Kitabı oku: «Ladies and Gentlemen», sayfa 5

“Come to think about it, though, I guess the thing you’re wonderin’ about the most is how us insurance people come to figger out that you wasn’t dead but ’live and kickin’,” continued the smoker. “I know good and well that if I was in your fix that’s what I would be interested in the most. That’s right, ain’t it?”

Chaney raised his head from the pillow and nodded, and was, as the saying is, all ears.

“Well, sir, I got to take the compliments for that part of it all by myself. You might not believe it, but if it hadn’t been for me they or nobody else would probably never have suspicioned anything out of the way about you bein’ squashed out nice and flat under that landslide. The way it come up was this way: I live at Kalispel, out in the Flathead valley, you know. I’m the resident agent there for the Equity and Warranty Company and on the side I’m a deputy sheriff for Flathead County, or the other way around, whichever way you want to put it. And it so happened I was the second human bein’ to get into that Scalded Creek basin after the quake last year. But this boy Hurley’s brother was the first.

“Just as soon as they felt the quake down on the river, this here brother, name Sherman Hurley, he took a notion into his head that something was wrong up in the mountains with his brother, the one that had hired out to guide you. It was almost like as if he’d got a message from his brother’s spirit. So nothin’ would do but what he must start right in and make sure, one way or the other. So he lit out and he traveled all that night, him knowin’ all the trails and the lay of the land, and by movin’ about as fast over them ridges as his pony could take him he made the trip in four or five hours less time than ’twould take doin’ it the regular easy way.

“By daylight next mornin’ he was there and he took one look around him and didn’t see hide nor hair of you two nor of the horses, but he did see that slide where it had come down right square on top of the camp-ground along the creek, and he decided to himself, the same as anybody else with good sense would, that the whole outfit of you was under that mess of truck. He didn’t waste no time foolin’ around. If he went in there fast, he came out still faster. It wasn’t noon yet when he got back to Polebridge with the news. His pony had went lame and he’d finished the trip, jumpin’ and runnin’.

“Well, they telephoned down to Kalispel and the sheriff sent me on up by automobile to sort of represent the county, and he sent word on ahead for the gang that was goin’ in to wait till I got there. Well, I burnt up the road gettin’ through. They had quite a posse organized when I pulled in – rangers and several kinfolks of the Hurleys and some neighbors and part of a road crew out of the Park. This young Sherm Hurley was practically all in from what he’d been through with and mighty near grieved to death besides – he took on worse than any of his family did – but he was still bent and determined on goin’ back the second time. He just would go, takin’ the lead, tired as he was.

“Somehow him and me was ahead of the rest when we hit the rim and purty soon after that I seen somethin’ that set me to thinkin’. I always did have kind of a turn for the detectin’ business; that was partly what induced me to be a deputy sheriff. Yes, sir, I seen something. Guess what it was I seen?”

Chaney shook his head.

“Tracks, that’s what. But I seen something a heap more significant right shortly after that. But these first things were tracks. I didn’t tell nobody what was sproutin’ in my mind, but I motioned everybody to stay where they was for a minute and then I got down off the plug I was ridin’ and made one or two rough measurements and sized up things. Then I holloed back to the others to come ahead and we went on down.

“So in a few minutes more we was all down there together in that basin. But while the crowd was prowlin’ round, with young Hurley beggin’ ’em to fix up some way of gettin’ his brother’s body out from under those jagged rocks and them all keepin’ on tellin’ him it looked to them like it was goin’ to be an impossible job, I was doin’ some prowlin’ on my own hook. Inside of three minutes I’d run onto something else that set me to thinkin’ harder than ever. Try guessin’ what that was.”

“Was it – was it the fishing rod?” asked Chaney. The question popped out of him of its own accord.

“Nope – you’re gettin’ warm though. It was something right close by. Say” – he raised his voice admiringly – “say, plantin’ that busted bamboo pole there wasn’t such a bad idea on your part. I’ve said that to myself often since then and I still say so. It showed you two had been there before the slide and it made it look like you’d been took by surprise when the big disturbance started. But the thing I’m speakin’ about now wasn’t anything you’d fixed up for a plant. It was something you must have overlooked in the excitement. Well, nobody could have blamed you much for that. It must have been pretty squally times down in that deep hole when the earth began to rock and the cliffs began to crumble. You bet!

