Ingraham stood over Helen. "Helen," he said, "you've been having a good deal to do with this chap. You've taken a long chance, even if he were the best instead of the worst. Now, you know he's the worst--you know all he's done, and from henceforth I want you to leave him severely alone. Though I'm sure," he added with a bow, "that I don't have to tell you that."

Helen didn't answer. She didn't change her position at the window, but her mother waved her hand excitedly to attract attention.

"Helen," she spluttered, coughing, "don't say anything to offend the man until he steals some more of these cigars."

Helen did not answer her father's seriousness nor her mother's gayety. She rose and swept swiftly from this room into another, closed the door, locked it, and sat down alone.

"Confounded shame," said Ingraham to his wife, "that fellow made a deep impression on the girl. I don't blame her, for he's made a deep impression upon me."

His wife blew smoke rings. "And on me," she added.

"However," sighed Ingraham, "she'll do as we say--she'll leave him alone; she'll cast him off before these people find out who he is. Let's hope they'll never find out."

Helen started in bravely to leave Pearson alone. Her first step toward it was to indite a brief note to him and send it nis office, requesting an interview that night.

Singularly enough, Pearson had done the same by her, and the two, each in solitude, read and somehow gloated over these summons to a tryst. But Pearson little knew what was in store for him.

Hours later, the girl sat upon a little hillock of dry sand, listening to waves that she could barely see, for the night was dark Pearson fumed and fretted at her side.

"What's the trouble with me," he exclaimed insistently. "Don't you know that that one moment at the railway station made you as surely mine as I am yours? Doesn't your inner consciousness tell you that?"

"It does not," replied the girl coldly. Suddenly she turned to him. "Tell me one thing, Mr. Pearson," she exclaimed, in a cruel, hard, uncompromising voice, "have you told me the whole truth about this?"

Pearson laughed. "No," he answered, "why should I do that. How can it signify. I wanted to know that you wanted me for myself--for the man that I am, if I'm any kind of a man at all. I didn't want to tell you the truth until after we had settled that."

"Have you nothing to tell me?" she inquired, her voice growing harder still as she proceeded.

Her belligerent manner affected him unpleasantly. Her coolness froze him. Under other circumstances he might have made a clean breast of everything, but something combative within him kept him from it. He thought for a moment and then he answered her.

"I've just one thing to tell you," he replied. "My name is not Oscar, thank Heavens, and my name is not Pearson, ditto. My name," he added in a low voice, "is Ordway Pelletier."

The name evidently signified nothing to the girl, and apparently he hoped it would not, for she sat silent--listless, even dejected, by his side.

Suddenly he seized her hand, but she drew it from him.

"Why?" he demanded. Then like a flash he had caught it and was holding it, staring down at it in blank surprise. It was her left hand and upon her third finger was a gem that gathered from the night all the night's darkness and turned it into brilliant rays of light. It was a solitaire diamond ring that he stared at for so long.

"This was not here yesterday--last week," he exclaimed.

"No," she replied, "it was not."

"Then," he returned, "there's somebody else."

She did not answer.

"Somebody else here in Ravenswood," he went on.

She still was silent.

"It's Dr. Crocheron," he exclaimed now, with tones of disgust, "Crocheron, that piffling proposition of a doctor--the village cut-up. What in Heaven's name can you see in him?"

For answer the girl stared into the darkness. For a long time they sat thus after he had released that hand of hers, with its portentous token. Finally he rose.

"Is that all you've got to say to me?" he asked.

"That is all," she answered.

She too, rose, and left him, a white figure against the blackness of the night. She swept on straight to the Inn, avoided all the loungers of both sexes on the broad veranda, sped swiftly to her room and locked herself in. Her first act upon switching on the light was to jerk from that third finger the sparkling gem and to cast it into a jewel box on her dressing-table.

