Oxford Democrat

Seven Keys
TO
Baldpate
By
EARL DERR BIGGERS
Copyright, 1913, by the Bobbs-Merrill Company
(CONTINUED.)
While Mr. Magee drew on his clothes the mayor and Max sat thoughtfully before the fire, the former with his pudgy hands folded over the vast expanse where no breakfast reposed. Mr. Magee explained to them that the holder of the sixth key had arrived.
"A handsome young lady," he remarked.
"Her name is Myra Thornhill."
"Old Henry Thornhill's daughter," reflected the mayor. "Well, seems I've sort of lost the habit of being surprised now. I tell you, Lou, we're breaking into the orchid division up here."
While Mr. Magee shaved—in ice cold water, another black mark against the hermit of Baldpate—he turned over in his mind the events of the night before.
He was ready to descend at last and came into the parlor of his suit with greatcoat and hat. In reply to Mr. Cargan's unasked question, he said:
"I'm going up the mountain presently to reason with our striking cook."
"You ain't going to leave this inn, Magee," said the mayor.
"Not even to bring back a cook! Come, Mr. Cargan, be reasonable. You may go with me if you suspect my motives."
They went out into the hall and Mr. Magee passed down the corridor to the farther end, where he rapped on the door of Miss Thornhill's room. She appeared almost immediately, buried beneath furs and wraps.
"You must be nearly frozen," remarked Mr. Magee pityingly. "You and your maid come down to the office. I want you to meet the other guests."
"I'll come," she replied. "Mr. Magee, I've a confession to make. I invented the maid. It seemed so horridly unconventional and shocking—I couldn't admit that I was alone. That was why I wouldn't let you build a fire for me."
"Don't worry," smiled Magee. "You'll find we have all the conveniences up here. I'll present you to a chaperon shortly—a Mrs. Norton, who is here with her daughter. Allow me to introduce Mr. Cargan and Mr. Max."
The girl bowed with a rather startled air, and Mr. Cargan mumbled something that had "pleasure" in it.
In the office they found Professor Bolton and Mr. Bland sitting gloomily before the fireplace.
"Got the news, Magee?" asked the haberdasher. "Peters has done a disappearing act."
It was evident to Magee that everybody looked upon Peters as his creature and laid the hermit's sins at his door. He laughed.
"I'm going to head a search party shortly," he said. "Don't I detect the odor of—coffee in the distance?"
"Mrs. Norton," remarked Professor Bolton dolefully, "has kindly consented to do what she can."
The girl of the station came through the dining room door. It was evident she had no share in the general gloom that the hermit's absence cast over Baldpate. Her eyes were bright with the glories of morning on a mountain. In their depths there was no room for petty annoyances.
"Good morning," she said to Mr. Magee. "Isn't it bracing? Have you been outside? Oh, I"—
"Miss Norton—Miss Thornhill," explained Magee. "Miss Thornhill has the sixth key, you know. She came last night without any of us knowing."
With lukewarm smiles, the two girls shook hands. Outwardly the glances they exchanged were nonchalant and casual, but somehow Mr. Magee felt that among the matters they established were social position, wit, cunning, guile and taste in dress.
When the rather unsatisfactory substitute for breakfast was consumed, Mr. Magee rose briskly.
"Now," he said. "I'm going to run up to the hermit's shack and reason with him as best I can. I shall paint in touching colors our sad plight. If the man has an atom of decency"—
"A walk on the mountain in the morning," said Miss Thornhill quickly.
"Splendid. I"—
"Wonderful," put in Miss Norton. "I, for one, can't resist. Even though I haven't been invited, I'm going along." She smiled sweetly. She had beaten the other girl by the breadth of a hair, and she knew it. New glories shone in her eyes.
"Good for you!" said Magee. The evil hour of explanations was at hand surely. "Run up and get your things."
While Miss Norton was gone Mr. Cargan and Lou Max engaged in earnest converse near a window. After which Mr. Max pulled on his overcoat.
"I ain't been invited either," he said. "but I reckon I'll go along. I always wanted to see what a hermit lived like when he's really buckled down to the hermit business. And then a walk in the morning has always been my first rule for health. You don't mind, do you?"