“Try to think of something besides the pole,” he prompted. “Go on and try!”

His prisoner, who was sitting up now, made a gesture to indicate that he still was entirely at a loss.

“I’ll give you a hint to help tip you off. What was you doin’ just before the hell-raisin’ broke loose?”

“Well, my line got twisted in a sapling – ”

“No, no, before that even.”

“I – let’s see? I – oh, by gosh!”

It all came back to Chaney; the answer to the riddle that had pestered him that afternoon on the rim-rock nearly a year before. The thing that had made him hesitate, half persuaded to return. The same thing which subconsciously had fretted him through his sleeping on that first night of flight. It came back vividly – how his duplicate false upper plate had fallen out of his shirt pocket on the wet shale; how, absently, he had wondered why the plate should be in his pocket when properly it belonged in the canvas carryall which fitted under a flap of his ground-cloth; how he had picked it up and balanced it momentarily on a flat stone, not restoring it to his pocket for fear of another fall; how then he noticed a sizable trout nosing in out of deep water to the shallows and how, hoping to land him, he cast. And then the gut leader snagging and he turning to free it and then – the first astounding quiver underfoot.

“Exactly,” affirmed the deputy as though he read what rolled in Chaney’s mind. “Your extry set of store teeth! There they was, settin’ on a rock, smilin’ at me as pleasant as you please and shinin’ in the sunlight.

“I don’t know why ’twas, but right then and there there popped into my head something that happened once up in Nevada when I was a kid livin’ with my folks just outside of Carson City. A fellow in Carson that had a glass eye hired a lot of Piute Indians to clean up a piece of ground for him – get the rocks and stumps out, you know. Well, them Piutes would work along all right as long as he stood right over them, but the minute he’d go away they’d every last single one of ’em lay down and take a nap. So finally he got an idea. He took his glass eye out of the socket and set it on a stump facing down the field and he says to old Johnson Sides, the Peacemaker of the Piutes, who could speak English and acted as interpreter for the gang, he says to him:

“‘You tell your bunch that I’m goin’ away a little while, but I’m leavin’ my eye behind me to watch and see that none of ’em don’t loaf on the job.’

“And old Johnson translated it and he put off somewheres. Well, sir, it worked fine for several days. Every time he quit the job he left his eye behind him on the stump. And every time a buck felt like loafing he’d look around and see that glass eye glarin’ his way, or anyhow seemin’ to, and he’d duck his head and spit on his hands and go to it again.

“But one day the boss came back and every blamed Indian in sight was stretched out on the ground snorin’ to beat thunder. One smart one had slipped up behind the glass eye and slipped an empty tomato can down over it so it couldn’t spy on ’em. And so when I seen your false teeth I thought of that Carson City feller’s false eye, only his was covered up with an old tin can and yours was settin’ out in the open, tellin’ me things.

“For one thing they was tellin’ me I maybe might be right on the suspicions I’d had about them tracks up above. First, though, I asked some questions without lettin’ on to anybody what I had in my mind. A detective on a case don’t go round blabbin’ his business to everybody in sight, you know. I found out Hurley never had a bad tooth in his head. So this plate must belong to the fellow that was with him, which was you. That was point number one.

“I found out what size foot Hurley had and what kind of a boot he was wearin.’ Point number two: them fake tracks up above couldn’t have been made by him. They must have been made by you. Question then was, why should you want to sneak out of that basin and duck your nut without spreadin’ the word? Says I to myself, ‘That’s for me to find out.’ So havin’ quietly confisticated that plate for evidence, I climbed up to the sandy stretch of the trail without bein’ noticed particular by any of the party and I made certain I hadn’t been wrong in the first place about them tracks.”

“You keep harping on that,” said Chaney with irritation. “What was wrong with those tracks? Mind you, I’m not admitting anything nor confessing anything, but I’m asking you what was wrong there?”

The under-sheriff grinned in appreciation of his own shrewdness.

