CONCERNING A NEWSPAPER CLIPPING
Boyd Arganbright gave a despairing whistle. This was the final straw! It had been bad enough to have been married to Sadie—but to have Milroy Westover find that his daughter was being courted by a married man, that—
The girl had quietly driven, in the meantime, as far as the point on the road where the tracks of the Atlantic Coast and Big River Railway crossed it. There she drew the car to a stop, and opened the door, listening intently up the track with one shell-like ear.
“You don’t have to do that, honey,” he told her quietly. “Unless, that is, you just like the sounds of those crickets up the tracks!”
“Don’t have—to do this?” she echoed. “But why not, Boyd? The westbound is due past here at 12:15. And going at 60 miles an hour too! And my watch hands are on that hour right now.”
“I know,” he said. “Only, yesterday, the schedules of the A.C. & B.R. R.R. were changed a bit. The westbound goes past here now at 1:15 a.m. instead. And not at any 60 miles an hour. For it stops now at Irontown instead of Slagville, next up the line.”
“It does?” she echoed, frankly skeptical of such a radical change.
“It really does,” he assured her. “For the depot’s right back of my boarding house, don’t forget; and if the sounds from the first stopoff last night at 1:10 a.m. weren’t the sounds thereof—then I was dreaming.”
“I—see.” She closed the door. And drove quickly across the tracks with a half-fearful look as though she were defying Fate.
Once on the other side, she explicated her previous words.
“Yes, Boyd, Father knows now about your marriage to Sadie. For he took a notion this morning, Boyd, after seeing your picture in the Steel City Gazette as that of Blake, that missing Indianapolis bank cashier, to—well—to look into you. It was, frankly, a case of his figuring that if a man was a criminal, as Blake was, then you—with identical face!—probably were too.”
“My God,” he said. “Of—of all the cussed luck! Why, when Doug Carworth of Associated News—my friend at college—stopped off here to see me a week ago—and told me how much I looked like Gilbert Blake, whom he had personally known—and how they’d not been able to get hide nor hair of a picture of the Indianapolis fellow—simply because he’d never had any taken—and I tossed Doug one of mine, and told him he could use it in a story, and welcome, since Blake and I were similar—I never dream—my God!”
“You can well say ‘My God,’ Boyd. For Father immediately figured that two men so identically alike must both be criminals if one was.”
“Well—how did he find out—what he did find out?”
The car, having now crossed the railroad tracks, had come into a much finer district. A district of nicely painted cottages. And trim hedges. Here dwelt white-collar workers of the mills—foremen, superintendents. Above them the sky was pink, however; that spelled “Bessemer”! She turned leftward on the street where he boarded. And resumed talking.
“Well, Boyd, answering your last question, Father first put his chief investigator to making a general routine check on you—general stuff, you know, as would be done on investigating any young man!—first, marriage-licenses, to get a lead on any women the man might ever have wanted to marry. And they found, of course, the entry of that license that had been issued to you and Sadie.”
“Yes,” Arganbright expostulated, “but how did he learn of the actual marriage, performed on stage?”
“From some old woman who lived close to where Sadie was shown to have been living at the time of the license issuance. For he went out there himself. Anticipating that he might find that you had been badly involved with this cannery girl. He found quite nothing—except that this woman had seen that performance where you and Sadie had been but married in play-acting. That, however, sent him to Alonzo Callowby’s, the stage clergyman who was a real clergyman. And who told Father frankly that you and Sadie had already been to him, and what he’d had to tell you both: that you were married that time on the stage. Then Father rushed to his lawyer, who confirmed that you two were married, all right, by—”
“By bell, book and candle,” he said bitterly. “Go on. He was plenty sore, I’ll bet? A married man—a-courting of his daughter?”
“Well, he seemed to grasp, Boyd, that you weren’t altogether to blame—under the circumstances such as those. Especially after I filled in a few of the details that I knew—but he didn’t. And when I also informed him that the picture of Gilbert Blake was a picture of you—which you’d generously given your syndicate friend. But he does, at least, say that unless and until you get a divorce from that girl—and soon!—you can’t see me again.”
He whistled.
And now she asked a question.