"Who am I," asked Magee, "that I should stand between you and health? Come along, by all means."
The three went out through the front door and found under the snow a hint of the path that led to the shack of the post card merchant.
"Will you go ahead?" asked Magee of Max.
"Sorry," grinned Max, "but I guess I'll bring up the rear."
"Suspicion," said Mr. Magee, shaking his head, "has caused a lot of trouble in the world. Remember the cruelty practiced on Pueblo Sam."
"I do," replied Mr. Max, "and it nearly breaks my heart. But there's a little matter I forgot to mention last night. Suspicion is all right in its place."
"Where's that?" asked Mr. Magee.
Mr. Max tapped his narrow chest.
"Here," he said. So the three began the climb, Mr. Magee and the girl ahead, Mr. Max leering at their heels.
Covertly Mr. Magee glanced at the girl striding along by his side. The red flamed in her cheeks; her long lashes were flecked with the white of the snow; her face was such a one as middle aged men dream of while their fat wives read the evening paper's beauty hints at their side. Far beyond the ordinary woman was she desirable and pleasing. Mr. Magee told himself he had been a fool, for he who had fought so valiantly for her heart's desire at the foot of the steps had faltered when the time came to hand her the prize. Why? What place had caution in the wild scheme of the night before? None surely. And yet he, dolt, idiot, coward, had in the moment of triumph turned cautious. Full confession, he decided, was the only way out.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Quest of the Hermit.
"I don't know how to begin," muttered the novelist, whose puppets' speeches had always been so apt. "Last night you sent me on a sort of quest for the golden fleece. I didn't know who had been fleeced or what the idea was. But I fared forth, as they say. I got it for you"—
The eyes of the girl glowed happily. She was beaming.
"I'm so glad," she said. "But why—why didn't you give it to me last night? It would have meant so much if you had."
"That," replied Mr. Magee, "is what I'm coming to—very reluctantly. Did you note any spirit of caution in the fellow who set forth on your quest and dropped over the balcony rail? You did not. I waited on the porch and saw Max tap the safe. I saw him and Cargan come out. I waited for them. Just as I was about to jump on them somebody—the man with the seventh key, I guess—did it for me. There was a scuffle. I joined it. I emerged with the package everybody seems so interested in."
"Yes," said the girl breathlessly.
"And then"—
"I started to bring it to you," went on Magee, glancing over his shoulder at Max. "I was all aglow with romance and battle and all that sort of thing. I pictured the thrill of handing you the thing you had asked. I ran upstairs. At the head of the stairs—I saw her."
The light died in her eyes. Reproach entered there.
"Yes," continued Magee, "your knight errant lost his nerve. He ceased to run on schedule. She, too, asked me for that package of money."
"And you gave it to her," said the girl scornfully.
"Oh, no," answered Magee quickly. "Not so bad as that. I simply sat down on the steps and thought. I got cautious. I decided to wait until to-day. I—I did wait."
He paused. The girl strode on, looking straight ahead.
"I know," he said, "what you think. I'm a fine specimen of a man to send on a hunt like that—a weak-kneed mollycoddle who passes into a state of coma at the crucial moment. But—I'm going to give you that package yet."
The girl turned her head. Mr. Magee saw that her eyes were misty with tears.
"You're playing with me," she said brokenly. "I might have known. And I trusted you. You're in the game with the others—and I thought you weren't. I staked my whole chance of success on you. Now you're making sport of me. You never intended to give me that money. You don't intend to now."
"On my word," cried Magee, "I do intend to give it to you—the minute we get back to the inn! I have it safe in my room."
"Give it to her," said the girl bitterly. "Why don't you give it to her?"
Oh, the perversity of women!
"It's you I want to give it to," replied Magee warmly. "I don't know what was the matter with me last night. I was a fool. You don't believe in me, I know"—Her face was cold and expressionless.
"And I wanted to believe in you—so much," she said.
"Why did you want to?" cried Magee. "Why?"
She plodded on through the snow.
"You must believe," he pleaded. "I don't know what all this is about—on my word of honor. But I want to give you that money, and I will—the minute we get back to the inn. Will you believe then? Will you?"
"I hate you," said the girl simply.