“Nothin’ much was wrong with them, only this,” he explained. “There was one set too many, that’s all. When you backed across that sand you done a first-rate job, but you plumb forgot to brush out the prints you’d already made comin’ in. You’d got down out of the saddle and was walking your horse when you started down that day. I’m right, ain’t I? You needn’t answer – I know I am. Well, that was your mistake, brother – not wipin’ out the first set. So there they was as plain as the nose on your face – two sets of prints, about a yard and a half apart and both pointin’ in the same direction!

“They say a feller that’s fixin’ to commit a cold-blooded murder always leaves something behind him to convict him, and I judge it’s the same way with a feller that takes it in his head all of a sudden to try to work a fraud on an insurance company or somebody. Lawsy me, that double set of tracks showin’ there to give you away, and no doubt you sayin to yourself how smart you was all the time you was makin’ ’em! Why, say, listen, the only way it could ’a’ been possible for you to make ’em honest would for you to be twins.

“Well, later on when I found out more about you, I wouldn’t been much surprised to hear you was twins and carried the other twin hid on your person somewheres and trotted him out when you wanted to use him. Because by all accounts you certainly are a great one, Chaney, for havin’ an extry supply of everything in your war bags. Well, maybe that is good medicine – I won’t say; but it certainly turned out bad for you this one time.

“Well, anyhow, I kept my mouth shut, not takin’ nobody in my confidence, on the trip back to Polebridge. As soon as I could get a minute to myself I called up Kalispel – and say, talk about your coincidences! The news of you and young Hurley bein’ missin’ had been given out the day before by the sheriff and it was telegraphed all over the country to the newspapers, and the home office of our company in New Haven, Connecticut, had seen the dispatch and wired to the district agency at Helena sayin’ you carried a policy with us and for them to start an inquiry into the circumstances and get confirmation and all; and the district agency had wired to me sayin’ the same thing.

“Maybe them home-office folks wasn’t astonished when the word came right back to ’em that their local representative was already on the job and smellin’ a rat. Just to show you, they thought so well of me on account of what I’d already nosed out they didn’t send no special investigator out from headquarters to handle the matter. They turned it over to me, with an expense account and a drawin’ account and all; just told me to drop everything else and stick to this case till I found you. So I got a leave of absence from the sheriff’s office, and, buddy, I’ve been on your trail ever since, and that’s goin’ on eleven months.

“Sometimes I’d think I was right close up behind you and then again there’d be times when I’d lose the scent altogether and have to scout round on the loose till I crossed it again. There’s been gaps and breaks to your movements where I just had to take a chance and bridge over the jump and bulge ahead. Why, I’d lose sign of you and your probable whereabouts for weeks and months hand-runnin’. But I didn’t quit you, not for a single minute, never, at no time.”

Having achieved the somewhat difficult feat of incorporating four separate negatives into one positive sentence, the pleased man-hunter contemplated his legs outstretched before him with a gloating, reminiscent smile.

“Well, that’s about all of the yarn,” he added after a short pause. “No, it ain’t quite all, neither. There was the way I first came to come to get you spotted definite. Startin’ off, I says to myself: ‘He wouldn’t go east or south; if he did, he’d run into one of the Park hotels or a bunch of dude tourists on one of the main trails. He couldn’t come back out at the west side because that’s where people who saw him when he went into the mountains would be sure to meet him and remember him. So, if he’s got any gumption at all, he’s went north.’ That’s what I says, dopin’ things out.

“So I goes north my own self. About all I had to go on for a spell was a photograph of you that the home-office people dug up – that and a pretty complete schedule of your ways and your habits. I banked on them more’n I did on the picture – a fellow can change the way he looks, but he ain’t so apt to change the way he does. As it turned out, I was right. Because when I’d worked along as far as Vancouver and made a canvass of all the dentists in the telephone directory, and run across one dentist over on a back street that had only just lately finished makin’ an extra upper plate for a feller answering to your general plans and specification – a feller, by gee, that already had a perfectly good plate in his top jaw – why, then I knowed I was on the right track.

“When you come right down to it, old-timer, that was what finally fixed your clock for you. Say, you certainly are a great hand, ain’t you, for havin’ two of everything? Yes, sir, you bet, two of everything!”

Seeming to like the phrase, he repeated it again and once again. All at once then it flashed to Chaney’s brain that in the drawled and deliberate repetition was a special emphasis, the hint and the menace of a special meaning. What was this guy driving at, anyhow? What revelation as yet unmentioned was impending? Then, with the next words from his captor it came – the realization.

