Kitabı oku: «Bound to Succeed: or, Mail Order Frank's Chances», sayfa 8

CHAPTER XX
A BAD BUSINESS

Frank came down to the office the next morning looking haggard and troubled. Stet was hanging around the door.

“Darry Haven told me to wait till you came down, and then let him know,” said the little fellow.

“All right,” nodded Frank in a dull way.

Stet darted off with his usual elfish nimbleness. Frank unlocked the door and sat down before his desk rather gloomily. He mechanically arranged some papers. Darry was with him before he had accomplished much. Stet accompanied him.

“Well, Frank,” questioned Darry, “any word of Markham?”

“Not a trace, Darry.”

“Strange, isn’t it?” observed Darry in a musing way. “I declare I can’t understand it.”

“Nor I,” said Frank. “It’s him I’m thinking of, not of myself. I haven’t slept a wink all night. Honest, Darry, if he was an own brother I couldn’t feel more anxious. Mother is quite as worried. I went everywhere about town last evening till the stores shut up. I telephoned several neighboring towns. I saw trainmen around the depot.”

“And found no one who had seen Markham after you sent him on that errand with the money and the mailing lists?”

“Not a soul, Darry.”

“How do you explain it?”

“I can’t. I suppose some people who don’t know Markham as I do, would say I was a fool to take up a stranger and put so much trust in him, that it served me right to have him run away with all I have in the world first chance he got. Well, let me tell you, Darry, that boy wouldn’t do me a wrong turn wilfully for a million dollars, and I know it.”

Darry sighed and was silent. He had liked Markham, but his young business career had brought him in contact with so many weak and absolutely bad people, that secretly he feared that Markham had yielded to temptation, and they would not hear of him again.

“Have you no theory as to the reason why Markham should be missing so mysteriously?” he asked.

“Why, yes, I have, in a way, Darry,” responded Frank, “but it is all guess-work. I told you last night about some secret in his life.”

“Yes, I know,” nodded Darry.

“I also told you that I was convinced that Dale Wacker knew Markham, and that Markham for some reason dreaded meeting him.”

“It certainly looked that way, judging from Markham’s actions.”

“Very well, I think they ran into each other after Markham went on the errand to you. Wacker is a blackmailer, as his talk to me about the puzzle plainly shows. Does he know something about Markham that might make him trouble? It certainly looks that way. He may have terrorized Markham into running away.”

“All right, if that is true, then Markham, if he is an honest boy, will send back your money and the mailing lists.”

“Of course he will,” declared Frank. “I’ve been expecting to receive them every hour.”

“And if he doesn’t,” suggested Darry, somewhat skeptically.

“If he doesn’t,” repeated Frank, slowly but steadily, “then make up your mind to one thing.”

“And what is that?”

“That Markham is in the power of some one who holds him a prisoner, and can’t get word to me.”

“H’m,” said Darry simply. Frank’s eyes flashed.

“Furthermore,” he went on, “assuming that, I shall make it my business to investigate along that line, I shall never lose faith in Markham’s honesty and fidelity to me till I have used every endeavor to find out when, where and why he dropped out of sight so mysteriously.”

“You’re a staunch friend, you are,” commented Darry. “In the meantime, though, Frank, your capital is gone. Worse than that, the whole basis of your business has gone with it.”

“Yes, the mailing lists,” said Frank. “I’ve thought that all out, Darry. You will have to stop work on the catalogue and the rest of the printing. I can’t pay for the work.”

“We’ll trust you.”

“No,” said Frank steadily, “I can’t run into debt.”

“We might spare a little cash till – till you hear from the other.”

“I won’t involve my friends. I have planned it all out. My mother is coming down to the office to take care of the little business that will come in from the advertising.”

“And what will you do?” asked Darry curiously.

“I have arranged to hire a horse and wagon. I shall go out and visit small towns and sell from door to door, or even from the wagon, till I hear from that missing money, or get on my feet again.”

“You’re a good one,” pronounced Darry with an admiring sparkle in his eye, slapping Frank heartily on the shoulder. “You’re a stubborn one, too, so I won’t intrude offers of assistance only to be turned down.”

“All the time,” resumed Frank, “I shall be looking out for a trace of Markham. See here, Darry, I can’t get that Dale Wacker off my mind. Who are his companions? Where does he hang out? How am I going to set a watch on him?”

