It was dusk of an April day, and Fifth Avenue was crowded. A young man, who had emerged from a large hotel, stood in the stream of traffic and gazed irresolutely up and down the thoroughfare. He wore a long, cheap rain-coat, and his head was covered by a steamer-cap of an old design, with two flaps tied in a knot across the top, behind which an overabundant crop of dull black hair pushed forth.

His thin, sallow face was unshaven, and his eyes were rimmed by round steel spectacles that gave him an almost owlish expression. An air of dejection hung about him, as he loitered by the curb—not the imaginative depression of youth, soon to float off like a cloud before the sun of life, but rather the settled gloom of repeated failure, as if the conviction of final doom had already begun to penetrate deeply into his manhood.

He looked first up the avenue, then down, vacant of purpose, seeing nothing in the moving pageant. Finally, as if aroused by certain curious glances that the less hurried passers-by cast on him, he bestirred himself and moved on down the avenue, his shoulders stooped, his legs trailing wearily.

Thus he proceeded for several blocks, never raising his head, stopping mechanically at the street crossings, resuming his discouraged pace as the crowd moved on. Once he plunged his hand into his coat pocket, to assure himself of some possession, and then withdrew it with a bitter smile for his unconscious anxiety.

When in this vacant promenade he had reached the lower part of the avenue, where the crowd was less dense, and less gay and rich in appearance, he lifted his head and looked musingly into the misty space before him.

“Well,” he muttered, with tightening lips, “it’s only one more throw-down. I ought to be used to ’em by now!”

Nevertheless, his face relapsed into its melancholy expression as he turned into one of the side streets with the unconscious precision of the animal following a beaten path to its hole.

He crossed several of the shabbier commercial avenues, which were crowded with traffic and blocked by men and women returning from the day’s work. Compared with these tired laborers, he seemed to have a large leisure—the freedom of absolute poverty. His thoughts had turned to supper. Should he buy a roll and a piece of pie at the bakery on the next corner, or—mad venture!—dissipate his last resources at the saloon opposite, where the Italian wife of the Irish proprietor offered appetizing nourishment for a quarter?

Meditating upon this important decision, the young man entered his own block. At one end the elevated trains rattled; at the other, heavy drays lumbered past in an unbroken file on their way to the ferries; but between the two there was a strip of quiet, where the dingy old houses were withdrawn from the street, and in front of them a few dusty shrubs struggled for life in the bare plots of earth.

In the middle of this block there was an unusually animated scene. A group of children had huddled together about some object of interest. A horse must have fallen on the pavement, the young man thought dully, or there was a fight, or a policeman had made a capture.

He hurried his lagging steps, moved by a boyish curiosity. As he drew nearer, he perceived that the circle was too small to contain a horse or a good scrap. The center of interest must be some unfortunate human being. He shouldered his way through the crowd.“What’s up?” he asked of a small boy.

“A drunk,” was the laconic reply.

Looking over the heads of the boys, the young man could see the figure of a stoutish, well-dressed man lying prone on the pavement. His black coat was spattered with mud, his gray hair rumpled. His eyes were closed, and through the open lips his tongue protruded.

“Say, he’s bad!” the boy observed knowingly. “Just look at him!”

A convulsion shook the prostrate figure. The face began to twitch, and one arm waved violently, beating the air. One or two more mature passers-by who had been attracted by the disturbance drew off, with the selfish city excuse that the proper authorities would come in time and attend to the nuisance. Not so the idle young man.

“He isn’t drunk!” he exclaimed, pushing his way into the circle and stooping over the figure. He had seen too many plain “drunks” in his newspaper days to be deceived in the symptoms.

“There he goes again!” the boys shouted.

“He has some sort of fit. Here, one of you give me a hand, and we’ll get him off the street!”

The boys readily helped the young man to drag the prostrate figure to the nearest steps, and one of them ran to the corner after a policeman. When the officer arrived, the young man, who had steadied the stranger through another convulsion, said:

“You’ll have to call an ambulance. We’d better carry him somewhere—can’t let him lie here in the street like a dog. We can take him to my room.”

He motioned toward the next house, and with the officer’s assistance carried the sick man into the rear room on the first floor, which he unlocked. Then the policeman drove the curious boys out of the house and went off to summon the ambulance. Left alone, the young man dipped a towel in his water-pitcher, wet the sick man’s brow, then wiped his face and cleaned the foam and dirt from his beard and lips.

The stranger, lying with half-closed eyes, looked to be rather more than sixty years of age. Judging from the quality of his clothes, and from his smooth hands, he was a well-to-do business man. Presently his eyelids began to twitch, then the whole face; the right leg shot out and beat the air; then the right arm began to wave, and foam oozed from his lips.

“I wish they’d hurry that ambulance!” the young man thought, as he wiped the sick man’s face again with the damp towel. “He won’t last long, at this rate!”This convulsion gradually passed off as the others had, and the stranger lay once more as if dead, his eyes almost wholly closed. The young man went to the door and listened nervously, then returned to the prostrate form, unbuttoned the coat, and felt for the heart. Immediately the sick man opened his eyes, and, looking directly into the eyes of the man bending over him, tried to raise his hand, as if he would protect himself from a blow.

“It’s all right!” the young man said reassuringly. “I was just feeling for your heart, friend.”

The sick man’s lips twitched desperately; and finally, in the faintest whisper, he managed to stammer:

“Wh-who are you?”

“One Edgar Brainard,” the young man replied promptly. “Let me unfasten this vest and make you more comfortable.”

“N-n-no!” the sick man gasped suspiciously.

He managed to clutch Brainard’s wrist with his wavering right hand; his left lay quite powerless by his side. His eyes closed again, but the lips moved silently, as if he were trying to frame sounds.

“He’s going this time, sure!”

The young man slipped his wrist from the feeble grasp, inserted a pillow under the sick man’s head, and sat back to wait.

II

It was very still in that back room. No step sounded in the hall, and the noise from the street came muffled. In the stillness, the sick man’s desperate efforts to breathe filled the little room with painful sounds. Brainard felt the stifling approach of death, and opened the window wide to get what air would come in from the small court outside.

He studied the figure on the lounge more closely. The thick, red under lip curled over the roots of the gray beard. A short, thick nose gave the face a look of strong will, even of obstinacy. There was a foreign expression to the features that might indicate German descent.

On the third finger of his right hand, the sick man wore an old, plain gold ring, which had sunk deep into the flesh. From the inside pocket of his short coat bulged a thick wallet, over which his right hand rested, as if to guard precious possessions.

“He thought I was going to rob him!” Brainard observed. “Expect he’s been up against it already—and that’s what’s the trouble.”It was quite dark. The young man lighted a gas-jet, then went again to the door. As he stood there, listening, he felt the old man’s eyes on him, and turned to look at him. The eyes, now wide open, held him, asking what the lips refused to utter.

Brainard went back to his patient and leaned over to catch the flutter from the moving lips. At last, as if with great exertion, the murmur came:

“Wh-wh-what are you go-going to do—to do—with me?”

In spite of the faintness of the whisper, it was the voice of one accustomed to being answered.

“I’ve sent an officer for an ambulance,” Brainard replied. “It ought to be here before now, I should think. They’ll take you to some hospital and fix you up,” he added encouragingly.

The lips twitched into a semblance of a smile, then mumbled:

“No—not—th-this time.”

“What’s the matter—accident?” Brainard asked.

The sick man did not attempt to reply, as if he considered the question of trifling importance. Instead, his eyes studied the young man’s face intently. Evidently his brain was clearing from the shock, whatever had caused it, and he was revolving some purpose. Soon the lips began to move once more, and Brainard bent close to catch the faint sounds.

“Wh-wh-what’s your bus-bus-i-ness?”

“Oh, I’ve had lots of businesses,” the young man replied carelessly. “Been on a newspaper, in the ad business, real estate, and so on.” He added after a moment, with a little ironical laugh, “Just now I’m in the literary business—a dramatist.”

The sick man looked puzzled, and frowned, as if disappointed. Perhaps his cloudy brain could not assort this information with his purpose. Presently his brow contracted, his face twitched violently, the right leg shot out.

“I say! It’s too bad,” the young man exclaimed sympathetically. “I wish I knew what to do for you. Where can that ambulance be?” He laid one hand on the sick man’s hot brow, and held his arm with the other. “Easy now!” he exclaimed, as the right arm began whirling. “There! Steady! It’s going off.”

Instead of closing his eyes, as he had done after the previous attacks, and relapsing into coma, the sick man made an immediate effort to speak.

“Co-come here,” he articulated faintly. “Important, very important.”

He groped feebly for his inner pocket.

“You want me to take out this bundle?” Brainard asked, laying his hand on the bulky wallet.

The man made an affirmative sign, and kept his eyes steadily on Brainard while the latter gently extracted the pocketbook.

“You—you will do something for me?” the stranger said more distinctly than he had hitherto spoken, as if urgency were clearing his mind. “You can—you can start to-night?”

“I’m not very busy,” the young man said, with a laugh. “I guess I could start for Hong-Kong on a few minutes’ notice.”

“Not Hong-Kong,” the old man labored forth literally. “You’re honest?”

It was said in a tone of self-conviction rather than of question.

“Oh, I guess so,” the young man answered lightly. “At least, what’s called honest—never had a chance to steal anything worth taking!” He added more seriously, to quiet the sick man, who seemed to be laboring under excitement, “Tell me what you want done, and I’ll do my best to put it through for you.”

The sick man’s eyes expressed relief, and then his brow contracted, as if he were summoning all his powers in a final effort to make a clogged brain do his urgent will.

“Lis-lis-listen,” he murmured. “No—no, write—write it down,” he went on, as Brainard leaned forward.

Brainard looked about his bare room for paper, but in vain. He felt in his pockets for a stray envelope, then drew from his overcoat a roll of manuscript. He glanced at it dubiously for a moment, then tore off the last sheet, which had on one side a few lines of typewriting. With a gesture of indifference, he turned to the sick man and prepared to take his message.

“All ready,” he remarked. “I can take it in shorthand, if you want.”

“Sev-en, thir-ty-one, and four. Sev-en, thir-tyone, and four. Sev-en, thir-ty-one, and four,” he repeated almost briskly.

Brainard looked at him inquiringly, and the stranger whispered the explanation: “Combi-na-tion pri-vate safe—understand?” Brainard nodded.

“Where?”

“Office—San Francisco.”

The young man whistled.

“That’s a good ways off! What do you want me to do there?”

“Take everything.”

“What shall I do with the stuff? Bring it here to New York?” the young man inquired, with growing curiosity.The sick man’s blue eyes stared at him steadily, with a look of full intelligence.

“I shall be dead then,” he mumbled.

“Oh, I hope not!” Brainard remarked.

But with unflinching eyes, the sick man continued:

“You must have—pow-er—pow-er of attorney.”

He brought the words out with difficulty, not wasting his strength by discussing his chances of recovery. He was evidently growing weaker, and Brainard had to bend close to his lips in order to catch the faint whisper, “Take it down!”

And with his face beginning to twitch, and the convulsive tremors running over his body, the sick man summoned all his will and managed to dictate a power of attorney in legal terms, as if he were familiar with the formula. When he had finished, his eyes closed, and his lips remained open. Brainard dropped his paper and felt for the sick man’s heart. It was still beating faintly.

After a few moments, the eyes opened mistily, and again the man made an effort to collect himself for another effort.

“What shall I do with the stuff?” Brainard inquired.

“Ge-get it out of the country. Take it to—to Ber-Ber-Ber—”“Bermuda?” Brainard suggested.

“Berlin!” the sick man corrected with a frown. As if to impress his messenger with the seriousness of his work, he added, “If you don’t get away, they’ll—kill you.”

“Oh!” Brainard exclaimed, impressed.

The blue eyes examined the young man steadily, as if they would test his metal. Then, satisfied, the man murmured:

“Quick—must—sign—quick! Now!” he concluded, as his face began to twitch.

Brainard handed him a pen, and held his right arm to steady him while he scrawled his name—“H. Krutzmacht.” The sick man traced the letters slowly, patiently, persisting until he had dashed a heavy line across the t’s and another beneath the name; then he dropped the pen and closed his eyes.

When another moment of control came to him, he whispered uneasily:

“Witness? Must have witness.”

“We’ll find some one—don’t worry,” the young man replied lightly. “The ambulance man, when he comes, if he ever does come!”

Brainard did not yet take very seriously the idea of starting that night for San Francisco to rifle a safe.

“Mo-mo-money,” the voice began, and the eyes wandered to the fat wallet which Brainard had deposited on the table.

Brainard lifted the wallet.

“Plen-plen-plenty of mon-money!”

“I understand,” the young man replied. “There’s enough cash for the journey in here.”

As he laid the wallet down, there was the welcome sound of feet in the passage outside, and with an exclamation of relief the young man flung open the door. The ambulance surgeon was there with an assistant and a stretcher. With a muttered explanation for his delay, the doctor went at once to the sick man and examined him, while Brainard told what he knew of his strange guest.

“Tries to talk all the time—must be something on his mind!” he said, as another convulsion seized the sick man. “Been doped, I should say.”

“Looks like brain trouble, sure,” the ambulance surgeon remarked, watching the stranger closely. “He can’t last long that way. Well, we’d better hustle him to the hospital as soon as we can.”

They had the sick man on the stretcher before he had opened his eyes from his last attack. As they lifted him, he mumbled excitedly, and Brainard, listening close to his lips, thought he understood what was troubling him.“He wants that paper witnessed,” he explained. “I forgot—it’s something he dictated to me.”

“Well, hurry up about it,” the surgeon replied carelessly, willing to humor the sick man. “Here!”

Brainard dipped his pen in the ink-bottle and handed it to the surgeon, who lightly dashed down his signature at the bottom of the sheet, without reading it.

“Now are we ready?” the doctor demanded impatiently.

But the blue eyes arrested Brainard, and the young man, stooping over the stretcher, caught a faint whisper:

“You’ll g-g-go?”

“Sure!”

“Gi-gi-give it all to—”

Krutzmacht struggled hard to pronounce a name, but he could not utter the word.

“It’s no use!” the doctor exclaimed. “Tell him to wait until he’s better.”

But Brainard, moved by the sick man’s intense look of mental distress, raised his hand to the doctor and listened. At last the whispered syllable reached his ear:

“M-M-Mel—”

“I tell you it’s no use!” the ambulance doctor repeated irritably. “They’ll find out at the hospital what he wants done. Come on!”

As they bore the stretcher through the narrow door, the agonized expression gave way, and the sick man articulated more distinctly:

“Mel-Melo—”

“Melo-melodrama!” Brainard said. “It’s all right, my friend. Don’t worry—I’ll fix it up for you!”

With astonishing distinctness came back the one word:

“Melody!”

“All right—Melody!”

The sick man would have said more, but the ambulance men bore him swiftly to the waiting vehicle and shoved him in.

“Will you come along?” the doctor asked.

“No. I’ll look in some time to-morrow, probably—St. Joseph’s, isn’t it?”

The sick man’s eyes still rested on Brainard, when the latter poked his head into the dark ambulance. They seemed to glow with a full intelligence, and also with a command, as if they said:

“Do just what I’ve told you to do!”

“He knows what he wants, even if he can’t say it,” Brainard muttered to himself as the ambulance moved off. “Poor old boy!”

III

When Brainard opened the door of his room, he heard the rustle of papers on the floor, blown about by the draft from the window. He lighted his lamp and picked up the loose sheets, which were the typewritten leaves of his last play—the one that he had finally got back that very afternoon from a famous actor-manager, without even the usual note of polite regret from the secretary. The absence of that familiar note had dejected him especially.

He shoved the rejected play into his table drawer indifferently, thinking of the sick man’s last urgent look, and of the terrible effort he had made to articulate his final words. What did he mean by “Melody”? Perhaps the old fellow was really out of his head, and all the rest about his valuable papers in some private safe at the other end of the continent was mythical—the fancy of an unhinged mind.

But the memory of the old man’s face—of those keen blue eyes—made Brainard reject such a commonplace solution of the puzzle. The sick man had been in this room with him for a full half-hour, and the place still seemed filled with his positive, commanding personality.

No! The man who signed “H. Krutzmacht” to the sheet lying on the table before him was no vague lunatic. Though he might be at the extremity of life, almost unable to articulate, nevertheless his purpose was clear to himself, and his will was as strong as ever.

Brainard was hungry. Snatching up his old cap, he went out to the neighboring avenue, and, without hesitation, entered the most expensive restaurant in sight—a resort he frequented only on rare days of opulence. Instead of the oyster-stew and doughnuts which had latterly been his luxurious limit, he ordered a good dinner, as if he had earned it, and devoured the food without the usual qualms of prudence.

His spirits had undergone a marvelous change from the timid, fearful state in which he had been that afternoon. He wondered at his own confidence. Complacently selecting a good cigar at the cashier’s desk, he strolled back to his room, his body peacefully engaged in the unaccustomed task of digesting a full meal.

When he entered his dreary little room, his eye fell upon the wallet, which lay under the table where he had dropped it. What was he going to do with that—with this whole Krutzmacht business? Why, simply nothing at all. In the morning, he would go around to St. Joseph’s and see how the sick man was. If Krutzmacht recovered, there was nothing to do but to return his pocketbook. But if he got worse, or was dead already? Well, Brainard could turn the wallet over to the hospital people or the coroner, and that would end the affair for him.

With this prudent resolution he took his play from the drawer, and looked it over. His interest in the thing had quite gone, and the sting of its rejection no longer smarted. Very likely it was as bad as the managers to whom he had submitted it seemed to think. He tied the manuscript together with a piece of twine, and shoved it back into the drawer.

One sheet—that last one on which he had taken down Krutzmacht’s dictation—was missing from this roll. That sheet contained his final curtain. He looked at the lines, and smiled as he read. The Lady Violet was parting from her lover, with the following dialogue:

Violet.—Oh, Alexander!

Alexander.—Violet!

Violet.—What will you do, dearest?

Alexander.—I go on my great adventure!

Violet.—Your great adventure?

Alexander.—Life!

He turned the sheet over. On the other side were the few shorthand notes he had hastily jotted down—the figures of the safe combination and the power of attorney with its legal phrases, the latter written out again below in long hand. At the bottom of the sheet, just beneath Alexander’s heroic announcement to Violet, were the three signatures. The old man’s blunt name dominated the others—a firm, black scrawl with a couple of vicious dashes.

The powerful will of the sick man, working in what might be the agony of death, spoke in that signature. Brainard felt that there was something mysterious in it. The name spoke to him as the eyes had spoken to him, personally. Criminal? Possibly. Dramatic? Oh, surely! He felt instinctively that there was more drama on this side of the sheet than on the other.

He folded the paper carefully and put it in his inner pocket. It would be an interesting souvenir.

As the young man sat and smoked in his little room, the comfort of his abundant meal penetrating his person, he felt more and more the drama of actual life touching him, calling to him to take a hand in it. He reached unconsciously for the fat wallet, and opened it. There were some legal papers—contracts and leases and agreements, at which Brainard merely glanced.He felt into the inner recesses of the old-fashioned wallet, and from one pocket extracted a thick sheaf of bank-notes. They were in large denominations—hundreds, fifties, and twenties. Brainard smoothed out the bills on his knee and carefully counted them; in all there was rather more than four thousand dollars.

“The old boy traveled with quite a wad!” he muttered, fingering the crisp bills.

The touch of the money gave a curious electric thrill to his thoughts. Here was an evidence of reality that made the old man’s mumbled words and intense effort assume a reasonable shape. When Krutzmacht let Brainard take possession of this wallet, he knew what it contained. He trusted to a stranger in his desperate need.

Still feeling around in the folds of the wallet, Brainard extracted a railroad-ticket of voluminous length for San Francisco.

“He was on his way to the train!” Brainard exclaimed, and added unconsciously, “when they got him and did him up!”

Already his busy mind had accepted the hypothesis of enemies and foul play rather than that of disease.

With the railroad-ticket and the money in his hand, he stood staring before him, still debating the matter. Something seemed to rise within him, some determination—a spirit of daring which he had not felt for years.

Mechanically he put the papers and bank-notes back into the wallet, and shoved it into his pocket. Then he looked at his watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. If he was to leave to-night, as the old man had ordered, there was no more time to lose.

Without further hesitation, he threw a few articles into an old bag and started for the ferry. On the way he stopped to telephone the hospital. After a delay which made him impatient, he learned that the sick man was resting quietly—“still unconscious,” the nurse said. So he had not spoken again.

When Brainard reached the station in Jersey City, having a few moments to spare, he wrote a brief note to the hospital authorities, saying that he was leaving the city on business, and would call on his return in a week or ten days. He inclosed several bank-notes, requesting that the sick man should have every comfort. Having dropped his letter into the box he stepped into the Chicago sleeper. The exhilarating beat of his heart told him that he had done well.

The disdainful look that the porter had given him when he took charge of his shabby bag, as well as the curious glances of his fellow passengers, the next morning, made Brainard conscious of his eccentric appearance. But all that he could do, for the present, to improve his neglected person, was to have himself shaved and his hair cut. He was obliged to keep his rain-coat on, although the car was hot, in order to cover up a large hole in his trousers—the only pair he possessed.

He resolved to employ the few hours in Chicago, between trains, in making himself as decent as possible. Meanwhile he ate three good meals and furtively watched his more prosperous fellow travelers.

IV

It was a very different person, in appearance, who seated himself on the observation platform of the Overland Limited that evening. Only the round steel spectacles were left as a memento of Brainard’s former condition. He had had no scruples in helping himself freely from the store of bills in the wallet. What lay before him to do for the sick man would probably be difficult, in any event, and it would be foolish to handicap himself by presenting a suspicious appearance at Krutzmacht’s office. He would play his part properly dressed.

So, when he glanced into the little mirror beside his berth, he smiled in satisfaction at the clean-shaven, neatly dressed, alert young man who looked back at him. With his ragged habiliments he seemed also to have discarded that settled look of failure, and not a few of his years. Without unduly flattering himself, he felt that he might easily be taken for one of the energetic young brokers or lawyers whom he observed on the train.

Removing his new hat, and stretching his well-shod feet on the cushioned seat opposite, he took up the evening newspapers and glanced through them for some telegraphic item about the fate of his mysterious employer. If Krutzmacht were a well-known figure, as he supposed likely, reporters must doubtless have discovered him before this and proclaimed his predicament to the world. But Brainard could find no reference to any such person in the newspapers, and with a sigh of relief he let them slip from his lap.

His task would be easier, if it could be accomplished while the sick man lay undiscovered in the hospital. If he should already be dead, when he arrived, there would be an end to Brainard’s job altogether; and that would have been a keen disappointment to the young man.

His job? A hundred times his mind reverted to this perplexing consideration—what, exactly, was he to do when he had reached the end of his long journey?

First, he would find where Krutzmacht’s offices were, and then? He had been told to make off with whatever he might find in the private safe. For this purpose he had provided himself, in Chicago, with a bulky leather valise, in which his discarded raiment was now reposing. It all sounded like an expedition in high piracy, but he quieted any scruples with the resolve that he would make off merely to New York, if Krutzmacht still lived, instead of Berlin, and remain there to await further developments.

So, as the Overland Limited rushed across the prairie states, Brainard took counsel with himself, mentally sketching out his every move from the moment when he should step from the train. The readiness with which his mind reached out to this new situation surprised himself; he was already becoming in some way a new person.

The journey itself was a revelation to him and an education. With his Broadway prejudice that the United States stopped somewhere just above the Bronx and behind the Jersey hills, he was astonished to find so much habitable country beyond these horizons and so many people in it who did not seem to depend upon New York City for their livelihood or happiness. At first he was so much preoccupied with his errand and himself in his surprising new rÔle that he paid little attention to the scenes spread before his eyes. Chicago impressed him only as a dirtier and more provincial New York. But the next morning when he awoke at Omaha he began to realize that America was more than a strip of land along the Atlantic seaboard, and by the time the train had left Ogden his respect for his fatherland had immensely increased.