She should not have said that. As far back as he could remember such opposition had stirred Mr. Magee to wild deeds. He opened his mouth, and words flowed forth. What were the words?
"I love you! I love you! Ever since that moment in the station I have loved you! I love you!"
Faintly he heard himself saying it over and over. By the gods, he was proposing—inanely, in words of one syllable, as the butcher's boy might have told his love to the second kitchen maid.
"I love you," he continued. Idiot! Often Mr. Magee had thought of the moment when he would tell his love to a woman. It was a moment of dim lights, music perhaps in the distance, two souls caught up in the magic of the moonlit night—a pretty graceful speech from him, a sweet gracious surrender from the girl. And this—instead.
"I love you." In heaven's name, was he never going to stop saying it? "I want you to believe."
Good lord! He recalled that a fellow novelist, whose love scenes were regarded as models by young people suffering the tender passion, had once confessed that he proposed to his wife on a street car and was accepted just as the conductor handed him his transfers.
The girl deliberately stopped. There was never less of sweet gracious surrender in a suffragette hurling a stone through a shopkeeper's window. She eyed Mr. Magee pityingly, and they stood until Mr. Max caught up with them.
"So that's the hermit's shack," said Max, indicating the little wooden hut at which they had arrived. "A funny place for a guy to bury himself. I should think he'd get to longing for the white lights and the table d'hotes with red wine."
"A very unromantic speech," reproved the girl. "You should be deeply thrilled at the thought of penetrating the secrets of the hermitage. I am. Are you, Mr. Magee?"
She smiled up at Magee, and he was in that state where he thought that in the blue depths of her eyes he saw the sunny slopes of the islands of the blest.
"I" he caught himself in time. He pulled himself together again.
"I'm going to make you believe in me," he said, with a touch of his old jauntiness.
Mr. Max was knocking with characteristic loudness at the hermit's door. The door of the hermit's abode opened before Mr. Max's masterful knock, and the bearded little man appeared on the threshold. He was clad in a purple dressing gown that suggested some woman had picked it. Surely no man could have fallen victim to that riot of color.
"Come in," said the hermit in a tone so colorless it called added attention to the gown. "Miss, you have the chair. You'll have to be contented with that soap box davenport, gentlemen. Well?"
He stood facing them in the middle of his hermitage.
"We have come to plead"— began Miss Norton, turning her eyes at their full candle power on the hermit's bearded face.
"I beg pardon, miss," interrupted Mr. Peters, but it ain't any use. I've thought it all out—in the night watches, as the poet says. I came up here to be alone. I can't be a hermit and a cook too. I can't and be true to myself. No, you'll have to accept my resignation, to take effect at once."
He sat down on an uncertain chair and regarded them sorrowfully. His long, well shaped fingers clutched the cord of the purple gown.
"It isn't as though we were asking you to give up the hermit business for good," argued Magee.
"It's just for a short time—maybe only for a few days. I should think you would welcome the diversion."
Mr. Peters shook his head vigorously. The brown curls waved fippantly about his shoulders.
"My instincts," he replied, "are away from the crowd. I explained that to you when we first met, Mr. Magee."
"Any man," commented Mr. Max, "ought to be able to strangle his instincts for a good salary, payable in advance."
"You come here," said the hermit with annoyance, "and you bring with you the sentiments of the outside world—the world I have foresworn. Don't do it, I ask you."
"I don't get you," reflected Mr. Max. "No, pal, I don't quite grab this hermit game. It ain't human nature, I say. Way up here miles from the little brass rail and the sporting extra and other things that make life worth living. It's beyond me."
"I'm not asking your approval," replied the hermit. "All I ask is to be let alone."
"Let me speak," said Miss Norton. "Mr. Peters and I have been friends, you might say, for three years. It was three years ago my awed eyes first fell upon him, selling his postcards at the inn. He was to me then the true romance, the man to whom the world means nothing without a certain woman at his side. That is what he has meant to all the girls who came to Baldpate. He isn't going to shatter my ideal of him—he isn't going to refuse a lady in distress. You will come for just a little while, won't you, Mr. Peters?"
But Peters shook his head again.
"I dislike women as a sex," he said, "but I've always been gentle and easy with isolated examples of 'em. It ain't my style to turn 'em down. But this is asking too much. I'm sorry, but I got to be true to my oath—I got to be a hermit."