“He may not even be in town,” suggested Darry. “You know Bob and I went all over Pleasantville last evening, like yourself seeking a trace of Markham. It looked as if Wacker had flashed into town and out again. We didn’t run across him, and we didn’t find anybody who had seen him since late in the afternoon.”

“Say, can I speak a word?” piped in an anxious voice.

It was little Stet who had spoken. Frank and Darry had forgotten all about him. Now Stet got up timorously from the door step.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Darry. “Heard all we’ve said, too, I suppose, Stet?”

“Yes, I have,” replied Stet. “Had to – ought to – I’m interested, I am. I like you. I like Mr. Newton. You’re both my friends. I like Markham, too. He gave Hemp Carson, the Eagle manager, a setting down for pitching onto me. I don’t like Dale Wacker. Huh! hadn’t ought to. He robbed me of two dollars once. Well, Dale Wacker is in Pleasantville. I saw him this morning. He came in on a farmer’s wagon from somewhere out of town.”

“That’s news, anyway,” said Darry.

“You were going to give me my regular ten days’ vacation next week, you know,” continued Stet to Darry. “Make it begin to-day, and I’ll soon find out for you all there is to find out about Dale Wacker’s doings.”

“But that is hardly a vacation, Stet?” suggested Frank.

“It will be,” chuckled the little fellow, “if I can get my two dollars’ worth of satisfaction out of him by showing him up.”

“All right,” said Darry, “try it, Stet, if you want to.”

Stet went away forthwith. Frank went into details with Darry as to the mail order business. It must remain partially inactive until something encouraging developed.

The morning mail was a pretty good one. About ten o’clock Mrs. Ismond came down to the office, and Frank initiated his mother into the business routine.

“Just get the mail each day, and fill what orders you can,” said Frank. “When you can’t fill an order, return the money. You see, mother, I want to take the bulk of stock on hand with me for quick sales, and I can’t order any more until I get some money ahead.”

Frank put in two hours about town trying to look up Markham. The result was quite as discouraging as upon the day previous. He closed an arrangement for the hire of a horse and a light wagon, and packed up some goods at the office, ready for his trip into the country.

Mrs. Ismond, with a woman’s instinctive capacity for neatness, had the office in attractive order by late afternoon, and all the work attended to.

“Don’t get discouraged, Frank,” she said, as they were on their way home. “It won’t take a great deal of money to keep up the business in a small way. I sent out a hundred circulars this afternoon, and I will keep on at that average while you are away.”

“Why,” spoke Frank, “how can you do that, with no mailing list addresses?”

“Oh, I set my wits at work and made quite a discovery,” responded Mrs. Ismond with a bright smile. “The Pleasantville Herald has quite a list of exchanges. I asked Darry to send me some. They come from all over the State. I selected a number of promising names from little news items in the papers. For instance: I took girls’ names from church and society items, and boys’ names from baseball club items and the like. Good, fresh names, Frank – don’t you see?”

“I do see,” said Frank, “and it’s a grand idea, mother.”

After supper Mrs. Ismond went upstairs to make up a little parcel of collars, handkerchiefs and the like for her son’s journey.

Frank looked up from the county map from which he was formulating a route, as his mother reappeared. At a glance he saw that she was very much agitated.

“Oh, Frank!” she panted, sinking into a chair pale and distressed-looking.

“Why, what’s the matter, mother?” exclaimed Frank, arising quickly to his feet.

Mrs. Ismond had a worn yellow sheet of paper in her hand.

“Markham,” she said, in a sad, pained way. “I was getting out some neckties for you, and by mistake opened the bureau drawer where he kept his belongings. I found this.”

“What is it, mother?” asked Frank, taking the paper from her hand. He saw for himself, and his face turned quite as white and troubled as her own.

“Too bad – too bad,” said Frank, looking down at the time-worn sheet of paper in a disheartened way.

CHAPTER XXI
AN UNEXPECTED MEETING

It was a depressing discovery that Mrs. Ismond had made. Frank sat staring at the paper in his hand in silence for some minutes.

This was a printed sheet. It was headed: “Reward – One Hundred Dollars.” In short, the warden of the Juvenile Reformatory at Linwood, offered that amount for the return to that institution of an escaped inmate – Richard Markham Welmore.

“Yes, it is our Markham,” murmured Frank – “that is his middle name. The description answers him exactly,” and again Frank said in a troubled way: “Too bad – too bad.”

Frank knew what his mother was thinking of – that they had harbored a convicted criminal, who had weakly yielded to temptation, beggaring them, and going back to his old evil ways.