He noticed also that the character of the people on the train was gradually changing. Large, rough-looking men, with tanned faces not too carefully shaved, and sometimes with a queer assortment of jewelry and patent leather shoes took the places of the pallid, smooth shaven business men that had been his companions from Jersey City to Chicago. There were also a number of women traveling alone, large, competent, and not overrefined. Brainard, whose ideas of Americans other than the types to be seen on the streets of New York had been drawn from the travestied figures of the stage,—the miner and the cowboy with flapping sombrero and chaps,—watched these new specimens of his fellow countrymen with keen interest. In spite of their rather uncouth speech and their familiarity with the negro porters, they were attractive. They had a vigorous air about them, indicating that they came from a big country, with big ways of doing things in it, and a broad outlook over wide horizons. The would-be dramatist began to perceive that the world was not peopled wholly by the types that the American stage had made familiar to him.

A little way beyond Ogden the train rolled out into the bright blue inland sea of the Great Salt Lake and trundled on for mile after mile in the midst of the water on a narrow strip of rocky roadbed. Brainard had read in the newspapers of this famous “Lucin cut-off” where in an effort to save a detour of a few miles around the shore of the lake millions of tons of “fill” had been dumped into an apparently bottomless hole. The pluck and the energy of that road builder who had conceived this work and kept at it month after month, dumping trainloads of rock into a great lake had not specially thrilled him when he read of it. But now the imagination and the courage of the little man who did this sort of thing thrilled him. Harriman, the bold doer of this and greater things, was of course a popular Wall Street hero to the New Yorker,—one of those legendary creatures who were supposed to have their seat of power in the lofty cliffs of that narrow Via Dolorosa and somehow like the alchemists of old conjure great fortunes out of air, with the aid of the “tape.” That was the way in which this young man had always thought of Harriman,—“the wizard of railroad finance.”

But now as he glided smoothly over the solid roadbed that ran straight westward into the remote distance with the salt waves almost lapping the tracks and leaving a white crust from their spume, with lofty mountains looming to south and to north,—as he stood on the rear platform of the heavy steel train observing this marvelous panorama,—a totally new conception of the renowned financier came to him. This was not done by watching the tape! It demanded will and force and imagination and faith—spiritual qualities in a man—to do this. The young traveler mentally did homage to the character that had created the wonderful highway over which for a day and a half he had been comfortably borne in luxurious ease.

As he watched the blue mountains about Ogden fade into the haze, it seemed that New York, his life there, and all his conventional conceptions of the little world in which he had vainly struggled for existence also receded and grew smaller, less real. The train in its westward flight was bearing him forward into a new world, within as well as without! As the track began to wind up again to higher levels before taking its next great leap over the Sierras, Brainard went forward to the smoking room, his usual post of observation, where he sat through long, meditative hours, listening to the talk about him and gazing at the fleeting landscape. Whatever else it might mean,—this jaunt across the continent on a stranger’s errand,—it was bringing him a rich cargo of new ideas.

Of all his fellow travelers the man who happened to occupy the drawing-room in the car where Brainard had his section aroused his curiosity especially. He was one of those well-dressed, alert young business men who had made Brainard conscious of his shabby and inappropriate appearance when he first started on his journey. The door of his room had been closed all the way to Chicago, and Brainard had seen nothing of the man. But since the train left Omaha the door to the drawing-room had been open, and from his section Brainard observed its occupant diligently reading a book. What aroused his attention and interested him in the stranger more than his pleasant appearance of frank good humor had been the sort of book he had chosen for this long journey. It was bound like a “best seller” in a gaudy red cloth, and a picture of a starry-eyed maiden with floating hair adorned the cover. But it was labeled in unmistakable black letters Paradise Lost. Brainard, who had made a painful and superficial acquaintance in his youth with this poetic masterpiece, decided that the smartly dressed young American could not be devoting the journey to Milton’s epic. It must be that some writer of best sellers had cribbed the great poet’s title and fitted it to a less strenuous tale of love and starry-eyed maidens. This theory, however, broke down before the fact that from time to time the young man consulted a small black book that was indubitably a dictionary, and Brainard taking advantage of a moment when the traveler had left his room assured himself that the book was really a copy of Milton’s poem set within profane modern covers. Just why this young man should spend his hours on the train reading the puritan epic of heaven and hell puzzled Brainard and whetted his curiosity to know what sort of man the stranger was.

Earlier this morning as the train was climbing down from the Rockies into Utah, an opportunity had come to speak to his fellow traveler. The train had pulled up somewhere before a desolate station whose architect had tried to make a Queen Anne cottage that looked singularly out of place in the bare, wild landscape. While the engine took its long drink, the passengers stretched their legs and enjoyed the crisp mountain air. The stranger came to the vestibule, yawned, and read the name of the station:

“Palisade, is it? . . . The last time I was over this way it looked more lively than this.”

“What was happening?” Brainard inquired.

“There was a bunch of miners somewheres in Utah making trouble, on a strike. The company had brought in a couple of carloads of greasers, and the miners were down here shooting up the party.”He got down to the ground, yawned again, and opened a gold cigarette case which he offered to Brainard,—“Have one?”

Brainard took one of the monogrammed cigarettes, and they sauntered together in the sunlight.

“Yes, sir,” his new acquaintance continued, “they sure did have a lively time. The greasers were over there on the siding in their cars, and they just let go at ’em with their guns. Now and then they’d hit the station, for fun, you know. I guess maybe you can see the holes yet.”

The young man pointed up at some scars among the shingles and a broken window in the upper story. “Sure enough they left their marks!”

“What did they do to ’em?” Brainard asked naÏvely, as they returned to the car when the conductor droned “all aboard.”

“Who?” the stranger asked. “The police?”

He waved a hand at the desolate stretch of sage brush backed by grim mountains and laughed. As the train moved off, he added, “Lord, I don’t know! They were still popping when my train pulled out. There weren’t many greasers fit to work in the mines. What was left after the reception must have walked home—a long ways.”

Brainard was somewhat impressed with the possibilities of a country that could offer such a scrap, en passant, so to speak. The stranger invited him into his room and gave him another cigarette.

“From New York?” he inquired. “Not a bad sort of place,” he observed tolerantly. “Ever been on the Coast? You’ve something to see.”

“How is San Francisco since the earthquake?” Brainard inquired, thinking to come cautiously and guardedly to the topic of Krutzmacht.

“It’s all there and more than ever,” the stranger cheerily responded. “You won’t find any large cracks,” he jested.

“It’s queer that you all went straight back to the same ground and built over again.”

“Why? It was home, wasn’t it? Folks always have a feeling for the place they’ve lived in, even if it has disadvantages. It’s only human!”

Brainard reflected that this was a sentimental point of view he should hardly have expected from the practical sort of man opposite him. In the course of their conversation Brainard inquired about the graft prosecution then in full swing, which had attracted the notice even of eastern papers on account of the highly melodramatic flavor that a picturesque prosecuting attorney had given to the proceedings. The man from San Francisco readily gave his point of view, which was unfavorable to the virtuous citizens engaged in the task of civic purification. When Brainard asked about the celebrated prosecuting attorney, the stranger looked at him for the first time suspiciously, and said coldly:

“Well, as that gentleman has just been parading up and down the state saying he was going to put me in state prison for the better part of my remaining years, I can’t say I have a high opinion of him.”

“Indeed!” Brainard emitted feebly. The stranger was more mysterious than ever. He did not seem in the least like a candidate for state prison.

“You see,” the young man continued cheerfully, “I’m loose now on about seventy-five thousand dollars of bonds. Time was up in fact day before yesterday, and I’ve been wondering some what they are going to do to my bondsmen. Well, we’ll find out at Ogden when we get the coast papers.”

And when they reached Ogden Brainard ventured to inquire, seeing his new acquaintance deep in the folds of a San Francisco newspaper,—“Well, what did they do to those bondsmen?”

“Nothing yet, so far as I can see. Oh, hell, it’s all bluff anyway!” and he dropped his newspaper out of the open window. . . .A man of such cheerful and frank presence, who read Paradise Lost (with the aid of a dictionary) and traveled to New York on seventy-five thousand dollars of bail bonds was a curiosity to Brainard. He very much wished to ask him a few impertinent questions in order to satisfy his curiosity, but could not summon sufficient courage, though he felt sure that the agreeable stranger would cheerfully enlighten him.

V

As Brainard entered the smoking compartment of the “club car,” he observed that his interesting fellow traveler was in close conversation with a new arrival, who had taken the section opposite Brainard at Ogden. He had already noted this grizzled, thickset person, about sixty years old, who wore a black frock coat, had a large seal ring and a massive Masonic charm. When the newcomer opened his grip to extract a black skull cap, he had seen that the remaining contents of the bag were a mass of papers, a few bits of loose rock, and a bottle of whisky. Whatever toilet articles the traveler carried were carefully concealed.

Already the oldish, grizzled traveler with the skull cap was at home, the center of a little group of men at one of the card tables,—a bottle of beer in front of him, a cigar tilted at an angle between his teeth. He was conversing with that perfect naturalness and freedom that Brainard had observed was the custom in this large country, even among complete strangers.

“Yes, sir,” he was saying, “I came back from Alaska in 1907 broke,—that is, what you might call broke,—a couple of thousand dollars all I had in the world. I said to my wife, ‘I’m done with mines! For good. I’ve spent the better part of thirty years chasing gold, and there may be money to be got out of the ground, but it ain’t for me.’ And would you believe it? The next morning I was starting for Union! Met a man I knew at the hotel in Seattle and he showed me some samples of the ore they were taking out there. And I started. The old woman too. Been there ever since!” He paused as if to let the others say “Kismet!” and repeated,—“Been there ever since, working the next claim. My wife died six months ago, and I got lonely and thought I’d come out and see what had happened to Frisco since the quake.”

From this point the talk drifted on erratically as the train rushed towards the Sierras. The agreeable young man who read Paradise Lost and was under bonds to justice seemed to have an extensive acquaintance in common with the grizzled miner. They discussed some Scotchman who had been mining but now owned an oil well in the “Midway field” that was reputed to be bringing in five thousand dollars a day. Another of their friends—an Englishman—had a silver “proposition” in Mexico. There was also Jimmie Birt who owned a string of horses and had sunk a fortune in a mine in British Columbia, but Jimmie, it seemed, was making good in Oregon timber land. So it went with one adventurer after another, roaming this side of the continent, now penniless, to-morrow with millions, restlessly darting from subarctic Alaska to subtropical Mexico along the coast or the mountain spine of the continent. They sought gold and silver and copper, oil and wood and cattle, water-power, wheat, and wine,—it made little odds what. Everything was a “big proposition” in which to make or lose. Brainard drank in the varied biography of this company of adventurers, his brain fired with the excitements of their risks. Krutzmacht, it seemed to him, must have been such a one as these. He was on the point of asking the old miner, who was the principal talker, if he had ever heard of Krutzmacht, when his ears caught the words:

“I see by to-day’s San Francisco paper that a receivership has been asked for the Shasta companies. That means they’ve got Krutzmacht, don’t it?”

“I expect so—he’s been on the edge some time from what I hear,” the younger man replied.

“So they got him. . . . I thought Herb would make good—he was a nervy Dutchman, if there ever was one! But he couldn’t go up against that crowd.”

“When he began building his road through the mountains to the Bay, the S. P. crowd went for him and shut off his credit. You’ve got to get permission to do some things in California.”

“I’m told he’d built up a big property.”

“That’s right—if he’d been able to hold on, there would have been millions, what with the power company, the timber, the railroad, and the land. That’s why the S. P. people wanted it! They waited, and when the panic came on, they began squeezing him. I saw him in New York a few days ago. I suppose he was trying to get money from some of those big Jew bankers where he’d got it before. But it isn’t the right time to pass the hat in Wall Street just now.”

The talk ran on desultorily about “the S. P. crowd,” who it seemed were the financial dictators of the Pacific Coast and “the nerve of the Dutchman who went up against that bunch.” Brainard listened closely to every word, but refrained from asking questions for fear of betraying an undue interest in Krutzmacht. As far as he could make out, with his inexperience in business affairs, Krutzmacht’s companies were valuable and solvent, but he himself was embarrassed, as many men of large enterprises were at this time, and his enemies had taken this opportune moment to get possession of his properties, using for that purpose the courts of which they seemed to have control as they had of the legislature and the governor.

“It’s a shame,” the younger stranger remarked frankly; “I expect they’ll put him through the mill and take every dollar he owns.”

“They’ll eat the hide off him all right!”

“Well, well,” the miner sighed in conclusion. “So Herb’s lost out! He’s a nervy one, though, obstinate as a mule. Wouldn’t surprise me if he crawled through somehow. I remember him years ago when he had a mine down in Arizona, a big low-grade copper proposition. That was in nineteen four, no,—three. It was another of those big schemes, too big for any one man,—a railroad and a smelter besides the mine. He claimed there was a fortune in it—and I guess it was so—only he was forced to shut down, and the next I heard of him he was out here on the Coast in this Shasta proposition.”

And that was all they had to say about Krutzmacht.

VI

“Do you know who that man is?” Brainard asked the old miner as the gentleman under bonds to return to California strolled out of the smoking room.

“Why, that’s Eddie Hollinger.”

“And who is Mr. Hollinger?”

“Say, young feller, don’t you ever read the papers where you live? Why, he’s the boss of the prize ring business here on the Coast,—the ‘fight trust,’ as they call it. Made lots of money. Mighty fine feller Ed is, too. He’s having his troubles these days the same as the rest of us. They’re trying him for bribery, you know.”

After he had delivered himself of an impassioned defense of the “business men who were being hounded by a lot of hypocrites,” Brainard led him back to Krutzmacht, or as the miner preferred to call him, “that nervy Dutchman.” But beyond elaborating the story of his own personal encounter with the German a number of years before somewhere in Arizona, the miner could add little to what had already been told. The German was a daring and adventurous man, who had been “known on the Coast” for thirty years or more,—always involved in some large financial venture in which he had been backed by capital from his native land. “But it’s up and down with all of us,” he sighed in conclusion and drifted on to tell his own story. He talked with the volubility and hopefulness of youth. When he said that he hadn’t seen a white man in six months except the dozen “dagoes” working his claim, his volubility seemed to Brainard excusable. It was less easy to explain his hopeful mood, for it appeared that he had knocked about the mountain states for the better part of a lifetime with scarcely more to show for his efforts than what was contained in his lean bag. But the roll of blue prints of his claim, with the little bag of specimen ore, was in his eyes a sure guarantee of fortune.

“You’d oughter see my mine,—the Rosy Lee I call it because that was my wife’s name. It’s a winner sure! I’m expecting they’ll break into the vein every blast. May get a wire in Frisco that they’re in, and then you bet I’ll go whooping back to pick up the dollars! The Union, next door to me, so to speak, got some ore that ran forty thousand to the ton—they’ve taken out four millions already.”

He rambled on about “shoots,” “winzes,” “stopes,” “faults,” and geological formation until he had thoroughly fired the young man’s imagination with the fascinating lure of the search for “metal.” They examined the specimens in the old miner’s bag and talked far into the night while the train panted up the steep grades and the moonlight lay white on the snowdrifts of the mountains outside.

“Come back with me, young feller,” the miner said in his simple, expansive manner, “and I’ll show you some life you’ve never seen! . . . It’s kind of lonesome up there now the old woman’s gone. . . . You’ll make money.”

“I’d like to,” Brainard responded warmly. “Nothing better! Perhaps I will some day, but I can’t this trip.”

“Come soon,” the old fellow urged, “or you’ll find me at the Waldorf in your own town.”

Brainard lay awake in his berth long afterwards, listening to the laboring locomotives as they pulled the heavy train over the mountains, rushed through the snowsheds, and emerged occasionally to give glimpses of steep, snowy hillsides. The rarefied air of the lofty altitude had set his pulses humming. So much it seemed had happened to him already since he stepped aboard the train in Jersey City that he could hardly realize himself. The “boss of the fight trust” and the cheerful miner who had “lost the old woman six months back” and still had faith after a lifetime of disappointments that he would dig a fortune from that “hole up in them hills,” were real experiences to the young man. The simple, natural, human quality of these strangers appealed to him. “It must be the west,” he generalized easily. “I suppose Krutzmacht is the same sort,—large-hearted, simple, a good gambler.” But the man who had signed his name between convulsions,—H. Krutzmacht,—didn’t seem to fit the same genial frame. He was of sterner stuff. “Anyway he’s given me one fine time and I’ll do what I can for him out there!” It was useless to speculate further as to what awaited him in San Francisco. It might be that court proceedings having already begun, the affair would be taken out of his hands completely. He might find a telegram from Krutzmacht countermanding his orders.

At last he dropped to sleep, buoyant and eager for that unknown future that lay before him, while the train having surmounted the last mountain barrier wound slowly down into the green, fruit-covered valleys of California.

VII

The Overland was several hours late; it was nearly four o’clock of a foggy April afternoon before Brainard emerged from the ferry station with his big valise in his hand. His first intention had been to go to a hotel and there deposit his bag and make inquiries. The miner had urged him to accompany him to the old “Palace.” “They say it’s finer than ever since the quake.” But Brainard, reflecting that it was Saturday afternoon and considering that a few hours’ delay might mean the loss of two days, shook hands with his fellow travelers and turned to the telephone booths to discover Krutzmacht’s city address. When he had memorized the street and number he started up Market Street, still carrying his bag. He was astonished to see how thoroughly the city had recovered from its disaster in little more than a year. There were large gaps in the business blocks, to be sure, but it was a lively, substantial city with a great deal of building going forward, especially in the noisy erection of tall steel buildings. The very sight of these ambitious structures inspired courage!After a short walk Brainard found himself at the entrance of a large, new building on Sutter Street that corresponded with the number he had memorized. He stood on the curb for a few moments staring up at the windows. Now that he had reached his goal, a trace of his former habit of despondency came over him, making him hesitate before the final effort, but shaking himself free from the old morbidness he walked briskly into the building. When he emerged from the elevator on the top floor, the boy pointed down the corridor. “The last one on the right,” he said.

Brainard passed a number of offices whose doors bore in small black letters the names of different companies,—“Pacific Northern Railroad,” “Great Western Land and Improvement Company,” “The Shasta Corporation.” At the extreme end of the corridor was a door with the simple lettering, “Herbert Krutzmacht.” The plain black letters of the name had something of the same potency that the signature at the bottom of the power of attorney had. Like that, like the sick man himself who had painfully gasped out his last orders, they were a part of the substantial realm of fact. So far, at least, the dream held! There was a real man named Krutzmacht, engaged in important business enterprises, and from what Brainard had learned on the train he knew that there was a crisis in his affairs.

With his hand on the door-handle he paused. His heart beat fast, and he looked around him nervously as if expecting to see an officer of the court lurking somewhere in the corridor. There was no one on this floor, however. The quiet of a late Saturday afternoon had settled down on the busy building, but within the private office Brainard could hear the slow click of a typewriter. He pushed open the door and entered.

It was a large, rather barely furnished room, evidently used as an ante-room to other offices. Near the window a young woman was seated at a desk, lazily examining a mass of papers and occasionally tapping the keys of a machine, with the desultory air of an employee killing time at the end of the day. She was a distinctly good looking woman, Brainard observed, although no longer young, with abundant coarse black hair, fresh complexion, and decidedly plump.

The stenographer looked up from her work at Brainard with a start as if she had been expecting some one, but quickly composed herself.

“Well, what is it?” she asked with a peculiar intonation that indicated hostility.

Brainard was at a loss for a reply and stood gaping at the stenographer foolishly. He had not thought of meeting a woman. He had known few women, and he lacked confidence in dealing with them.

“Is—is Mr. Krutzmacht in?” he stammered awkwardly, and cursed himself for the silly question.

The woman gave him a suspicious look and answered shortly:

“No, he ain’t.”

“Oh,” the young man remarked, looking about the office. Near the stenographer’s desk was a door partly open, which led into an inner room. In the farther corner of this room could be seen the projecting corner of a steel safe. This Brainard felt must be his goal, and he unconsciously stepped toward the door of the inner office. The woman rose as if to bar his further progress and snapped irritably:

“What do you want here?”

“Why, I just want to talk to you,” he replied as amiably as he could.

“Cut it short then, young man. I haven’t any time to waste in conversazione.”

“You don’t seem very busy!” Brainard observed smiling.

“I’m always busy to strangers, little one—I do my day-dreaming outside of office hours.” She thrust the metal cover on her machine with a clatter. “See?”“Oh, yes, I see,” Brainard replied and again tried to approach the inner office. The stenographer confronted him alertly and folding her arms demanded:

“What’s your game, anyway, young man? If you’re one of those lawyers—”

“No, I’m no lawyer,” Brainard said laughing. “Guess again!”

“Haven’t the time. It’s Saturday afternoon, and this office is supposed to be closed at one o’clock.”

“So it is Saturday—I’d almost forgotten the fact.”

The stenographer eyed him very sourly and observed coldly:

“Where do you keep yourself that you don’t know the day of the week? Go home, young man, and think it over.”

Brainard saw that in this national game of “josh” he could make no progress against such an adept and came bluntly to the point:

“Are you in charge of Mr. Krutzmacht’s office?”

“What’s that to you?”

“Because I’ve been sent here by Mr. Krutzmacht to—”

“Sent here by Mr. Krutzmacht—the one you were asking for just now? . . . Try something else, sonny.”Brainard felt foolish and completely baffled. He wanted to strangle the woman and throw her out of the window. But aside from the fact that she appeared to be vigorous and of a fighting disposition he realized that the less disturbance he made the greater chance he would have of carrying through his mission successfully. It is not clear what the outcome between the two would have been, if at that moment there had not appeared from the inner office an elderly man whose mild face had a worried look. Brainard noted the man’s near-sighted, timid air and regained his calm.

“Here’s a young feller, Mr. Peters, who says he’s looking for Mr. Krutzmacht,” the girl said.

“Mr. Krutzmacht is not in the city,” the man said nervously.

“Yes, I know that!” Brainard replied easily. “You see I was sent here by Mr. Krutzmacht himself.”

“You come from Krutzmacht!” the man gasped in excitement, while the woman’s face expressed incredulity. “Where is he? We’ve been telegraphing all over the country the last week trying to locate him. Mr. Snell has just gone east—left this office only an hour ago—to see if he can find him.”

Brainard reflected that the Overland Limited had probably served him a good turn by being late; for he judged that the fewer persons he had to deal with in the present emergency the easier it would be for him to accomplish his purposes. This mild-mannered, flustered clerk did not look formidable. His tones gained confidence.

“Mr. Krutzmacht,” Brainard explained glibly, “has met with an accident—not a serious one, I hope. He is in good hands. He has sent me out here to get some papers that he wants from his safe.”

“But, but,” the bewildered clerk stammered, “don’t you know that the court—”

“They’ve fixed up a receivership, I know,” Brainard interrupted, “that’s the reason perhaps—”

“I’ve been expecting ’em in here all the afternoon,” the clerk said nervously, looking at the door. “Then there’ll be the devil to pay generally.”

“All the better!” Brainard exclaimed. “Let’s get busy before they arrive.”

“But who are you, anyway?” the old man demanded with a sudden access of caution.

Brainard merely smiled at the worried old man. He was more and more at his ease, now that he knew the caliber of the timid old clerk, and though he felt the necessity of haste in his operations, if an officer of the court was momentarily expected to make a descent upon Krutzmacht’s private office, yet he spoke and acted with calm.

“Suppose we lock these outer doors—if you think any one is likely to interrupt us—and then we can proceed undisturbed.”

He shot the brass bolt in the door through which he had entered and glanced into the inner office, but apparently this one had no exit upon the corridor. Meanwhile the stenographer was whispering vehemently to the old clerk, who looked at the intruder doubtfully and seemed irresolute. Brainard leisurely pulled down the shade over the glass window in the door.

“There!” he said. “Now we are ready.”

He took the sheet that bore Krutzmacht’s signature from his pocket and held it out to Peters. “Want my credentials? That’s a power of attorney Mr. Krutzmacht dictated and signed just before I left him.”