"Maybe," sneered Mr. Max, "he's got good reason for being a hermit. Maybe there's brass buttons and blue uniforms mixed up in it."
"You come from the great world of suspicion," answered the hermit, turning reproving eyes upon him. "Your talk is natural. It goes with the life you lead. But it isn't true."
"And Mr. Max is the last who should insinuate," rebuked Mr. Magee. "Why, only last night he denounced suspicion and bemoaned the fact that there is so much of it in the world."
"Well he might," replied the hermit. "Suspicion is the keynote of modern life, especially in New York."
He drew the purple dressing gown closer about his plump form. "I remember the last time I was in the big town seeing a crowd of men in the grill room of the Hoffman House. One of them, long, lean, like an eel, stooped down and whispered in the ear of a little fellow with a diamond horseshoe decorating his haberdashery and pointing to another man near by. 'No, I won't,' says the man with the diamonds. 'I don't introduce nobody to nobody. Let every man play his own game, I say.' That's New York. That's the essence of the town. I introduce nobody to nobody.'"
"It seems odd," remarked Mr. Magee, "to hear you speak of the time you walked on pavements."
"I haven't always been on Baldpate mountain," replied the hermit. "Once I, too, paid taxes and wore a derby hat and sat in barbers' chairs. Yes, I sat in 'em in many towns, in many corners of this little round globe. But that's all over now."
The three visitors gazed at Mr. Peters with a new interest.
"New York," said Mr. Max softly, as a better man might have spoken the name of the girl he loved, "it's a great little Christmas tree. The candles are always burning, and the tinsel presents always look good to me."
The hermit's eyes strayed for away down the mountain and beyond.
"New York," said he, and his tone was that in which Max had said—the words, a great little Christmas tree. It is, with fine presents for the reaching. Sometimes at night here I see it as it was four years ago. I see the candles lit on the great white way. I hear the elevated roar and the newsboys shout and 'Diamond Jim' Brady applauding at a musical comedy's first night. New York!"
Mr. Max rose pompously and pointed a yellow finger at the hermit of Baldpate mountain.
"I got you!" he cried in triumph. "I'm wise! You want to go back."
A half hearted smile crossed the visible portion of the hermit's face.
"I guess I'm about the poorest liar in the world," he said. "I never got away with but one lie in my life and that was only for a little while. It was a masterpiece while it lasted too. But it was my only hit as a liar. Usually I fail, as I have failed now. I lied when I said I couldn't cook for you because I had to be true to my hermit's oath. That isn't the reason. I'm afraid."
"Afraid?" echoed Mr. Magee.
"Scared," said Mr. Peters, "of temptation. Your seventh son of a seventh son friend here has read my palm O. K. I want to go back. Not in the summer, when the inn blazes like Broadway every evening, and I can sit here and listen to the latest comic opera tunes come drifting up from the casino and go down and mingle with the muslin brigade any time I want and see the sympathetic look in their eyes as they buy my postals. It ain't then I want to go back. It's when fall comes and the trees on the mountain are bare and Quimby locks up the inn and there's only the wind and me on the mountain—then I get the fever. I haven't the postcard trade to think of—so I think of Ellen and New York. She's—my wife. New York—it's my town.
"That's why I can't come among you to cook. It'd be leading me into temptation greater than I could stand. I'd hear your talk and like as not when you went away I'd shave off this beard and burn the manuscript of 'Woman' and go down into the marts of trade. Last night I walked the floor till 2. I can't stand such temptation."
Mr. Peters' auditors regarded him in silence.
He rose and moved toward the kitchen door.
"Now you understand how it is," he said. "Perhaps you will go and leave me to my baking."
"One minute," objected Mr. Magee. "You spoke of one lie—your masterpiece. We must hear about that."
"It was like this," he began. "Five years ago I worked for a fruit company, and business sent me sliding along the edges of strange seas and picture book lands. I met little brown men and listened to the soft swish of the banana growing and had an orchestra seat at a revolution or two. Don't look for a magazine story about overthrown tyrants or anything like that. It's just a quiet little lie I'm speaking of, told on a quiet little afternoon by the sands of a sea as blue as Baldpate inn must have been this morning when I didn't show up with breakfast.
