The Indian Drum Part 21

Alan came back to Constance. Outside, the gray of dusk was spreading, and within the house it had grown dark; Constance heard the doctor turn on a light, and the shadowy glow of a desk lamp came from the library.

Alan walked to and fro with uneven steps; he did not speak to her, nor she to him. It was very quiet in the library; she could not even hear Luke's breathing now. Then she heard the doctor moving; Alan went to the light and switched it on, as the doctor came out to them.

"It's over," he said to Alan. "There's a law covers these cases; you may not be familiar with it. I'll make out the death certificate--pneumonia and a weak heart with alcoholism. But the police have to be notified at once; you have no choice as to that.

I'll look after those things for you, if you want."

"Thank you; if you will." Alan went with the doctor to the door and saw him drive away. Returning, he drew the library portieres; then, coming back to Constance, he picked up her m.u.f.f and collar from the chair where she had thrown them, and held them out to her.

"You'll go now, Miss Sherrill," he said. "Indeed, you mustn't stay here--your car's still waiting, and--you mustn't stay here ... in this house!"

He was standing, waiting to open the door for her, almost where he had halted on that morning, a few weeks ago, when he had first come to the house in answer to Benjamin Corvet's summons; and she was where she had stood to receive him. Memory of how he had looked then--eager, trembling a little with excitement, expecting only to find his father and happiness--came to her; and as it contrasted with the way she saw him now, she choked queerly as she tried to speak. He was very white, but quite controlled; lines not upon his face before had come there.

"Won't you come over home with me," she said, "and wait for father there till we can think this thing out together?"

Her sweetness almost broke him down. "This ... together! Think this out! Oh, it's plain enough, isn't it? For years--for as long as Wa.s.saquam has been here, my father has been seeing that man and paying blackmail to him twice a year, at least! He lived in that man's power.

He kept money in the house for him always! It wasn't anything imaginary that hung over my father--or anything created in his own mind. It was something real--real; it was disgrace--disgrace and worse--something he deserved; and that he fought with blackmail money, like a coward! Dishonor--cowardice--blackmail!"

She drew a little nearer to him. "You didn't want me to know," she said. "You tried to put me off when I called you on the telephone; and--when I came here, you wanted me to go away before I heard. Why didn't you want me to know? If he was your father, wasn't he our--friend? Mine and my father's? You must let us help you."

As she approached, he had drawn back from her. "No; this is mine!" he denied her. "Not yours or your father's. You have nothing to do with this. Didn't he try in little cowardly ways to keep you out of it?

But he couldn't do that; your friends.h.i.+p meant too much to him; he couldn't keep away from you. But I can--I can do that! You must go out of this house; you must never come in here again!"

Her eyes filled, as she watched him; never had she liked him so much as now, as he moved to open the door for her.

"I thought," he said almost wistfully, "it seemed to me that, whatever he had done, it must have been mostly against me. His leaving everything to me seemed to mean that I was the one that he had wronged, and that he was trying to make it up to me. But it isn't that; it can't be that! It is something much worse than that! ... Oh, I'm glad I haven't used much of his money! Hardly any--not more than I can give back! It wasn't the money and the house he left me that mattered; what he really left me was just this ... dishonor, shame..."

The doorbell rang, and Alan turned to the door and threw it open. In the dusk the figure of the man outside was not at all recognizable; but as he entered with heavy and deliberate steps, pa.s.sing Alan without greeting and going straight to Constance, Alan saw by the light in the hall that it was Spearman.

"What's up?" Spearman asked. "They tried to get your father at the office and then me, but neither of us was there. They got me afterwards at the club. They said you'd come over here; but that must have been more than two hours ago."

His gaze went on past her to the drawn hangings of the room to the right; and he seemed to appreciate their significance; for his face whitened under its tan, and an odd hush came suddenly upon him.

"Is it Ben, Connie?" he whispered. "Ben ... come back?"

He drew the curtains partly open. The light in the library had been extinguished, and the light that came from the hall swayed about the room with the movement of the curtains and gave a momentary semblance of life to the face of the man upon the couch. Spearman drew the curtains quickly together again, still holding to them and seeming for an instant to cling to them; then he shook himself together, threw the curtains wide apart, and strode into the room. He switched on the light and went directly to the couch; Alan followed him.

"He's--dead?"

"Who is he?" Alan demanded.

Spearman seemed to satisfy himself first as to the answer to his question. "How should I know who he is?" he asked. "There used to be a wheelsman on the _Martha Corvet_ years ago who looked like him; or looked like what this fellow may have looked like once. I can't be sure."

He turned to Constance. "You're going home, Connie? I'll see you over there. I'll come back about this afterward, Conrad."