He waited for the clerk to adjust his glasses and read the hastily penned sheet, thinking what he should do if by chance the old man refused to recognize it. He did not feel disturbed. The ride across the continent had rested him bodily and mentally. The good meals and the unwonted luxury of eating and sleeping without care, which had been his daily companion for all the years he could remember, had given him a fresh spirit. He could think quickly and with precision; he felt himself amply capable, full of power to meet any emergency that might rise—for the first time in his life.

“What do you want to do?” Peters asked, handing back the power of attorney. He seemed somewhat reassured by the sight of his master’s signature at the bottom of the scrawl.

“Mr. Krutzmacht wanted me to get the stuff out of his safe—I suppose it’s the one in there?”

“But—but,” the clerk protested. “If the court has granted this injunction, I don’t suppose I ought to—”

“That’s just why you ought!” Brainard interrupted impatiently. “Don’t you see this is Krutzmacht’s one chance of getting his property out of their reach? Once the court puts hands on it, there won’t be much left for the owner!”

Without further delay he strode into the inner office, saying lightly:

“Krutzmacht is keeping out of sight for the present—until trouble blows over, you see.”

“The safe’s locked,” the clerk objected weakly, “and no one here has the combination. Mr. Snell didn’t leave it.”

Without taking the trouble to reply, Brainard walked over to the heavy steel door and began twirling the knob as if he had opened office safes all his life. The clerk and the stenographer stared while the little nickel wheel revolved in Brainard’s fingers. When finally the bolts shot back and the door swung open, Peters gasped:

“But how will you get all that stuff out of here?”

“Just bring me that bag from the other room, will you please?” Brainard asked the stenographer. As she turned unwillingly to fetch the bag, there came a loud, resolute knock at the door of the outer office.

“There!” the old clerk exclaimed.

The stenographer started for the door, but Brainard with one leap overtook her, pushed her back into the inner room, and closed the door. Again the knocking on the outside door came, even more insistently, and the knob was rattled as if the visitor was determined to gain entrance. The three in the inner office stood still listening, not speaking. Brainard noticed an angry red flush spread over the woman’s features. As no further knocking came after a few moments, Brainard turned to the stenographer sternly.

“You can sit at that desk, miss. I’ll answer the door. Come on, Mr. Peters, and show me the most important things in here—the papers Krutzmacht’s enemies would hate to lose. You know them, don’t you?”“Some of them,” the clerk admitted, rather doubtfully, his eyes running over the close-packed shelves of the vault. “They’re ’most all valuable in here, I suppose. The general papers are kept in the other vault downstairs. But the most important are in these drawers.”

He pulled out several receptacles that seemed crammed with engraved certificates and legal papers.

“Mr. Krutzmacht kept all his personal papers up here where he could get at them day or night,” he explained. “I guess it’s all valuable to some one!” he concluded hopelessly.

“I can’t put it all in that bag,” Brainard observed, his eye running over the contents of the well-filled vault. “Well, let’s try the drawers first—the cream is likely to be there.”

He began to pass out the contents of the drawers to the clerk, who shoved them hastily into the large valise. But before Brainard had quite finished the second tier of drawers, the bag was almost filled with crisp, tightly packed bundles of securities and legal papers. There remained books and other rows of documents. Brainard looked at some of them impatiently, trying to decide what could best be left behind. At last he exclaimed:

“It’s no use my trying to pick it over. I might leave the best of the lot. I must have a small trunk. Can you get me one, Peters? While you are gone I will fetch it all out here and sort it over. . . . No, don’t go out that way!” he exclaimed, as the clerk started for the outer door. “Where does that go?” He pointed to a small door behind the corner of the safe.

“It’s the fire escape,” Peters explained timidly.

“Just the thing!”

He opened the door and peered out into the dark, inclosed well down which ran one of the modern circular fire escapes.

Brainard handed Peters a bill, and shoved him toward the door. After the clerk had gone, Brainard turned to his task, and emptied the safe in a few minutes. Then he began to sort the books and papers and securities into piles for convenient packing, stuffing the bonds and stocks, which he judged to be the most valuable part of the loot, into his valise.

There had been no movement by the stenographer for some time, and Brainard had almost forgotten her presence. Suddenly, while he was in the safe, he heard a slight sound outside, like the movement of a woman’s dress. He jumped to his feet. The stenographer, with one hand on the desk telephone, was about to take off the receiver.“Put that down!” Brainard ordered, and added more gently, “What are you telephoning for?”

“Just going to call up a friend,” the woman replied pertly, and started to take the receiver off the hook again.

Brainard cleared the intervening space in a bound, and snatched the instrument from the woman’s hand.

“You’ll have to wait a while to talk to your friend!”

“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked angrily.

“You can see—packing up some papers. You might give me a hand.”

“Say,” she replied without moving, “I don’t believe that yarn you told old Peters.”

“Oh, you don’t?”

“Not for one minute!”

“Well, what will you do about it?”

The girl tapped sullenly with her foot, without replying.

“Want to let that friend of yours know about me?” Brainard continued meaningly. As the stenographer tossed her head and moved again toward the telephone, he added, “Come over here where I can watch you! Quick now, pack those bundles into the bag.” As she still hesitated, defying him, he said sharply, “Get down on your knees and go to work!”

She whimpered, but fell to her knees. They worked silently for several minutes. The vault was stripped bare. The smaller papers were packed into the bag, and the bulkier stuff was stacked on the floor, ready to be thrust into another receptacle.

Brainard glanced at his watch. Peters had been gone more than a quarter of an hour. Had he been detained, or had he become suspicious and decided to get advice before going any farther? Brainard considered departing with what he had already packed in his bag, which he judged was the more important part of the safe’s contents.

“I guess it’s about time for me to be going home now,” the stenographer remarked, plucking up her courage. “I’ll leave you and Mr. Peters to lock up.”

“You want to see that friend badly, don’t you?” Brainard asked. “Not quite yet; the day’s work is not over yet. Be patient!”

He did not dare to trust her beyond his sight, nor did he think it wise to leave her behind him. The girl walked idly to the window, then edged along the wall. Beside the safe there was a recess, from which the rear door opened. When the stenographer reached this, she, darted for the door.

“Good-by!” she called. “I guess the police will take care of you!”

The little door fortunately stuck. Before she could open it, Brainard had dragged her back into the room.

“You’re just a common second-story man!” she cried angrily.

“Exactly! How clever of you to penetrate my disguise! I’m a car-barn bandit—Texas Joe—anything you please! But before you skip, I want you to look through those drawers in the vault, to see if I have missed anything.”

He shoved the surprised woman into the empty vault, and swung the door. As the bolts shot back into place, a muffled cry escaped from within. Brainard called back:

“Save your breath! There’s enough air in there to keep you alive for some hours; and I’ll see that you get out in plenty of time to join that friend for dinner. Just keep quiet and save your breath!”

A sob answered him from the vault.

VIII

At that moment a low, confidential knock came on the door of the outer office, followed by a discreet rattling of the knob.

“There he is at last!” thought Brainard, with a sense of relief.

He hurried to unbolt the door; but instead of Peters’s mild face, a chubby, spectacled young fellow, wearing his derby hat pushed far back on a round, bald head, confronted him.

“Who are you?” Brainard demanded, trying to close the door.

The man grinned back:

“And who are you?”

He had shoved his right leg into the opening, and with his question he gave a powerful push that almost knocked Brainard from his feet.

“Well?” he said, once within the office, grinning more broadly. “I’m Farson—Edward, Jr.—from the Despatch. We just had a wire from New York that Krutzmacht’s been found, dead!”

“Dead!” Brainard exclaimed.

“Had a stroke or something, and died this morning in a hospital. One of our old men down East got on to it, and tipped us the wire.”

The intruder settled himself comfortably on the top of the stenographer’s little desk, and drew out a cigarette. Dangling his fat legs, he eyed Brainard with an amused stare.

The latter stood for the moment dumfounded. Although he had at first looked for this outcome, as the days had gone by he had come to believe that the old man was recovering. Now he realized swiftly that with Krutzmacht dead his power of attorney was no better than a piece of blank paper. His position was doubly tenuous.

“Say!” The reporter interrupted his meditation in a burst of cynical confidence. “The old man was a good pirate—fought to the last ditch, and then got out.”

“What makes you think he got out?” Brainard inquired.

The reporter shrugged his shoulders.

“They had him, and he must have known it. That railroad crowd would have taken the hide off him, and put what was left in the penitentiary.”

“Perhaps they made away with him,” Brainard suggested meaningly.

“You think so? My, that would be a fat scoop! What makes you think so?”

Brainard raised his eyebrows mysteriously, and the reporter nimbly filled in a reasonable outline of the story.

“You mean he got the money down East that he needed to stop this receivership, and they knew it, and put him out of the way, so that he shouldn’t interrupt the game?”

“Possibly,” Brainard admitted.

The reporter jumped from his seat briskly. “Well, I must get busy—they’re holding the paper for me. Who’s in charge here?”

“I am,” Brainard replied promptly.

“And what’s your name?”

He pulled a dirty note book from his hip-pocket.

“Wilkins,” Brainard answered quickly, “of Wilkins & Starbird, Mr. Krutzmacht’s New York attorneys.”

The reporter looked at Brainard and whistled, but he wrote down the name.

“You folks didn’t lose any time in getting busy! I s’pose there’ll be litigation and all that. Do you expect to save much from the wreck?”

“That’s what I am here for—to keep those pirates from making off with the stuff!” His eye fell upon his valise, and a sudden resolution came to him. “See here, Farson,” he said confidentially, laying a hand on the reporter’s pudgy thigh, “do you see that bag? The Pacific Northern that they’re after and the Shasta Company are right inside that bag, together with a lot of other valuable property. I’m going to take it where those pirates can’t lay a finger on it, in spite of all the courts in California!”

The reporter’s eyes grew round.

“You’ve got your nerve!” he said admiringly.

“You see, time’s money—big money. So I can’t stay here all night gassing with you. There is a train on the Santa FÉ at ten, isn’t there?”

“Ten ten,” the reporter corrected.

“I must make that train, or—”

“Lose the trick?” the reporter suggested affably.

“I’m going to make it!”

“You’ll need some help in the get-away, I suppose?”

“Just so! If I make that train all right with this stuff, there’ll be a couple of hundred dollars for you, my boy; and what’s more, you can have the story all to yourself. It will be better than the old man’s death.”

A pleasant smile circled around the reporter’s chubby face.

“All right, Mr. Wilkins! What do you want now?”

“I’ve sent out for another bag,” Brainard explained. “I’ll just pass the rest of these papers out to you, and you can stack them ready to pack when the bag comes.”

Brainard opened the inner door and listened. There were faint sounds like sobbing within the safe.

“If she can cry, she’ll last,” he said to himself. “Now for it! Where in thunder can that fellow Peters be? I hope he hasn’t heard that the old man is dead!”

He began to shove the books and papers through the door, which he kept nearly closed, for fear that the reporter might detect the sounds that came from the safe, and ask questions. It was dark now, but he did not dare to turn on the electric lights, for the windows faced the street, and he feared men might already be watching the office.

He had transferred all the packages not packed, and was struggling at his heavy valise, when he heard a voice behind him, and started.

“I guess you thought I was never coming back,” Peters stammered breathlessly. He was dragging a small trunk through the little back door behind the safe. “It nearly broke my back getting this thing up those five flights of stairs.”

“Bring it this way, Peters!” Brainard shouted nervously, pushing the old man through the door into the outer office.He banged the door shut just as a muffled scream issued from the safe.

“What’s that?” Peters asked, dropping the trunk to the floor.

“Somebody in the hall, I suppose,” Brainard replied coolly.

Fortunately the old man’s attention was distracted from the scream by the sight of the reporter. Farson had lighted another cigarette, and was swinging his legs and smiling amiably.

“Didn’t expect to see me, did you?”

“Who—”

“That’s all right. Your friend here seems to be in a hurry. He asked me to stay and help in the spring moving.”

“Come, get to work!” Brainard called out, on his knees before the trunk. “Cigars and explanations afterward!”

They slung the books and the packages of papers, which the reporter had neatly arranged, into the little trunk. Then they closed and locked it. Brainard unbolted the outer door.

“I wouldn’t make my exit by the front door,” the reporter advised. “I reckon you’d be spotted before you got to the street. There’s a back way, ain’t there?”

Brainard, thinking of the woman in the safe, hesitated.“That’s how I brought up the trunk,” Peters said. “There’s nobody out there.”

Brainard opened the door to the inner office, and listened. It was quite still. Probably the woman had fainted.

“Come on!” he called, grasping one end of the trunk.

The reporter caught hold of the other, and Peters followed, tugging at the heavy bag. As they crossed the inner office, there was not a sound.

Brainard hesitated at the door, thinking that he must release the girl before he left; but as he stood before the safe, there was a squeal from within which indicated sufficient liveliness on the part of the stenographer. There would be time enough to attend to her after he had got his loot to the street. If she were released now, her temper might prove to be troublesome; so he joined the others on the landing, closing the little door behind him.

“The old man used to get out this way sometimes,” Peters observed.

“I reckon he never will again,” the reporter laughed.

The hall opened on a narrow, circular iron staircase, without a single light. Down this pit Brainard and the reporter plunged, tugging at the trunk, which threatened to stick at every turn. The old man got on more easily with the bag, which he merely allowed to slide after him. Brainard was soaked in perspiration; the reporter puffed and swore, but he stuck manfully at his job.

At last they tumbled out into the dark alley at the rear of the building. After he had caught his breath, Brainard inquired where he could find a cab.

“If I were you, young man,” the reporter replied, “I wouldn’t try being a swell. I’d take the first rig I could charter. There’s one over there now.”

He pointed down the alley, and waded off into the dark. Presently he returned with a plumber’s wagon.

“He says he’ll land your baggage at the ferry for four bits. You can ride or walk behind, just as you like.”

They loaded the trunk and the bag into the wagon, and the reporter, perching himself beside the driver, announced genially:

“I’ll see you aboard!”

“How much time is there left?” Brainard asked.

“Thirty-two minutes—you can do it easily in twenty-five.”“Wait a minute, then!”

Brainard took Peters to one side, and said to him in a low voice:

“You remember that noise you heard up there in the office? It came from the girl—the stenographer. She got fresh while you were out, and I had to lock her up in the safe to keep her quiet. I think there is enough air to last her some time yet; but her last squeal was rather faint. Suppose you run up and let her out!”

Peters, with a scared look on his face, made one bound for the stairs.

“Hold on, man!” Brainard shouted after him. “You don’t know the combination. Here it is!”

He searched in his pockets for the slip of paper on which he had copied the figures, but in the dark he could not find it.

“This ain’t any automobile,” the reporter suggested. “You’d better put off your good-bys until the next time!”

“Try to remember what I say,” Brainard said to the frightened Peters, and began repeating the combination from memory. “I’m pretty sure that’s right. Say it over! There, again!”

The shaking man repeated the figures three or four times.

“Good! Keep saying it over to yourself as you go upstairs, and I’ll telephone the office from the ferry and see if you’ve got her out.”

But Peters had already disappeared into the darkness within the building. Brainard climbed into the plumber’s wagon, the man whipped up his horse, and they jolted out of the alley. As they came in sight of the ferry building, the reporter compared his watch with the clock, and remarked:

“Eight minutes to the good—fast traveling for a plumber!”

“Just look out for my stuff while I telephone!” Brainard exclaimed.

All the way to the ferry he had been anxious about the girl in the safe. He had already resolved that if he found Peters had failed to open the safe, he would go back and run the risk of capture.

When the operator rang up the number of Krutzmacht’s private office, there was an agonizing wait before any one answered. Finally a woman’s voice, very faint, called:

“Who is it?”

Prudence counseled Brainard to assume that the voice was that of the stenographer, and to hang up the receiver. But he wished to make sure that it was the woman herself, and so he asked:“Are you feeling all right, miss?”

“You thief!” came hissing over the wire to his ear. “You won’t get—” And there was no more.

She had dropped the receiver, probably for action. When Brainard stepped from the telephone booth, he looked uneasily in the direction of Market Street, as if he expected to see the stenographer flying through the hurrying crowd. The reporter beckoned to him.

“Your trunk has gone aboard the ferry. Here’s the check—to Chicago. I thought you’d rather tote this bag yourself, though it’s pretty heavy.”

“Much obliged for all your trouble,” Brainard replied warmly. “And now for you!”

He pulled his roll of currency from his pocket, and handed five hundred-dollar bills to the reporter.

“You earned it! I never should have got away in time without you.”

“I guess that’s so. Much obliged for the dough; but the scoop alone is worth it. What a story! A light-fingered attorney from New York blowing in here under the court’s nose and lifting the whole Pacific Northern, and goodness knows what else besides, clean out of the State! Some folks who think they know how to do things will be sick to-morrow morning when they get the Despatch!”He shoved the bills into his trousers pocket and pulled out another cigarette.

“There’s the gong!” he remarked.

“Thanks!” Brainard said warmly, shaking the reporter’s fat hand. “I’ll want to see your story. Send it to me!”

“And say, I’d make up a better yarn than that lawyer story, when you have time.”

“So you didn’t believe me?”

“I guess I’m no cub reporter!” the Despatch man laughed complacently, as the ferry-boat began to move out of the slip.

Then he started on a run for the nearest telephone booth.

“If that girl means business, as I think she does, I shan’t get as far as Chicago!” Brainard muttered to himself, turning into the cabin of the ferry-boat.

IX

When Brainard awoke the next morning the train was moving through the Mojave desert. He lay for some time in his berth trying to collect himself and realize all that had brought him thither. It was intensely hot in the narrow compartment that he had taken, and when he raised the window curtains the sunlight reflected from the desert was blinding. As he drew down the curtain, his eyes fell upon the large bag beside him, and with a start the adventure of the previous day came over him. He laughed aloud as he recalled the different scenes in Krutzmacht’s office,—the stenographer’s suspicious reception, the endless bumping down the circular iron stairs with the bag and the valise, old Peters’s horrified face when he learned that the woman had been shut in the safe. Indeed, the entire week since he ran across the dying stranger at the door of his lodging seemed like a dream, peopled with faces and scenes that were extraordinarily vivid and of a kind he had never known in his narrow, sordid life. With a luxurious sense of new possession he went over all the little details of his journey across the continent. The week, he recognized, had been a liberal education to his mentally starved self. But what was he going to do now?

Hitherto he had been carried along easily on a wave of events that demanded instant action, and he had not worried about the future. Even when the reporter had given him the news of Krutzmacht’s death in the hospital he was already too deep in the affair to stop, although he realized that the crude power of attorney, which had been his sole legal protection in looting the safe, had lost all its force the instant its maker ceased to breathe. After that, he was, as the stenographer had said,—merely a burglar. Yet he had not hesitated to obey the dead man’s will rather than the law. But now?

Thus far he had been executing Krutzmacht’s direct orders, with an unconscious sense of a living personality guiding him, taking the real responsibility for his deeds. The stranger who had been stricken near his door had seized upon him as the nearest available tool, had imposed on him his will, and had sent him hurrying across the continent on an errand the full nature of which was even yet a mystery to Brainard. And he had obeyed the dying stranger with a curious faith in his reasonableness,—had responded to him pliantly as to the command of a natural master. But now that this master was dead, the situation was altogether different. Should he still attempt to execute his scarcely intelligible wishes?

He had learned enough about Krutzmacht these last few days to understand that the old man had been engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the control of large properties,—one of those peculiarly modern duels fought with bankers’ credits and court decrees. Apparently his enemies, more powerful than he—at least with larger resources at their command—had been closing in on him for the final grapple, which threatened utterly to ruin him. He had gone to New York to raise the funds with which to evade impending bankruptcy and loss of control of the properties which he had created. Brainard now fully believed that Krutzmacht had succeeded in this, and that he had been stricken at last by the hand of a hired thug and thrown on the street to die. But even in the torture of his final convulsions the old man had exerted his powerful will to defeat these cowardly foes, and had lingered on in life just long enough to enable his agent to snatch the prey from their jaws.

What now was he to do with this bag of documents and securities that lay there, its fat sides bulging in proof of his deed? The obvious thing would be to seek the nearest federal authority, deposit his plunder, and allow an impartial court to settle the dispute between the dead man and his enemies. A week before, such a timid and safe course of conduct would have seemed to Brainard the only possible action to take. Now he found it not in the least to his taste, and dismissed it without further consideration. He had become an altogether different person, even in this week, from that beaten man who had stumbled homeward from a petty defeat through the New York streets in the gloom of an April day. For this one brief week in all the years he could remember he had been alive—fully alive—and with his hand now in the thick of this vital web he was not willing to withdraw. The one who had used him as a tool was dead, but his strong will lived on in him, not yet fulfilled, and to that strong will whose only hope of fulfillment lay in him—the chance stranger—a new sense of loyalty responded. He would not desert the old man in the present crisis, no matter what the merely legal aspects of his situation were. Already the stranger’s will like fertile seed was germinating within this fresh soil.

“Take everything,” Krutzmacht said. “Take it all to Berlin.” That he would do if he could.But then what?

There was a strange name—Mell or Melody—that the dying man had been at such pains to enunciate. What had Melody to do with the matter? Was it the name of a person? Or an institution? He exercised all his ingenuity in trying to invent a reasonable explanation of this one word. Possibly Krutzmacht had tried to pronounce Mendel or Mendelssohn. Brainard thought there was a firm of German bankers with some such name. Light on the puzzle might be found in the contents of his bag, but at present he did not like to open it. At any rate Berlin must be his next destination.

He pondered all these things at his late breakfast, where in the close-shaded car electric fans buzzed to make a semblance of moving air. The fellow travelers on this train—returning tourists from Southern California resorts—did not interest him as had the varied company on the Overland, and he shut himself up in his compartment with his secret, not even leaving it for luncheon. It seemed that already the cares of property—even of another, unknown person’s property—were beginning to separate him from his fellows, rendering him less eager to make acquaintances, more suspicious than he was by nature. In the present circumstances he preferred to keep to himself. So all that long day, alone in his hot room, he thought, while the train slowly traversed the mighty Arizona plains, arid, limitless, austere, broken here and there by solitary rocky peaks that rose majestically out of the desert into the still, clear atmosphere. It was a stranger land than he had ever dreamed, outside all the world that he knew, remote, mysterious, calm.

He did not open the bag for fear of possible interruption. He thought, and as the hot day wore on into the afternoon he began to lose that sense of security he had had when he caught the train in San Francisco. The burden of the bag became heavier. If he were any judge of newspaper men, that reporter Farson had by this time spread the story of his deeds broadcast over the civilized world. Messages might be speeding past him even now on the wires, directions to intercept his flight at some convenient point farther to the east. He first planned to make for New Orleans as a port of departure for Europe, having altogether abandoned the idea of returning to New York, which probably was the one most dangerous spot for him on the globe. Even New Orleans seemed a desperately long way off. The sooner, he reasoned, he could put an international boundary between himself and Krutzmacht’s enemies, the better would be his chance of reaching Berlin with his plunder.

He examined the crude map in the railroad folder and made out that by the next noon, if the train were on time, he could make connections at Albuquerque in New Mexico with a train for El Paso. To-morrow noon seemed far off, but he concluded that it was the best he could do. Until then he should have to run his chances, and possess himself with patience. The day drew slowly to its conclusion. The sun streamed more horizontally across the arid plain, touching the distant mountains with blood-red tints. A desolate, man-forsaken country! For miles and miles there was not a living being, not a habitation in sight from the railroad. Somewhere far off beyond those purpling mountains lay the romantic land of Mexico, which seemed the proper haven for any kind of lawlessness. Fortunately he was abundantly supplied with ready money. In addition to the large sum he had found in the old wallet he had come across in one of the inner drawers of the safe a canvas bag of gold coin, placed there no doubt by the thrifty German for some emergency such as this when it might not be convenient to get money from a bank. So he had on his person very nearly ten thousand dollars in gold and bills, which ought to suffice for an extended journey. Ready money gave the young man a comfortable sense of security that he had never hitherto experienced for any length of time. . . .