“I gotta hand it to you there, yes, sir. Two of everything for you, includin’ aliases —and wives. Whoa! Stiddy, boy! Stand hitched!”

For the bigamist, with a vision of state’s prison before his eyes, had jerked so hard in his scrambling leap that he almost dislocated his shackled wrist and did rack the frail bed down.

We of the Old South

Just as he was, Captain Ransom Teal might have stepped right out of the pages of some story book. He looked like a refugee from a list of illustrations. Still, and with all that, there was on his part no conscious striving for effect. He looked that way because that was the way he looked. And his general walk and conversation matched in. He moved in the gentle prismatic shimmer of his own local color. He was the genuine article, absolutely.

On the other hand, Miss Blossom Lamar Clayton was what you might call self-assembled.

Hers was a synthetic blend, the name being borrowed in these quarters, the accent in those. As for the spare parts, such as mannerisms and tricks of gesture and the fashion of dressing the hair, they had been picked up here, there and elsewhere, as the lady went along. Almost the only honest thing about her was the original background of an inconsequential little personality. She was so persistent a cadger, though, that only once in a while did the primary tints show through those pilfered, piled-on coats of overglazing.

She was living proof of what petty larceny will do for a practitioner who keeps it up long enough and gets away with it most of the time. She was guilty on twenty counts but the trouble was you couldn’t convict her. Not with the evidence on hand, anyhow.

They met – the escaped frontispiece and the human loan collection – in Hollywood, hard by one of the larger moving-picture plants. It was a first-rate site for such a meeting between two such specimens to take place, and highly suitable, because out there so many of the fictions are dressed up as facts and nearly every fact has a foundation of fiction which lies under it and lies and lies and lies. Almost anything can happen in Hollywood. And almost everything does, if you believe what you read in the Sunday supplements.

To be exact, the trails of these two first crossed in the dining-room of Mrs. H. Spicer. They crossed there and shortly thereafter became more or less interwoven.

Miss Clayton had been a guest at Mrs. H. Spicer’s for some weeks past now, long enough to be able to describe beforehand what would be served for dinner on any given day. In the matter of her menus Mrs. H. Spicer was very High-church; she followed after ritual. This saved mental fag, which is a thing to be avoided when one is conducting a high-grade boarding-house mainly patronized by temperamental ladies and gentlemen who either are connected with, or who hope ultimately to be connected with, what used to be the largest single amusement industry in the United States before bootlegging crowded it back down into second place.

A tapeworm would have some advantage over a surviving sojourner beneath Mrs. H. Spicer’s roof because the tapeworm never can tell in advance what it is going to have for its chief meal for the day, whereas if you were hardy and lasted through the second week at Spicer’s, you knew that Monday’s dinner would be based on the solid buttresses of corned beef and cabbage, and Tuesday’s on lamb stew with cole-slaw on the side, and Wednesday’s on liver and bacon, and so on through to Sunday’s crowning feast, which was signalized by chicken fricassee accompanied by a very durable variety of flour dumpling with fig ice-cream for dessert; then repeat again in serial order, as named.

It was Mrs. Spicer’s brag that she ran a homelike establishment. She said it really was more like one big happy family than a mere boarding house; to make it such was her constant aim, she said. But Tobe Daly said – behind her back, of course – that if this was home he knew now why so many girls left it. Tobe was always pulling some comical line.

This, being a Friday, was fish day with rice pudding to follow. Miss Clayton, having finished her rice pudding, was in the act of rising from her chair to go out and join this same Mr. Tobe Daly on the porch when Mrs. H. Spicer brought in a strange old gentleman. With the air which she always wore when presenting a fresh recruit to the other members of her constantly changing family groups – a kind of soothing yet a fluttering air – the landlady piloted him to the small table for four over in the far corner and presented him to the pair who still lingered at it – Miss Clayton and a Mrs. Scofield – and assigned him to the one vacant place there and told Katie, the second dining-room girl, to bring him some dinner.

