The Gates of Chance Part 16

Balencourt and the mysterious 'Forty.' It would be rather cold off the Maine coast during this unseasonable summer, but there were fireplaces in plenty and stacks of drift-wood. The only real difficulty lay in persuading my estimable sister to cut short her Newport visit and come to me a month earlier than usual.

"Finally, I left it to Betty to manage. 'I can't explain myself any clearer, my dear,' I ended up, rather lamely, 'but it will be better for George. Will you do it?'

"'So you won't trust me with the secret? No; you needn't protest--there is a secret, and I ought to know it. But you have put it so cleverly that I haven't any choice in the matter. "Better for George" indeed!

Very good, mon oncle; I'll obey orders. But remember that it will be the worse for you later on, unless you can show good and sufficient reason for this ridiculous mystery. Poor, dear mamma! how she will hate to be plucked up--like an early radish.' And thereupon Miss Betty sailed away with her small head tilted skyward.

"But she did manage it, and by Thursday night the party was actually a.s.sembled at 'The Breakers.' There was a sou'easter on that night, but the drift-wood burned stoutly in the wide chimney-piece, with now and then a cheerful sputter as a few stray drops sought to immolate themselves in the green and purple flames.

"'Not so bad--eh, mamma?' said Betty, as she slipped another pillow behind Mrs. catherwood's back and handed her the last volume of 'Gyp,'

with the pages neatly cut. And then she actually smiled over at me. I think I am beginning to understand Betty.

"Again I pa.s.s over many uneventful days. 'Nothing doing,' as Crawfurd put it, and laisser-faire was a good enough motto for our side of the house. The two children, of course, were blissfully happy.

"Three, four, nearly six weeks, and no sign or sound from M'sieur Balencourt. Not so surprising, after all, seeing that we were living on an island surrounded on all sides by deep water and no land within a mile except that little dot called 'The Thimble.' And while we didn't make any parade of our precautions, Crawfurd and I kept watch and watch, just as we used to do in the old Alert, on the China station, twenty-odd years ago. Moreover, the gardener and my boatman were men who could keep their eyes open and their mouths shut, and, finally, there were the four dogs--two Great Danes, a collie, and 'Snap,' the fox-terrier. It would have been a bold man who sought to visit Hoodman's Ledge, uninvited, during that particular month and a half.

"It was the morning of the 1st of August, and I was lounging on the piazza, Crawfurd being on duty at the time. The warm weather had come at last. The air was so soft and delightful that the scientific review I had been reading slipped from my hand and I gave myself up to indolence, gazing lazily at the white pigeons that were trading about the lawn, between the boat-house and a rustic pavilion overlooking the tennis-court. One bird I marked in particular, admiring his strong and graceful sweeps and dips as he circled about, possessed, as it were, with the pure joy of motion. I followed him as he sank down on a long slant to the lawn, swift as a bolt from the blue; then I rubbed my eyes in amaze. It was a pigeon of snowy whiteness that an instant before had been flying free; it was a coal-black nondescript that now fluttered feebly once or twice and then lay still on the gravelled path, close to the stone sun-dial. I ran down the steps and bent over the pitiful thing. Pfui!--the bird was but a charred and blackened lump of dead flesh. There was a disagreeable odor of burned feathers in the air.

Mechanically my eye fell on the sun-dial; there was a spot the size of a silver dollar on the side of the pedestal where the stone had crumbled and disintegrated, as though it had been placed at the focus of some immensely powerful burning-gla.s.s. I stepped behind the sun-dial and looked out to sea. And there, in line with the pedestal of the dial and the dead bird on the path, lay 'The Thimble.'

"Now, as I have said, 'The Thimble' was a rocky islet only a few rods in extent, but densely wooded with spruce and blue-gum. The general shape of the rock was that of a lady's thimble; hence the name. Rather a picturesque object in the seascape, but, of course, utterly valueless except for occasional picnic uses--a bit of No Man's Land whose purpose in the economy of nature had hitherto remained unfulfilled. But now?

"I went back to the piazza and caught up a pair of stereo-binoculars that were lying on the table. There, shining like a star through the close curtain of green that veiled 'The Thimble,' was the projecting end of a highly polished tube of steel. And even as I gazed a man's face peered out as though in the act of sighting--Aram Balencourt!