At a division headquarters where the train was changing engines, Brainard with his head out of the window was gazing interestedly at the motley crowd of plainsmen, greasers, and blanketed Indians. The door of his compartment was brusquely thrown open and one of the trainmen demanded:

“What’s your name?”

Brainard jumped back from the window, replying mechanically, “Edgar Brainard—why?”

“Don’t be scared, stranger!” the official replied with a chuckle at Brainard’s startled look. He glanced through his spectacles at a yellow envelope. “I’m lookin’ for a party named Wilky or Wilkins. You ain’t the feller.”

Brainard stepped forward to take the telegram, but the man had already turned away. It flashed over Brainard at once that probably Farson was trying to communicate with him, using the foolish name he had given the reporter half in jest. The friendly newspaper man, grateful for the liberal gift he had received, was perhaps trying to warn him of some possible danger. It was too late now to get possession of the telegram. The conductor was passing through the car, asking the passengers their names and exhibiting the yellow envelope.

For the next hour Brainard sat with his nerves on edge, his mind keenly alert to some impending danger. Suddenly the train drew up with a forcible application of the emergency brakes that brought the passengers to their feet. All the men in the car streamed out to the vestibules, and Brainard among them, to see what had happened.

X

“Only a bridge gone,” was the word disgustedly handed back from mouth to mouth. There had been an unusual fall of rain in the arid country to the north, and for a few hours one of the arroyos had become a boiling flood, which had swept away a substantial new bridge. The passengers straggled forward to the scene of trouble.

In the curious half light of the sun sinking into the desert behind and illuminating all the vast high plain with a brilliant reddish light, the huddle of passengers along the right of way and the stalled cars seemed singularly out of place, accentuating the desolate loneliness of the country, where for miles and miles as far as the eye could reach nothing was to be seen rising above the sagebrush and cactus except a range of misty, purple mountains a few miles to the south and a huge water tank a mile or two in the rear. On either side of the petty stream that had already subsided to its normal shallow condition several trains had been caught and held by the loss of the bridge, the Eastern Limited being the last to join the confusion. The passengers on these various trains had mingled along the right of way and were watching the efforts of a large gang of laborers to build a temporary track across the gully, which was almost completed. Some of the passengers had been there since early morning, and these greeted the newcomers from the Limited with joking inquiries about the state of the larder on their train. It was a good hundred miles in either direction to any station possessing a lunch counter, and the question of supper was becoming of serious importance to the less fortunate travelers. As Brainard talked with some of these passengers from the East, he was given a newspaper brought on the last train. It was the Sunday morning Albuquerque Star. Brainard drew to one side and scanned its pages by the fading light. It did not take long for him to find what he was seeking. On the front page of the first section, in the place of honor, there was an associated press dispatch from San Francisco, describing the sensational robbery in the office of a prominent business man. It told without material exaggeration the events of the afternoon before; there was no hint that the affair was more than a daring, but common burglary by a reckless and experienced hand. Brainard rather resented this aspect of the story. In conclusion it said that the authorities had strong clews and expected to lay their hands on the robber before he would have any chance to dispose of the more valuable part of his haul. Brainard handed the paper back to its owner, chatted for a few moments longer about their common predicament, then strolled thoughtfully back the way he had come.

His was almost the last car of the three trains on the westerly side of the arroyo, and as he picked his way beside the track he could hear the few elderly ladies that had not left their seats talking about the delay. It amused him to think what they would say, if they knew that their quiet, well-dressed fellow traveler was the hero of the tale he had just read in the Albuquerque Star. There was a peaceful calm here in the rear, for even the porters and the train hands had gone forward to watch the operations of the laborers. The engines puffed slumberously; there was an intense stillness in the air; the sun had just disappeared, leaving a dull red glow in its place.

It was perfectly evident to Brainard that he could not hope to reach Albuquerque without arrest; he must leave the train at the next station of any size, but even that was extremely risky. With searching eyes he examined the country, which was now sinking imperceptibly into the vagueness of dusk. There was nothing for miles in any direction for the eye to rest upon but cactus and forlorn sagebrush, except that lonely water tank in the rear. There were the mountains, to be sure, but they were many miles away, and he knew that he could never reach them alone with his bag, even if he were sure that he could find a refuge in them. No, it would be suicidal to attempt an escape in this desert! Whatever came, he must run the risk of waiting until the train stopped at some more favorable place. He had come to this conclusion, standing beside the rear platform of the last car, where he could get an uninterrupted view of the vast landscape and was about to seek the seclusion of his own little room, when his eye caught sight of an object in the cactus not far from the track. He soon made out the moving figure of a small horse and a rider, and waited with curiosity to see what sort of person would appear in this desolate country.

The horse dropped to a walk, then halted altogether, as if timid, but soon approached at a slow walk. As far as Brainard could see, the figure was that of a young girl, riding astride a rough yellow pony. The pony crawled within a few yards of the cars, then refused to go farther in spite of its rider’s efforts with a quirt to overcome his fear. Brainard walked down the track nearer them.

“Good evenin’, stranger,” the girl called out. “What’s all the trouble he-ar?”“Bridge gone,” Brainard replied succinctly. “Live around here?”

“A ways back, up yonder!” The girl hitched a shoulder in the direction of the south.

“Live in the water tank?” he queried.

“I reckon I don’t, stranger,” came back in the severe tones of a child whose dignity has been ruffled.

“Then where can you live on this desert—is there a town concealed anywhere abouts?”

The answer from the figure on the pony was a pleasant girlish laugh, and then in the soft, southern tones:

“I reckon, stranger, you won’t find much of a to-own this side of Phoenix—and that’s a mighty long ways from he-ar!”

By this time Brainard and the pony had come sufficiently near together so that he could make out the small straight figure. The girl could not be over fourteen, he judged; she was thin and slight, with dark skin and small features concealed beneath the flap of an old felt hat. She wore a faded khaki skirt and leather leggings. In her small bony hand dangled a heavy man’s quirt with which she swished the ground, and at times she looked up shyly at the “stranger.”

“Where you from?” she inquired.

“New York,” Brainard replied.“New York!” she repeated with an accent of wonder and surprise. “That must be a mighty big ta-own.”

“Rather more populous than this—what do you call it?”

“They call the siding back there by the tank Phantom.”

“Phantom—is that because it’s only a mirage?”

“I can’t say. . . . Where be you going?”

“Mexico!” Brainard hazarded at a venture.

“Mexico!” the girl drawled. “That must be a sight farther off than Phoenix.”

“I guess it is.”

“What are you going to Mexico for, stranger?” the girl persisted.

“Mining business,” Brainard fabricated glibly.

“Copper or gold?”

“All kinds, my child,” Brainard replied flippantly.

The girl drew herself up with considerable dignity, and remarking,—“I’m agoin’ to see what they all be doin’ down yonder,” stirred up the yellow pony and rode off in the direction of the arroyo. She drew up a few rods from the center of activity and stood there in the twilight. Brainard was sorry for his foolish answer that had apparently frightened her away. He went back to his compartment, and after a few moments’ thought grasped his valise and got off the car.

“If she can live in this country, I guess I can,” he muttered to himself.

He flung his bag down in the sagebrush and sat on it, waiting until the girl came back. Presently there was a series of jubilant toots from the engine of the first train as a signal of the successful reopening of traffic; then the east-bound trains began slowly to move one by one down into the gully over the temporary track. When the last train had crept by him Brainard rose and sauntered in the direction of the girl. She was still sitting motionless on her pony, absorbed in the spectacle of all these moving trains,—a peculiarly lonely little figure, there in the gathering dusk of the desert, watching as it were the procession of civilization pass by her. . . . After the eastbound trains had got away and were steaming off towards the horizon, the west-bound trains began to file across the break, having picked up the wrecking crew and their equipment. The girl did not move. Evidently in her life this was a rare treat, and she did not mean to lose any part of it. So Brainard waited until the red rear lamps of the last train shone out by the water tank, and then as the girl slowly turned her pony back he rose from the ground and hailed her. “Hello!”

The pony shied at Brainard, but the girl easily reined it in. She did not seem much discomposed by the sight of him.

“Lost your train, stranger?” she observed with admirable equanimity. “There won’t be no more along ’fore to-morrow morning, I reckon,” she added.

“I don’t believe I want a train,” he replied.

“Goin’ to Mexico on foot with that trunk?” she asked. He detected a mirthful note in her voice. Evidently she took neither him nor his pretended mining business with great seriousness.

“That’s just what I’m going to try to do!”

“Well, you won’t get there to-night, I reckon.”

“I suppose not. Can you tell me some place where I could spend the night?”

“There’s the water tank,” she suggested, with a little laugh.

“Isn’t there somebody where you come from?”

The girl shook her head quite positively.

“There must be some one in this God-forsaken country who would take a stranger in! I don’t care about spending the night out here.”

The girl laughed as if it were all a great joke. “There won’t be nobody to hurt you, stranger.”

“Thanks!”She started on her road. Brainard thought he was in for a night in the open and cursed his folly in jumping off into the desert. But the girl pulled up after a few steps, and he could hear her gay chuckle as she called out:

“You sure did want to stay in Arizona bad—you lost six trains!”

“I meant to!”

“That mining business must be very important.”

“Something else is,” he said boldly.

“Was it very bad, what made you want to get to Mexico—a killing?”

“Not as bad as that.”

“What was it?”

“You wouldn’t understand, I am afraid.”

“You might try tellin’ of me, all the same.”

“It isn’t anything bad.”

“They all say that,” she suggested mockingly.

“I’m merely trying to carry out some one’s orders.”

The girl looked mystified, and after a moment’s further thought remarked:

“There’s old man Gunnison. He might take you in for the night.”

“Where does he live?”

“Back a ways up the trail.”

“Won’t you show me the way?”“I might,” she admitted. “Better give me that trunk,” she said, pointing to the bag. “You would sure be tired if you toted that all the way to Gunnison’s.”

The girl slipped from the pony and expertly made the bag fast to the saddle with the thongs. Then taking the reins, which she drew over the animal’s head, she strode out into the darkness. Brainard stumbled on after his guide as best he could. Presently when he became more accustomed to the dark and to progress over the uneven ground he joined the girl and tried to make her talk. She developed shyness, however, and replied only briefly to his questions. She lived somewhere up in the mountains towards which they were traveling and which could be dimly perceived ahead, a soft, dark barrier rising in the night. But what she did there, who her people were, she would not say. In spite of her youth and her inexperience she had a shrewd child’s wit that could turn off inconvenient curiosity. Although she drawled and spoke the slovenly language of uneducated people, there was something about her, perhaps her instinctive reserve, that bespoke a better breeding than her clothes and her speech indicated. She did not make further inquiries about Brainard’s business; he surmised that she refrained because she thought him to be some kind of a wrongdoer. He wanted to explain to her his erratic conduct, but he realized that it would be not only foolish but almost impossible to make clear to her limited mind just what the situation with him was. So for minutes there was silence between them while they plodded on.

Brainard liked the girl, felt a strange sort of pity for her, an unreasoned pity for a forlorn and lonely child, who he instinctively divined was sensitive and perhaps unhappy in spite of her flippant speech.

“What were you doing down there at the railroad?” he asked in another attempt to start conversation.

“Oh,” she replied vaguely, “nothin’.”

“Nothing! It must be a long way from your home to the railroad?”

“It takes three hours to ride it,” she replied.

“And do you ride down there often just to look at the trains go by?”

“’Most every week, stranger,” she said softly.

Brainard whistled.

“What makes you do that?”

He could feel her toss her head. Her answer was vague.

“They’re goin’ somewheres.”

“And you want to go on them?”“Perhaps. . . . I expect I shall some day.”

“Where?”

“Oh,” she sighed, “anywheres—California, maybe,—New York—somewheres I can live!”

The energy with which she uttered these last words had something pathetic in it. As if to avoid further confession, she urged the tired pony to a shambling trot and Brainard again found difficulty in keeping the pace. After another half hour of this blind progress behind his taciturn guide, the girl stopped before what seemed to be a mound of dirt and remarked:

“Here’s Gunnison’s. Maybe the old man is abed—I’ll raise him for you.”

She proceeded to pound vigorously with the butt of her quirt on the door of the dugout. Presently there was a sound within, and a human head appeared at the door.

“Here’s a gentleman who wants to go to some place in Mexico,” the girl said in her gentle Southern voice. “I told him it was pretty fur from these parts, but I reckon you know how to git there, if any one does.”

“Will you put me up for the night, anyway?” Brainard asked. “That’s the first thing.”

“I can do that,” the sleepy Mr. Gunnison replied after a time, coming out of the door. “But if you be in a hurry to reach Mexico, stranger, you’d better go back to the railroad you come from, and take the next train.”

“We’ll see about that in the morning,” Brainard replied.

The girl had already unfastened the bag and mounted her pony.

“Much obliged to you, miss, for all your help!”

“That’s all right, stranger,” she said cheerily, starting the pony.

“Going home now?” Brainard asked.

“Yes!”

This childish figure, astride the tired pony, riding back into the lonely mountains, seemed to him extremely pathetic.

“Good-by!” he called after her. “Hope we shall meet again some day!”

“Reckon we might, stranger!” came back to him in the soft voice.

“Perhaps in New York?”

“Ye-as—or in Mexico.”

Then the pony’s feet padded rapidly off into the darkness, and the girl was gone.

“Who is she—do you know?” he asked the man.

“Belongs over in Moniment, in one of them mining camps, I expect,” the old man replied indifferently. “I seen her riding past this afternoon.”“Where is she going alone at night?”

“I dunno—guess she knows her own business.”

“Such a small girl!”

“They know how to look after themselves, in these parts, as soon as they can creep,” the old man remarked calmly. “They have to!”

“Monument!” Brainard repeated to himself, wondering where he had heard that name before.

“That’s what they call it. It ain’t much of a place now. There used to be a big mine near there, but it ain’t been worked in years. . . . You can come right in and bunk alongside of me, stranger.”

Brainard did not follow the old plainsman’s advice to stick to the railroad for his travels. Instead, he induced Gunnison to leave his dugout and guide his chance guest across the Mexican border.

It was not as easy as it looks on the map in the railroad folder to get from Phantom, Arizona—which was the name of the water tank where he had dropped from the train—into the State of Chihuahua; but Brainard did not feel pressed for time. Indeed he judged it might be as well for him to remain out of all possible contact with civilized centers for several weeks, to “let things settle down,” as he phrased it. Pursuit would naturally relax after the first unsuccessful attempts and would probably concentrate upon New York where it might be supposed that he would ultimately turn up. Moreover, every day of delay made it less likely that some observing busybody would recall the sensational newspaper story and identify him and his bag with the description of the robber who had left San Francisco on the evening of April 26. Gunnison asked no questions. The virtue of reticence, Brainard found, was admirably cultivated in these sparsely habited parts of the earth. The old man seemed to have no pressing duties to recall him to his dugout, and so they followed the trail leisurely, making a few miles each day and occasionally stopping for a day or two to rest while Gunnison procured supplies from one of the small mining towns.

Those weeks on the trail with old Gunnison and the pack train of two horses and a mule were full of joy to the city-bred man, who had rarely escaped the pavements. The high altitudes, the vivid desert colors, the beauty and the savage wildness of this little-known part of the world filled him with ecstatic happiness as well as abounding health. He became hard and rugged, losing the pallor of the city man and all the petty physical weakness that had contributed largely to his fits of depression. Health made a new man of him in mind as well as in body. He hardly recognized himself when he awoke in the morning. Never before had he known what it was to be heartily in love with life, thoroughly vital, eager to act, to plan, to embrace the struggle of living; so light and free from distressing doubts, so willing to test what destiny held in store for him! Just as the exciting events of his sudden journey and his hours in Krutzmacht’s office had awakened his will and his self-reliance, so these weeks of wandering free through the desert and the mountains were the best sort of preparation for a strong, active manhood. Fortunately they had come to him before it was too late, before his character had finally settled into its groove, and new powers were evoked in him, even physical possibilities, that he might never have suspected to be his.

The nights under the glittering cover of the Arizona heavens, the long days of peaceful activity in the sunlight, the silence and the majesty of these vast desert spaces appealed to him strongly, satisfied that love of beauty and of mystery that had been crushed hitherto. Lying awake beneath the stars, his head pillowed on his bag, which had rapidly lost its suspicious appearance of newness, he speculated upon much that had never before entered his head. And his feeling about Krutzmacht and the accident that had brought them together changed. It was no longer a mere wild jaunt, something unreal, like an adventure in piracy. It was part of the great enfolding mystery of the universe that had touched him and enlisted his life. It seemed that he had embarked upon a mission that must end in a great experience.

At this time of life, with the blood flowing actively through his body, his mind awake to all the voices of the earth, it was but natural that woman should enter into the affair. Krutzmacht’s last mumbled word,—that dubious “Melody,”—served him as point of departure for romantic dreams. Forgetting altogether his reasonable hypothesis that it might prove to be the name of some firm of German bankers he assumed that “Melody” must be the name of a woman. A queer name, doubtless, especially for one in any way connected with the old German, who seemed to have no affinity for fine art or even womanhood, other than the common stenographer of his office. Nevertheless, in obedience to the desire of his heart, Brainard created a person to fit the name, and thought of Melody as a woman.

From this his thoughts wandered occasionally to the little girl who had guided him to old Gunnison’s. He saw her slight, wistful figure as she stood motionless watching the procession of trains, heard her soft voice and gurgling laugh. He resolved to return some day to this wonderful country, his mission fulfilled, and discover that abandoned mining town of Monument, and find there the little girl on the pony who had come to his rescue in the darkness. He had probed old Gunnison for more exact information about the girl, but either he knew nothing more than that “she belonged up Moniment way” or did not care to tell what he knew.

On other matters he was more communicative. He had been long in the country, knew it in the old days before it had been invaded by railroads and large mining companies. He had prospected from the Colorado River south to Chihuahua in old Mexico. He had driven cattle from Texas to Nebraska, and latterly worked on the railroad. He knew Indians, “greasers,” miners, cowboys, and for hour after hour he talked of what he had seen “before it got so dern ceevilized in these parts.” In other words, before there was a railroad line two hundred miles to the east and another three or four hundred miles west! He knew where to camp and where supplies could be got without arousing undue curiosity. He knew horses and mules and men. And he taught the young man some of these useful things that he knew so that when they parted in the city of Guadalajara Brainard felt more grateful to him than to any one of the regular instructors of youth, who had given him his so-called “education.” He paid him liberally for his services, and the old man, sticking the bills beneath the band of his felt hat, made a few final remarks to his patron:

“I don’t know where you come from, my son,—hain’t asked yer, and I don’ want to know. You’ve treated me right, and I’ve treated you right. I guess if you keep free of cards, and drink, and women, and keep on agoin’ due saouth, you’ll likely strike the City of Mexico, before you be much older, and keep your belongin’s with yer,” he added, smiling upon the bag that Brainard had so carefully guarded.

“I think I’ll try the railroad for a change,” Brainard laughed back.

“It’s quicker—sometimes,” the old man admitted, “if you don’t find too many troublesome persons traveling the same way!”

With this last hint he waved farewell and started northwards for the States.

XII

The next day Brainard entered the City of Mexico, lean and brown and hard, with a very much travel-stained valise. So far as he could learn from the few American newspapers he had come across, there had been no further excitement over Krutzmacht’s death, and the robbery of his safe. If a pursuit had been undertaken, the fact had been carefully kept from the press; and he felt confident that by this time either it had been given up, or the persons interested were watching the wrong places.

There was a steamer sailing for Havre from Vera Cruz sometime towards the end of the month, and he resolved to take it, meanwhile resting and making a few preparations for his voyage. It was the first time in his life that he had been outside his own country, and every sight and sound in this bastard Spanish metropolis filled him with curiosity and pleasure. He secured his cabin on the Toulouse, and then set out to do the sights.

The second evening, as he was resting after a busy day in the cool courtyard of the old Hotel Iturbide, a little man in a bedraggled linen duster hitched his chair across the stones toward Brainard.

“Just come down from the States?” he inquired. Brainard nodded.

With this slight encouragement, the stranger launched forth upon a rambling talk about himself. He had come to Mexico, several years before, to manage a rubber-planting enterprise, and the “dirty dagoes” had done him out of his last cent. Soon he proposed having a drink with his compatriot, “in honor of the greatest country in God’s world.” When Brainard refused, saying that he was tired and was going to bed, the American shambled along by his side through the corridors.

Judging that his fellow countryman was a harmless dead-beat, Brainard put his hand into his pocket, and drew forth a bill, as the easiest way of ridding himself of an unwelcome companion. At sight of the money, the man’s eyes filled with tears. Taking his benefactor’s arm, he poured forth a flood of personal confession and thanks that lasted until they were at the door of Brainard’s room.

“Let me come in and talk to you a minute,” the stranger begged. “Ain’t often I see a decent man from God’s country, and I get lonely down here,” he whimpered.“All right,” Brainard replied reluctantly, wondering how he could rid himself of the fellow.

When he turned on the electric light, the stranger’s eyes roamed carelessly over the room. It seemed to Brainard that his guest exhibited much more keenness than his forlorn and lachrymose state warranted.

As Brainard turned to the wardrobe to fetch a box of cigars, he caught the man’s eyes fastened on the valise which was shoved under the bed. Brainard gave him a cigar, but did not invite him to sit down, and after a little while he left, thanking Brainard profusely for his hospitality. As he went out of the door, his eyes rested once more on the bag beneath the bed.

After his visitor had left, Brainard prepared to undress. First he placed his watch and pocketbook on the night table. Over them he laid his revolver, which he had purchased in his wanderings, and, under Gunnison’s directions, had learned to use. Now that he was outside the States, whoever might dispute with him the possession of Krutzmacht’s property would have to make good his demands. He had lost every trace of that nervous fear which had made miserable the day after his departure from San Francisco.

Before turning out his light, he glanced into the courtyard, and caught sight of his recent acquaintance skulking behind a pillar. For several minutes Brainard stood behind his curtain, looking into the courtyard, and in all this time the man did not move from his post.

There was no reason, Brainard said to himself, why this dead-beat should not spend the night in the courtyard of the Hotel Iturbide. Turning out the light, he got into bed; but he could not sleep, and presently he rose and peered cautiously out into the dark. The courtyard, faintly lighted by the lamps in the office, was empty. This disturbed him rather more than the skulking presence of the American, although he could give no reason for his suspicion beyond the stranger’s apparent interest in his valise.

He got back into bed, but not to sleep. After tossing restlessly for another hour, he rose and dressed. As soon as the first light appeared, he took his bag and groped his way through the dark corridors to the office. He inquired of the night porter about trains and found that there was an early morning train to the North. Saying that he had had a bad night and thought he would go to the railroad station and wait there for the train, he paid his bill, not forgetting to add a good tip. The man offered to get him a cab, but he refused, saying that he could easily pick up one in the street. As the porter who had been roused to something like animation by his pour boire unbarred the great door, Brainard asked him casually:

“Do you know that Gringo who was talking to me last evening—the one who was hanging about here all the evening?”

“No, seÑor,” the man replied. “He’s been in and out at the hotel for a week. Just come from the States, and lost all his money at cards so soon. A bad lot!” with a final shrug of the shoulders.

“He told me he had been here several years!” Brainard exclaimed.

“No, seÑor, that cannot be. He knows no Spanish. Probably he wished money from you to go back to the States.”

“Very likely—well, he didn’t get much!”

After a short walk Brainard came out upon the plaza in front of the cathedral. The cracked bells of that great edifice were clanging inharmoniously for the early mass. Already country people had arrived with market produce, and there was considerable stir in the beautiful May morning. Brainard walked about the plaza until he found an old, muddy diligence drawn by four little mules that was about to start for some village of an unpronounceable Indian name. Brainard took a place inside and waited for it to fill with passengers. At last the driver climbed into his perch, and the diligence rattled off through the square over the stone streets just as the sun was rising into a clear sky. A regiment of rurales came galloping down the narrow street, with its band playing a lively air. The diligence pulled to one side, then turned off towards the west, and soon it was out in the flowering fields of the great plateau. As he left the city pavements, Brainard smiled to himself at the disappointment his acquaintance of the night before might be having at the railroad station. Of course, he might be nothing worse than a stranded dead-beat anxious to sponge a few dollars from a good-natured compatriot who appeared to be in funds.