"He thought," she said softly to herself, "that it was what it seemed to be. It was the best way after all--the best way out of it." She drew her hand across her eyes. "Ordway Pelletier," she whispered softly to herself, "somehow I can't believe that you are what they say you are, and yet--" Suddenly she switched off the light and threw herself face down sobbing upon her bed.

VI

"Straight road down the beach?" asked Pearson.

"Sure," answered the attendant at the Inn garage, "twenty miles, maybe, straight as you can go."

"Jove," answered Pearson, "just what I need. It's the only thing that will brace me up. Where's my man?"

His man was sent for and he came. "Henri," said Pearson, "I want you to put my racer in A No. 1 condition, and have it ready for me at three o'clock."

"To-morrow afternoon?" inquired Henri indolently.

"Not a bit of it," replied his employer, "three o'clock this morning. The moon will be up and I'm going to do something that I've never done before."

"Yes, sir," said Henri, "and what may that be, sir?"

Pearson drew a long breath. "I'm going to beat the world's record in a twenty-mile dash on the Shore Road, and I'm going to do it all alone. Three o'clock, Henri, to the minute."

Henri nodded, and retiring to the recess where the racer stood, switched on a dozen lights and started in to work.

Pearson gritting his teeth, digging his nails into the palms of his hands, went back to the beach to sit alone upon that little hillock of sand, to stare blankly for hours into the blackest of black nights.

No sooner had he left the Inn garage than Henri whistled to the uniformed attendant. "Say," he whispered in a hoarse voice, "you go an' tell one of them guys that is watching us, what you heard him tell me, do you understand?"

"Who are them guys?" asked the other man. "I see them here--there--everywhere. What are they watching for?"

"Search me," answered Henri, "all you got to do is to go and tell one of them, do you understand?"

"What will they do," demanded the attendant, "stop him?"

"Search me," replied Henri, lighting up a cigarette, "that's their business, not mine."

The attendant obeyed his orders, and Henri finishing his cigarette and tossing it into the safety of the night, started in on his allotted task.

In a half hour the three men he had sent for entered the garage. "Anybody got a fast machine here?" one of them inquired.

The attendant, who had returned with them, nodded. "Mr. Pearson," he returned.

"I know," said one of the three, "but I mean anybody else."

The attendant looked around the place, and finally placed his hand upon a big machine. "This is the next fastest, gentlemen," he said.

"Who does it belong to?" demanded they.

"Mr. Ingraham, of the Inn," returned he of the garage.

The three put their heads together. "Well," they finally decided, "we'll have to see Ingraham, that's all." So they saw Ingraham and offered him a price to take out the car, and Ingraham, being a practical man of the world, and being also curious as to their mission, accepted their proposition and sent for his chauffeur. "And I guess," said Ingraham to himself, "that I'll just hang around to-night and see what's going on; there's something in the air." He hung round on the grill side of the veranda, drinking Scotches, and he was right about something being in the air, but that something did not eventuate until the moon had peeped up above the horizon--until the Cathedral clock inside was striking three.

Shortly after that the folding doors of the silent garage opened and a long low racer, like some midnight marauding rat, thrust its nose into the dispelling gloom, gave one or two squeaks of caution, grunted a snort of defiance, and then silently darted past him, swung into the Shore Road, and disappeared into the distance. He had only time to note that the racer bore but a single figure, and that that figure was Pearson. He waited then for a few minutes and waited not in vain. Silently, his own ponderous steel-blue sixty horse power, leaped in sight, François at the helm and the three mysteries as passengers. That, too, darted past him and that, too, swung into the Shore Road after the racer, like some huge rat terrier on the scent of some huge rat.

"I'll bet dollars to doughnuts," exclaimed Ingraham to himself, "that he's bound for Florida." And Ingraham went to bed.

It was at four o'clock in the morning that the night clerk downstairs, drowsily nodding in the midst of his long vigil, was aware that the night bell was insistently ringing. He rose, and opened the door. Before him stood Dr. Crocheron.

"What's up, Doc," he demanded, "somebody 'phone you?"