"Sitting on those yellow sands the afternoon I speak of, wearing carpet slippers made for me by loving, so to speak, hands, I saw Alexander McMann come along. He was tall and straight and young and free, and I envied him, for even in those days my figure would never have done in a clothing advertisement owing to the heritage of too many table d'hotes about the middle. Well, McMann sat at my side, and little by little, with the sea washing sadlike near by, I got from him the story of his exile and why.
"I don't need to tell you it was woman had sent him off for the equator. This one's name was Marie, I think, and she worked at a lunch counter in Kansas City. From the young man's bill of fare description of her I gathered that she had cheeks like peaches and cream, but a heart like a lunch counter doughnut, which is hard.
" 'She jilted you, Ron, or not?' I asked
" 'She threw me down,' said he."
CHAPTER XIV.
A Falsehood Under the Palms
Well, it seems he'd bought a ticket for that loud colored country where I met him and come down there to forget.
'I could buy the ticket,' he said, 'as soon as I learned how to pronounce the name of this town. But I can't forget. I've tried. It's hopeless.' And he sat there looking like a man whose best friend had died owing him money. I won't go into his emotions. Mr. Bland, up at the inn, is suffering them at the present moment, I'm told. They are unimportant; I'll hurry on to the lie. I simply say he was sorrowful, and it seemed to me a crime, what with the sun so bright and the sea so blue and the world so full of a number of things. Yes, it certainly was a crime, and I decided he had to be cheered up at any cost. How? I thought awhile, gazing up at the sky, and then it came to me—the lie—the great, glorious lie—and I told it."
The hermit looked in defiance round the listening circle.
" 'You're chock full of sorrow now,' I said to McMann, 'but it won't last long.' He shook his head. 'Nonsense,' I told him. 'Look at me. Do you see me doing a heart bowed down act under the palms?' And he couldn't, the lie unfolding itself in such splendor to me.
'You?' he asked. 'Me,' I said. 'Ten years ago I was where you are today. A woman had spoken to me as Mabel—or Marie—or what was it?—spoke to you.'
"I could see I had the boy interested. I unfolded my story as it occurred to me at the moment. 'Yes,' said I, 'ten years ago I saw her first. Dancing as a butterfly dances from flower to flower, dancing on the stage—a fairy sprite—I loved her, worshiped her. It could never be. There in the dark of the wings she told me so. And she shed a tear—a sweet tear of sorrow at parting.
" 'I went to my room,' I told McMann, with a lot of time tables and steamship books—bright red books; the color came off on my eager hands. I picked out a country and sailed away. Like you, I thought I could never be happy, never even smile again. Look at me.'
"He looked. I guess my face radiated bliss. The idea was so lovely. He was impressed—I could see it.
" 'I'm supremely happy,' I told him. 'I am my own master. I wander where I will. No woman tells me my hour for going out or my hour for coming in. I wander. For company I have her picture as I saw her last—with twinkling feet that never touched earth. As the spirit moves I go. You can move the memory of a woman in a flash, my boy, but it takes two months to get the real article started, and then, like as not, she's forgot everything of importance. Ever thought of that? You should. You're going to be as happy as I am. Study me. Reflect.' I waved my carpet slippered feet toward the palms. I had certainly made an impression on Alexander McMann.
"As we walked back over the sands and grass grown streets to the hotel his heart got away from that cupid's lunch counter, and he was almost cheerful. I was gay to the last, but as I parted from him my own heart sank. I knew I had to go back to her and that she would probably give me a scolding about the carpet slippers. I parted from McMann with a last word of cheer. Then I went to the ship—to her, my wife. That was the lie you understand. She traveled everywhere with me. She never trusted me.
"We were due to sail that night, and I was glad, for I worried some over what I had done. Suppose my wife and Alexander McMann should meet. An estimable woman, but large, determined, but little suggesting the butterfly of the footlights I married long before. We had a bad session over the carpet slippers. The boat was ready to sail when McMann came aboard. He carried a bag, and his face shone.
" 'She's sent for me,' he said. 'Marie wants me. I got a letter from my brother. I'll blow into Kansas like a cyclone and claim her.'