He now knew what Dale Wacker meant when he spoke of the inventor of the wire puzzle as being in a “snug, tight place.” Markham had sought relief from his irksome confinement getting up the pleasant little novelty that had taken so well. Evidently Wacker, when he first called on Frank, was not aware of the fact that Markham had escaped.

Wacker had probably once himself been an inmate of the reformatory. He knew its rules and routine. Coming across Markham on his way to Haven Bros., what more natural, Frank reasoned, than that he should take advantage of this knowledge? His recognition by Wacker would crush Markham. Had Wacker terrified him so that he had led him to some quiet spot, bargained with him, robbed him, sent him back to the reformatory, and laid claim to the reward?

“I am going to find out,” cried Frank, starting for his cap, but instantly quieting down again as he reflected farther.

His impulse was to hurry downtown and telegraph the reformatory at Linwood for information. Suddenly, however, he reflected that if his surmises were wrong, and things turned out differently than he theorized, he would simply be putting the authorities on the track of the unfortunate Markham.

“Mother,” he said, “nothing will make me believe that Markham voluntarily stole my money. No, this Dale Wacker had a hand in this disappearance. Perhaps poor Markham met him and fled, and is in hiding. We may hear from him yet.”

“But, Frank,” suggested Mrs. Ismond in a broken tone of voice, “we are sure now that Markham was a – a bad boy.”

“Why so?” asked Frank.

“He was the inmate of a reformatory.”

“When I think of the old wasted days in my own life when I ran away from home,” said Frank, “and the evil men I met who would have got me into any kind of trouble to further their own schemes, and I innocently walking into their trap, I shall give Markham the benefit of a doubt, every time. What right have we to assume that he was not a victim of wrong? No, no! He was a true friend, an honest worker. I won’t desert or forget him until I have cleared up all this mystery.”

Frank was up before five o’clock the next morning. He had just finished cutting a week’s supply of kindling wood in the wood shed, when Stet popped into view over the back fence.

Stet tried to look like a real detective. He glanced back over his shoulder. He even said “Hist!” in first hailing Frank. Then he asked:

“Going away to-day?”

“I’ve got to, Stet,” answered Frank. “Have you been looking up that Wacker fellow?”

“I’ve been doing nothing else,” answered Stet, putting on a serious, careworn look. “Say, he’s a bad one. Hangs out at the worst places on Railroad Street, and plays cards all the time.”

“Throwing away his money, eh?”

“He don’t seem to have much. No,” said Stet, “I saw him borrow from two or three chums. But he’s got great prospects, I heard him say. He’s waiting for somebody to come to Pleasantville, or for something to happen. You leave it to me. I’ll watch him like a ferret, only you’d better leave word where I can find you, if anything important comes up.”

“All right, Stet. My mother will know where I am each day I am gone.”

“And say,” continued Stet, “I want you to say something to me.”

“Say something to you, Stet?” repeated Frank in a puzzled way.

“Uh – huh.”

“What?”

“I want you to look at me fierce, and frown, and say that you order me out of your place, and if I show up again you’ll break every bone in my body.”

“See here – ” began Frank in wonderment.

“Now, you just say it,” persisted Stet. “I know my business,” and he blinked and chuckled craftily.

“All right – here goes.”

“Good as a play,” declared Stet, as Frank went through the rigmarole. “Now I needn’t tell any lies. Thrown out by my friends, discharged from my job, O – O – Oh!” and Stet affected sobs of the deepest misery. “Had Bob Haven kicked me – not hard – out of the shop last night. See? Object of abuse and sympathy. Oh, I’m fixed now to play Mr. Dale Wacker good and strong.”

Stet disappeared the way he had come in a high state of elation. Frank went into the house for breakfast. He walked as far as the office with his mother. Then he went to the livery stable where he had hired the turnout.

He was soon on the road. Frank tried to forget the anxieties of the mail order business and his missing friend. He planned to cover six little towns by nightfall.

Frank had good luck from the start. At a crossroads there was a country schoolhouse, a general store and some twenty houses. The man running the store was just stocking in for the fall term of school. Frank came in the nick of time. He sold the man over ten dollars worth of notions and novelties.

Watering his horse at a roadhouse, a little later on, he interested some loungers on the veranda. Frank got rid of two rings, a cheap watch, a pedometer and three of Markham’s puzzles.