"Nobody from here," answered Crocheron, "but they 'phoned me down the line to come right over here and stay here until I was wanted. What's up?" he asked.

"Blest if I know," said the clerk, "I haven't heard anything."

"Something must be doing," exclaimed the doctor, "I wonder what it is."

He did not wonder long, for at that instant the toot-toot of a motor car was heard in the distance, and before they knew it Ingraham's big sixty horse power had pulled up under the _porte-cochère_ and three men were lifting a heavy object out of the machine.

Crocheron peered at them across the broad veranda. "What's the matter," he exclaimed.

"Matter enough," answered the three men in fearful tones, "smash up, man killed, and a ten thousand dollar racer gone to the junk heap."

They swung their burden into the full light of the hotel office.

"Dead?" asked Crocheron.

"No," they whispered, "but mighty near it, that's why we sent for you." They halted with Pearson's limp form between them and nodded to the clerk. "Can you give us a ground floor room?" they asked.

"Sure," replied the clerk. He darted across the broad hall and threw open the Governor's suite and ushered them in there. "Put him on that bed," he said.

Once they had deposited their unconscious burden on the couch reserved for high officials of the state, the three men fell back and permitted Crocheron to examine him.

"Jove, but he's smashed up," said Crocheron, going over the man carefully. He glanced at them interrogatively. "What was he trying to do?" he asked.

"Nobody knows," they answered, "only he went past the lighthouse at Shore Front faster than a streak of greased lightning. The night watch saw him pass--he was going like mad--machine swung from side to side--seemed almost beyond control."

At this juncture, Henri, who had been attracted by the hubbub, thrust his countenance into the room. He wrung his hands in despair. "I don't wonder, gents," he said, "I knew he'd get his, some time or other, and he did it once too often.

"Has he done it before?" asked Crocheron.

"Sure," answered Henri. "Any time anything gets on his nerves, so he can't stand it, he goes out and breaks the speed laws. Another man would take to drink, he takes to this."

Crocheron sighed. "I don't know whether he'll take to any others," he returned. Then swiftly while he stripped his patient, he gave brief directions in his professional low voice, directions for drugs, splints, bandages, for surgical aid, for everything that occurred to him, and not once during all this time did his patient regain consciousness.

The three men stood about the couch, looking each other in the eye. "It wasn't our fault," they assured each other, as though afraid of some rebuke that waited for them in the future. "How could we have helped it?"

VII

It was two days later. Ingraham, the banker of Cleveland, had sent word to the New York specialist, who was waiting to see him, that he would be glad to consent to an interview.

The specialist--and this specialist was the same man Pearson himself had interviewed on the day he stepped out of the Tombs--came to the point at once.

"Mr. Ingraham," he said, "this is a matter of life and death, and you won't lift your finger to save a life."

"I won't do the thing you want me to do," returned the banker, "and I don't see how it's going to save his life."

"Mr. Ingraham," went on the specialist, "this man's broken bones don't cut any figure in his present condition. If it were only broken bones, we could pull him through. It's a question of nerves, shattered nerves, sir, and ever since that man recovered consciousness, he's been calling for your daughter Helen. Sir, I'll pit my knowledge against that of any expert in the world, and I say to you that the presence of your daughter in that room is going to save this man. Her absence is going to kill him."

"It will have to kill him, then," remarked the Cleveland banker.

In desperation the specialist left the room, and Helen, pushing open her own door, entered it. "Father," she exclaimed, "I heard what he said, and I know--I believe he speaks the truth. I'm going--going down."

Ingraham gripped her wrist as in a vise and forced her into a chair. "You'll do just what I say," he exclaimed. "I'm not going to have your name in the papers, the talk of all New York, linked with the name of this thief downstairs. You'll do just as I say, if you don't I'll lock you up--do you understand?"

Helen understood. She leaned over, burying her face in her hands and wept as though her heart would break.