But Brainard would take no chances! If the contents of his battered valise were as valuable as he thought they must be, the persons interested in securing them would spare no effort or expense in tracking him. Although he had grown brown from the sun and much stouter and had discarded his spectacles, still it would not be difficult for a good detective to identify him from a description furnished by the stenographer.

And if this fellow were really after him, it was not likely that he was alone. So it was important that he should find some small place where he could spend the remaining days before the departure of the French line boat. It was a pity that the diligence he had chosen at random should apparently be making in the opposite direction from Vera Cruz. But the morning was too brilliant, and Brainard’s nerves were too sound to let anything worry him. Thus, with the few words of Spanish which he had acquired while he was with old Gunnison, he launched himself again gayly upon the unknown in Mexico.

“The world is full of ways,” he said to himself. “All you have to do is to take one!”

XIII

If there was a spot on the round earth where a somewhat weary fugitive might spend a few quiet days in absolute retirement, undisturbed by inquisitive intruders, it must surely be the little Mexican town of Jalapa. Situated on a gentle hill not far from the snowy dome of Orizaba, about midway between the hot coast and the lofty central plateau, Jalapa is a mass of green verdure and possesses a delightful climate. All about on the slopes of Orizaba and in the green valleys are extensive coffee plantations, watered by delightful streams. Everywhere great umbrageous trees, tropical in their luxuriance, shade the approaches to the old town. Jalapa itself consists of a few streets of white buildings with irregular tile roofs, a squat cathedral of the Spanish-American type, fertile green gardens carefully walled in, and of course a plaza, which at this season of the year was abloom with fragrant lilies.

To Brainard, after a week of circuitous wandering through Mexican villages, sleeping and eating in filthy places, it seemed a veritable oasis. As the mule cart in which he had completed the last part of his erratic journey slowly dragged him up the shady hill, he had visions of a good bath and a day or two of complete idleness before moving on to Vera Cruz, to take the boat for Havre. His clothes sadly needed attention, and he was uncomfortably aware that in addition to a useful acquaintance with the Spanish language he had also acquired a miscellaneous assortment of vermin from his recent wandering. The somnolent streets in the hot May afternoon were nearly deserted, so that his arrival in the town aroused little attention. As the mule cart drew up in the courtyard of a clean-looking hotel next to the cathedral and opposite the pretty plaza, he congratulated himself thoroughly on his luck. Having seen his bag deposited carefully in one of the enormous bedrooms that faced the plaza, and accomplished the desired bath, he descended to the patio on an exploring expedition. Near the trickling fountain in the center of the patio a well-dressed man was seated, reading a book. Brainard instinctively felt that he must be an American from the appearance of his clothes, although his face was hidden by the book. On the small iron table by his side an iced drink was standing. The stranger reached for this and dropped his book long enough to perceive Brainard.“Hello!” he said calmly, “when did you arrive?”

Brainard recognized the fight-trust magnate whom he had met on the Overland Limited.

“You here too!” he exclaimed. “What brings you down here?”

Hollinger sipped his drink and eyed the young man as though to say,—“we don’t ask that sort of question in these parts—it is very crude of you.”

“Oh, business and pleasure,—that combination which carries us mortals most everywhere,” he observed and with a slight stress added,—“the same I judge that brought you to Mexico.”

“Exactly,” Brainard laughed. “I can’t say how much is business and how much pleasure.”

“And possibly a dash of—something else?” Hollinger suggested genially. “Well, let’s have another drink on it. Mozo! . . . A southern gentleman who resides in Jalapa has taught these people how to make his favorite form of booze. It is cooled by snow brought from the mountains on mule back—and is very refreshing.”

When the waiter had brought two high glasses filled with the crystal flakes of snow, the fight-trust magnate grew more expansive.

“Yes, shortly after I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance I found the climate of California uncongenial to my nerves, for the first time in my life, and having business interests in Mexico I took a little vacation. Delightful time of the year here, don’t you think?”

Brainard agreed enthusiastically.

“You didn’t make a long stay with us on the Coast,” Hollinger remarked, with the shadow of a smile. Brainard knew that the fight-trust man suspected his story, but judged it wiser to avoid personal confidences. For this reason he refrained from inquiring whether the American’s business had to do with some notable encounter that was to be staged in Mexico in order to avoid the laws in the States. Hollinger’s next remark seemed to indicate that such was his “business interest” in this country.

“We are apt to look down upon Mexico,” he said sententiously. “But it is a great country. We say that it is not civilized. That is just why it is a great country. It is not civilized in our peculiar, narrow way, and hence we deny that it has any civilization.”

“It certainly has fleas,” Brainard threw in flippantly.

“Exactly, young man—it has fleas and therefore you think it is barbarous. You have been brought up among a people that regards cleanliness as above godliness and the other fellow’s godliness of more importance than his own! That is what is called Puritanism. You understand me?”

Brainard nodded. He began to comprehend the results of Hollinger’s reading on the Overland.

“Now,” continued Hollinger, clearing his throat, “I have nothing to say against Puritanism. It’s a very good thing for some people. It did some mighty fine work in the world.”

“Discovered Plymouth Rock, for instance.”

“Yes, and created the nicest lot of little hypocritical tight-wads there in New England the world has ever seen. We needed those tight-wads out west—we needed their bank accounts, I mean to say. But we don’t need ’em any longer, only they can’t understand it and keep shoving their morals in our faces. That’s the trouble with America all over at the present date. Puritanism breaks out here, there, and everywhere, like the measles. And it always means trying to make the other feller as good as you think he oughter be—and a damn sight better than you are yourself!”

He paused to send for another drink. Brainard wondered what the august author of the great epic would have thought of this twentieth century criticism of his theory.

“Now Mexico is free from all that sort of cant, and that is why I said Mexico was destined to be a great country. In Mexico they let the individual alone. You see, the Church is supposed to look after the morals of the community. That is a great relief—it simplifies life and makes it much more honest. The Church does the best it can, and the State helps it out when necessary. But the Church don’t expect too much, the Catholic Church I mean, of human beings, and so it isn’t disappointed. It all works beautifully! You’ll never find in Mexico such a fool performance as that going on in San Francisco to-day. They’re no puritans in California either. They don’t want reform—they don’t want to shut up the cafÉs and French restaurants and prevent the city council from getting its little rakeoff—not a bit of it! It’s only this puritan bug has got hold of some ‘better than thous’ among us, and they are raising hell.”

He paused to finish his drink and wipe his brow.

“It always heats me to think,” he explained. “But I was saying that for this reason Mexico has a great part to play in the future. For one thing, it furnishes us Americans a possible place to live in when our own country has one of these righteous attacks and is cleaning house. Lovely country, lovely climate, lovely people—if you know how to handle ’em right. No, sir, I hope they’ll never civilize Mexico in my time any more than it is civilized at present. The natural man needs a country, and Mexico is his country. . . . Come on—let’s have a look at the town. The band will be playing in the square a little later, and you will see some of the prettiest girls you ever saw in your life.”

The fight-trust man lighted another cigar, put on his panama hat, and tucked an arm under Brainard’s elbow, and thus they sallied forth to explore Jalapa. Brainard might not agree with his friend’s anti-puritanism, but he heartily agreed with his praise of Mexico. At this gentle hour of the late afternoon soft rosy clouds hovered about the white head of old Orizaba. The gardens, glimpses of which might be caught through iron-barred gates, were fragrant with flowering trees, in which the birds sang madly. After a short ramble about the outskirts of the town, they returned to the plaza, which was now fairly filled with men and women and children, gathered to hear the military band and to enjoy the fragrant coolness of the dying day. Many of the brown peon girls were pretty, and the Spanish women, pallid and black-haired, with white mantillas, quite fascinated the young American. A fountain shot a lively jet of water into the sunlight. The great white lilies drooped their golden chalices under shining leaves. The band of Indians at the other end of the square played operatic music that came through the soft air languorously in harmony with the atmosphere.

“Where in America, the land of the puritan, can you get so much for your money?” Hollinger demanded. “It is only in the lands of license that the people delight in innocent things.”

He flung a copper coin to a beggar woman, who crossed herself and blessed him.

“It is even pleasant to give to the beggars, instead of subscribing to an orphan asylum! We make virtue so dull and inhuman.” . . .

As they strolled towards the hotel for dinner, they were joined by a tall, lean, lank fellow countryman, whom Hollinger introduced to Brainard as Major Calloway,—“from Alabama, superintendent of the Jalapa-Vera Cruz branch of the railroad.” The three dined together in the patio with a young German, who was the agent for a firm of coffee merchants in Hamburg. They had an extraordinary Mexican dinner, consisting of the most fiery condiments that Brainard had ever put into his mouth. His eyes were constantly watering, and he drank quantities of water, much to the amusement of the others, who swallowed the pungent food with relish. They sat for a long time over their coffee and some very black cigars that Calloway produced, listening to the stories the Southerner told. It seemed that he had been in the country forty years, in fact ever since the close of the Civil War, in which Calloway had gained his title. Until recently the railroad had been but a mule tramway and Jalapa not even a “spot on the map.” He regarded it now as a metropolis. Mexico according to this old resident was hopelessly tame and civilized under the firm rule of Diaz and the influx of money-making Americans and Germans. “You should have seen it in the old days when a man could live as he liked. Why, they have even got extradition laws for most things now,” he complained.

“But they don’t use ’em,” the fight-trust man put in suavely.

Listening to the regrets expressed by the railroad manager, Brainard perceived that the perfect era of freedom and joy was always somewhat removed from the present time and place. Calloway was most friendly to the young American.

“I’ll show your young friend one of the old-time places to-morrow. It isn’t far from here—just a pleasant ride of a couple of hours.”

So a party was arranged for the early morning, and then Brainard excused himself because of his fatigue, while the others went out to a cafÉ for the rest of the evening.

Before sinking into his clean, inviting bed Brainard stepped to the balcony to look once more at the snowy crown of Orizaba that shone softly in the starlight across the valley. The plaza and the street beneath the balcony were deserted except for an occasional figure that slouched along, covered even to the head with a long cloak. At the next corner he saw a young man leaning against the window of a house, talking to some one within, doing his courting in the manner of the country. A sharp call rose into the night from the distance, answered by another, and then all was silence. From the plaza across the street came the sweet scent of lilies. It was the rich, languorous night of the semitropics, full of perfume and mystery,—romance for youth,—a bit crude, perhaps, and elementary, but appealing to every sense.

Brainard sank asleep to dream of a land of enchantment, full of hidden gardens, the sound of swaying trees and falling water, the scent of lilies, the sweet glances of dark women.

XIV

Very early the next morning after the usual deep cup of chocolate Brainard joined Hollinger and Major Calloway, and the little party set forth on horseback. They rode through the silent town, between high walls jealously guarding the privacy of large gardens, out into the fields which were drenched with a heavy dew like rain. The birds sang in the arching trees above the road. The sun came up from a golden mist in the lowlands below and touched the hoary crest of Orizaba. Brainard had never seen such an incarnation of spring upon the earth as this glorious May morning, and his heart sang joyously, free of care, forgetful of the burden of his heavy bag and all the coil of events that had brought him hither. Like a schoolboy he was resolved to have his holiday. The lively chestnut horse with which Calloway had mounted him danced mincingly, chafing at the heavy bit. The magnate of the fight trust in a short jacket and leather breeches, a broad straw sombrero on his head, a long black cigar in his mouth, had the appearance of a bull fighter on parade. He too seemed gay in mood, and called Brainard’s attention to the richness of the land, the varied specimens of tropical trees beneath which they rode, the beauty of the landscape, always dominated by the symmetrical snow-crowned mountain. Calloway and the German took the expedition more phlegmatically, discussing the prospects of the new coffee yield.

From the shaded hill road they emerged upon a fertile valley where the peons were already at work in the fields. And they also began to meet the country population moving towards Jalapa for the weekly fair. Hollinger, who seemed to have a fair command of Spanish, joked with men and women along the road.

“You couldn’t do that in the States!” he remarked to Brainard. “They’d just give you a couple of sour looks and vote for no license.” . . .

The little party rode up to the HaÇienda di Rosas in time for the second breakfast. The old Englishman seemed delighted to welcome Calloway’s friends and presented them to his placid Mexican wife and his two daughters. The younger of these fell to Brainard at the breakfast, which was served in the cool patio shaded by a thick canopy of rose vines. SeÑorita Marie was very small, very pretty, and very naÏve,—just home from a convent near Madrid, she told the young American. She spoke English daintily, mixed occasionally with French and Spanish phrases and some very modern American slang whose meaning she seemed scarcely to understand. She was so unlike the few American girls that Brainard had known, so little able “to look out for herself” as they were, so appealing with shy glances from her black eyes, that from the first moment he scarce remembered where he was or heard the conversation at the other end of the table. She was exquisitely small and dainty, like one of those Spanish beauties by Goya that Brainard had seen in the Metropolitan Museum. Her black hair was drawn close about her delicate head, concealing her ears and setting off the fairness of her skin, which had an underglow of faint rose. Her voice was a murmur and a whisper, at times like broken bird notes, as if meant for one ear alone. They talked of the nothings that mean much to youth. She told him of her life in the convent, her one winter in the City of Mexico with its formal parties, her brother studying to be an engineer in a New York school.

After the siesta they went into the plantation, and Brainard lingered while the others drifted on discussing the culture of coffee and its future. SeÑorita Marie showed him her favorite walk with a view of Orizaba across the valley, told him that her favorite poet was Tennyson, the flower she loved best was the rose, the time of the year spring, the time of the day twilight. And she asked him if he had brothers and sisters and was a good Catholic. The time might come, and shortly perhaps, when the childishness of this little mind would be apparent to Brainard, but on this heavenly May afternoon with the birds singing in the thickets and lazy white clouds floating across the snowy summit of the volcano, their talk seemed quite wonderful and the girl herself the most exquisite and adorable creature he had ever known.

“American girls do not talk like that, no?” she murmured, appealing to him.

“No, they don’t!”

“Ah, but you see it’s different down here—we have only little things to think about, we women, all day long.”

“It is very pleasant down here,” the young American sighed.

“You like it?” she responded eagerly. “But you would not like it for always. . . . You American men are like that. You come to see the plantation and drink coffee and talk—maybe you flirt a little, no?—and then you ride away and say you will write. But you never write, and you never come back!”

“I shall write, and I shall come back.”The small lady shook her head with a demure smile. They returned slowly through the fields. Yes, this girl was utterly different from the women of his own race, and her difference appealed to him. She seemed, even in her simplicity, more womanly, more as women were meant to be, the protected and the adored. His imagination built up a pretty picture of a dreamy existence in a beautiful country with such a trusting, simple, lovable creature as companion.

“Why do you go away so soon?” she demanded as they neared the house.

“I must take the boat for Europe,” he replied.

“There will be another boat in a month.”

“Would you like me to stay?”

“Of course! Don’t you know that?” . . . Calloway and Hollinger were already on horse-back in the courtyard, about to start without him.

“Are you coming with us?” the fight-trust man asked with an ironical smile.

The Englishman and his wife gave the young stranger a cordial invitation to remain and make a long visit. Brainard was about to accept when he remembered his bag left unguarded in the hotel room.

“I shall have to return to the hotel for to-night,” he said reluctantly.“Well, I’ll drive over for you and your luggage to-morrow,” the Englishman insisted cordially.

And SeÑorita Marie whispered demurely, “Au revoir—there’s another steamer—in a month!”

So Brainard rode off with the others, very much pleased with himself and life, lightly putting aside his settled purpose of taking the Toulouse two days hence. What urgent reason for haste, when life was so full of promise and of beauty? Another month would do as well for Krutzmacht’s business. . . .

“You didn’t see much of the plantation,” the Southerner drawled to Brainard as the young man’s horse drew up abreast.

“He saw a great deal of something more to his liking,” Hollinger observed, a little ironical smile on his lips.

“I had a very good day,” Brainard responded simply, wishing to avoid further reference to the girl.

The daylight quickly faded, and before they reached the hill on which Jalapa lies, the moon was up, flooding the valley and the mountains. Calloway became confidential, and for the first time told the full story of their recent host. Years before, the Englishman had arrived in Mexico and bought this plantation. He was a young man then and single. He never went home. It seems that he had absconded from a shipping firm in Liverpool where he was employed and had taken ten thousand pounds. Later he married a Mexican woman of good family and had prospered.

“But he never leaves the country. The woman and the girls go—the son is being educated in the States—but the old man has never been beyond the line.”

“It must be hard on them—the girls,” Brainard said.

“What do they care? Harlow is rich and respected in this country. The women are Mexican, though the girls have been well educated. It was a long time ago when he took the money, and as you see he lives like a perfect gentleman with his own wife and family. There are a good many citizens here who have better antecedents than Harlow and aren’t as respectable.”

He looked suddenly at Brainard. The young man did not reply. He was thinking that even if the Englishman had been a thief, there was no reason why he should not like the daughter,—yes, and visit the HaÇienda di Rosas, if he so desired! He supposed that Calloway had told him Harlow’s story for a purpose.

“After you have lived here awhile,” the Southerner continued, “you don’t ask questions about newcomers, so long as they play fair and don’t try to borrow money of you. Live and let live—that’s a good motto, young man. You never can tell when you will need the same charity for yourself that you hand out to another fellow!”

That philosophy seemed a bit specious, and Brainard felt an instinctive repugnance to the morals of his new acquaintances. He suspected that the Southerner might have his own story, which would explain why he was living a lonely old age so far from his native Alabama. Hollinger added nothing to the conversation. It was a somewhat delicate subject with him also. But all the young man’s chivalry rose in behalf of the little Mexican girl. This was the reason why young Americans never wrote and never came back! Well, he would show her that there was one who had the courage to forget that her father was an embezzler.

When they reached the hotel Calloway said good night and went to his room. Brainard was about to follow him when Hollinger yawningly suggested having a drink of pulque.

“Ever tried it? It’s not so bad; like the sort of yeast mother used to make out of potatoes,” and as Brainard demurred, he said more urgently, “Oh, come on! If you’re going to live on a Mexican haÇienda, better get acquainted with the national drink—though that was pretty good claret the Englishman put up.”

They went across the way to a cafÉ that was still open and ordered pulque. Brainard, after tasting the sirupy, yeasty stuff put his glass down with a grimace. Hollinger drained his and ordered another.

“All you have to do with most things is to get used to ’em. The question is,” he added, looking meaningly at Brainard, “whether you want to get used to ’em! . . . Young man,” he remarked, as they turned back to the hotel, “I don’t want to butt into your business—I am not that kind. I don’t know whether you are traveling for your health, the same as I am, or for some other fellow’s health. But, in any case,—” here his voice became quietly emphatic, “all is, if you’ve got a job to do, do it! Whether it’s cracking a safe or running a city mission, my young friend, go at it and finish with it.”

Brainard threw up his head with all the haughtiness of the young man who considers that he has thus far done very well without outside assistance.

“Just cut out any woman business until the job’s done,” Hollinger continued. “Women are likely to upset most business—they distract the mind, you know. Pardon me for calling your attention to the fact that you seem still young and somewhat inexperienced in life, in spite of your achievements. Have you fully made up your mind to join the exiles down here for good and all? Better think it over first far away from the seÑorita’s eyes, out at sea. . . . Well, here endeth the first lesson, and good night, and pleasant dreams!”

“Good night!” Brainard replied stuffily.

The porter handed them both candles, and by way of ingratiating himself with his generous patrons announced that two more gringos had arrived late that afternoon. Brainard, who was smarting under the fight-trust magnate’s moral advice, paid little attention to the servant’s chatter and went directly to his room. He undressed slowly, thinking of the charming girl at the HaÇienda di Rosas and the happy day he had spent with her. Hollinger’s frank warning to get to his “job” and let women alone rankled all the more because he felt the good sense of it. But something within him tempted him to rebel at good sense. He was young, and he had been through a series of strenuous weeks, living a lonely, rough life. There seemed nothing unpardonably weak in allowing himself a bit of good time here in this lovely place. Of course Hollinger’s idea that he would straightway marry the embezzler’s daughter and settle down in Jalapa for life was needlessly exaggerated. Probably there would be another steamer in less than a month. And so forth, as youth under such circumstances reasons with itself!

Continuing this debate he went out to the balcony for a last look at the beautiful moonlight night. He lingered there, charmed by the stillness of the deserted streets, by the soft scented air, by the beauty of the white peak towering into the southern heavens. The pleasant murmur of the girl’s voice sounded in his ears. He was not in love, he said to himself,—that would be quite ridiculous! But he was, without knowing it, in a state where a young man soon thinks himself into love.

All his experience since leaving New York led up, as a matter of fact, to this very state. SeÑorita Marie need not be so extraordinarily fascinating, nor Jalapa so wonderfully picturesque, to set the stage for the eternal drama. He was just repeating to himself one of the girl’s naÏve remarks when he became conscious of low voices above him. English was being spoken, and by a woman. He remembered what the porter had said about new arrivals at the hotel, and strained his ears to hear what was said. But the speaker was evidently seated within the room overhead, and her voice was too low to reach out and down with any distinctness. There was something in the timbre of it, or the accent, that seemed to Brainard familiar,—perhaps nothing more than its Americanism. A man’s voice, rather guttural and entirely unfamiliar, broke in on the woman’s speech. The man must be standing nearer the balcony, for Brainard could hear distinctly what he said.

“I don’t see how Mossy let him slip through his fingers in Mexico City, do you?”

An unintelligible answer came from within the room.

“Anyway, it was clear luck our stopping off here to send that wire.”

And then suddenly in perfectly distinct though low tones came the sentence:

“You didn’t see the grip?”

Brainard knew that voice! The pert, crisp twist to the words might resemble a thousand other stenographers in style, but he knew only one that hissed her final words slightly. He held his breath and listened. The woman came out on the balcony, and Brainard noiselessly glided back into the shadow of his dark room. He had seen the profile of the figure above and knew beyond doubt that she was Krutzmacht’s former stenographer. The man said:

“I wish I knew which way he meant to jump next. He’s just fool enough to go back North.”

“We’ll get him, either way,” the woman replied with a snap and retreated into the room, closing the French window.

XV

Brainard stood without moving until his muscles ached. Then he dropped to the floor, crawled over to the bed, and felt beneath the bolster, where he had taken the precaution to conceal his bag when he had left that morning. It was still there. The room had been casually searched, or possibly his pursuers had only just arrived by a delayed train.

At any rate, he had until the next morning. The woman and her companion would not be likely to make a disturbance that night, feeling that they had him and his plunder safe within grasp. They knew as well as he that all escape from Jalapa was impossible before the early morning train for the North. It must be said that from the moment Brainard first heard the stenographer’s voice, every thought of SeÑorita Marie and of the HaÇienda di Rosas dropped from his mind. Danger was a panacea for the early symptoms of love!

While he thought, Brainard took off his shoes, tied them together by the laces, and slung them around his neck, as he had done as a boy, when he wished to make an early escape from the parental house. Then, placing his precious bag on his shoulders, he crept inch by inch toward the open window. It was hazardous, but it was his only chance. He was morally certain that he could not enter the hall without making sufficient noise to attract attention.

When he reached the balcony, he listened. Not hearing any sound from the next room, he stepped out into the moonlight, and walked as rapidly as he could along the open balcony to the corner of the building, and around to the other side. He knew that the fight-trust man’s room was somewhere in the rear wing, and his plan was to make an exit through his room. But the balcony did not extend to this wing, and he was brought to a halt. He looked over the rail to the street, thinking to drop his bag and follow it as best he could. It was a good fifteen feet from the balcony to the hard pavement beneath. As Brainard debated the chances of breaking a leg, he saw approaching the spot the figure of a night officer on his rounds. Instinctively he drew back, felt for the nearest window, and pushed it open. He prayed that it might be an empty room; but he was no sooner within than he heard the loud snoring of a man.