At noon he took dinner at Carrollville, quite a good-sized town. A small circus was playing here. Frank conceived the idea of buying a privilege to sell on the circus grounds. The manager wanted ten dollars for a permit, however, so Frank took up his stand near the railway depot.

As the crowds came for their trains at five o’clock, he opened up his novelty stock.

“A pretty thrifty day,” mused Frank, an hour later, as he started for his final stop of the day at Gray’s Lake. “Profits eleven dollars and twenty cents. Why, thirty days of this kind of trade will give me back my lost capital.”

Gray’s Lake was a settlement and a summer resort. Frank put up the horse, got a good supper, and then selected the newest and most salable of the trinkets and novelties he carried in stock.

Among these was a good assortment of leather souvenir postal cards, just then a decided novelty outside of the large cities. He had brought along a large jewelry tray. This he suspended by a strap from his neck, and went up to the big hotel at the end of the lake.

A group of girls in a summer house running out over the water furnished Frank with his first customers. He sold two friendship rings and sixteen postal cards.

A crowd of idle men took fire on the puzzle proposition, as two men examining the wire devices got rating one another as to their respective ability to get the ring off first. A dozen puzzles were purchased in as many minutes.

Frank went the rounds of the verandas, meeting with very fair success. The people there had plenty of money to spare, time hung rather heavy on their hands, and they welcomed his arrival as a diversion.

Frank grew to have a decided respect for Markham’s little puzzle. He had struck the right crowd to sell it to, this time. At the end of an hour fully fifty persons could be seen on the well-lighted verandas and in the hotel rotunda, working over the clever puzzle. An occasional utterance of satisfaction would greet the solution of the puzzle.

“Markham has certainly left me a money-winner, if he never came back,” reflected Frank.

He was passing along a lighted walk near the lake beach, when a young lady ran past him towards a group of friends.

A foppishly-dressed man with a great black moustache was hastening after her, but she was calling laughingly back at him:

“No, no, count, you would take all night getting that ring off – I’ll try some one else.”

“It ees a meestake. Allow me to try once more, my dear young lady.”

“Hello!” ejaculated Frank, with a violent start. Then in a flash he slipped the tray from place, set it hastily on a vacant bench, and as the man was passing by him caught him deliberately by the sleeve.

“Sare!” challenged the man, with a supercilious stare. “Oh!” he added, wilting down in an instant.

“I suppose you don’t know me?” demanded Frank.

“Nevare, sare.”

“I am Frank Newton, of Greenville, and, for all your false moustache and broken English, you are Gideon Purnell.”

“Let go!” hissed the man, with a rapid glance at the group just beyond them.

“No,” replied Frank firmly, only tightening his grasp on the man’s coat sleeve. “I have been looking for you for over a year. I knew I should find you some time. I have found you now.”

“What do you want?” stammered his crestfallen companion.

“Ten minutes’ quiet conversation with you.”

“About what?”

“You know. You were the tool Mr. Dorsett used to rob my mother of her fortune. He got what he was after. You overstepped yourself. You forged two names in your crooked dealings, as Mr. Beach, our lawyer at Greenville, has the proof.”

“Boy,” said Purnell, in a low, quick tone, “don’t make a rumpus here. Come and see me to-morrow, and I will do the square thing by you.”

“You’ll do it now,” declared Frank definitely, “or I will expose you to the people here, and wire Mr. Beach for instructions.”

“At least let me go and make some excuse to my friends yonder,” pleaded “the count.”

“Go ahead,” said Frank.

CHAPTER XXII
GOOD NEWS

Frank kept a close watch on Purnell. He had reason to do so. Upon what he might by threats or persuasion compel this man to divulge, hung all the future prospects of his mother ever recovering her stolen fortune.

When Frank’s step-father died, this person, one of his former associates, had produced notes and deeds apparently giving him the ownership to everything that Mr. Ismond owned.

There were many flaws to his claim. Mrs. Ismond’s lawyer, Mr. Beach, discovered two arrant forgeries. Before any action at law could be taken, however, Purnell transferred all the property to “an innocent purchaser,” Dorsett.

Mrs. Ismond brought suit against the latter, but even Mr. Beach did not believe the law would force him to restore what he claimed to have bought for a valid consideration. Their only hope seemed to be to find Purnell, who had disappeared. If through him they could connect Dorsett with a conspiracy, Mrs. Ismond would win her case.