Downstairs the specialist was 'phoning to New York. He was talking to somebody in the Wall Street district. "You had better come down here at once," he warned the man at the New York end of the wire, "and knock something into this fellow's head, I can't."

Two hours later a natty looking individual was ushered into Ingraham's apartment. "Mr. Ingraham," he said, "I'm the representative of the International Insurance Company of New York. We've got a branch in Cleveland."

"So you have," exclaimed Ingraham, passing his cigars, "and your Cleveland branch banks at my bank."

"Exactly," replied the natty individual, "and it keeps large sums of money on deposit there."

"Best customer I've got," murmured Ingraham gratefully.

The manner of the natty individual changed at once. "Mr. Ingraham," he exclaimed ferociously, "you don't want to lose your best customer, do you?"

"No," returned Ingraham, paling.

"Well, you will," thundered this individual, "if you don't do what we say."

"Wh--what do you say?" stammered Ingraham.

The stranger tapped Ingraham upon the shoulder. "You follow the directions of our friend, the specialist, downstairs, friend Ingraham," he remarked ominously. "Do everything he says, and we'll stick to you. Decline, and you don't get a dollar of our money on deposit. Do you understand?"

Ingraham, terribly agitated, threw open Helen's door, and called to her. "Helen, my dear," he cried, "Helen, you must come with me."

Twenty minutes later Ingraham was standing outside of the Governor's suite of rooms on the ground floor of the Inn. Inside, as he knew, were Crocheron and the New York specialist--and his own daughter Helen. From time to time, reports of the injured man's condition filtered through the doors and were gobbled up by the groups of guests who ranged themselves about the entries to hear every bit of news.

Finally the specialist hustled out. He caught Ingraham by the lapel of his coat. He seemed to have forgotten his resentment toward that gentleman. "Mr. Ingraham," he exclaimed, "I've never seen anything like it in all my experience. Talk about mental suggestion, telepathy, or influence of one mind upon another. The instant that your daughter entered that room, my man knew it without opening his eyes. 'There she is,' he said, as she came in. These were the first words he uttered, other than the constant calling of her name. 'There she is,' he said and opened his eyes and held out his hand--his right arm, you know, is not broken--and then, Mr. Ingraham, as your daughter stopped a minute and said, 'Mr. Pelletier,' he smiled, actually smiled, sir, and he said, 'Can't you do better than that?' and from the minute, Mr. Ingraham, that that girl uttered his first name 'Ordway'--from that instant this young man's recovery has been a fact assured."

The doctor beckoned to him the natty individual from the International Insurance Company, and clutching him with his left hand, while he held Ingraham with his right, he retold the tale with gusto. "Most remarkable thing in my experience," he commented.

While they were standing there, two people approached them. Two strangers they were. One was a woman in a long cloak with a veil about her face, and the other was a youthful business man. The woman started for the door and had her hand on the knob before she was detained. She whispered some words to the man at the door and he nodded toward the specialist. "You'll have to see him," said the man. She swept toward the specialist and caught him by the arm.

"I must see him," she demanded.

"You can't," returned the specialist.

"I must," she answered, "it may be a matter of life and death; I always have a wonderful effect upon him when he is ill, I don't know why, but you must let me see him."

She pressed her card upon the specialist and he looked at it, though it meant nothing to him, and under the force of her insistence, he found himself entering the apartments with her. Once inside, he found her not at all amenable to reason; she simply swept past him as one who could not be stayed, and burst into the room where lay the injured man, and then she stopped. And at the same instant she stopped, the heart of Helen Ingraham seemed to stop beating, too, for Helen noted that the injured man had turned to this woman with a new light of something more than recognition in his eyes, and with a clutch of fear upon her, she saw this other woman stride to the other side of the bed, near Dr. Crocheron, and kneel down.

Crocheron tried to restrain her. "Who are you, madam," he exclaimed, "his wife, or--what are you doing here?"

"She is neither," answered the patient, feebly, "she is only my Aunt Charlotte. Let her stay."

