Seven Keys to Baldpate Part 24

"And no conscience," commented Magee.

"Conscience," said Mr. Cargan, "ain't worth much except as an excuse for a man that hasn't made good to give his wife. How much did you say you was going to get for this article?"

Mr. Magee looked him coolly in the eye.

"If it's ever written," he said, "it will be a two-hundred-thousand-dollar story."

"There ain't anything like that in it for you," replied the mayor.

"Think over what I've told you."

"I'm afraid," smiled Magee, "I'm too busy to think."

He again crossed the office floor to the stairway. Before the fire sat the girl of the station, her big eyes upon him, pleadingly. With a rea.s.suring smile in her direction, he darted up the stairs.

"And now," he thought, as he closed and locked the door of number seven behind him, "for the swag. So Cargan would give twenty thousand for that little package. I don't blame him."

He opened a window and glanced out along the balcony. It was deserted in either direction; its snowy floor was innocent of footprints.

Re-entering number seven, he knelt by the fireplace and dug up the brick under which lay the package so dear to many hearts on Baldpate Mountain.

"I might have known," he muttered.

For the money was gone. He dug up several of the bricks, and rummaged about beneath them. No use. The fat little bundle of bills had flown.

Only an ugly hole gaped up at him.

He sat down. Of course! What a fool he had been to suppose that such treasure as this would stay long in a hiding-place so obvious. He who had made a luxurious living writing tales of the chase of gems and plate and gold had bungled the thing from the first. He could hammer out on a typewriter wild plots and counter-plots--with a boarding-school girl's cupid busy all over the place. But he could not live them.

A boarding-school cupid! Good lord! He remembered the eyes of the girl in blue corduroy as they had met his when he turned to the stairs. What would she say now? On this he had gaily staked her faith in him. This was to be the test of his sincerity, the proof of his devotion. And now he must go to her, looking like a fool once more--go to her and confess that again he had failed her.

His rage blazed forth. So they had "got to him", after all. Who? He thought of the smooth crafty mountain of a man who had detained him a moment ago. Who but Cargan and Max, of course? They had found his childish hiding-place, and the money had come home to their eager hands.

No doubt they were laughing slyly at him now.

Well, he would show them yet. He got up and walked the floor. Once he had held them up in the snow and spoiled their little game--he would do it again. How? When? He did not know. His soul cried for action of some sort, but he was up against a blind alley, and he knew it.

He unlocked the door of number seven. To go down-stairs, to meet the sweet eagerness of the girl who depended on him, to confess himself tricked--it took all the courage he had. Why had it all happened, anyhow? Confound it, hadn't he come up here to be alone with his thoughts? But, brighter side, it had given him her--or it would give him her before the last card was played. He shut his teeth tightly, and went down the stairs.

Mr. Bland had added himself to the group about the fire. Quickly the eyes of Miss Norton met Magee's. She was trembling with excitement.

Cargan, huge, red, cheery, got in Magee's path once more.

"I'll annihilate this man," thought Magee.

"I've been figuring," said the mayor, "that was one thing he didn't have to contend with. No, sir, there wasn't any bright young men hunting up old Napoleon and knocking him in the monthly magazines. They didn't go down to Sardinia and pump it out of the neighbors that he started business on borrowed money, and that his father drank more than was good for him. They didn't run ill.u.s.trated articles about the diamonds he wore, and moving pictures of him eating soup."

"No, I guess not," replied Magee abstractedly.

"I reckon there was a lot in _his_ record wasn't meant for the newspapers," continued Cargan reflectively. "And it didn't get there.

Nap was lucky. He had it on the reformers there. They couldn't squash him with the power of the press."

Mr. Magee broke away from the mayor's rehashed history, and hurried to Miss Norton.

"You promised yesterday," he reminded her, "to show me the pictures of the admiral."

"So I did," she replied, rising quickly. "To think you have spent all this time in Baldpate Inn and not paid homage to its own particular c.o.c.k of the walk."

She led him to a portrait hanging beside the desk.

"Behold," she said, "the admiral on a sunny day in July. Note the starchy grandeur of him, even with the thermometer up in the clouds.

That's one of the things the rocking-chair fleet adores in him. Can you imagine the flurry at the approach of all that superiority? Theodore Roosevelt, William Faversham, and Richard Harding Davis all arriving together couldn't overshadow the admiral for a minute."

Mr. Magee gazed at the picture of a pompous little man, whose fierce mustache seemed anxious to make up for the lack of hair on his head.

"A bald hero at a summer resort," he commented, "it seems incredible."

"Oh, they think he lost his hair fighting for the flag," she laughed.

"It's winter, and snowing, or I shouldn't dare _lese-majeste_. And--over here--is the admiral on the veranda, playing it's a quarter deck. And here the great portrait--Andrew Rutter with a profaning arm over the admiral's shoulder. The old ladies make their complaints to Mr. Rutter in softer tones after seeing that picture."

"And this?" asked Magee, moving farther from the group by the fire.

"A precious one--I wonder they leave it here in winter. This is the admiral as a young man--clipped from a magazine article. Even without the mustache, you see, he had a certain martial bearing."

"And now he's the ruler of the queen's navee," smiled Magee. He looked about. "Is it possible to see the room where the admiral plays his famous game?"

"Step softly," she answered. "In here. There stands the very table."

They went into the small card-room at the right of the entrance to the office, and Mr. Magee quietly closed the door behind them. The time had come. He felt his heart sink.

"Well?" said the girl, with an eagerness she could not conceal.

Mr. Magee groped for words. And found--his old friends of the mountain.

"I love you," he cried desperately. "You must believe I want to help you. It looks rather the other way now, I'll admit. I want you to have that money. I don't know who you are, nor what this all means, but I want you to have it. I went up-stairs determined to give it to you--"

"Really." The word was at least fifty degrees below the temperature of the card-room.

"Yes, really. I won't ask you to believe--but I'm telling the truth. I went to the place where I had fatuously hid the money--under a brick of my fireplace. It was gone."

"How terribly unfortunate."

"Yes, isn't it?" Mr. Magee rejoiced that she took so calm a view of it.

"They searched the room, of course. And they found the money. They're on top now. But I'm going--"

He stopped. For he had seen her face. She--taking a calm view of it? No, indeed. Billy Magee saw that she was furiously, wildly angry. He remembered always having written it down that beautiful women were even more beautiful in anger. How, he wondered, had he fallen into that error?

"Please do not bore me," she said through her teeth, "with any further recital of what you 'are going' to do. You seem to have a fatal facility in that line. Your record of accomplishment is pathetically weak.

And--oh, what a fool I've been! I believed. Even after last night, I believed."

No, she was not going to cry. Hers was no mood for tears. What said the librettist? "There is beauty in the roaring of the gale, and the tiger when a-lashing of his tail." Such was the beauty of a woman in anger.

And nothing to get enthusiastic about, thought Mr. Magee.

"I know," he said helplessly, "you're terribly disappointed. And I don't blame you. But you will find out that you've done me an injustice. I'm going--"