Perplexed, Brainard listened for a few moments, then quietly crossed to the bed. Feeling about over the night table, he secured the pistol that he suspected might lie there, then boldly struck a match. With a snort, the sleeper sat bolt upright. Luckily it was Calloway, the manager of the railroad. Brainard whispered tensely:

“It’s all right, but don’t speak! There’s your gun—only don’t shoot!”

“What’s the matter?” the Southerner demanded coolly, now wide awake.

“You said,” Brainard whispered, “that there was always a time when a man might need charity. Well, I want your help. I have a bag here that contains valuable papers belonging to some other person. I’m trying to get them to a safe place, as I was told to. I haven’t stolen anything, you understand, but of course you won’t believe that. I’ve been followed here by some enemies of the man who owned the stuff. They’d kill me as quickly as they would a fly to get possession of this bag. If they can’t murder me, and take it that way, they will probably put me in prison to-morrow and keep me there. I must get out of town to-night!”

“You can’t do that before to-morrow morning,” the Southerner replied, yawning, as if he wished Brainard would take himself off to bed and let him alone.

“I must get out of this hotel now, to-night, and away from Jalapa, and not have a soul know where I’ve gone. I’ll pay you well for your trouble!”

“Keep your money, my son,” the man answered gruffly. “It wasn’t for that I had to come down here. But I’ll help you out, if you are in trouble.”

He reflected yawningly for a few moments, while Brainard held his breath with impatience. For all he knew, the man and the woman might already have entered his room and discovered his flight.

“If it were daylight, it would be different, but you know I couldn’t start a train out of here at this time without the whole town knowing about it; and I reckon that isn’t what you want.”

“Not much!”

“Can’t you bunk here with me until morning? Then Hollinger and I can fix up something.”

Brainard shook his head.

“I’d run you down myself in an engine to the coast—”

“That’s it!”

“But there isn’t an engine that can turn a wheel in the place. The first train comes up in the morning.”

“I might get a horse and go over to the haÇienda,” Brainard suggested.

The Southerner scratched his sleepy head for a while.“You might,” he admitted. “But that wouldn’t put you out of your trouble and might put other folks into danger. You want to lose these urgent friends of yours for good.”

“That’s so.”

“Got some nerve?”

“Enough to capture this stuff from a court and tote it ’cross country from Frisco!” He patted his valise.

“Come on, then!”

The Southerner drew on his trousers and boots. As Brainard turned impatiently toward the door, he said:

“Not that way!”

He pulled back a hanging at the foot of his bed, revealing a little wooden door, which he opened, and, candle in hand, led the way through a close, dusty passage. After making several turns, they descended a flight of narrow stairs, and Brainard’s guide pushed open a door at the bottom. The musty odor of old incense told him that they had entered a church, and the wavering candle-light partially revealed the statues of the saints and the altars of the chapels.

“The cathedral,” the Southerner remarked, and added, “Convenient sometimes!”

Brainard followed him closely across the nave of the church to a door, which Calloway unbolted after some fumbling. They emerged upon a narrow lane with blank walls on either side.

“That hotel used to be the bishop’s palace,” the Southerner explained. “It’s a pretty handy place to get out of on the quiet, if you know the way!”

It was only a short distance to the railroad terminal. Calloway walked rapidly and noiselessly on the toes of his boots, and kept to the dark side of the lane. They entered the yards beyond the station building, and went to the farther end, where several tracks were occupied by antiquated coaches that looked like a cross between open street cars and English third-class railway carriages.

“We used these rattletraps before they changed the line to steam. It took six mules to haul one of ’em up from the junction of the Mexico and Vera Cruz road; but they can go down flying! It’s down grade all the way for nearly forty miles. They are rather wabbly now, but if you get one with a good brake, it will last the trip.”

He tried several of the old cars, and finally selected one with a brake that worked to his satisfaction. Together they could just start it, and they pushed it out to the main track. Brainard threw his valise aboard, and took his post, as the railroad man directed him, at the handbrake.“I’ll open the gate for you, and set the switch; then it’s clear sailing. Go slow until you learn the trick, then let her sail. There’s a bad curve about seven miles out, and a couple of miles farther on you’ll find a considerable hill and some up grade. You must let her slide down the hill for all she can do, and take the grade on her own momentum. If you don’t, you may get stuck. I can’t think of anything else. You’ll roll down to the junction in a couple of hours, as pretty as coasting, if that confounded peon hasn’t left the switch open at Cavallo. If he has, you’ll just have to jump for it, and foot it down through the chaparral, if you haven’t broken your neck. Needn’t bother to return the car,” he chuckled. “Is there anything else I can do for you, young man?”

“You’ve got me out of a tight hole,” Brainard replied warmly, “and I can’t begin to thank you for it. I hope I shall see you up North some day, and be able to do something for you!”

“It isn’t likely we’ll meet in the States. They don’t want me up there!” the Southerner answered slowly. “But perhaps, sometime, you’ll be able to help a poor fellow out of his hole in the same way.”

“That woman may strike the scent, and come hot-foot to Vera Cruz by the first train. Well, I’ll have to take my chances there before the boat sails.”

“Leave her to me and Hollinger. We’ll give her a tip that you have gone North.” Calloway laughed. “If she won’t take it, there are other ways of stopping her activity. There’s a good deal of smallpox hereabouts, you know, and if the mayor suspected these gringos had the disease, he’d chuck ’em into the pesthouse. Don Salvador does pretty much what I tell him—and the hotel-keeper, too. I think we can keep your friends quiet.”

“Get me twelve hours, if you can! And tell Hollinger I’m on the job again.”

The two men shook hands; Calloway pushed back the great gate; and the car slid down the track out into the warm, black night, groaning to itself asthmatically as it gathered impetus.

XVI

The Transatlantique line steamer Toulouse lay off the breakwater of Vera Cruz, smoking fiercely, anchor up, passengers all aboard, ready to sail for Havre. Her departure had been delayed nearly eighteen hours by a fierce “norther,” which had not yet exhausted its fury. They had been anxious hours for Brainard, who had gone aboard the night before, in the expectation of sailing immediately. Now the black smoke pouring from the funnel indicated that the captain had decided to proceed, and Brainard’s spirits rose.

Nothing had been seen or heard of the stenographer and her companion. Either they had lost the trail, or his friends at Jalapa had succeeded in holding them there for almost two days, and had kept them away from the telegraph, too.

Brainard was about to leave the deck, where he had been anxiously watching the land, when his attention was caught by a small launch that was rounding the end of the pier and heading for the steamer. His hands tightened on the rail; he suspected what that launch might contain. He noted that the steamer was moving slowly. Would the captain wait?

The Toulouse had swung around; her nose pointed out into the Gulf of Mexico, and her screw revolved at quarter speed. The launch approached rapidly, and signaled the steamer to wait. Brainard could see the smart French captain, on the bridge above, examining the small boat through glasses. He himself could detect two figures in the bow, waving a flag, and he smiled grimly at the comedy about to take place at his expense.

The screw ceased to revolve. As the launch came within hailing distance, there was an animated colloquy in French between the officers on the bridge of the Toulouse and the man in charge of the launch.

“Some late passengers,” remarked the third officer, who was standing beside Brainard. “A woman, too!”

Apparently neither the stenographer—for now he could recognize the young woman—nor her companion, a stout, middle-aged, red-cheeked American, understood the French language. They kept gesticulating and pointing to Brainard, whom they had discovered on the deck. The captain of the launch translated their remarks, and threw in some explanations of his own. The officers from the bridge of the Toulouse fired back vigorous volleys of questions. It was an uproar!

Brainard, in spite of his predicament, burst into laughter over the frantic endeavors of the two Americans to make themselves understood. The captain tried his English, but with poor results. Finally, with a gesture of disgust, he yanked the bell rope. Brainard could hear the gong sound in the engine room beneath for full speed. The Toulouse would not wait.

The steamer began to gather speed, the launch to fall behind, while the woman at the bow shrieked and pointed to Brainard. The captain of the Toulouse merely shrugged his shoulders and walked to the other side of his vessel.

“Some friends of yours?” the third officer said to Brainard, with a grin, as the little launch fell into their wake and finally turned back toward the inner harbor. “The lady seemed anxious to join you—might be a wife, non?”

Apparently he knew enough English to enable him to conjecture what the two Americans wanted. If, thought Brainard, the captain had known as much English as his third officer, it might not have gone so happily for him!

“The lady isn’t exactly my wife,” Brainard replied, with a laugh; “not yet!”

“Ah!” the Frenchman said, with a meaning smile. “What you in the States call a breach of the promise?”

“Exactly!” Brainard replied hastily, glad to accept such a credible fiction.

“She seems sorry to let you make the journey alone, eh?”

“Rather!”

The story circulated on the ship that evening, and gave Brainard a jocular notoriety in the smoking room among the German and French business men, who composed most of the Toulouse’s first-cabin list. It was forgotten, however, before he emerged from his cabin, to which the remains of the “norther” had quickly driven him. By this time—it was the fourth day out—the Toulouse was in the grasp of the Gulf Stream, lazily plowing her twelve knots an hour into the North Atlantic, and the passengers were betting their francs on the probable day of arrival at Havre.

That evening, at dinner, Brainard ordered a bottle of champagne, and murmured, as he raised the glass to his lips:

“Here’s to Melody—whoever and whatever and wherever she may be!”

His youthful fancy, warmed by the wine, played again with the idea of an unknown mistress for whom he was bound across the seas with her fortune in his grip. With the insistence of youth, he had made up his mind that Melody must be a woman—what else could she be? He always saw her as a young woman, charming, beautiful, of course, and free!

And yet she might well be some aged relative of Krutzmacht, or a fair friend of his youth, to whom, in the moment of decision allowed him, he had desired to leave his fortune; or some unrecognized wife, to whom, at the threshold of death, he thought to do tardy justice.

“An old hag, perhaps!” the young man murmured with a grimace. “We’ll see—over there!”

But his buoyant fancy refused to vision this elusive Melody as other than young and beautiful. And he gave her the attractive shape and personality of SeÑorita Marie. He began to think of her as living in some obscure corner of the great world, waiting to be dowered with the fortune that he had bravely rescued for her.

When Brainard felt that his stomach and his sea legs were both impeccable, he descended to his cabin, bolted the door, pulled the shade carefully over the porthole, pinned newspapers above the wooden partitions, and proceeded to make a leisurely examination of the valise. It was the first safe moment that he had had to go through the contents of the bag thoroughly; and when the key sank into the lock, his curiosity was whetted to a fine edge.

He had already made a careful count of the notes and gold left after his devious journey to Vera Cruz. The sum was eight thousand dollars and some hundreds. This he had entered on a blank leaf in a little diary, under the heading “Melody, Cr.” On the opposite page he had put down all the sums that he remembered to have spent since leaving New York, even to his cigarettes and the bottle of champagne which he had drunk in honor of his unknown mistress.

“Here goes!” he said at last. “Let’s see what Melody’s pile is, anyway.”

It took the best part of the night to examine thoroughly what the bag held. Even after he had gone over every piece, Brainard, untrained in business matters, could but guess at the full importance of his haul. There were contracts and deeds and leases relating to a network of corporations, of which the most important, apparently, was the Pacific Northern Railway.

Despairing of understanding the full value of these documents without some clew, Brainard contented himself with making a careful inventory of them. The meat of the lot, he judged, lay in certain bundles of neatly engraved five-per-cent bonds of the Pacific Northern, together with a number of certificates of stock in the Shasta Company. In all, as he calculated, there were eight millions of bonds and fifteen millions, par value, of stock.

“Melody doesn’t look to me to be a poor lady,” Brainard muttered, bundling up the bonds and stock, and packing them carefully away at the bottom of the valise. “They are welcome to the rest, if they’ll let me off with these pretty things!”

What was more, he had come across the name of Schneider Brothers, bankers, Berlin, on the letterhead of several communications, indicating that they had been the dead man’s foreign fiscal agents. That would be of use to him, he noted, as he wrote the name in his little diary. Then he went on deck, lighted a long Mexican cigar, and began to think. The value of his haul made him very serious. Latterly his adventure had more or less the irresponsibility of a boy’s lark about it, but now it assumed larger importance. What he had done was a serious matter in the eyes of the law, and he must justify his proceedings, not only to himself, but to others. . . .

The days of the lazy, sunny voyage slipped away. As the vessel drew nearer Europe, Brainard speculated more and more anxiously on what might be waiting for him on the dock at Havre. Now that he knew how valuable his loot was, he felt certain that old Krutzmacht’s San Francisco enemies, who had tracked him to the dock at Vera Cruz, would hardly be idle during the sixteen days that the Toulouse had taken to cross the seas. There had been ample time for them to hear from the stenographer and their other agents in Mexico, to communicate with the French authorities, to have detectives cross from New York by one of the express boats and meet him at Havre. There would be a fine reception committee prepared for him on the dock!

Cudgel his brains as he might, hour after hour, he could see no way out of the predicament that was daily drawing nearer. After the incident at Vera Cruz, he could not approach any of the officers of the vessel and seek to enlist their help. He thought of bribing the sociable third officer to secrete the contents of his valise, but he mistrusted his volatile temperament. There was a Frenchwoman who sat next him at the table, a dark-haired little person, clever and businesslike, who had been very agreeable to Brainard, and had undertaken to teach him French. He could tell his story to Mme Vernon, and ask her to assume charge of the troublesome valise. But an instinctive caution restrained him from taking any one into his confidence. He preferred to run his chance of arrest, and to fight against extradition. Whenever he resigned himself to this prospect, his sporting blood rebelled, and there rose, also, a new sentiment of loyalty to the interests of his unknown mistress, Melody. He had come too far in his venture to be beaten now!

“Whether the old man was straight or not, whether he really owned the bunch of bonds and stock or not, it would be a pity not to get something out of it for Melody. She’s not in the scrap,” he said to himself. “No, I don’t chuck the game yet!”

His anxieties were quieted by another fit of seasickness on the day before they were due to arrive at Havre. As she approached the coast of Brittany, the Toulouse lost the balmy weather which had prevailed since they entered the Gulf Stream, and ran straight into a gale that was sweeping over the boisterous Bay of Biscay. Brainard went to bed, to spend altogether the most wretched twenty-four hours he had ever experienced.

In his more conscious moments he gathered that the old Toulouse was having as hard a time with the weather as he was. Her feeble engines at last lay down on the job, and the captain was forced to turn about and run before the storm. It mattered little to Brainard, just then, whether the ship was blown to the Azores, or went to the bottom, or carried him into Havre, there to be arrested and finally deported to the United States for grand larceny. He turned in his berth, thought of the Bourgogne, and closed his weary eyes.

Toward evening the gale blew itself out, and the battered old Toulouse was headed north once more across the Bay of Biscay. Sometime in the night the engines ceased to thump, and Brainard awoke with a start. When he had hurried into his clothes, and groped his way to the deck, he was astonished to see ahead, through the gray fog of early morning, faint lights and, farther away, the stronger illumination that came from some city.

“Is it Havre?” he demanded of the third officer, whom he met.

“No, monsieur—St. Nazaire!” the Frenchman answered. “Monsieur will be disappointed?”

“I don’t think so!” exclaimed Brainard.

It was, indeed, the port of Nantes. The captain had not chosen to risk the voyage around the stormy coast of Brittany with his depleted coal supply, and had taken the old Toulouse to the nearest port.

“Here’s where Melody scores!” Brainard muttered, when he realized the significance of the news. “Now for a quick exit to Paris, before the telegraph gets in its deadly work and notifies the civilized world where we are!”

Three hours later the passengers of the Toulouse were aboard a special train for Paris, and in a first-class compartment Brainard was seated, facing his valise, and looking out upon the pleasant landscape of the Loire valley, a contented expression on his brown young face.

He had already formulated to himself the exact plot of his movements from the moment he reached Paris. From the pleasant Frenchwoman who had been his neighbor at the ship’s table he had learned the address of a little hotel in the Bourse quarter, where she assured him that Americans rarely appeared. It was not far from the large bank in which he intended to deposit Melody’s burdensome fortune until he could make arrangements for disposing of it.

It did not take him long, therefore, to install himself at the little HÔtel des Voyageurs et BrÉsil, and to rid himself of his troublesome loot. Then he wrote a letter to Schneider Brothers, of Berlin, who, he had learned at the CrÉdit Lyonnais, were a well-known firm of bankers with an agency in New York. He wrote the Messrs. Schneider that in obedience to the instructions of the late Mr. Herbert Krutzmacht, of San Francisco, he wished to consult with them in regard to the disposal of some securities that he had in his possession. He would remain for the present in Paris, and he begged to suggest that the bankers should send a responsible agent to meet him at some place—preferably The Hague, whither he was going the following week.

He had selected The Hague as a safe middle ground, after consulting the map of Europe in his guidebook.

“That will draw their fire,” he thought complacently. “We shall see on which side of the game they are!”

Having mailed the letter, he strolled out to the boulevards to enjoy his first whiff of Paris. This was the city that he had walked in his dreams! He had never hoped to see it; but now he was strolling along the Boulevard des Italiens, and there before his eyes lay the great Place de l’OpÉra, with its maze of automobiles, ’buses, and pedestrians. And there—Brainard stopped in the middle of the crowded place, wrapped in wonder, staring at the gilded figures on the faÇade of the OpÉra, until an excitable official with a white baton poured a stream of voluble expostulation into his ear, and he dodged from under an omnibus just in time to fall into the path of a motor, causing general execration.

The official with the white stick finally landed him on the curb before he became an obstruction to traffic. He sank into an inviting iron chair and ordered a drink, as he saw that that was what the Parisians used their sidewalks for. In answer to his labored French, there came back in the purest Irish:

“Whisky, sor? Black and White, sor? Very good, sor!”

“Well, I never!” he murmured, radiant with happiness.

When the waiter reappeared with the drink, he was gazing down the broad avenue, entranced.

“Where does that go?” he whispered to the waiter, thrusting a bill into the curving palm and pointing vaguely before him.

“The Luver, sure, sor. You’ll be wanting a nurse before the day is done!” the Irishman muttered.

And indeed the self-contained young American began to act like a lunatic let loose. Gulping down his whisky, he set off at random, plunging again into the sea of traffic, finally escaping to the shelter of a cab. The driver, after vain attempts to extract an intelligible order from his fare, just drove on and on through the boulevards, across great squares, up the noble avenue to the lofty arch, and then came back to the center of the city and stopped suggestively before a restaurant.

Somehow Brainard managed to get fed, and then the fatherly cabby received him and bore him on through the gas-lighted streets, soft and lambent and vocal, and at the end of another hour deposited him in front of what Brainard took to be a theater—a modest-looking building enough. From the poster he saw that it was the FranÇais.

The great ThÉÂtre FranÇais! He beamed back at cabby, who gesticulated with his whip and urged him on. Cabby had begun sympathetically to comprehend his lunatic.

They played Cyrano that night, it happened. Though the fluent lines rolled too swiftly over Brainard’s head for his feeble comprehension of the language, he understood the wonderful actors. For the first time in the twenty-eight years of his existence, he realized what is art—what it is to conceive and represent life with living creatures, to clothe dull lines of print with human passions. This was what he had dreamed might be when he descended from his gallery seat in a Broadway theater—but what never was.

Cabby was asleep on the box outside when Brainard emerged from his dream. At the young American’s touch, he awoke, and, chirping to his decrepit horse, bore the stranger to his hotel. At the door they exchanged vivid protestations of regard, and a couple of pieces of gold rolled into cabby’s paw.

“He understood!” Brainard murmured gratefully. “Demain—demain!” he cried; and the cocher cracked his whip.

The next two days were the most wonderful that Brainard had ever spent. He slept but a few hours each night—was there not all the rest of life to sleep in? Under the fat cabby’s guidance he roamed day and night. He would murmur from time to time some famous name which seemed to act on cabby like a cabalistic charm,—Louvre, PanthÉon, Arc de Triomphe, Invalides, Bastille, Luxembourg, NÔtre Dame. At noon and at night they drew up before some marvelous restaurant where the most alluring viands were to be had. Each evening there was a theater, carefully chosen by cabby; and there Brainard spent enchanted hours, drinking in at every sense the meaning of the play, savoring the charm of intonation, of line, of gesture—the art which seemed innate in these people.

For was he not, as he had said to Krutzmacht, by profession a dramatist?

The third day he bethought him of the French lady of the Toulouse, and gave her address to his guardian. With her he made an expedition to Versailles. On their return from the chÂteau, they dined at a little restaurant at Ville d’Avray, the Frenchwoman carefully ordering the food and the wine.

As the twilight fell across the old ponds and over the woods where Corot had once wandered, Brainard murmured softly:

“Melody, my dear, I owe you a whole lot for this—more than I can ever pay you, no matter how much I can squeeze out of those Dutchmen for your bonds and stock!” And then, aloud, “Here’s to Melody—God bless her!”

“Mel-odie!” said the French lady daintily. “It is a pretty name. Is that the name of your fiancÉe?”

“No, madam! I have never seen the lady—but I hope to, some day!”

The Frenchwoman smiled and made no comment, puzzled by this latest manifestation of the lunatic American.

After dinner they strolled through the ancient park of St. Cloud to the river, and took a bateau mouche for Paris. Mme. Vernon seemed to understand all the pleasant little ways of enjoying life. It was a warm, starry night. The French lady sat close to Brainard, and looked up tenderly into his eyes, but though his lips were wreathed in smiles, and his eyes were bright, he did not seem to comprehend what such opportunities were made for.

“Not even took my hand once!” she murmured to herself with a sigh, as she mounted the stairs to her apartment alone. “What are these Americans made of? To drink to the name of an unknown, and spend their dollars like sous. And always business!”

For when she had suggested an excursion for the morrow, the young man had excused himself on the plea of “my business.”

“Always business!” she murmured.

But the lady did Brainard an injustice. He was thinking little of business. If she had but known it, he was in love, and dreaming—in love with life, and dreaming of the wonderful mystery of Krutzmacht and of the still more mysterious Melody!

At his hotel there was a dispatch from the Schneider Brothers, appointing a meeting at a hotel in The Hague for the following evening.

XVIII

When a servant had ushered Brainard into a private salon of the old Bible Hotel, and discreetly closed the door, an alert, middle-aged German with grizzled hair and close-trimmed beard rose from a table and advanced with outstretched hand.

“Mr. Brainard, I presume?” he said in fluent English. “I am Adolf Schneider.”

“So it’s important enough for the old boy to come himself!” Brainard thought as they shook hands.

Herr Schneider cast a quick look at the small bag which the servant had taken from Brainard’s hand and placed beside his coat and hat.

“You haven’t brought the papers with you!” the banker exclaimed with unconscious disappointment.

“They are in a safe place,” Brainard replied; “but I have a pretty complete inventory of them.”

He drew from his pocket a copy of the list that he had made on board the Toulouse, and also a copy of the power of attorney that Krutzmacht had signed. The former he handed to the banker, who seized it with a poorly assumed air of indifference, and ran his eye down the list.

Herr Schneider’s face expanded, it seemed to Brainard, as he neared the bottom; but without making any comment he took a list from his pocket and compared it with Brainard’s. When he had finished, he looked at the young man with fresh interest.

“There’s some more stuff—books and files of papers, which I packed in a trunk,” Brainard explained. “But I had to leave the trunk behind me. It should be safe in Chicago by this time, and I can get it, if it’s still there, when I return to America.”

“You were thorough!” the banker exclaimed with a smile. “You did not leave much behind you.”

Apparently Herr Schneider already knew something about the raid upon Krutzmacht’s safe.

“I took everything in sight,” Brainard said simply.

“And I am to understand that you have these”—the banker pointed to the inventory—“with you in Europe?”

“They are where I can get at them easily,” Brainard replied guardedly.