“And what, Boyd, did Sadie say—when you wrote to her?”
His answer dripped with bitterness.
“She asks $25,000, darling, for ‘evidence’ such as I would need, and which she’s left with Abe Rubinstein. She didn’t name him, but I know who she means from a pet name she applied to him in the letter and which I have personally heard her apply to him. And Rubinstein is plenty ruthless and grasping, himself. Before a certain sucker she’s with now is done with her, she and Rubinstein will be holding him up. But that’s nothing connected with me. The letter that she held me up in was absolutely n.g. for any legal action against her or anybody in the whole Universe—she wrote it on my own machine—in my own room. And didn’t even sign it. I burned it up tonight to get the stench of it out of my nostrils. Anyway, she’s not even reachable now. Gone off to Europe. Mistress, practically by her own confession, to this gink who employs her theoretically as a ‘secretary.’ But nothing can be pinned on people with money enough to rent suites with several rooms—and have ‘locked’ doors between. Much less can you pin anything on ’em when they’re hundreds of miles away. The worst crack of all that the little rat made—oh, yes, Alyda, even if she is my legal wife, she’s a filthy little golddigging rat!—well—I shouldn’t tell you what that crack was.”
“Oh, yes you should,” Alyda Westover responded. “I should know all.”
“I daresay you’re right,” he admitted. “Well, the lousiest, frowsiest crack she made—if you don’t object to my language—was that I borrow the $25,000 from you—to get my freedom. Well, I may someday get to be as low as a snake in a subway—but I haven’t yet descended that low; and—”
“But,” the girl put in, “if I had that $25,000, through inheritance from a relative—none of which relatives I possess but Father—be mighty certain I’d make you take it—rather, I’d go to Sadie or her lawyer myself, and buy her off. Only—I haven’t got $25 of my own—let alone $25,000.”
“I know you haven’t,” he said, “and that was the only reason I even transmitted her rotten suggestion to you.”
The girl’s car had by now drawn up in front of the place where he lived. A white painted cottage with a porch, and pillars, and a flower garden, surrounded by oyster shells—“calcium plaques,” Boyd Arganbright, chemist, always called them—in front. A gleam of light from the rear side yard showed that Mrs. O’Casey, who boarded him alone, was ironing—as so frequently she did at this hour. Over the roofs of cottages between there and the A.C. and B.R. R.R. could be seen the red-tiled roof of the depot he had referred to awhile back, gleaming in the moonlight.
“And, Boyd,” the girl went on troubledly, “I—I hate to add this—to everything else. Though since it deals with dollars, it won’t count so much with you! But here ’tis: Father is about ready—will be, he thinks, in about 10 days—to give a 10-year contract, as Chief Chemist of Irontown Steel, at $15,000 a year, to a German named Gustav von Schussmock. He told me, Boyd, that he had been going to give that contract to you—and me—as a wedding present. That he thought you were the best all-round practical chemist he’d ever met—and that this was a grand chance to hand it out without having to displace a loyal employee, since Mr. Moorhatch is leaving. But since there is to be no wedding—since you’re already married!—and the plant has to go on ‘chemically’—he might as well have this great German.”
“Is he great?” The feline that exists in all mankind was now speaking.
“Well,” the girl said quizzically, “he puts on a great show! Personally, I don’t think he belongs in steel. I’d say he’s a dye expert—if anything. But Father, you know, gets easily impressed with foreign science and foreign scientists.” She paused. “To tell you the truth, I rather really think that it’s Gustav von Schussmock’s brother Rudolph—a Berlin type-writographical inventor!—who’s the really ingenious and brilliant one of the two!”
“Rudolph? Rudolph von Schussmock? And—and typewritographical—expert? What on earth is a typewritograph—however, I’ll have to confess I never heard of him—or his specialty. But I suppose that, you folks having wined and dined Gustav, you know brother Rudolph’s whole history. What—what did Rudy—typewritographical expert!—invent?”
But if Boyd Arganbright was hoping to learn something that would indicate he was up against, as rival, a member of a family which contained only superficial scientists, he was mistaken. For, by the girl’s reply, he was to learn of the sheer genius which lay in that Family Schussmock!