"Then I understood. The tube was the means of projecting some enormously powerful heat-beam whose nature must be akin to that of the so-called X-ray. The article I had been reading not ten minutes ago--what was the t.i.tle?--'Radium, the Wizard Metal'--that incomprehensible substance, forever sending forth its terrible emanations, yet never diminished by even the ten-thousandth part of a grain--a natural force whose properties and functions were but imperfectly understood, even by the learned men who had succeeded in isolating it, an agent of such enormous potency that an ounce or two might serve to put a battle-ship out of commission--a couple of pounds and the universe itself were endangered. Even now from that steel tube, sighted so carefully on the pedestal of the sun-dial, billions of ions might be rushing, invisible to the eye, but certain death to whatever of animal existence they chanced to encounter. There was the pigeon lying dead on the walk.

"'Do hurry, George,' called out Betty's thin, sweet treble. She stood at the entrance to the pavilion and waved a tennis-racquet impatiently.

"'Coming,' was the cheerful response, and Estes turned the corner of the house. He took the gravelled path at full speed. In an instant or two at the farthest he would be pa.s.sing between the sun-dial and the dead pigeon, in line with those deadly radiations.

"We had been playing a little single-wicket earlier in the day, and a cricket-ball lay on the wicker table at my hand. I could not have uttered a word or a cry to save my life--to save his--but instinct held true. With a full, round-arm sweep the ball left my hand, catching the boy squarely on the forehead. He fell within his stride.

"Betty was with us on the instant, but I seized and held her despite her struggles. Naturally, she thought I had gone mad. Then I looked over again at 'The Thimble,' just in time to see a sheet of palest-colored flame shoot up from the island. The dense ma.s.s of green foliage seemed to wither and consume away within the tick of a clock.

Through the gla.s.s I caught a glimpse of a dark figure that rolled down to the water's edge, clutching feebly at the shifting shingle. Perhaps a log, after all--it lay so still.

"An instant later 'The Thimble' disappeared in a cloud of grayish vapor, the dull sound of an explosion filled the ear, and the ground under our feet trembled. There was nothing to be seen, even with the gla.s.s, save a light sc.u.m covering the water and some fragments of charred tree branches. But the air about us was full of a fine dust that powdered Betty's hair, as though for a costume ball, and made me cough consumedly.

"Naturally, there were quite a number of explanations to make to Miss Betty after George had been resuscitated--a slightly disfigured hero, but still in the ring--but I spare you. The dear girl listened quietly, but at the end she began to tremble, and I won't say but that she cried a bit. It doesn't matter if she did, and I think we all began to feel a little queer when we came to think it over. However, it WAS over--no possible doubt about that.

"'One thing I don't understand,' said Crawfurd. 'There were to be three warnings, and Estes only received two of the red b.u.t.tons.' Whereupon Betty blushed, and drew a little package from her pocket.

"'It came last night directed to George,' she said, 'but I forgot to give it to him. It broke open in my pocket and it contained this.' She held out to us the third red b.u.t.ton. That was decent of Balencourt--to have given the last warning.

"There is only one possible hypothesis to account for the catastrophe.

Balencourt was dealing with a terrible force, whose nature was but partially understood, even by science. He had intended to use it to fulfil the vengeance of the 'Dawn' but something had happened, and in an instant the monster had turned and rended its master. That is all that we can know.

"Two days later George and Betty were married, for they stuck to the original date in spite of the fact that George, with a lump on his forehead as big as the cricket-ball itself, did not make a particularly presentable bridegroom. I carried an umbrella at the function whose incomparable rolling was remarked upon by all. Need I say that it was the same umbrella that Balencourt's man, Jarman, had manipulated for me that fateful evening when we dined at the Argyle. I shall never unroll that umbrella, even at the cost of a wetting. To me it is a memento."

"There's melodrama for you," said Indiman, a little shamefacedly as he finished. "But one feels differently, you know, about taking chances where a nice girl like Betty is concerned. Let me see; it's still early. Do you feel up to taking that long-deferred ride on a trolley-car? Good! We'll take the cross-town over to Eighth Avenue and get into the heart of it at once."

"That's an unlucky number," said Indiman, as we boarded a car. "Sixteen hundred and twenty-four--the sum of the units is equal to thirteen."

"You're going to lose some money," I suggested.

"The tip points that way," he replied.