Immediately there was something about the newcomer to catch the fancy and set the mind to work. There was more than a something, there was a great deal. It was not so much that he wore white whiskers and wore his white hair rather long. Hollywood is one spot where whiskers – a vast number of them – command favorable attention and have a money value. The reckless partisan who swore never to trim until William Jennings Bryan had been elected president comes into his belated own there. After all these long and cumbered years he has at last his place in the sun – as a benevolent uncle, or a veteran mining prospector, or the shaggy but kind-hearted keeper of the lighthouse on the coast where the little child drifts ashore in the storm, lashed to a mast, or the aged wanderer of the waste-lands who in Reel Three turns up and in Reel Six turns out to be the long-lost father of the heroine. Or what not.

So it was not this new boarder’s whiskers and his long hair which centered the collective eye of the dining-room so much as it was his tall, slim, almost straight old figure, his ruddy and distinguished but rather vacuous face, his high white collar and black string tie, his black frock coat with the three upper buttons of the waistcoat unfastened so that the genteel white pleated shirt bosom ballooned out of the vent, his slim “low quarter” shoes. More than these it was his bearing, so courtly, which meant so old-fashioned, and most of all it was the sweeping low salute he rendered to Mrs. Scofield and to Miss Clayton before he sat down and drew up. It was as though he said: “As examples of fair womanhood I render tribute to you both. Through you I honor all the gracious sex of which you two are such shining ornaments.”

You almost could hear him saying it; your imagination told you this was precisely the sort of high-flown, hifalutin language he would use, and use it naturally, too. For here was a type come to life, a character bit in the flesh. And that’s a rare bird to find even in Hollywood where types do so freely abound.

He asked Miss Clayton a question or two, and she made hurried and, one might have thought, confused answers before she escaped to the veranda where Tobe Daly, that canny squire of dames, was holding space for her alongside him on the top step.

“Gee,” began Tobe, “did you make it?”

“Make what?” she asked, settling and smoothing her skirts.

“The old pappy guy, who else?”

“He’s nice,” said Miss Clayton, still engaged in the business of drawing the skirt down over her knees.

“He’s a freak,” said Mr. Daly. He cocked a shrewd appraising squint at her side face. “Say, I was piping it off through the front window when the old battle-ax towed him in and interduced him to you gals, and the way it looked to me you kind of ducked soon as he began shooting conversation at you.”

“Never mind that part of it,” she countered. “Who is he and where did he come from? Or, don’t you know? All I caught was his name. Teal, something like that.”

“Teal, huh? Swell name for an old duck, I’ll claim. Jimmy Hoster yonder was just giving me the low-down on him. It seems like Chief Gillespie – you know, director with the Lobel outfit – well, Gillespie he piped him off down there in Alabama or wherever it was down South that he’s had his bunch on location, shooting stuff for that new costume picture that Winifred Desiree and Basil Derby are being featured in. So Gil brought him along with ’em when they got back this morning, figuring, I guess, on using him in that picture or else in something else.

“They had him over on the Lobel lot this afternoon and they tell me he went big just on his looks. Well, you got to hand it to that Gillespie – he’s some picker. If that old boy only had one of these here white goatees on his chin instead of those mountain-goat drapes, he’d be the most perfect Southern Colonel ever I saw in the fillums or on the talking stage, either one. But he’s the first one ever I saw – you know what I mean, O. K. in every touch – outside of a book or a show shop. I figure quite a lot of ’em around here will be wanting him.”

“I wish somebody would decide they wanted me,” she said. “This just hanging round and hanging round gets on my nerves – not to speak of other reasons.”

“Well, ain’t I told you I’m on the look-out for something for you? Ain’t I told you all about what I been doing ’specially on your account? But with a million of these janes from all over the country swarming in here and fighting for every chance that turns up, it’s kind of hard making an opening for a new hand.”

“If I could just get on once, even as an extra, I’d show ’em something.”

“If you’d listen to reason, kid, and be good to me” – he sank his voice – “you know, be a real little cozy pal, I’ll guarantee you’ll be something better than an extra. A fella likes to be a good fella and a good sport and all, and go through for somebody, but what I say is he’s due his reward. Now, ain’t he?”

The girl seemed not to have heard him.

“He’s nice,” she said, as though to herself. “I’ll bet anything he’s awfully nice.”

“Who? Oh, you mean old Uncle Whiskers. Forget him – think about me a spell. Why not be reasonable now, like I was just now saying?” He scrooged in closer.