For several moments the two men looked at each other across the table.“What do you mean to do with it?” the banker asked casually at last.

“I don’t know yet,” Brainard replied lightly. “I want to find out what it’s worth, if I can.”

“Your coup has created much excitement in certain quarters. I suppose you are aware of that,” Herr Adolf observed in a warning tone. “You will find it difficult to negotiate any securities you may have—if you escape worse complications!”

Brainard realized that the German was speaking diplomatically—bluffing, to use a plainer word.

“I have merely obeyed the orders I received,” he observed innocently, handing the banker a copy of Krutzmacht’s power of attorney. “Unfortunately, as you know, Mr. Krutzmacht died suddenly, and I am left with only the most general instructions to direct my future movements.”

The banker glanced at the power of attorney, and, shrugging his shoulders, handed it back to Brainard. Apparently he preferred to regard the young stranger as merely a clever adventurer.

“That can’t be of much use to you,” he said coldly.

Brainard tipped back in his chair and eyed the banker. Finally he brought the chair down on the floor with a bang, and, leaning forward, tapped the banker pleasantly on the knee.“I’m no crook, Herr Schneider—not really, you know! You can think so, if you want to, but it won’t make the price of the goods any cheaper in the end. You might like to hear how I happened to get mixed up in this affair?”

He proceeded to tell the story of his movements since that April evening when he had found Krutzmacht in a fit on a New York street. He omitted all references to the vague Melody, who seemed irrelevant for the moment.

“An extraordinary story!” the banker commented, with more warmth, but still dubiously.

“And it’s all true!” Brainard cried. “Now I want to know a lot of things from you. First, who was Krutzmacht? And why was the old man so dead set on getting his property over here?”

The banker’s manner relaxed into its habitual suavity. This extraordinary young American, who looted safes for a chance acquaintance, amused as well as puzzled him. Evidently Brainard was not easily intimidated. The banker resolved upon another method of attack.

“Really, young man,” he said, “you know nothing more than you have told me about your—employer?”

“Hardly a thing—except that he was mixed up in some big business deals. Naturally, these past weeks, I have wondered a good deal about who he was.”

“I should think you might!” the banker agreed, with a laugh. “I can tell you in a few words what I know about him. Mr. Herbert Krutzmacht was a countryman of mine, as you might infer from his name—a native of Mannheim. He went to the States when he was a young man, back in the fifties. Like so many of my countrymen, he carried nothing to your land but his brains and his will. He had many adventures out there. After your Civil War, he moved to the Pacific coast, engaged in mining operations, made a great deal of money, and lost it. He put it all into one property, from which he expected to take a vast fortune, but—”

“At Monument, Arizona?” Brainard interrupted.

“In Arizona, I think. I don’t remember the name of the place. The mine was called—let me see—yes, the Melody mine.”

“The Melody!” Brainard exclaimed, startled. “So that was it, was it?”

“What was?”

“Nothing—merely a guess of mine. Please proceed!”

“After the failure of his mine he had a hard time, and everything seemed against him. Then, a few years ago, he got control of a company to develop water power in northern California—the Shasta Company, it was called. From this he went into land and timber business, and finally began to build a railroad, the Pacific Northern. From time to time, as he needed money for his various enterprises, he applied to us, and we found the capital for him when he could not get it in the States. It was our capital, mostly, that went into the railroad, which was to go northward into a region controlled by other roads. That started the opposition in California to him and his schemes, and trouble quickly developed. Your countrymen, Mr. Brainard, are not always scrupulous in the weapons they use. These hostile parties had bought up one of the judges in California, and they struck their blow while Mr. Krutzmacht was in New York a month or more ago conferring with our representative. It had been arranged to raise the necessary funds to pay the interest due on the outstanding bonds, and to complete the railroad. Then Mr. Krutzmacht disappeared, the California court granted the other side their receivership, and he was found dead in a New York hospital!”

“It must have been foul play!”

“What do you mean?”“As I figure it out, those crooks must have been watching him all the time in New York, and when they learned that he had succeeded in raising this money he needed to keep his property out of their hands, they did not wait. They—”

“What?” the banker demanded.

“Made away with him—drugged him, probably, then chucked him out of a cab into the street.”

“Quite possibly that was it. Your people do such peculiar things! Well, the crooks, as you call them, got their receivership for the Shasta Company—the parent company—the very day he died. Krutzmacht was a fighter, a hard man to conquer, and if he had lived, I have very little doubt that he would have succeeded in worsting his enemies.”

“And now?” Brainard asked with a smile. The banker made a comical gesture.

“The receiver found very little to receive, naturally, after your visit. Of course, you can understand what they were after was not the Shasta Company, but its rich subsidiaries. You had left the shell, of which the Court has taken physical possession.”

Brainard laughed.

“The old boy knew what he was about,” he said. “There was no time to lose! Tell me,” he asked abruptly, “do you know whether Krutzmacht had any relatives—any heirs?”

“He must have some connections at Mannheim. Krutzmacht is a common enough name there. But I do not think that any of them were closely related to Mr. Herbert Krutzmacht.”

“I don’t mean thirty-third cousins. Had he a wife or children?”

The banker hesitated, and then said:

“Several years ago, when I was in New York, I remember meeting some woman with Mr. Krutzmacht at a hotel—a very handsome woman, from one of your Southern States, I judged by her accent. But,” he added hastily, “I have no reason to believe that she was his wife. It is probable that one might find out in San Francisco, where he lived the latter part of his life. I could not say.”

“So far as you know, there is no one interested in this deal?” Brainard persisted.

“The heirs will announce themselves soon enough, if there are any. Until then,” Herr Schneider remarked slyly, “we need not go into the question.”

The young American stared at the banker with honest, uncomprehending eyes.

“But that’s just what it is my business to do!” he exclaimed. “There was some one, I am sure, whom the old man tried to tell me about.”“Oh!”

“He was too far gone to say the whole name, but I think he had in mind some one whom he wanted to have his money. You see how it is, Herr Schneider. I am acting as this old fellow’s representative—his executor, so to speak—to take care of his property and hand it over to some one named Melody, or—”

“Melody?” inquired the banker, puzzled.

“Yes—that was what I made it out to be,” Brainard said, blushing.

“But that was the name of the Arizona mine.”

“It might perhaps be the name of—of a person, too.”

The banker shrugged his shoulders. He turned to the inventory. Putting on his glasses, he re-read the paper carefully. When he had finished, he glanced up, saying:

“Well, Mr. Brainard, now for business, as your people say. What do you want me to give you in exchange for these securities and papers?”

“What they are worth.”

“Ah, that would be very hard to say!”

“What would they be worth to Mr. Krutzmacht, if he were here?”

“If Mr. Krutzmacht were alive, they might be worth a great deal,” the banker said cautiously, “and yet they might have no value, now that he is dead.”

“He seemed to think they had some value,” Brainard said flatly.

The banker fidgeted.

“Oh, of course, naturally!”

“And they can’t have lost all their value within a few weeks.”

“One company is bankrupt already. This suit, the irregular manner in which possession of these papers was obtained—” began the banker, fencing.

“What will you give, cash down?” demanded Brainard.

The banker rose from his chair and walked to the window. He pulled out a fresh cigar, lighted it, laid it down, and turned to Brainard.

“It is a great risk. We do not know what we can do with the properties. We shall doubtless have lawsuits. We may lose all. Let us say fifty thousand dollars for everything—everything!” he repeated.

The banker looked keenly at Brainard, as if he thought he had been impressive.

“There are over eight millions of Pacific Northern bonds, and about fifteen millions in stock—besides all the rest,” Brainard observed reflectively. “It won’t do, Mr. Schneider—guess again!”“Stocks and bonds are worth what you can get for them.”

“Then I’ll wait, and see if I can get more for these,” Brainard suggested smilingly. “There’s no hurry about the matter. I came to you first,” he said, “because I supposed you would have the old man’s account checked up, and know just what was coming to him.”

The banker smiled at the young man’s simplicity.

“Business is not done that way. It is a question to whom the property belongs,” he added meaningly.

“I see! Well, it belongs to me at present—”

“Let us say a hundred thousand—in cash, paid to you personally,” the banker interrupted hastily.

“You think you are bidding for stolen goods, eh, and can get them cheap?” Brainard suggested.

“Four hundred thousand marks is much money!”

“A whole lot of money—no question about that!” the young American remarked with a quizzical smile, thinking that ten dollars was more ready money than he had had, of his own, for many months. “But it isn’t enough!”

“Are you not ready for dinner?” the banker suggested genially. “We can have our dinner here and talk matters over quietly. I will explain.”

They dined at great leisure, while the banker gave Brainard his first lessons in corporation finance, with apt illustrations from the history of Krutzmacht’s enterprises. He explained how an individual or a corporation might be put into bankruptcy and yet be intrinsically very rich,—the spoil always going to the stronger in the struggle. He had ordered a magnum of champagne, and pressed the wine upon the young man with hospitable persistence; but Brainard felt that if he ever wanted to keep his head clear, this was the time, and he drank little. He suspected the banker’s geniality.

From finance the banker drifted to the topic of Krutzmacht himself. He told many stories of the old man, which showed his daring and his ability to take what he could get wherever he found it.

“He was always talking about that mine—the one in Arizona. He expected to make a very big fortune from it some day. It was to get money with which to develop his mine, I believe, that he went into all the other things,” Herr Schneider explained.

“The Melody mine!” the young man murmured to himself.“That was it! He sank one fortune in it, but he would never let go—that was his way.”

When they had reached their coffee, the banker turned suddenly upon Brainard.

“Have you made up your mind to take my offer?”

“Your people here have a good deal of money tied up in this business?”

“A good deal more than I wish we had,” the banker replied frankly. “So we must send more down the well to bring back what’s there already. We shall have a fight on our hands, too.”

“I don’t understand business,” the young man said. “The chances are that Mel—Krutzmacht’s heirs don’t, either. That’s why he told me to come over here to dispose of his stuff. The best I can do is to take cash and quit.”

“Exactly!” the banker beamed.

“Of course,” Brainard drawled, “we don’t sell Krutzmacht’s private things—the mine, I mean—the Melody mine.” The banker waved his hand indifferently. “And for the rest you can give us”—the banker held his cigar poised in the air—“two millions.”

The banker leaped to his feet.

“You swindler!” he shouted angrily. “You have the impudence—”“Careful! That’s not a pretty name, Herr Schneider,” Brainard replied coldly. “Perhaps I am not the only crook in this business. Don’t get excited. You don’t have to take my offer.”

The banker slowly subsided into his chair.

“We shall appeal to the courts!” he snarled.

“What courts? I thought you might try to bluff, and so I suggested having our talk in some neutral place.”

“You are pretty shrewd, my young man. You take all these precautions for the sake of Mr. Krutzmacht’s heirs, I suppose,” he sneered unpleasantly.

“Careful now! I don’t mind one bit going to a Dutch jail for slugging you; but what good would that do either of us? The stuff isn’t here, you know.”

With this Brainard rose to his feet and took his coat and bag.

“Where are you going?” the banker asked in some alarm.

“Oh, I’ll take a look about the place, I guess, and then go back to Paris. I don’t believe you and I can do business to advantage in your present mood.”

“Your plunder won’t do you any good,” the banker observed. “You can’t raise a penny on it.”“We’ll see about that. There are others who might be willing to pay me something for the paper. I have a pretty good idea that their agents are hunting for my address at the present moment. Suppose I let them find me?”

“Call it a million marks!” the banker snapped.

“I said two million dollars, and I’ll keep the bonds, too. You said they were no good, as I understand. They might as well stay with me, in that case. They look pretty!”

The banker gave him an evil look. Brainard, unconcerned, rang for a waiter, and when the man appeared he ordered his bill and a cab.

“When can you deliver the papers—those that you have with you in Europe?” the banker asked briskly, when the servant had departed.

“Whenever you are ready with the cash—two million dollars, not marks—Herr Schneider!”

“One doesn’t carry two million dollars in one’s trousers pockets, over here,” the banker sneered.

“I will give you one week to deliver the cash in Paris,” Brainard replied carelessly. “Just seven days.”

“Your cab is waiting, sir,” the waiter announced.

“All right! You will have to excuse me, Herr Schneider. I want to take a look about the town.”

And thus they parted without shaking hands.“Tell the driver,” Brainard said to the waiter, “to show me everything worth seeing in your town.”

As he settled himself into the cab for his sightseeing, he mused:

“I wonder if I got enough! There’s no telling what the stuff is really worth. I’d have given it to him for a million, all of it, if he hadn’t taken me for a common sneak thief. Well, I guess I touched his limit. If he lays down on my proposition, I’ll have to look up the other crowd, and I suspect there isn’t much to choose between them so far as their methods are concerned. But I bet old Schnei will turn up in Paris before the week is out with a bag of dollars. And there are the bonds—they may be worth something, after all, to Melody!”

He interrupted his meditation to squint an eye at a palace toward which the cocher was furiously waving his whip.

“All right, cocher,—you can drive on,” he replied, having taken in the monument sufficiently. “Well”—he concluded his meditation aloud—“two millions, cash, is a pretty good bunch of money for any girl. I don’t believe she could have done any better herself. And there are the eight millions of bonds. Now where in thunder is Melody?”“Was?” the coachman demanded.

Brainard waved him on, and continued his thoughts without speaking.

“There is the mine, too—the Melody mine. Queer name for a mine, and a queer name for a woman, too, now you think of it! Is there any Melody girl—woman, anyway, anywhere?”

The mere doubt of the existence of such a personage dampened his good spirits. If Melody was a fiction of his youthful imagination, he was loath to part with her; for she had become the possible reality that held his dream together.

“No!” he concluded aloud. “No man would have made all that effort, when he was dying, to speak the name of a mine!”

With this sage reflection he dismissed from his thoughts the teasing puzzle of Krutzmacht and his heirs, and devoted his entire attention to the monuments of The Hague.

XIX

Five days later Brainard stood chatting with Herr Adolf Schneider and Herr Nathan Schneider on the broad granite steps of the CrÉdit Lyonnais in Paris. The transfer of all Krutzmacht’s papers, except the packages of bonds, had just been completed within the bank, and receipts for them had been given to the young American, together with drafts on New York for two millions of dollars.

“May I inquire what you intend to do now?” Herr Nathan asked, simple curiosity on his broad face.

“I’m going to put in one week more here, then pull out for San Francisco, and try to hunt up my principal,” Brainard replied.

“You are not afraid to return to the States?” Herr Adolf inquired.

“Why should I be? Our people know when they are licked. Those crooks won’t worry me any longer. More likely they’ll be after you now!”

Brainard laughed pleasantly.“I think,” Herr Nathan observed complacently, “we can take care of them.”

“I hope so! I want to see those bonds make good some day.”

“Don’t be in a hurry to sell your bonds, young man. That is my best advice,” the banker said gravely.

“I’ll tell Mel—my principal what you say,” Brainard laughed back. “Now good day to you, gentlemen, and good hunting!”

Herr Adolf shook the young man’s hand cordially.

“If you ever want a business—after you have discovered this mysterious heir to Mr. Krutzmacht—why, come over here to me, and I will make a financier of you!”

“Thanks!”

Brainard sauntered slowly down the crowded boulevard. He had before him seven more days of Paris—seven beautiful June days. For he had resolved to give himself one week of pure vacation in Paris as payment for services performed for his unknown principal. Thus seriously did he hold himself to his mission.

At the end of the week he would take the first fast steamer for New York, and begin the hunt for an heir for the money he had obtained from old Krutzmacht’s property—for that shadowy Melody whose name so persistently haunted his imagination. But now how best could he spend these last precious hours of freedom and delight which he had well earned?

The young American with two million dollars in his pockets paused beside the curb and watched the brilliant stream of Paris life flow past him for many minutes. Then he beckoned to a cab, and drove to a steamship office, where he engaged passage for that day week from Cherbourg. Next he went to a tailor, and ordered clothes to replace his Chicago ready-made suit, which no longer satisfied his aspirations in the way of personal appearance. He did not mean to go shabby any longer, no matter what fate might be in store for him at the close of his present adventure.

These necessary duties performed, he betook himself to a famous restaurant near the Madeleine, where he ordered an excellent breakfast. While he ate, he laid his plans.

Brainard had made most of his journey through life without congenial companions, but now he felt a desire for companionship. It was another of those hitherto unsuspected capacities that had been stimulated by his recent experiences. He bethought himself of the only human being he knew in all Paris—the amiable Mme. Vernon, his friend of the Toulouse; so after his breakfast he proceeded to the Frenchwoman’s hotel. Mme. Vernon welcomed him cordially.

“I thought you had returned to America.”

“I have another week,” he explained, “and I want you to show me how to spend it. Think of everything that a man twenty-eight years old, who has never had a day’s real vacation in his life, would like to see and do in Paris, and we’ll do it all together. That is, if you can give me the time!”

The good-natured Frenchwoman, who had returned to her native country after a long absence in “barbarian lands,” did not seem greatly occupied, and was not averse to spending a few days with this naÏf American. She smiled upon Brainard.

“It is a serious matter,” she said after meditation, wrinkling her placid brow. “And you must see all?”

“Everything!”

“In one week!” she cried. “Allons—let us start!”

There began seven days of wonder and delight—enough to pay with good measure for all the sordid years of struggle that the young man had endured; enough to last him, if need be, for a lifetime of dull toil. The amiable Frenchwoman entered into the spirit of her task with enthusiasm and a high intelligence, and Brainard paid the way with unquestioning liberality.

“It’s my commission on two millions,” he said to himself, entering the items scrupulously in his little account book.

From gallery and church and restaurant to theater and opera and cafÉ they trailed through the sunny days and the soft nights. They haunted the theaters especially, for the young American—would-be dramatist—felt with sure instinct that here he had discovered the pure gold of his art after the sounding brass of Broadway. They went to the little theaters hidden away in obscure corners, to the theaters of the people, as well as to the stately stages of the FranÇais and the OdÉon and to the popular boulevard playhouses.

Brainard was like a dry sponge that soaks and soaks but never satisfies its thirst, so Mme. Vernon declared. With her help, the rapid dialogue of the theater became easily comprehensible. For the young man’s ears seemed attuned, his whole intelligence quickened. He was like one arriving, after a long journey, at the promised land.

“You are an artist,” the Frenchwoman flattered, “and should stay here with us in the land of artists!”

Brainard merely smiled, murmuring:“We, too, are artists over there, in our way—artists of life!”

The last day came. At midnight the two companions emerged upon the busy Place du ThÉÂtre FranÇais, beside the plashing fountain. It had been “PhÈdre,” and the Frenchwoman had yawned through the stately lines of sublime passion. She would have preferred the farce at the Palais Royal, or to prolong their last intimate dinner at Lavenue’s, which she loved so well. But the young American had sat enthralled, and now he walked as in a dream, with head erect.

In a few hours more this dream in which he had lived, this inspired world of beauty and art, would have vanished from his sight, never again, perhaps, to dazzle his eyes. Some careless god had taken him from his dingy corner and had shown him what a wonderful place this world can be. Now, after a week spent in the city of his desires, he must return to his own little hole, and let the clouds of reality fall between him and his vision.

“But why, oh, why,” he murmured aloud, “can’t we have something like that? Why isn’t there a place in all America where poor devils like myself could drop in for a few hours of paradise?”

“My poor poet!” the Frenchwoman exclaimed, guiding his footsteps gently toward a lighted cafÉ. “If you like it so much, why dost thou leave thy paradise?”

“Because it is so ordered,” he replied simply.

“By whom?”

And as he did not answer, she suggested with a slight smile:

“By that one of whom you spoke—that MÉlodie?”

“By Melody!” he affirmed gravely.

For to-night, on the eve of his departure for America, that elusive mistress seemed especially real and compelling, no mere figment of his heated brain.

“Then, indeed,” said the Frenchwoman, with a touch of pique, “you must be in love with your MÉlodie!”

The young American laughed.

“Hardly. I don’t know her!”

“I do not understand.”

“Nor I!”

With two millions of ready money lying close to his heart in the drafts of the Schneider Brothers, it never entered the young man’s mind that he might prolong his vacation indefinitely.

“Stay with us another eight days,” urged his companion, laying a caressing hand upon his arm. “Your MÉlodie will wait for you!”Brainard laughed, and for reply paid the waiter and rose from the table where they sat. They walked out into the soft night, and passed through the Tuileries Gardens, across the great square beyond, with its silent monuments and gleaming lights. When they reached Mme. Vernon’s apartment, the Frenchwoman urged him to enter.

“It is the last time,” she said sentimentally.

Brainard held out a friendly hand; but she would not let him go.

“I have not thanked you enough for this!” She pointed coquettishly to a lovely pendant which she had admired in a window of the Rue de la Paix, and which Brainard had bought for her.

“That’s nothing—just to remember me by!”

“I do not need it for that!”

“Good night,” he said, “and good-by—it has been a great week!”

And that was all.

“‘Good night and good-by—it has been a great week!’” The Frenchwoman mimicked the young man’s words to herself. “Ciel, what manner of man can he be? Or have I grown so old?” And she answered herself with a sigh: “No, he’s only a poet, and he is in love with—an idea! MÉlodie! Foolish poet!”

So that was the final judgment of Mme. Vernon.But out in the gentle June night, under the dark Paris sky, the poet was sauntering beneath the dusky shadow of the Louvre, the music of the lines he had heard that evening floating through his brain. He drifted on past the empty courts of the old palace, toward the river, exalted by all that he had seen and felt during these last seven wonderful days. The spinning moments of his brief dream were too precious to waste in sleep. As he went, he talked aloud to himself.

“We ought to have something like it over there. It could be done, too! Melody should do it for us, with a portion of all this loot that I am bringing back to her. She should give something to America to justify her name!”

If Mme. Vernon had heard these muttered words, she would doubtless have qualified her judgment of the young American by adding:

“He is a crazy poet!”

Indeed there was something scarcely rational in the young American’s enthusiasm, the glowing intoxication of spirit in which he enveloped Paris. That too had been preparing for him through all the vicissitudes of the past weeks,—by the sudden resolves to commit himself to the sick man’s purpose, the growth of will as he met each fresh complication, the physical and moral regeneration of the long trail into Mexico, above all by the sense of triumph gained in his encounter with the Berlin banker. The crust of his starved nature had broken, and at the magic touch of Paris there appeared the better spirit of the man,—fearless, enthusiastic, worshiping,—the spirit of the artist, as Mme. Vernon had said. Even in his quixotic renunciation, his determination to turn away from the happiness he had found, there was a glowing conviction that this was not the end. The spirit would survive. ’Twas, indeed, but the start, the preparation for another adventure, larger, more thrilling, that loomed before him, across the ocean. Paris also was but revelation and preparation; more was to come! . . .

The graceful lines of the Palace of the Louvre rose mysteriously into the night, and recalled to Brainard the pages of old Dumas, from whom he had learned to know France. Home of the past, of a great race, home of beauty and art and romance, it called to him, young barbarian that he was, cast by chance upon its shores!

Beneath the stone parapet on which he was leaning, a laden barge passed stealthily over the black surface of the river. He followed it up the quays, crossing the Pont Neuf, over which loomed the shadowy figure of the king on horseback, on toward Notre Dame. All was still and silent about the old cathedral as he paced under the shadows of the springing buttresses. At last, while he lingered on the point of the island, out of the east came a rosy light that touched the great gray towers of the cathedral. It was the misty dawn.

“To think,” he murmured prayerfully, “that I might have died without knowing all this!”

The old stone buildings along the winding river gradually emerged from the gray mist of the dawn and hung as if suspended, floating before his eyes. The thin branches of a tall poplar waved lightly above his head, dropping to him a yellow leaf. A gendarme who was patrolling the quay looked interrogatively into the face of the young American, as if he were suspicious of his proximity to the river at that hour of the morning.

“Beau temps,” he observed amicably to the loiterer.

“What do you say?” Brainard asked, coming a long way down to earth.

The officer repeated his innocent remark about the weather.

“Yes, the temps is all right,” the young man agreed. “Fine!”

