Lonesome Town Part 8

"Suppose, madame, we take a look at that safe."

Mrs. Sturgis led the way into the room from which she had appeared on his arrival. It was a library, its far end one huge window of many colored panes and its walls lined with book-shelves except where family portraits in oils were hung or where the fireplace and its mantel interfered. An antique writing desk in the window, a magazine-covered table off center, a pillow-piled couch and a scattering of several comfortable-looking, upholstered chairs comprised the furnishings, the rich old mahogany of which was brought out by the glow from a companionable fire of cannel coal.

To a corner of this room repaired Mrs. Sturgis and there pressed her palm against an autumnal colored leaf in the wall-paper design. A shelf, laden with books moved out, one volume, by chance, falling to the floor.

Another touch-exactly what or where Pape did not see-caused a panel to slide back, disclosing the nickeled face of a wall safe. With a.s.sured fingers she began to turn the dial-to the right, to the left, then a complete turn to the right again. Every movement added evidence of her boast of precision. Seizing the k.n.o.b, she pulled upon it hard and harder. The door of the safe, however, did not yield.

"Peculiar!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, all the well-bred softness whittled off her voice. "Never before have I made a mistake on that combination. I know it like my own initials."

"Mind _your_ nerve now, Aunt Helene," advised Jane from just behind, her tone, too, rather sharp.

For such a sweet-looking girl, she certainly could sound sour-malicious!

Not another word or glance had she spared to him, the double-barreled interloper. She was playing his game-yes. But was it because he had asked her or for reasons of her own? This dame he had self-selected would seem to be an intricate creature.

So Pape reflected as he picked up and held in his hands the book which had fallen. But he, at least, was simple enough; with his very simplicity in the past had solved more than one intricate problem. He would, if she permitted, try to solve her.

Again Mrs. Sturgis turned and twirled; again tugged at the k.n.o.b, but with no more effect than before; again faced about with consternation, even superst.i.tion on her face.

"There must be something wrong here," she half-whispered.

"That we already know," Jane agreed, "else why the detective in our midst?"

In Pape's hands, suppose we say by accident, the volume he had rescued from the floor opened upon one of O. Henry's _immortelles_-"Alias Jimmie Valentine." To him the work of the lamented Mr. Porter ever had been fraught with suggestion for more than the "kick" that, unlike home-brew, is always to be found at the bottom of his bottle-at the _finis_ of his tale.

The latest in amateur detectives, thus opportunely reminded, decided that he must rise to the occasion. And he had reason to hope that he could, once upon a time having been shown some tricks of the tumbler profession by a professional.

"Why else should I be in your midst," he offered cheerfully, "if not to open your safe for you?"

Mrs. Sturgis at once gave him the benefit of doubt; made way for him; took a stand beside her skeptical-looking niece. But Jane's contempt over his essay was frank-really, made her look downright disagreeable.

Pape made up his mind to disappoint her evident expectations if within his powers so to do. He knelt down; wedged his head into the vacancy left by the swinging shelf; pressed his ear close to the lock; began to finger the dial. There was more than hope in his touch; there was also practice. In his ranch-house out h.e.l.lroaring way he long ago had installed a wall safe of his own in which to deposit the pay-roll and other cash on hand. And one day it had disobligingly gone on strike; but not so disobligingly that a certain derelict whom he had fed-up on he-man advice as well as food-one who had followed the delicate profession of "listener"-was beyond reach.

This turned-straight cracksman, without admitting his former avocation, had solved a pay-day dilemma by conquering the refractory dial and later had given his benefactor a series of lessons in the most-gentle "art,"

that the emergency might not recur. Pape, miles and miles from the nearest town which might afford an expert, had been convinced by the experience that a safe is unsafe which cannot be opened at the owner's will.

In the course of present manipulations, the "under-graduate" considered what he could say or do to the contemptuous half of his audience should he fail, but reached no satisfactory conclusion. Indeed, he felt that the only real way of venting his chagrin would be to wring her graceful, long, white neck for doubting him before he failed, a proceeding quite beyond consideration of any man from Montana. So he must not fail. Yet how succeed?

Just as he was reminding himself for the seventh time-seventh turn-that "slow and careful" was also the watchword for this sort of acquaintanceship, an electrifying response to his light-fingering sounded from within -- a click. Turning the k.n.o.b, he pulled out the door. The yielding hinges completed an electric circuit and an incandescent bulb lighted in the roof.

Pape sprang to his feet and back, as much amazed over his feat as the dazed-looking Miss Lauderdale. Then, at once, he got control of himself; straightened his cuffs, as his teacher always had done after turning the trick; remarked most calmly:

"The thief must have been changing the combination in the hope of delaying the discovery of his crime and been frightened into such a panic that he didn't take time to close the door."

Mrs. Sturgis again bent to the safe. She had reached well into it when, with a poignant cry, she put both hands to her eyes and started back.

"It's there again! This is getting too much for my nerves. Was I mad before or am I going mad now? Jane-Mr. Pape-_it isn't gone_-_at all_!"