She edged away, keeping distance between them. Mr. Daly caught a flash of her quick grimace. From wheedling, his tone changed to a rasping one of rising temper. “Maybe he’s nice,” he said, “but even so I noticed you sort of run out on him a while ago.” He let a little grit of satire sift into the next sentence: “What’s the matter – don’t you real Southerners like to get together when you get a chance and hold hands and sing Dixie Land? Or is it you was scared of something?”

“Say, look her-r-r-e, you lay off that stuff.” If the truth must be known Miss Clayton was a child of Pittsburgh. And in Pittsburgh to r-r-r is human, to forgive almost impossible – if you’re a purist in the matter of phonetics. And in moments of stress this native was prone to forget things which laboriously she had learned, and revert to the native idioms.

“Well, then, all I got to say is that if you’re Southern I’m a Swede watchmaker.” He shrugged, then got on his legs. “Say, little one, if you want to get huffy and act standoffish I’m pretty well up on the huff stuff myself. But stick around here awhile longer and you’ll see how far a head of taffy hair and a doll-baby face will get you without you got somebody on the inside of one of the big plants to plug your game.” Young Mr. Daly, camera-man by profession and skirt-chaser on the side, tipped his hat brim the fractional part of an inch. “So long; and think it over.”

The dusk gathering under the pepper trees along the sidewalk absorbed his runty but swaggering shape. Left alone, Miss Clayton put her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fisted hands and thought it over. She took stock of herself and her prospects, social and artistic, also financial. On the whole she didn’t have such a very cheerful evening sitting there all by herself.

It was next morning when the California pathways of those two Southerners – the seventy-nine-year-old regular and the twenty-year-old volunteer – really met and joined. It started at the breakfast table, which they had now to themselves. The disgruntled Mr. Daly had come down earlier. Mrs. Scofield would come down later. Between engagements in small mother rôles – not necessarily small mothers but nearly always small rôles – she was resting, which is a professional term signifying restlessness.

Captain Teal had eaten his prunes – Native Sons, Tobe would have called them – and was waiting for his bacon with an egg, when Miss Clayton entered. At sight of her he instantly was on his feet, much to the surprise of Katie, the other dining-room girl, who thought she knew boarding-house manners but was always willing to learn something; and he made a featly bow of greeting in which the paternal was blended with a court chamberlain’s best flourish, and drew out Miss Clayton’s chair for her. Katie perceived that the old gentleman was not welcoming his fellow lodger to a place at Mrs. H. Spicer’s board so much as he seemed to be welcoming her to his own. For the moment, he was the entertainer, Miss Clayton his honored guest. There was a trick about it, someway.

He waited in a silence which throbbed with the pulse of a considerate gallantry until the lady had stated her wishes to Katie, she choosing the apple sauce in preference to the prunes. Then he took up at the point where he had left off on the interruption of her flight the evening before.

“I hardly dared hope I should have the esteemed pleasure of meeting a fellow Southerner – and one so charming – so soon after my advent into this far Western city,” he said. “When our delightful hostess mentioned the fact I was agreeably surprised, most agreeably. You will pardon me the liberty I take in paying you compliments at so early a stage of our mutual acquaintance. But between Southerners meeting so far from home there is bound to be a bond, as you know.” His antique stilted language had a pleasant flavor for the show girl. She wanted to giggle and yet she was flattered. “I was on the point of putting more questions last evening when something intervened – I believe you were called away. Pardon me again, but might I inquire from what part of our beloved South you hail?”

“From Georgia,” she answered, more or less on a venture. Back in New York it usually had sufficed when she announced that she was a Southerner.

“Why, then, that does indeed strengthen the tie between us,” he said. “By birth I am a Carolinian but my dear mother was a Georgian of the Georgians. She was a Colquit – one of the Savannah Colquits.” So, in another century, a descendant of a Tudor or a Percy might have spoken. “From what part of that noble old state do you come?”

“Well, not from any place in particular,” she parried desperately. “I mean, not from any regular town, you understand. I was born out in the country, on a kind of a country place – a farm, sort of.”

“Ah, a plantation,” he corrected her gently. “In our country we call them plantations. But near where? And in what county?”