Evidently another of those foolish Americans, star-gazing in the early dawn! The officer lingered near, cocking his eye on the stranger; but Brainard had started for his hotel, talking to himself as he walked.

“There’s a whole lot, Melody, I can never pay you for, even with two millions and a bunch of five-per-cent bonds! Where are you, Melody, in all this wide world?”

Suddenly he stopped, and stood very still. Then, slapping his thigh, he shouted into the dawn:

“Why, Monument! Monument, Arizona! That’s it! That’s what the old boy was trying to say at the very end, when he was too far gone to make himself clearly understood. He was trying to give me the address, of course!”

The gendarme, thinking there must be something wrong with a young man who acted in this fashion, followed Brainard to his hotel, whither, now that he had solved his puzzle, he went at a brisk pace.

XX

To get to that pin-prick on the map called Monument, Arizona, you drop off the railroad at Defiance, which is somewhere east of the water tank named Phantom, and then follow an old post road across the lofty plateau in the direction of the mountains to the southwest. After something more than twenty miles, the trail strikes a deeply sunk river bed that winds like a gigantic serpent over the desert toward the declining sun. In one of the coils of this dead river serpent lies what is left of the mining camp of Monument.

From the dusty trail over the alkali plain Brainard emerged one blazing July afternoon, saddle-sore after his unaccustomed exercise, and red-faced from the pitiless glare of the Arizona sun. As he climbed the rocky path on the farther side of the river bed, the sun was sinking in a gorgeous sky behind the wooden shacks of Monument.

The place had the desolate air of a mining camp that had been smothered before its boom had really come. The stack of a large smelter rose from a group of corrugated iron buildings at the further end. Beyond, on the summit of a curious detached mound, set quite apart from all other features of the landscape, there was a considerable mansion with tall pillars along its southern front. This, Brainard surmised, must have been the residence of the owner or the manager of the mine, and his present goal.

Apparently Monument had not enough life left to bestir itself, even on the arrival of a stranger. Brainard slid from his horse unobserved in front of the Waldorf Hotel, which was apparently the most pretentious hostelry in the town. Inside the Waldorf, a Chinaman was serving a customer with a meal of fried steak and liver-colored pie. The only other person in the establishment was a fat Irishwoman dozing in one corner of the large bar-room, to which the Chinaman referred the stranger, with a silent nod. The landlady—for such he took her to be—looked at Brainard stupidly, and to his request for a room merely dropped her head on her ample breast and resumed her nap.

Brainard turned back to the street, and there the only human being in sight was an old man sitting in front of a tiny cottage, which seemed more decent in appearance than the other residences of Monument. Brainard hailed him, and inquired if there was another hotel in Monument in which he might take refuge.“There’s hotels enough,” the old citizen replied with placid irony, “but they ain’t doing business these days. I reckon you’ll have to put up with the Waldorf, stranger—it ain’t so worse!”

In reply to Brainard’s complaint that the landlady of the Waldorf would not take notice of his arrival, the old man remarked:

“I expect Katie’s just getting over her yesterday’s booze. She’ll come around after sundown. Come over and sit awhile. There ain’t any use of worryin’ yourself in this here country!”

He waved an arm slowly over the empty landscape.

“That’s a fact—Monument doesn’t seem greatly rushed with business,” Brainard observed, taking the proffered seat beside the old man. “What’s the matter with the place?”

“The matter is that nothing has been doing in this here camp for ’most ten years,” the miner replied, pointing to the smokeless smelter.

“Mine gave out?”

“Mine’s all right—they never really got into it. The money gave out!”

The old man explained, in his placid drawl, how Monument once had great hopes. Then there had been a dozen Waldorfs in full swing. The smelter had been built, and shafts sunk in the red-brown hills behind the town.

“The Melody Mine?”

“That’s what they called it, and it’s as good a mine as there ever was in Arizony—better ore than the El Verde ever had—more money in it than three El Verdes rolled into one, I say!”

“Gold?”

The old man spat contemptuously at a venturesome lizard.

“Gold! Hell, no—copper! High-grade ore.”

“What was the matter?”

“Them panic times came along, and the fellow that owned the Melody went broke. He went back to Frisco. I always expected him to ride into camp some day, when the panic was over, hitch down there at the Waldorf, and sing out, ‘Howdy, Steve!’ and things would begin to hum once more. But he never come back. Guess it’s likely he ain’t made good out in California.”

“Perhaps he’s dead now,” Brainard suggested.

“P’r’aps—but some other feller will work the mine, one of these days. Copper’s booming all over the world, you understand. I’m waiting for that day!”

The old man spat meditatively.

“What is that large house on the hill?” Brainard asked, pointing to the lonely mansion beyond the town.

“That’s where the old man lived—Krutzmacht’s house,” he replied. “He used to live there with his folks.”

“He had a family, then?” Brainard inquired quickly.

“Some said she warn’t really his wife—couldn’t be, because she had a husband where she came from, back East. I don’t know. I never asked him. Folks always talk, you understand. Well, she’s dead now. The old man left her here when he went away. She stayed on with the girl—”

“With what girl?”

“Her darter, stranger—not his, I guess. She was a scraggly little black-haired thing, more like a boy.”

Brainard smiled as his young man’s dream of a beautiful heroine, with aristocratic manners and gracious character, crumbled at the miner’s touch.

“She used to ride all over the place on her pony—she was a wild sort. Sometime after her mother died, she disappeared.”

“Where did she go?”

The old man shook his head slowly.

“Nobody could tell. One night, a month or more ago, she just rode off on the trail. I seed her going down there at a run on her pony, and she never came back. P’r’aps she was going to look for Krutzmacht. They caught the pony over by Phantom, but nothing has been heard of her since.”

“Melody—”

“Yes, that was her name, stranger!” the old miner said with a look of surprise. “Melody White! How did you come to know it?”

“I must have guessed it,” Brainard replied with a smile.

“The mine was named after her, or she after the mine; I don’t know which.”

Brainard stared out into the grim Arizona landscape, before which rose the deserted mansion. There was a Melody! He had never really doubted her existence, but this assurance of his conviction pleased him, even though she might not be all that his ardent fancy had imagined.

“And now the house is empty, same as the mine, and I dunno what will become of it all. Sold for taxes, I expect, if they can git any one to buy it!”

They strolled up the road in the direction of the house upon the hill. The austere dusk of the desert was settling over the dreary habitations of Monument. Far away along the horizon purple mountains lifted their heads in grandeur.

The house was so placed that it gave a large view of the horizon from the mountains to the distant rim of the desert and again to mountains. Close beneath, in wide folds, the river bed wound its serpent course westward into the dusk. Before the broad southern veranda there were signs of old flower beds, which had once been cherished with precious water brought in iron pipes from the river below. The great white pillars had peeled their one coat of paint, and underfoot the sun-dried boards rattled.

The scene was large and grand, but inhumanly empty—as empty as the great house itself. No wonder that the young girl, her mother dead, had fled from this parched desert and these bony mountains in search of the world of men and women, in search of life!

“Kind of lonesome here?” the miner observed.

“It’s like death!”

“But you get used of it, same as death. . . . She and her mother stayed here by themselves after the old man went, and I guess the girl had enough of it.”

“How old was she, do you think?”

The old miner wrinkled his brows thoughtfully.

“She must have been nigh on sixteen,” he said. “She warn’t quite ten when Krutzmacht left.”

This girl of “nigh on sixteen” had gone forth alone in search of the stepfather, who for long years had left her and her mother neglected here.

“Don’t you want to see the house? Krutzmacht fixed it up real elegant—carpets and mahogany stuff. Nothing like it in this country.”

The old man pressed against the warped door, which yielded after a slight resistance. An odor of warm, musty air from the empty dwelling filled the lofty hall, which was quite bare. The miner opened a door leading to a western room.

“They lived mostly in here,” he said.

On the floor was a thick Oriental rug, and there were several pieces of handsome furniture, especially a massive, old-fashioned mahogany writing desk and a large divan. On the divan lay a quirt and a woman’s cloak, as if they had been thrown there carelessly the day before.

The dust of the desert had already settled on the rug, the desk, the table, and the chairs. Nevertheless, the room presented a singularly living look, such as only the life of people with certain habits and education can impress upon an abiding place. Brainard felt as if he had entered a drawing-room whose mistress had left it in the care of neglectful servants.

Beside the window a small piano stood open, with a piece of music on the rack. Some dead stalks of flowers drooped from a vase, and on the hearth lay a charred log. Among the spools and pieces of cloth on a worktable was a drawing board, to which was fastened a water-color sketch. A brush, carelessly dropped, had stained one corner of the sketch with a blotch of red. Brainard looked at the water color with some curiosity. It was a young girl’s attempt to seize the barbaric splendor of the arid plain outside of the window, fringed with ranges of savage mountains, lighted by the fire of the setting sun.

The two men went up the broad staircase with its white-painted handrail. Only one of the bedrooms had been recently occupied—the one in the southwestern corner, facing the winding river. There a dresser drawer was pulled out, as if it had been rifled by hasty hands.

“Seems as if they were really coming back agin!” the old miner remarked, feeling the personal touch of occupancy. “They allus kep’ to themselves. You see, they didn’t really belong,” he added, as if in explanation.

Brainard went back into the living room once more, and examined the water-color sketch. It seemed to him that this rough sketch was like a sign left for him. It breathed the passion and the longing of the girl hidden away in this lonely corner of the earth. He detached it gently from the board, and put it into his pocket. Then, with another glance around the deserted room, he followed his guide out upon the veranda.

While the old man busied himself carefully shutting up the place, Brainard leaned against one of the white pillars and stared into the gray evening that had stolen over the plain. She had gone—the mistress whom he had tried to serve so faithfully. She had disappeared into that vast, gray outer world, that the twilight was gradually covering.

All the way across the ocean and the land, and especially on the blazing trail over the alkali plain from Defiance, he had pictured to himself the woman he hoped to find at the end of his journey. He had imagined his interview with her, her emotions of surprise and delight, when he accounted for the fortune he was bringing her. At first she had been but a name, then an idea, and this idea had gradually assumed, in his imagination, the vivid sense of personality. But somehow, in all his speculation, he had never contemplated this! She lived, but she had just flitted forth—whither?

Suddenly it came over him that there was no clear next step. For the first time since he had obeyed Krutzmacht’s will and taken the train westward for San Francisco, his spirit was dampened, and in the gray evening a weight of depression fell upon him. For the moment he had no will, no plan. That which had held all his acts together and made them reasonable to himself had vanished.

Yet the girl had left behind her an impression—a sense of being some one, a person—which he had never had completely before. Somewhere in the universe there really was a young creature with the strange name of Melody White, to whom belonged sundry important properties now in his possession. It was clearly his business to find her if he could! . . .

The old miner came stamping over the loose boards of the veranda.

“The place will sure drop to pieces, like all the rest,” he observed, “if something ain’t done to it mighty quick.”

“Where do you suppose she went?” the young man asked abruptly.

“The girl? Goodness only knows. P’r’aps she went to her mother’s folks, or p’r’aps out to the coast after him—who can tell? ’Twould be like hunting for a young rabbit out there!” He nodded toward the gray plain.

By the time that Brainard reached the Waldorf, the landlady had roused herself, and she undertook to provide the traveler with food and room. After disposing of John Chinaman’s fried steak and liver-colored pie, he went forth again into Monument, seeking further information about the former occupants of the mansion beyond the town. But nothing was known of the two women except the vague rumor that the mother had come originally from “Louisiany way.” She had held herself apart from the little community, and most of the present inhabitants of the place, it seemed, were derelicts who had gathered there after the closing of the mine. All the vital population had taken the trail back to the railroad shortly after Krutzmacht’s disappearance from the scene.

“Faith, I knew the gurl,” admitted Kate, of the Waldorf. “A queer wan she was, too, ridin’ around by night and singin’ loud up there in the big, lonely house. When you heard her singin’ in the dark, it would frighten the heart in you!”

But more positive information the landlady did not possess. When Brainard went to his hot room for the night, he felt “lonesome,” as the miner had said—as if some one had missed an appointment with him here in the Arizona desert.

The more he thought about the description the old miner had given him, the date of her final departure, the more he became convinced that he had seen this elusive Melody that night at Phantom when he had dropped from the Santa FÉ train and practically thrown himself upon the girl’s good nature to guide him into safety. He was so preoccupied with his own danger at the time, and the loss of his precious bag, that he had not given much thought to the girl, had not even remembered the talk about Krutzmacht’s mining venture in Arizona until later. So he had passed her in the dark almost at the start of his adventure—the one whom now he was seeking in a circle!

Even then, in all probability, she had planned her flight,—he remembered how evasive she had been in reply to his blunt questions,—and she had left not long afterwards, within a few days, as far as he could make out. Yes, that must be Melody White,—the girl “nigh on sixteen,” the shy little girl with the appealing Southern accent, who had seemed to him so lonely sitting her yellow pony among the cactus as the night fell on the desert. His imagination fastened strongly on this belief, for it gave him fresh courage and purpose. If she were a being of flesh and blood four weeks before, she must be somewhere now. It was his business to find her. Probably she had gone first to San Francisco in search of Krutzmacht; but when she had learned of his death, where had she gone? At any rate California was the place from which to start the long trail.

And a long trail, indeed, it might prove—the search for a wild young girl on her first journey into the wide world.

XXI

In the morning, when he descended to the bar-room of the Waldorf in search of nourishment, the old miner greeted him.

“I thought,” he said suggestively, “maybe you’d like to see the mine. The Limited don’t reach Defiance until evenin’. The mine ain’t but a little ways out from here. You might be interested in lookin’ it over.”

“All right!” Brainard exclaimed. “Let’s see the mine.” He had been so much preoccupied with Melody, the girl, that he had altogether forgotten about Krutzmacht’s interest in the Melody mine. “How far is it?” he asked.

“About three miles back in the hills. The old man was building a trolley from the mine to the smelter here beside the river.”

The miner pointed out the rusty rails and bleached sleepers of the trolley road as their horses picked the way over the rough ground up to the opening of the main shaft of the mine.

“Defiance lies off there,” the miner said, pointing to the blue horizon, “twenty-five miles in a straight line north. He meant to run a railroad right across the sagebrush. It’s down grade all the way, so the cars could go out by gravity. They reckoned on gettin’ power for the trolley from the river, by damming it above the smelter.”

“It was to be developed on a big scale!” Brainard exclaimed, impressed by the scope of Krutzmacht’s plans.

“You bet!” the miner agreed. “It ain’t no use to do things in a small way in this country. Krutzmacht knew that.”

Brainard scanned the steep, savage mountains above the shaft. They were devoid of all vegetation on the lower slopes, dull brown in color, with their flanks seamed by little gullies. Behind, the higher peaks lifted their heads in broken lines of serrated edges; and in the far distance, glittering in the cloudless sky, were snowy tips of dazzling white.

The miner picked up a piece of purplish ore from the pile heaped high about the mouth of the shaft.

“Look at that!” he said admiringly. “There’s enough ore of that sort right under our feet to pay almost to tote it out to Defiance. And they had just scratched the surface, here and there. The old man didn’t reckon to begin mining until he had things fixed right.”

They descended from the ore pile and proceeded to the entrance of the main shaft. It was cluttered with timber and abandoned machinery, some of which had never been installed. They spent a couple of hours examining the mine, stumbling about the dark tunnels by the light of a candle which the old miner had brought, looking at the ore bodies already exposed, ready to be worked.

When at last they emerged into the dazzling sunlight, and were resting, Brainard remarked wonderingly:

“It’s queer that a man like Krutzmacht should have abandoned a large property such as this, when he had gone so far with it.”

“He hain’t abandoned it, I tell you. He paid the taxes up to last year. It takes an awful sight of money, stranger, to develop a big mine so far from the railroad. Krutzmacht’s pile wasn’t big enough, and he wasn’t the kind who’d take anybody in with him. All or nothing for him—that was his way. So he went back to California to get his stake. If he’s alive still, he’ll be coming in here some day ready to work this bonanza!”

“I am afraid that will never be,” Brainard said slowly. “Krutzmacht died in New York two months ago.”

The miner stared in astonishment, exclaiming at last:

“Well, well! So the old man died before he made good!” Brainard nodded. “Maybe you are looking at the property for yourself?”

“Do I look like a miner? No, I came to Monument to find out if the old man left an heir.”

“I reckon the only folks he had was that girl and her mother, and one is dead and the other gone goodness knows where,” the old miner replied. “So the Melody mine don’t belong to nobody now!”

“It belongs to that girl, if we can find her.”

“It may be sold for taxes before that.”

“Then I’ll buy it in,” Brainard said promptly.

They ate the bread and bacon they had brought with them for lunch under a pine tree on a slope of the steep hill above the mine. The old miner shook his head from time to time, and muttered to himself over the strange dispensations of Providence that left a rich mine like the Melody abandoned. Brainard thought of the girl who had escaped him, and planned vaguely what his next steps should be.

“There’s an old crater up among them hills,” the miner vouchsafed, when the last slice of bacon and bread had disappeared, “and some sulfur springs. There’s another fortune, maybe, if you could get at the sulfur.”

“I’ll take a look at it,” Brainard said. “How do you go?”And so, while the old man turned back to look after their horses, which they had left tethered far below, Brainard clambered on among the sharp peaks toward the snow beds that lay in drifts along the ragged edge of the mountains. He passed the circular depression of which the miner had spoken, and noticed the yellow crust upon the earth; but for a long time he kept on upward. He wanted to be alone, to think over a certain daring idea that had seized hold of him while the miner was showing him the neglected riches of the Melody mine. Perhaps the keen mountain air, blowing dry and fresh from the desert below, had its part in stirring his brain to unwonted excitement. Perhaps it was the reaction from his disappointment of the evening before in not finding his young mistress waiting to receive her fortune. However that might be, his idea kept teasing him, expanding all the time in reasonableness and urgency.

Why should he not take up Krutzmacht’s purpose—use part of the money he had obtained from the bankers in developing this great property? While he was prosecuting the search for the young girl, which he foresaw might take much time, might indeed end in failure, this work would give a new incentive, a new meaning to his long adventure.“Give it all to Melody!” the old adventurer had whispered with his last breath. Yes, all to Melody in one form or another, as soon as possible. He would dive deeper than the letter of Krutzmacht’s word—he would do as the old man might have done himself, if his life had gone on. He would fulfill his inmost purposes.

He had humor enough to smile at his own daring. “One Edgar Brainard,” as he had described himself to Krutzmacht, unsuccessful playwright, scrub of the city streets, to run a mine! But why not? For that old self, that “one Edgar Brainard,” buffeted, discouraged human chip on the muddy surface of the stream of life, had completely disappeared, never again to exist, he earnestly hoped. These eventful weeks of vital living, constant and quick decision, of prompt, forceful execution, of vivid feeling and yet calm self-reliance, had made a totally other man of him—one whose possibility he had never suspected, but one whom he liked and respected an infinite deal more than that old, familiar “one Edgar Brainard.”

Thanks to Krutzmacht and the elusive Melody, he could never again become the timid, inefficient struggler earning his precarious crust of bread by humiliating tasks, dreaming futile dreams and putting them into equally futile words. He had tasted of life, action, power, and he found them sweet. He would not resign them! Thus Krutzmacht had bestowed on the chance stranger who had befriended him in his last need more than those millions he was leaving to Melody.

His rapid thoughts swept over these last weeks. Everything in them, it seemed, had prepared the way for this decision, had fitted him to dare, to take the responsibility. If it had confronted him a month before, when he and Melody had passed each other unknown, he would not have been ready; if it had come a fortnight before while he was in Paris, he would not have risen to the opportunity. It had come Now, at the fertile moment. . . . His thin, weak body had filled out, just as his harassed face had taken on firm lines of real manhood. He was no longer afraid of life, nor of any of its chances. He would act for this girl as he would act for himself; he would be her trustee, her faithful servant, and the guardian of her property until such time as it could be given into her hands. And the idle millions should set about their proper task of breeding more millions.

At this point in his thinking he gave a boyish whoop that even caught the ear of the old miner below and made him look up. Brainard waved his hat and laughed from the glorious fun of it all,—the risk and the joy of life,—living at last! . . .

As was characteristic of the new man, having projected an idea, committed himself to a decision, his mind at once bent quickly to filling in the details of the pattern in action. He should go to-morrow across the mountains to look for his old friend Gunnison, to learn what more he could, if anything, about the girl’s sudden departure. Gunnison might also give him information of value concerning the mine. Then he should take the evening train for San Francisco, and there first of all he would look up the friendly reporter Farson, to enlist his aid in the search for the girl. In this he must exercise great caution, because San Francisco might not yet be a perfectly salubrious climate for him, nor did he wish to stir cupidinous desires in the breasts of possible claimants to Krutzmacht’s fortune. What he should do afterwards was not clear as yet, but he thought that Farson might be helpful in suggesting the best methods for prosecuting such a search as was before him. Hollinger, if he had returned to the States, might also be useful. He would willingly confide in the “fight-trust magnate.” In any case he should try to find the grizzled miner from Union,—just why, he could not say. But he felt that the old man who had searched fortune in the earth for thirty years might be useful in “handling the Melody proposition.” He would run across him either at the Palace in San Francisco or, if not there, could stop at Winnemucca on his way east and make the journey to Union. He had the man’s name written down somewhere. And then he must call for that trunk in Chicago, in which he hoped to find the title deeds to the mine and other interesting documents. There was much to be done, and to be done speedily. Yet he felt no haste, no nervous anxiety to be adoing. Time for thought was needed also. . . .

So he climbed on rapidly toward the glittering banks of snow until he reached a small plateau gleaming like a jeweled robe in the sunlight. Beneath him lay the little valley about the shaft, scarred by the ore pits with their abandoned rock piles. Far down, the old miner was leading the horses from the shed where they had been tied. Above beckoned the peaks, reaching into the steely heavens like naked icicles. A broad-winged bird circled majestically, tracing its dark shadow on the gleaming snow field, as with a brush.

Not a sound upon the earth nor in the sky! A broad, deep silence! The clear light, the lofty peaks pointing heavenward—nothing more, except his own beating heart!

The man stood there in the immense silence, his soul poised like the hawk above his petty world, surveying in one swift rush of thought that little self of his past, with its small ambitions and desires. Up to this level the road that Krutzmacht had opened for him had led.

He gazed steadily upward into the wonderful sea of blue sky, deeper than the blue depth of the Gulf Stream, above the snowy peaks, beyond the world, into his future. What he saw there was a vision of will, man’s will. He was all will—a vitalized mass of glorious energy to conceive, to create, to do!

He laughed in the cloudless amplitude of snow and blue heavens, laughed at the small self he had left behind, writing play pieces, making tiny scenes for a tiny stage. The world was the great stage upon which he would present his masterpiece! Krutzmacht had played on that stage, and Brainard had helped him to put up a rousing melodrama at the close. His own play thereon should be something different.

Krutzmacht’s will had made the fortune; his will should take it, if need be, reshape it, and speed it to some more perfect end than the old buccaneer of the West had ever dreamed of. Where Krutzmacht’s will had ended, his will would start.

There rose, too, a vision of art as he had felt it in Paris at dawn, beneath the towers of the old cathedral. And sweetly the two united in his fecund mind. He laughed softly in the joy of this vision, and his laugh tinkled strangely among the silent mountain peaks. Throwing up his head to the dazzling rampart of snow that broke the wavering azure lines of the heavens, he exclaimed:

“That, too, will come true! That will be! We’ll make life our stage, and write the play in life, as God writes upon the snows up here. That is creation!”

Brainard could see the old man below holding the horses by their bridles and shielding his eyes with his free hand, as he searched for his companion. And faintly, very thinly, through the valley came the old man’s hail.

Brainard gave a last, lingering look to the immensity above, beyond, around him—the place where his great idea had been born. Then he turned his steps downward, the light of distant thoughts in his eyes, a smile upon his lips which said:

“I have seen. Now to do!”

“You will meet me again before long,” he said to the old miner, when they parted. “And then we’ll make the Melody sing!”