VIII

The Tip-top Tip

Do you know Abingdon Square? It is a small, irregularly shaped triangle of asphalt situated on the lower West Side, and at the intersecting-point of Eighth Avenue and Hudson Street. The houses that front upon it have seen better days. Many of them are now the quarters of cheap political clubs or centres of foreign revolutionary propaganda. It is a neighborhood that has finally lost all semblance to gentility and has become frankly and unreservedly shabby. A square, mind you, and not a park, for there is neither blade of gra.s.s nor tree in all of its dreary expanse. Half a block to the north lies a minute gore of land surrounded by an iron fence, and here are flowers and greenery upon which the eye may rest and be satisfied. But in Abingdon Square proper there is only the music-stand, that occupies the middle of the miniature plaza, a hideous wooden structure in which one of the city bands plays on alternate Sunday afternoons during the summer.

However, open s.p.a.ce counts in the city, and the air circulates a trifle more freely through the square than it does in the side streets--at least, that is the opinion of the neighborhood people, and they flock there on a hot night like seals at a blow-hole. Even the submerged tenth must come up to breathe now and then. During the dreadful pa.s.sage of a hot wave from the West one may count them by the dozens, coatless and even shirtless wretches, lying p.r.o.ne on the flag-stones like fish made ready for the grid. Occasionally, a street-cleaning "White Wings"

will be compa.s.sionate enough to open a fire-hydrant, under pretence of flushing the gutters, and then, for a few minutes, there is joy in Abingdon Square. Women line the curb, cooling their feet in the rushing flood; the men light their pipes and contentedly watch the children as they paddle about. There is the echo of mountain brooks in the gush of the water as it roars from the hydrant. With eyes tight closed one may conjure up the phantasma of green leaves waving and of meadows knee-deep with lush gra.s.ses and starred with ox-eyes. Such is Abingdon Square on a night in early August when first the dog-star begins to rage.

Now my friend Esper Indiman is a social philosopher; life in all its phases interests him tremendously. Consequently, he likes to take long rides on trolley-cars. He calls them his vaudeville in miniature, and sometimes the performance is amusing--I acknowledge it freely. But to-night the actors were few and the play dull. I began to yawn. The car, one of the Eighth Avenue line bound down-town, swung round a curve into Abingdon Square, and Indiman touched my arm.

"What's going on over there?" he said.

Although it was not a concert night, there was a crowd around the band-stand. It looked as though some one was haranguing the a.s.semblage from the vantage-point of the music pavilion--a local political orator or perhaps a street preacher. "Salvation Army," I suggested.

"Shall we take a look?" I nodded, and we alighted and pushed our way to the front.

It was a young man who stood there, rather a nice-looking chap, with a broad forehead from which the thin, fair hair fell away in a tumbled wave. He was attired in evening clothes, a.s.suredly an unusual sight in Abingdon Square, where they do not dress for dinner, and the expression upon his countenance was that of recklessness tempered with a certain half-humorous melancholy. "One dollar," he repeated, as we came within sight and hearing. "Do I hear no other bid? One dollar, one dollar.

Will any gentleman make it a half?"

"I'll give fifty for your skull alone," spoke up a youngish, sallow-faced man who stood directly opposite the stand. "On condition,"

he added, in a lower tone, "that the goods are delivered at Bellevue before the end of the week. Foot of Twenty-sixth Street, you know."

The young man smiled with a pathetic quizzicality. "Now, doctor," he said, reproachfully, "there's no use in going over that ground again. I made the terms of the sale perfectly plain, and there can be no deviation from them."

"Well, if that's your last word," retorted the unsuccessful bidder, "I'll say good-evening."

He turned to Indiman, who stood at his elbow. "A fakir," he growled, disgustedly. "Now, I'll leave it to you, sir."

"If you will acquaint me with the essential particulars," said Indiman, "I shall be most happy to p.r.o.nounce upon them."

"In two words. This cheap josher has been offering to sell himself, out and out, to the highest bidder. I make him a cash offer and he takes water."

"Pardon me," interrupted the young man in evening dress, "but your bid is plainly for what the students in medical colleges call a 'subject.'

Now, I expressly disclaimed any intention of terminating my material existence at any fixed period in the future. On the contrary, it is for the purpose of prolonging my life that I am driven to this extraordinary procedure. It is myself, my talents, and my services of which I desire to dispose. My skull, in which you seem to take such an interest, goes, of course, with the bargain. But I do not guarantee immediate delivery."

"Your services," sneered the student of medicine. "May I inquire into their nature and nominal cash valuation?"

"I am an experienced leader of the cotillon," answered the young man in evening clothes, with a sweet and serious dignity.

"Umph!"