The girl next applied to the cavity in the wall. Her face set in an apparent effort to "mind" her nerves. She reached in and drew out an oblong box of gold beautifully carved and set with small rubies in a design of peac.o.c.ks. From her expression-no longer disagreeable, but beautiful from an ecstasy of relief-Pape judged this to be the "stolen"

heirloom upon which she was said to set such store.

That her aunt might be absolutely rea.s.sured, Jane Lauderdale handed her the _tabatiere_ so recently accounted missing. That good lady, however, looked weak, as if about to drop the jeweled box. Pape relieved her of it; led her to a chair.

"I-I don't understand."

Like a child utterly dependent on grown-ups for explanation, she glanced from one to the other of the younger pair.

"Except for that famous precision of yours, it would seem easy enough,"

Jane offered with more clarity than respect. "You must have pushed the box aside when you took out the pieces Irene wanted to wear. Your hands were full and you neglected to close the safe. When you came down again for your black pearl set and found the door open you thought at once of my snuffbox and jumped at the conclusion, since it wasn't in the place you remembered putting it, that it wasn't there at all. Cheer up. You wouldn't be the dearest auntie in the world if you weren't human."

Pape seconded her. "The most precise of us are liable to figments of the imagination, madam. All's well that ends that way. A snuffbox in hand is worth two in the --"

But Aunt Helene wasn't so sure. She interrupted in a complaining voice, as if offended at their effort to cheer her.

"I never jump at conclusions-_never_. If I was startled into jumping at the one you mention, Jane, it seems strange that I selected these black pearls so accurately. _Doesn't_ it? And I'd almost take oath that the box wasn't pushed to one side-that it stood, when I found it just now, exactly on the spot where I first placed it. And then, Mr. Pape, the trouble with the combination--"

"Don't worry any more about it, poor dear," Jane begged with a suddenly sweet, soothing air, the while laying a sympathetic palm against her relative's puckered brow. "I've noticed that you haven't seemed just yourself for days. Perhaps these headaches you've complained of mean that you need eyegla.s.ses. It's only natural that a strain on the optic nerves should confuse your mind, which usually _is_ so precise about all--"

"Nothing of the sort, Jane. You can't mental-suggest me into old age!"

snapped the recalcitrant patient. "My eyes are just as good as yours.

And I feel positive that I am quite myself."

"Then why, Aunt Helene, didn't you go with us to hear Farrar to-night?

You aren't usually so squeamish about--"

"Of course not. It was indigestion, if you must know. Certainly it had nothing to do with my optic nerves. You shouldn't accuse me of jumping at conclusions, Jane, with all your irritating, positive ideas about other people's--"

"It is my opinion-" the unofficial investigator thought advisable at this point to remind them that an outsider was present-"that your remembrance of the combination figures and the various turns was absolutely correct-ab-so-lutely. But you may have jolted the delicate mechanism of the lock when you shut the door. You _may_ have slammed it."

He received two glances for his pains to maintain peace, a quick, resentful one from the niece and a long, grateful one from her aunt.

"A beauty, isn't it?" he continued buoyantly, looking at Jane, but referring to the snuffbox in his hands, lowered for closer inspection into the light of the electric lamp. "I don't wonder that the thought of losing it distressed you, my dear Miss Lauderdale."

"a.s.sociations, my dear Mr. Pape."

Her brevity, cut even shorter by her accent, evidently was calculated to inform him that, although she had played, she didn't care much for his game. For a young person who could warm one up so one minute, she certainly could make one feel like an ice-crusher the next! Since that's what he was up against, however, he proceeded with all his surplus enthusiasm to crush ice.

"The sight of this heirloom takes one right back to the days of old, doesn't it, when ladies fair and gallants bold--"

"You wax poetic from hearsay, Mr. Pape? You don't look exactly old or wise enough to have lived in those good old days."

"Miss Lauderdale, no. I don't claim to have staked any 'Fountain of Youth.' In fact, I ain't much older or wiser than I look and act. But I've read a bit in my day-and night. The courtly Colonial gent, if I remember aright, first placed the left hand on the heart-so." Then he bent gracefully, not to say carefully, so that the seams of his satin straight-jackets should not give-thus. With his right hand he next snapped open his jeweled box and pa.s.sed it around the circle of snufflers of _the_ s.e.x, who would likely have swooned at the thought of a cigarette as at the sight of a mouse-in this wise.

"Oh don't-don't you _dare_ open it!"

Pape, who duly had pressed his heart, bowed with care, if not grace, and was in the act of pressing the catch, felt the box s.n.a.t.c.hed from his grasp. In his fumbling, however, his thumb had succeeded. As Jane seized her treasure the lid sprang back. One look she gave into it, then swayed in the patch of lamplight very like the limp ladies he had been mentioning. A face of the pure pallor of hers scarcely could be said to turn pale, but a ghastly light spread over it. Her eyes distended and darkened with horror. A shudder took her. She looked about to fall.

"It is-empty! See, _it is empty_," she moaned.

Pape was in time to steady her into a chair. Aunt Helene hovered over her anxiously.