Outside the door the youthful looking business man was arguing with the representative of the International Insurance Company. "Do you mean to tell me," he demanded, "that I can't see Mr. Pelletier. Nonsense. I've got to see him."

"I'm on guard here," returned the insurance man, "and I'll see to it that you don't see him. He's seen enough already."

"But this is a matter of life and death," pleaded the other. "I must see him and he must see me. If he knew I was here he would insist upon it."

The insurance man wavered. He felt after all, perhaps, that he was not authorized to interfere quite as fully as he started out to do, so by way of compromise he nodded and said: "Suppose you tell me your business, if it's important, and I'll take the message to him."

The youthful business man looked about him, looked at Ingraham and concluded, evidently, that he was to be trusted, although a stranger, and then he went on to tell his troubles.

"We're all higgledy-piggledy up in the Tri-State Trust without Pelletier," he said.

Ingraham interrupted him. "Pelletier," exclaimed Ingraham, "I've heard that name somewhere. Who's Pelletier?"

"The man inside," returned the insurance man, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

But the other man went on. "You tell Mr. Pelletier," he said, "that we won't bother him except about one thing. There's a cheap skate banker over in Cleveland, of the name of Ingraham, who wants a line of credit at our bank, and we've put him off and put him off until we can't put him off any longer. Ask him what we'll do."

Ingraham turned scarlet. "Cheap skate banker," he exclaimed, "do you know who you're talking about--do you know who you're talking to? I'm Ingraham."

The other man was not even feezed. "Glad to meet you, Mr. Ingraham," he remarked, "even if you are a cheap skate banker." He held out his hand. Ingraham ignored it.

"We don't let paying tellers like our friend inside," he thundered, "loot our banks out in Cleveland, I can tell you. You New York chaps have hayseed in your hair."

For answer the other stepped to the door and said a few words to the doorkeeper, and finally was admitted.

The insurance man smiled mysteriously at Ingraham. "You don't imagine, sir," he asked, "that Mr. Pelletier is an absconding paying teller, do you?"

"I know he is," returned the banker. "I've followed that paying teller's crime all through the papers, and this man's history has all the earmarks of it. He's a thief."

The insurance man held up his hands. "Dear me," he exclaimed, "a thief!"

At that instant the specialist returned and joined the little group of two. The insurance man nodded to the specialist.

"Doctor," he laughed, "Mr. Ingraham here thinks that Pelletier is the paying teller of his own bank."

"Why, my dear sir," interposed the specialist, "Pelletier is a millionaire--he's the president of the Tri-State Trust--he's the man whose dress suit case that paying teller stole when he stole the funds, and this man Pelletier, overworked as he is anyway, worried himself almost to death about the thing."

"Not about the dress suit case?" asked Ingraham.

"No," replied the insurance man, taking up the doctor's story, "but because of this: he, the president of the Trust Company, was the only official in the bank at the time when the paying teller stole the money. The paying teller did it right under his nose, and for that reason Pelletier felt responsible in the same degree as he would have held a watchman responsible for letting a burglar get away. It worried him to death."

"I should think it did," said the doctor, taking up the story, "and after that Pelletier spent most of his time in the District Attorney's office trying to get him to refuse bail, and up at the Tombs trying to worm out of that paying teller the secret of his hiding place where he had stowed away the loot. Pelletier told me, in fact, that he thought he ought to pay back to the bank himself the money that the paying teller robbed them of. Meantime, Pelletier's nerves were going by the board. He had to get away from business--go where business couldn't find him."

The insurance man shivered. "I should think so," he sighed, "with business at his heels every minute of his time--he had to get away incog."

Ingraham, his face flushed with these disclosures and with the mistake of his own diagnosis, was silent for an instant. Then he tightly clutched the doctor's arm.

"I think you're fooling me, gentlemen," he said slowly. "I think this man is that paying teller, and you're merely friends of his, trying to shield him. If I'm wrong, why is it that three New York detectives follow this Pelletier about. Can you tell me that?"