This was the first time since he had fled from Greenville that Frank had seen this man. Now he forgot his sample case, Markham, and the whole mail order business amid the keen importance of keeping track of the slippery fugitive, and forcing from him a confession.

Purnell approached the party of young ladies, still acting the exquisite and playing the foreign count he pretended to be. He bowed and smirked, and backed away to Frank.

Instantly his face lost its mask. With a scowl he dropped his affected foreign drawl.

“You will have it out, here and now, will you?” he growled, grinding his teeth viciously.

“Yes, I’ll have it out, or you in,” responded Frank pointedly.

“Then come to my room.”

The false count led the way into the hotel, hurried up a staircase, and, unlocking a door on the second floor, ushered Frank into a room. He lit the gas and threw himself into a chair, glaring at Frank in a savage and desperate way.

“You’re a determined young man, you are,” he observed.

“Why not?” demanded Frank. “It has been the resolve of my life to hunt you down. If you escape me this time, I shall find you later. You are masquerading here under false pretences. I can expose you. Should I telegraph Mr. Beach, he would at once send an officer to arrest you.”

“That won’t help your case any,” observed the man.

“I don’t care. It will prove that Dorsett had a criminal for a partner, and that will influence the court when my mother’s suit comes to trial.”

“Name your terms,” spoke Purnell suddenly.

“Very well,” said Frank gravely: “you helped rob my mother of the estate her husband left her. What you got out of it I don’t know, but it seems to have made it necessary for you to continue the career of a fugitive and a fraud.”

“What I got!” snapped out Purnell, springing to his feet in hot anger. “I got what everybody gets who deals with that old rascal – the bad end of the trade, drat him!”

“I’ll leave you alone to your own devices,” said Frank. “I’ll promise to see that you get some money when my mother recovers hers, if you will write out, sign and swear to the facts of your conspiracy with Dorsett against my mother.”

“All right,” answered Purnell, after a moment of thought. “I’ve got some papers that apply to the matter. They are in my sitting room. I’ll get them.”

The speaker walked to a door, turned a key and disappeared beyond the threshold. Frank sat awaiting his return. He congratulated himself on the ease with which he had intimidated the man to his purposes.

Two minutes passed by, and Frank became impatient, five, and his suspicions were aroused. He walked to the door and knocked, tried it, pushed it open, and found himself, not in a connecting room, but in a side corridor.

“Well, he has slipped me,” instantly decided Frank.

He realized that he had been tricked badly. Frank went to the hotel office to make some inquiries, made a tour of the grounds, and, finally surmising that the object of his search had fled for good, regained his sample tray and returned to the town.

Frank did not stay all night at the local hotel, although he went there to ask for mail. He had given his mother a list of the hotels in the various towns he expected to visit, secured from a guide book.

There was a brief note from his mother. It imparted no particular news, saying only that she was attending to orders as they came in.

Frank found a cheap lodging, and was back at the hotel at the lake by six o’clock the next morning. A brief talk with the clerk convinced him that Purnell would not be likely to return to that hostelry.

He had gone, owing a week’s bill, and the two valises left in his room were found to be filled with bricks.

“I’ve missed my man this time,” reflected Frank, as he hitched up the horse an hour later. “I may as well go right on my route. I’ll find him again, some time.”

At Derby, Frank upon his arrival went to the telegraph office. He sent a message to the reformatory at Linwood, asking if one Richard Welmore was still an inmate of that institution. He asked, further, if one Dale Wacker had ever been a prisoner there.

He went on selling in the town, with fair returns, until mid-afternoon. A reply to his message awaited him on his next visit to the telegraph office. It read:

“Dale Wacker paroled on bond of his uncle. Richard Welmore escaped about six months since. One hundred dollars reward for his capture. If know his whereabouts, wire at once.”

“That upsets one of my theories,” thought Frank. “Markham has not been captured for the reward.”

Brandon was his next town. The day following he made Essex. He was pretty tired as he drove to its livery stable, about eight o’clock in the evening.

After supper he went to the local hotel, and asked if there was any mail for Frank Newton.

“No,” replied the clerk whom he questioned, “but here’s a telegram been waiting here for you since noon.”

“Thank you for your trouble,” said Frank, rather anxiously tearing open the yellow envelope.

“That’s all right,” nodded the hotel clerk. “Good news, I reckon?” he smiled, as Frank’s face lit up magically at a hasty perusal of the message.

“I should say so!” declared Frank.

The message was from Darry Haven, at Pleasantville, and it read:

“Come home at once. Money found.”