Alan followed them to the door and closed it after them. He spread the blankets over Luke. Luke's coats, which Alan had removed, lay upon a chair, and he looked them over for marks of identification; the mackinaw bore the label of a dealer in Manitowoc--wherever that might be; Alan did not know. A side pocket produced an old briar: there was nothing else. Then Alan walked restlessly about, awaiting Spearman.

Spearman, he believed, knew this man; Spearman had not even ventured upon modified denial until he was certain that the man was dead; and then he had answered so as not to commit himself, pending learning from Constance what Luke had told.

But Luke had said nothing about Spearman. It had been Corvet, and Corvet alone, of whom Luke had spoken; it was Corvet whom he had accused; it was Corvet who had given him money. Was it conceivable, then, that there had been two such events in Corvet's life? That one of these events concerned the _Miwaka_ and Spearman and some one--some one "with a bullet hole above his eye"--who had "got" Corvet; and that the other event had concerned Luke and something else? It was not conceivable, Alan was sure; it was all one thing. If Corvet had had to do with the _Miwaka_, then Luke had had to do with it too. And Spearman? But if Spearman had been involved in that guilty thing, had not Luke known it? Then why had not Luke mentioned Spearman? Or had Spearman not been really involved? Had it been, perhaps, only evidence of knowledge of what Corvet had done that Spearman had tried to discover and destroy?

Alan went to the door and opened it, as he heard Spearman upon the steps again. Spearman waited only until the door had been reclosed behind him.

"Well, Conrad, what was the idea of bringing Miss Sherrill into this?"

"I didn't bring her in; I tried the best I could to keep her out."

"Out of what--exactly?"

"You know better than I do. You know exactly what it is. You know that man, Spearman; you know what he came here for. I don't mean money; I mean you know why he came here for money, and why he got it.

I tried, as well as I could, to make him tell me; but he wouldn't do it. There's disgrace of some sort here, of course--disgrace that involves my father and, I think, you too. If you're not guilty with my father, you'll help me now; if you are guilty, then, at least, your refusal to help will let me know that."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Then why did you come back here? You came back here to protect yourself in some way."

"I came back, you young fool, to say something to you which I didn't want Miss Sherrill to hear. I didn't know, when I took her away, how completely you'd taken her into--your father's affairs. I told you this man may have been a wheelsman on the Corvet; I don't know more about him than that; I don't even know that certainly. Of course, I knew Ben Corvet was paying blackmail; I've known for years that he was giving up money to some one. I don't know who he paid it to; or for what."

The strain of the last few hours was telling upon Alan; his skin flushed hot and cold by turns. He paced up and down while he controlled himself.

"That's not enough, Spearman," he said finally. "I--I've felt you, somehow, underneath all these things. The first time I saw you, you were in this house doing something you ought not to have been doing; you fought me then; you would have killed me rather than not get away.

Two weeks ago, some one attacked me on the street--for robbery, they said; but I know it wasn't robbery--"

"You're not so crazy as to be trying to involve me in that--"

There came a sound to them from the hall, a sound unmistakably denoting some presence. Spearman jerked suddenly up; Alan, going to the door and looking into the hall, saw Wa.s.saquam. The Indian evidently had returned to the house some time before; he had been bringing to Alan now the accounts which he had settled. He seemed to have been standing in the hall for some time, listening; but he came in now, looking inquiringly from one to the other of them.

"Not friends?" he inquired. "You and Henry?"

Alan's pa.s.sion broke out suddenly. "We're anything but that, Judah. I found him, the first night I got here and while you were away, going through my father's things. I fought with him, and he ran away. He was the one that broke into my father's desks; maybe you'll believe that, even if no one else will."

"Yes?" the Indian questioned. "Yes?" It was plain that he not only believed but that believing gave him immense satisfaction. He took Alan's arm and led him into the smaller library. He knelt before one of the drawers under the bookshelves--the drawer, Alan recalled, which he himself had been examining when he had found Wa.s.saquam watching him.

He drew out the drawer and dumped its contents out upon the floor; he turned the drawer about then, and pulled the bottom out of it. Beneath the bottom which he had removed appeared now another bottom and a few sheets of paper scrawled in an uneven hand and with different colored inks.

At sight of them, Spearman, who had followed them into the room, uttered an oath and sprang forward. The Indian's small dark hand grasped Spearman's wrist, and his face twitched itself into a fierce grin which showed how little civilization had modified in him the aboriginal pa.s.sions. But Spearman did not try to force his way; instead, he drew back suddenly.

Alan stooped and picked up the papers and put them in his pocket. If the Indian had not been there, it would not have been so easy for him to do that, he thought.

CHAPTER XII

THE LAND OF THE DRUM

Alan went with Wa.s.saquam into the front library, after the Indian had shown Spearman out.

"This was the man, Judah, who came for Mr. Corvet that night I was hurt?"

"Yes, Alan," Wa.s.saquam said.

"He was the man, then, who came here twice a year, at least, to see Mr.