"I was paralyzed. At that minute a large black figure appeared on deck. It headed for me. 'Jake,' it says, 'you've sat up long enough. Go below now.'
"McMann's face was terrible. I saw it was all up. 'I lied, McMann,' I explained. 'The idea just came to me it fascinated me, and I lied. She did turn me down—there in the wings. And she shed that tear I spoke of too. But when I was looking over the railroad folders she sent for me. I went—on the wings of love. It was two blocks, but I went on the wings of love. We've been married twenty years. Forgive me, McMann!'
"McMann turned around. He picked up the bag. I asked where he was going. 'Ashore,' he said, 'to think. I may go back to Kansas City—I may. But I'll just think a bit first.' And he climbed into the ship's boat. I never saw him again."
The hermit paused and gazed dreamily into space.
"That," he said, "was my one great lie, my masterpiece. A year afterward I came up here on the mountain to be a hermit."
"As a result of it?" asked Miss Norton.
"Yes," answered Mr. Peters, "I told the story to a friend. I thought he was a friend. So he was, but married. My wife got to hear of it. 'So you denied my existence?' she said. 'As a joke,' I told her. 'The joke's on you,' she says. That was the end. She went her way, and I went mine. I'd just unanimously gone her way so long I was a little dazed at first with my freedom. After fighting for a living alone for a time I came up here. It's cheap. I get the solitude I need for my book. Not long ago I heard I could go back to her if I apologized."
"Stick to your guns," advised Mr. Max.
Miss Norton rose and stood before Mr. Peters. She fixed him with her eyes—eyes into which no man could gaze and go his way unmoved.
"Just one tiny day," she pleaded.
Mr. Peters sighed. He rose.
"I'm a fool," he said. "I can't help it. I'll take chances on another day though nobody knows where it'll lead."
"Brooklyn, maybe," whispered Lou Max to Magee in much horror.
The hermit donned his coat, attended to a few household duties and led the delegation outside. Dolefully he locked the door of his shack. The four started down the mountain.
"Back to Baldpate with our cook," said Mr. Magee into the girl's ear. "I know now how Caesar felt when he rode through Rome with his ex-foes festooned about his chariot wheels."
Mr. Max again chose the rear, triumphantly escorting Mr. Peters. As Mr. Magee and the girl swung into the lead the former was moved to recur to the topic he had handled so amateurishly a short time before.
"I'll make you believe in me yet," he said.
She did not turn her head.
"The moment we reach the inn," he went on, "I shall come to you with the package of money in my hand. Then you'll believe I want to help you. Tell me you'll believe then."
"Very likely I shall," answered the girl without interest. "If you really do intend to give me that money no one must know about it."
"No one shall know," he answered, "but you and me."
They walked on in silence. Then shyly the girl turned her head. Oh, most assuredly she was desirable.
Clumsy as had been his declaration Mr. Magee resolved to stick to it through eternity.
"I'm sorry I spoke as I did," she said. "Will you forgive me?"
"Forgive you?" he cried. "Why, I"—
"And now," she interrupted, "let us talk of other things—of ships and shoes and sealing wax"—
"All the topics in the world," he replied, "can lead to but one with me"—
"Ships?" asked the girl.
"For honeymoons," he suggested.
"Shoes?"
"In some circles of society I believe they are flung at bridal parties."
"And sealing wax?"
"On the license, isn't it?" he queried.
They were then at the great front door of Baldpate inn.
Inside, before the office fire, Miss Thornhill read a magazine in the indolent fashion so much affected at Baldpate inn during the heated term, while the mayor of Reuton chatted amiably with the ponderously coy Mrs. Norton.
Into this circle burst the envoys to the hermitage, flushed, energetic, snow flaked.
"Hail to the chef who in triumph advances!" cried Mr. Magee.
Myra Thornhill laid down her magazine and fired her great black eyes upon the radiant girl in corduroy.
"And was the walk in the morning air," she asked, "all you expected?"
"All and much more," laughed Miss Norton, mischievously regarding the man who had babbled to her of love on the mountain. "By the way, enjoy Mr. Peters while you can. He's back for just one day."
"Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow the cook leaves, as the fellow says," supplemented Mr. Max, removing his overcoat.
"How about a quick lunch, Peters?" inquired Magee.
"Out of what I'd like to know," put in Mrs. Norton. "Not a thing in the house to eat. Just like a man."
"You didn't look in the right place ma'am," replied Mr. Peters, with relish. "I got supplies for a couple of days in the kitchen."
"Well, what's the sense in hiding 'em?" the large lady inquired.
"It ain't hiding—it's system," explained Mr. Peters. "Something women don't understand." He came close to Mr. Magee and whispered low. "You didn't warn me there was another of 'em."
"The last, on my word of honor," Magee told him.
"The last," sneered Mr. Peters. "There isn't any last up here."
And with a sidelong glance at the new Eve in his mountain Eden he turned away to the kitchen.
"Now," whispered Magee to Miss Norton, "I'll get you that package. I'll prove that it was for you I fought and bled the mayor of Reuton. Watch for our chance. When I see you again I'll have it in my pocket."
"You mustn't fail me," she replied. "It means so much."
Mr. Magee started for the stairs. Between him and them loomed suddenly the great bulk of Mr. Cargan. His hard menacing eyes looked full into Magee's.
"I want to speak to you, young fellow," he remarked.
"I'm flattered," said Magee, "that you find my company so enchanting. In ten minutes I'll be ready for another interview."
"You're ready now," answered the mayor, "even if you don't know it. I've been trying to dope you out, and I think I've got you. I've seen your kind before. Every few months one of 'em breezes into Reuton, spends a whole day talking to a few rats I've had to exterminate from politics and then flies back to New York with a ten page story of my vicious career all ready for the linotypers. Yes, sir, I got you. You write sweet things for the magazines.
"Think so?" inquired Magee.
"Know it," returned the mayor heartily. "So you're out after on Cargan's scalp again, are you? I thought that now, seeing stories on the corruption of the courts is so plentiful, you'd let the same of the city halls alone for awhile. But—well, I guess I'm what you guys call good copy. Big, brutal, uneducated. picturesque—you see I read them stories myself. How long will the American public stand being ruled by a man like this, when it might be authorizing pretty boys with kid gloves to get next to the good things? That's the dope, ain't it—the old dope of the reform gang, the ballyhoo of the bunch that can't let the existing order stand? Don't worry. I ain't going to get started on that again. But I want to talk to you serious—like a father. There was a young fellow like you once"—
"Like me?"
"Exactly. He was out working on long hours and short pay for the reform gang, and he happened to get hold of something that a man I knew—a man high up in public office—wanted and wanted bad. The young fellow was going to get $200 for the article he was writing. My friend offered him $20,000 to call it off. What'd the young fellow do?"
"Wrote the article, of course," said Magee.
"Now—now," reproved Cargan. "That remark don't fit in with the estimate I've made of you. I think you're a smart boy. Don't disappoint me. This young fellow I speak of—he was smart, all right. He thought it over, Magee, the same as you're going to do. 'You're on,' says this lad and added five figures to his roll as easy as we'd add a nickel. He had brains, that guy."
"And no conscience," commented Magee.
"Conscience," said Mr. Cargan, "ain't worth much except as an excuse for a man that hasn't made good to give his wife. How much did you say you was going to get for this article?"
Mr. Magee looked him coolly in the eye.
"If it's ever written," he said, "it will be a $200,000 story."
There ain't anything like that in it for you," replied the mayor. "Think over what I've told you."
"I'm afraid," smiled Magee, "I'm too busy to think."
He again crossed the office floor to the stairway. Before the fire sat the girl of the station, her big eyes upon him pleadingly.
With a reassuring smile in her direction, he darted up the stairs.
"And now," he thought as he closed and locked the door of No. 7 behind him, "for the swag. So Cargan would give $20,000 for that little package. I don't blame him."
He knelt by the fireplace and dug up the brick under which lay the package so dear to many hearts on Baldpate mountain.
"I might have known," he muttered.
For the money was gone. He dug up several of the bricks and rummaged about beneath them. No use. The fat little bundle of bills had flown. Only an ugly hole gaped up at him.
(to be continued.)
If a man is square it is easy to put up with his sharp corners.