The insurance man turned pale. "Did you know they were following him about?" he asked.

The banker nodded. "Well, they didn't do their duty very well, then," returned the representative of the International Insurance Company. "Their instructions were never to show themselves, unless necessary, and never to let Pelletier know that they were watching him."

"It was necessary, several times, for them to show themselves down here," burst in Ingraham, and he told about the incidents of the hold-up and of the ocean rescue. "But," he persisted, "there's a method in their madness that, I figure it, the District Attorney of New York understands."

The insurance man hesitated for a moment, and then he looked Ingraham in the eye.

"Mr. Ingraham," he exclaimed, "you're our banker out in Cleveland, I suppose I may as well let you into the secret. The doctor here is on. You didn't know that this young Pelletier is a crank on life insurance. Millionaire as he is, he came to us for a Two Million Five Hundred Thousand Dollar policy. After that, do you think we can let him wander around alone, taking all kinds of risks? No, sir, we can't even let him get sick safely. The International Life Insurance has got to see that Ordway Pelletier lives out his three score years and ten. Now, do you understand?"

Ingraham wilted. He understood, but he had no time to apologize, for at that instant he felt a tug upon his coat sleeve, and his daughter Helen drew him toward the door and into the room of the injured man.

"Father," she exclaimed, "if you want that line of credit in the Tri-State Trust Company, you had better ask us now."

That evening as the dusk slowly settled down upon the Ravenswood Inn, those who paced the board walk in the twilight, glanced from time to time upward toward a moving spectacle. That moving spectacle disported itself upon a balcony. It consisted of two elderly ladies, apparently at peace with all the world.

Aunt Charlotte blew smoke rings into the heavens. "This is a lovely spot," she murmured.

Mrs. Ingraham blew another set of smoke rings that rose and twisted themselves about Aunt Charlotte's.

"Have you missed any of your cigars lately?" she inquired.

Aunt Charlotte lit a fresh one. "I should think I have," she answered genially, her face widening to a broad but dignified grin, "and Ordway has been filching them from me, the young thief."

Angelo

BY JOHN A. MOROSO

James Tierney pressed a pearl button on his desk in the handsome Wall Street suite of James Tierney, Inc., and supplemented the electric summons with a series of shouts for his first lieutenant, Mickey Reilley.

Reilley bounced into his chief's office with a shameful apology for a salute.

"Reilley," began the head of the famous private detective agency, with the expression of a martyr on his clean shaven, homely countenance, "y'gotta find me a Carrie again, a real nice Carrie, one of those things with a little walking cane, a fried-egg hat, yellow shoes and all the other frills."

Reilley looked his displeasure.

"Say," he asked, "what we runnin' now, a college annex?"

Tierney held before him a letter from one of his directors and backers, a Broad Street banker who had gathered an almost criminal share of the country's wealth.

"Yow! Wow!" he grunted as he studied the epistle. "Here's Mr. James Frothingham Phillips, one of the guys what put us in business, asking to have his daughter, Ione--get that name?--shadowed."

"What she doing, shoplifting?"

"Nix; making love to the family chauffeur."

Reilley dropped into a chair and put his head in his hands.

"Say," he groaned, "if they keep shootin' this kind of business at us we'll get to be a set of nice old ladies, believe me. I t'ought we was put here to look out f'r the banking business and watch the yeggs."

Tierney looked at his aide with glassy eyes.

"We're here to do just what they tell us to do," he said. "If your conscience hurts yuh, go up to police headquarters and work with the bulls until you're cured and then come back f'r a job." He grinned sarcastically.

"There's only one swell guy in reach," Reilley said, surrendering promptly. "He's outside now smoking a perfumed cigarette and making the office smell like--"

"Trot him in."

Reilley went to the waiting room and returned immediately with William Winthrop, only that very morning rechristened "Boston Willie."

