“I know there is much you are concealing from me, and I cannot understand why. Surely, you are not unwilling to aid me in saving Uncle Sergius?”
Grunya’s last sentence was uttered pleadingly, and her eyes were warm with the golden glow that for this once failed to reach Hall’s heart.
“Uncle Sergius doesn’t seem to need much saving,” he muttered grimly.
“Now just what do you mean?” she cried, quickly suspicious.
“Nothing, nothing, I assure you, except merely that he has escaped so far.”
“But how do you know he has escaped?” she insisted. “May he not be dead? He has not been heard of since he left Chicago. How do you know but what those brutes have killed him?”
“He has been seen here in St. Louis—”
“There!” she interrupted excitedly. “I knew you were keeping things from me! Now, honestly, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Hall confessed. “But by your uncle’s own instructions. Believe me, you cannot be of the least assistance to him. You can’t even find him. It would be wise for you to return to New York.”
For an hour longer she catechized him and he wasted advice on her, and they parted in mutual irritation.
Promptly at eleven, Hall rang the bell at Murgweather’s bungalow. A little sleepy-eyed maidservant of fourteen or fifteen, apparently aroused from bed, admitted and led him to Murgweather’s study.
“He’s in there,” she said, pushing open the door and leaving him.
At the further side of the room, seated at the table, partly in the light of a reading lamp, but more in shadow, was Murgweather. His crossed arms rested on the table, and on them rested his bowed head. Evidently asleep, Hall concluded, as he crossed over. He spoke to him, then touched him on the shoulder, but there was no response. He felt the genial assassin’s hand and found it cold. A stain upon the floor, and a perforation of the reading jacket beneath the shoulder, told the story. Murgweather’s heart had been in the right place. An open window, directly behind, showed how the deed had been accomplished.
Hall drew the heap of manuscript from beneath the dead man’s arms. He had been killed as he pored over what he had written. “Some Casual Thoughts on Death,” Hall read the title, then searched on till he found the monograph, “A Tentative Explanation of Certain Curious Psychological Traits.”
It would never do for Murgweather’s family if such damning evidence were found with the corpse, was Hall’s decision. He burned them in the fireplace, turned down the lamp, and crept softly out of the house.
Early the following morning, the news was broken to him in his room by Starkington, but it was not until afternoon that the papers published the account. Hall was frightened. The little maidservant had been interviewed, and that she had used her sleepy eyes to some purpose was shown by the excellence of the description she gave of the visitor she had admitted at eleven o’clock the previous night. The detail she gave was almost photographic. Hall got up abruptly and looked at himself in the glass. There was no mistaking it. The reflection he saw was precisely that of the man for whom the police were searching. Even to the scarf-pin, he was that man.
He made a hurried rummage of his luggage and arrayed himself as dissimilarly as possible. Then, dodging into a taxi from the side entrance of the hotel, he made the round of the shops, from headgear to footgear purchasing a new outfit.
Back at the hotel, he found he had just time to catch a westbound train. Fortunately, he was able to get Grunya to the telephone, so as to tell her of his departure. Also, he took the liberty of guessing that Dragomiloff’s next appearance would be in Denver, and he advised her to follow on.
Once on the train and out of the city, he breathed more easily, and was able more calmly to consider the situation. He, too, he decided, was on the adventure path, and a madly tangled path it was. Starting out with the intention of running down the Assassination Bureau and destroying it, he had fallen in love with the daughter of its organizer, become Temporary Secretary of the Bureau, and was now being sought by the police for the murder of one of the members who had been killed by the Chief of the Bureau. “No more practical sociology for me,” he said to himself. “When I get out of this I shall confine myself to theory. Closet sociology from now on.”
At the depot in Denver, he was greeted sadly by Harkins, the head of the local branch. Not until they were in a machine and whirling uptown did the cause of Harkins’s sadness come out.
“Why didn’t you warn us?” he said reproachfully. “You let him give you the slip, and we were so certain that his account would be settled in St. Louis that we were not prepared.”
“He has arrived, then?”
“Arrived? Gracious! The first we knew, two of us were done for—Bostwick, who was like a brother to me, and Calkins, of San Francisco. And now Harding, the other San Francisco man, has dropped from sight. It is terrible.” He paused and shuddered. “I parted from Bostwick not more than fifteen minutes before it happened. He was so bright and cheerful. And now his little love-saturated home! His dear wife is inconsolable.”
Tears ran down Harkins’s cheeks, so blinding him that he slowed the pace of the machine. Hall was curious. Here was a new type of madman, a sentimental assassin.
“But why should it be terrible?” he queried. “You have dealt death to others. It is the same phenomenon in all cases.”
“But this is different. He was my friend, my comrade.”
“Possibly others that you have killed had friends and comrades.”
“But if you could have seen him in his little home,” Harkins maundered on. “He was a model husband and father. He was a good man, an excellently good man, a saint, so considerate that he would not harm a fly.”
“But what happened to him was only what he had made happen to others,” Hall objected.
“No, no; it is different!” the other cried passionately. “If you had only known him. To know him was to love him. Everybody loved him.”
“Undoubtedly his victims as well?”
“Aye, had they had the opportunity they could not have helped loving him,” Harkins proclaimed vehemently. “If you only knew the good he has done and was continually doing. His four-footed friends loved him. The very flowers loved him. He was president of the Humane Society. He was the strongest worker among the anti-vivisectionists. He was in himself a whole society for the prevention of cruelty to animals.”
“Bostwick . . . Charles N. Bostwick,” Hall murmured. “Yes, I remember. I have noticed some of his magazine articles.”
“Who does not know him?” Harkins broke in ecstatically, and broke off long enough to blow his nose. “He was a great power for good, a great power for good. I would gladly change places with him right now, to have him back in the world.”
Nevertheless, outside of his love for Bostwick, Hall found Harkins to be a keen, intelligent man. He stopped the machine at a telegraph office.
“I told them to hold any messages for me this morning,” he explained as he got out.
In a minute he was back, and together, with the aid of the cipher, they translated the telegram he had received. It was from Harding, and had been sent from Ogden.
“Westbound,” it ran. “Chief on board. Am waiting opportunity. Shall succeed.”
“He won’t,” Hall volunteered. “The Chief will get Harding.”
“Harding is a strong and alert man,” Harkins affirmed.
“I tell you, you fellows don’t realize what you’re up against.”
“We realize that the life of the organization is at stake, and that we must deal with a recreant Chief.”
“If you thoroughly realized the situation you’d head for tall timber and climb a tree and let the organization go smash.”
“But that would be wrong,” Harkins protested gravely.
Hall threw up his hands in despair.
“To make it doubly sure,” the other continued, “I shall immediately tell the comrades at St. Louis to come on. If Harding fails—”
“Which he will.”
“We’ll proceed to San Francisco. In the meantime—”
“In the meantime, you’ll please run me back to the depot,” Hall interrupted, glancing at his watch. “There’s a westbound train due. I’ll meet you in San Francisco, at the St. Francis Hotel, if you don’t meet the Chief first. If you do meet him first . . . well, it’s goodbye now and for good.”
Before the train started, Hall had time to write a note to Grunya, which Harkins was to deliver to her on the train. The note informed her of her uncle’s continued westward flight and advised her, when she got to San Francisco, to register at the Fairmont Hotel.