Branded Part 24

Oftener and oftener, as the winter progressed, the business of the mine took me to the capital; and Agatha never let me escape. One time it would be a theater party, at which I would be obliged to meet her friends; people who, as I soon learned, were of the ultra fast set. At another it would be a driving party to some out-of-town resort with the same, or a worse, crowd; midnight banquetings, with champagne in the finger-bowls, c.o.c.ktails to go before and after, and quite likely some daring young woman to show us a new dance, with the cleared dinner-table for a stage. Many times I tried to dodge; to slip into Denver on the necessary business errand and out again before the newspapers could publish my arrival. It was no use. That woman's ingenuity, prescience, intuition--whatever it may be called, was simply devilish. Before I could turn around, my summons would find me, and I had to obey or take the consequences.

Now and again I rebelled, even as the poorest worm will turn if it be sufficiently trodden upon; but that, too, was useless. My tormentor held me in a grip of steel. Worse than all, the dog's life she was leading me caused me to lose all sense of proportion. As a choice between two evils, a return to prison would have been far more endurable than this indefinite sentence of degradation Agatha Geddis was making me serve. But I could not see this: all I could see was that this woman had the power to make a total wreck of all that I had builded. The larger fact that I was myself the princ.i.p.al contributor to the wreck, helping it on by the time-serving course I was pursuing, did not lay hold of me.

One night, or rather early one morning, when I had taken her home from a road-house revel so shameful that the keeper of the place had practically turned us out, I asked her where all this was to end.

"Perhaps it will end when I have taught you how to make love to me again," she returned flippantly.

"And if I refuse to learn?"

Her smile was no longer alluring; it was mockingly triumphant.

"You can't keep it up indefinitely--with the Cripple Creek girl, I mean, Bertie"--she still called me "Bertie" or "Herbert" when we were alone together. "Sooner or later, she is going to find out what you are doing to her; and after that, the fireworks."

I shook my head. "It is hard to decide, sometimes, Agatha, whether you are a woman or merely a she-devil in woman's shape."

"Oh, I'm a woman--all woman."

"But the motive," I gritted. "If I had done you the greatest injury a woman could suffer--if you had a lifelong grudge to satisfy--you could hardly be more vindictively merciless."

Her smile at this was not pleasant to look upon.

"Somebody has said that the keenest pleasure in life is the pleasure of absolute possession. I own you, Bertie Weyburn, body and soul, and you know it. If you were a big enough man, you'd kill me: if you were big enough in another way, you'd defy me and take what is coming to you."

"And since I am not yet ready to become either a murderer or a martyr?"

"You will probably do the other remaining thing--marry me some day and give me a chance to teach you how to spend the money which, thus far, you don't seem to know what to do with."

"You have money enough of your own--or your father's," I retorted.

"I'd rather spend yours," she said coolly.

It was the old _impa.s.se_ at which we had arrived a dozen times before, only the wretched involvement seemed to be adding coil upon coil with the pa.s.sing of time. I have often wondered if she really meant the marriage threat. At this distance in time it appears extremely doubtful. She may have had moments in which the steadily augmenting output of the Little Clean-Up tempted her, but this is only a surmise.

And a little later I was to learn that during this very winter when she was dragging me bound and helpless at the end of her trail-rope, she was--but I need not antic.i.p.ate.

"You have me bluffed to a standstill, but sometimes I wonder if it isn't only a bluff," I said, in reply to her remark that she'd rather spend my money than her father's. "What if I should tell you here and now that this is the end of It?--that you can't make a plaything of me any longer? What would you do?"

"There are a number of things I might do--to one who is so temptingly vulnerable as you are, Bertie. For one, I might send a wire to the sheriff of the home county, or to the warden of the penitentiary.

Really, when I come to think of it, I'm not sure that I oughtn't to do it, anyway, on the score of public morals. n.o.body would blame me; and some few would applaud."

"Morals!" I exploded. "You don't know the meaning of the word!"

"Maybe not," she rejoined lightly. "Not many women do. But sending the wire would be a rather crude way of bringing you to terms; especially since I know of at least one better way. I'm going to hazard a guess. You haven't told the Cripple Creek girl anything about your past?"

I was silent.

"I thought not," she went on smoothly. "With some women, perhaps with most women, it wouldn't make any great difference, one way or the other. So far as anybody out here knows to the contrary, you are a free man--and a rich one; and so long as you haven't committed bigamy or something of that sort, the average girl wouldn't care the snap of her finger. Up to a few days ago I thought the brown-eyed little thing you brought up here one night last fall to the theater was the average girl. But now I know better."

It had always seemed a sheer sacrilege to even mention Mary Everton in Agatha Geddis's presence. But this time I broke over.

"You know who she is?" I queried.