Willie nodded patronizingly to Tierney as he stood flickering at his gray trousers with a silver-topped cane. He was a well set-up youngster of twenty-five, with broad shoulders, bright, clear, blue eyes, silky complexion and the hint of a smile playing about patrician lips.

A gorgeous blue scarf relieved the neutral gray of his well made morning suit. A black pearl set in carved gold for a stickpin was his only ornament. His gloves were chamois and of such freshness that it was evident that he was accustomed to having people open doors.

"How-do, Mr. Tierney," he said in a Harvard drawl that would have made an Eliot lecture sound like a Salvation Army appeal.

"How-do," repeated Tierney.

"It's--ah rawther a pleasant--ah morning."

"It's grand," said Tierney. "I gotta job f'r yuh."

"Thanks awf'ly, y'know, and all that sort of thing."

Tierney began to feel a pounding in his head. Reilley loomed in the background, grinning fiendishly as he watched his chief suffer.

"D'yuh know a society girl named Ione Phillips?" he asked when he felt that he could proceed without loss of reason.

"Ione Phillips?" repeated "Boston Willie." "I've heard the name. Ah, yes! She was at the Pawmer cotillon last New Year's eve, I believe."

"The Pawmer cotillon?" asked Tierney.

The young man nodded.

"The Pawmers, y'know," he explained.

"How do you spell them?"

"P-a-l-m-e-r-s."

"Oh, I gotcha, Steve," cried Tierney. "Yuh must excuse me, Mr. Winthrop. I don't talk Boston very well."

Reilley left the room to avoid an explosion of mirth.

"What about the--ah, young lady?" Boston Willie asked.

"She's trying to get the family chauffeur to elope," explained Tierney getting down to business. "She's the only daughter and her paw wants her to marry a duke, or anyhow, nuthin' cheaper than a count. He's got the price and if there was any kings in the discard he'd spend a few millions and pick one up."

"Jove," exclaimed Willie, "I remember them now. She's the daughter of Old Man Phillips."

"K'rect," said Tierney, "on her father's side and of Old Lady Phillips on her mother's side."

The smile about Willie's lips broke into a series of wide-spreading ripples and his eyes sparkled. "Ha!"

That one "ha" alone escaped his lips. It represented laughter. Mirth had stirred him profoundly.

When he recovered from this outburst Willie placed a gloved hand to his side as if it ached.

"My word, Mr. Tierney," he said, "you are droll."

Tierney looked at him suspiciously.

He made a mental note of that word "droll." He would look it up. His stenographer had a dictionary.

"Anyhow, Mr. Winthrop," he said, "yuh gotta see that she don't elope with the chauffeur. The gir-rl's paw writes me that he is a very handsome chauffeur, but he is a wop."

"A wop," repeated Tierney. "Some people would call him a Guinea, others might call him a Joe and I guess he calls himself an Eyetalian."

"Oh!"

"My talk is the rough stuff, Mr. Winthrop, but I'm telling you what yuh gotta do," went on Tierney, seriously now. "Don't let Ione marry the wop. Marry her yourself if it is absolutely necessary--but use that only as the last resort. You know you ain't no duke or even a count. Her old man's got all the money that Rockefeller didn't have time to pick up. Go out and hire the finest gazump that ever burned benzine. Buy all the fine clothes and little hats that you want. Blow yourself to more neckties and walking sticks. Do just as you please. If I sent Ione's paw an expense bill under a thousand a week he'd think I was loafing on the job and only a piker. Just see that she don't marry the family chauffeur."

"Why don't Mr. Phillips fire the chauffeur?" asked Willie.

"Why?" repeated Tierney. "Because just as soon as he fired him she'd run away and nothing could prevent her marrying the guy except sudden death. She'd give up home and candy and everything else and start life all over again in a hall bedroom with one gas jet and a frying pan. She'd take in washing until her husband got another job. That's the way they all do when the handsome chauffeur is fired."