"I do now. And I know her _metier_ even better than you do, Bertie, dear. She might go to her grave loving you to distraction, but she would never have an ex-convict for the father of her children--not if she knew it. It's in the Everton blood. Anybody who knew Phineas Everton as you and I did in the old school-days, ought to know exactly what to expect of his daughter."

I sat up quickly, and the lights in the high-swung drawing-room chandelier began to turn red for me.

"You devil! Do you mean to say that you would tell Polly Everton?" I burst out savagely.

"I'm not going to tell her because you are not going to drive me to it,"--this with a half-stifled yawn behind a faultless white hand that was just beginning to show the blue veining of bad hours and dissipation. Then: "Go back to your hotel and go to bed, Bertie.

You'll wake up in a better frame of mind a few hours later, perhaps.

Kiss me, and say good-night."

As I have confessed, I carried a gun in those days; had carried one ever since that memorable afternoon when I had dropped from the trolley-car in Cripple Creek to preface the opening of our business office by going first to a hardware shop for the purchase of a weapon.

After leaving the Altberg house I dismissed the night-owl cab on the north bank of the river and crossed the Platte on the viaduct afoot.

Half-way over I stopped to look down into the winter-dry bed of the stream. There was one way out of the wretched labyrinth of shame and double-dealing into which my weakness and cowardice had led me. The weapon sagged heavily in my pocket as if it were a sentient thing trying in some dumb fas.h.i.+on to make its presence felt.

It was but a gripping of the pistol and a quick pull at the trigger, and I should be out of the labyrinth for good and all. I don't know why I didn't do it; why I hadn't done it long before--or rather, I do know. It was because, when the deciding moment came, I was always confronted by a vivid and soul-harrowing flash-light picture of Polly Everton's face as it would look when they should tell her.

XIX

A Reckoning and a Hold-Up

I imagine it is only in fiction that a man is able to live a double life successfully to the grand climax. I failed because the mounting fortunes of the Little Clean-Up, my share of which was as yet merely giving me money to squander on the extravagant whims and caprices of Agatha Geddis, were making all three of us, Gifford, Barrett and myself, marked men.

One incident of the marking timed itself in one of my trips to Denver.

I had breakfasted at the Brown and was leaving my room-key with the clerk when I ran up against the plain-clothes man who had arrested me on the day of my arrival as a runaway. I should have pa.s.sed him without recognition, as a matter of course, but he stopped and accosted me.

"Carson's my name," he said, offering me his hand and showing his concealed badge in one and the same motion. Then: "You'll excuse me for b.u.t.ting in, Mr. Bertrand, but there is something you ought to know.

You've got a double kicking around here somewhere; a fellow who has swiped your name and looks just a little like you. He's a crook, all right, and we've got his thumb-print and his 'mug' in the headquarters records. I ran across his dope the other day in the blotter, and thought the next time I saw you I'd give you a tip. You never can tell what these slick 'aliases' 'll do. He might be following you up to get a graft out of you. That's done, every day, you know."

Naturally, there was nothing to do but to thank the purblind city detective, to press a bank-note into his hand, and to beg him to be on the lookout for this dangerous "double" of mine. But the incident served to show what the bonanza-fed publicity campaign was doing for us.

Gifford, grubbing in the various levels of the mine, had the most immunity; the newspaper reporters let him measurably alone. But neither Barrett nor I could dodge the spotlight. Every move we made was blazoned in type, and I lived in daily fear of the moment when some enterprising newspaper man would begin to make copy of the theater parties and road-house rides and midnight champagne suppers.

I knew that the blow had fallen one morning when Phineas Everton came unannounced into my private office and asked me to send the stenographer away. The _debacle_ had arrived, and I was no more ready to meet it than any other spendthrift of good repute caught red-handed would have been.

"I think you can guess pretty well what I have come to say, Bertrand,"

Everton said, after the door had closed behind the outgoing shorthand man. "I have been putting it off in the hope that your own sense of the fitness of things would come to the rescue. I may be old-fas.h.i.+oned and out of touch with the times and the manners of the new generation, but I can't forget that I am a father, or that common decency still has its demands."

Out of the depths of my humiliation there emerged, full-grown, a huge respect for this quiet-eyed ex-schoolmaster who, for the few of us who knew him, lived the life of a studious recluse among his technical mechanisms in the laboratory. He was a salaried man, and I was one of his three employers. That he was able to ignore completely the business relation was a mark of the man.

He waited for his reply but I had none to make. After a time he went on, without heat, but equally without regard for anything but the despicable fact.

"For quite a long time, if I am informed correctly, you have been a.s.sociating in Denver with a set of people who, whatever else may be said about them, are not people with whom my daughter would care to a.s.sociate. More than this, you have allowed your name to become coupled with that of a woman whose reputation, past and present, is not altogether of the best. Tell me if I am accusing you wrongfully."

"You are not," I admitted.