The Hunter and Other Stories Part 27

"I don't take it kindly that you aren't to stay here," she said.

"I'm sorry, but I'm not a free agent."

"Oh," she hazarded, "then you are here on business. From what Herbert told me I imagined it was to be a visit."

Elfinstone said nothing, looking over her head at the Miss Gutman someone had called Tamar: a green-gray-eyed girl of not much past twenty in greenish gray who made a throne of a rose and gold damask winged chair by sitting in it.

"But you will at least stay for dinner," Mrs. Dolliard said. "You needn't dress."

"I'm sorry," Elfinstone declined with scarcely enough regret, still looking at the girl in the wing chair. Her face was an ivory oval more Oriental than Occidental, though lines of eyes and red mouth promised other things than docility. The hair showing briefly under the rim of her hat was likewise Oriental in its blackness.

"Are you trying to escape me?" Mrs. Dolliard was demanding with mock severity. "How do you know that dining with us is such an ordeal?"

The tall man smiled with partial attention, protesting, "No, really, Mrs. Dolliard, I can't make a single plan even for the next hour until I know what I have to do," but his eyes did not smile and did not move from the girl's face across the room.

She was talking with the young South American, sitting comfortably still. She must have been conscious of the copperish stare fixed on her, but she gave no sign she was.

"I might even ask Miss Gutman," Helen Dolliard teased.

The tall man's gaze left the face it had held so long, swung down to Mrs. Dolliard's blonde prettiness.

"I would like that if I were free this evening," he said without embarra.s.sment.

General Dolliard and Mrs. Matheson came across the room to join them. Mrs. Matheson, an angular woman in much brown fur, learned Elfinstone had been in the Northwest. She had been in an automobile accident in the Fourth of July Canon in Idaho the previous year. She told him about it, lengthily, was still telling him about it when Tamar Gutman and Miss York went away together.

Five minutes later Elfinstone left the Dolliard house. His coat-collar turned up against the wind-slanted snow, he returned afoot to his hotel, walking with swift long strides on the white-padded sidewalks, past the State, War, and Navy Building, its thousands of angles rounded whitely now, past the White House and the Treasury that were more sombre than ever in the late afternoon grayness.

In his room he unlocked his two pigskin traveling bags and removed their contents piece by piece, examining each article carefully before removing it. The last out, he scowled without dissatisfaction, repacked his bags, relocked the bags, and went downstairs to the hotel grill. His meal was ordered and eaten in the manner of one to whom food is an uninteresting necessity, exercising neither imagination nor the menu's resources in its selection, eating it to the last mouthful, but without attention.

The meal done, Elfinstone, overcoated and hatted, went through the lobby and into the street. His way was down the avenue to Four and a Half Street, thence into that darker portion of Washington which lies around the Pennsylvania Railroad freight depots. Snow still floated down to keep the sidewalks cushioned, to make footsteps inaudible. The tall man turned a corner, walked a block swiftly, turned another corner, stopped, spun to face the rear.

A little round man in a round black overcoat and round black hat puffed around the corner.

His throat, dressed in unstarched collar and upturned coat collar, was soft in Elfinstone's hands. His eyes were round and bulging beneath the copper ones. His fat fingers jerked ineffectually at Elfinstone's lean wrists.

"Tailing me," captor accused captive.

"No! No!"

"You frisked my bags."

"No! No!" The denial was gasped out more chokingly now.

The tall man swung the round man off the sidewalk by his neck, shook him, jammed him back against the brick wall of the corner building. While one long hand held him there its mate ran into his overcoat pockets, inner pockets. No weapons came out, but a handful of papers.

Pocketing these papers, the tall man shifted his grip from throat to wrist.

"We're going up to the next corner, where there's a light," he said. "Cut up on me and I'll break your arm."

"You've got me wrong, Jack," the round man protested foolishly.

Under a weak light they halted. With the hand that did not hold his prisoner the tall man shook out the papers one by one and read them while flakes of snow spotted them damply. There was a card introducing the bearer as an operative in the employ of Vickery's Tri-City Detective Agency. There was nothing else that seemed to interest the tall man.

He thrust card and papers into the round man's nearest pocket and led him back the way they had come. Midway the block, where the shadow was deepest, they halted.

"Why were you tailing me?" the tall man demanded.

"I wasn't."

"Who's having me tailed?"

"n.o.body I know of. I tell you, I was going home. I wasn't following you."

"Will you tell me?"

"I wasn't." The voice was dogged.

"You were." The voice was impatient.

"I wasn't. You've got me wrong."

The tall man stepped back, yanked the round man to him with his left hand, whipped right hand-a fist-into round face. The round man went down hatless to the sidewalk. Three men, dim in the night but dressed roughly as laborers, appeared out of the storm close to Elfinstone, and peered curiously at him and at the man at his feet.

"What's happening?" one asked.

"It's a private fight," Elfinstone said shortly and turned away, returning to his hotel.

In the morning the tall man consulted a telephone directory and went to the offices of Vickery's Tri-City Detective Agency. A lavishly scented woman with pale prying eyes listened stonily to his request to see the manager, but she vanished swiftly with the card he gave her bearing his name and temporary t.i.tle of captain of detectives of the northwestern city.

Ten minutes later she ushered him into an inner room where three men were. One sat at an oak desk, one of his hands out of sight beneath it. He was fatly red-faced and hairless. Another stood with his back to a window, arms folded over arched chest. The third, a raw-boned sandy man with a loose wide mouth, straddled a chair on the other side of the office. Arranged, this trio, so that Elfinstone could at no time face all three, and they had this in common: their eyes were hard and watchful and did not leave the tall man while he was there.

"This is a pleasure, Captain Elfinstone," the bald man at the desk said. "I have always wanted to meet you." But he did not get up, did not bring his right hand into view. He flourished his left hand at a chair drawn beside the desk. "Sit down, sir."

"You are Vickery?" Elfinstone asked, standing just inside the door the woman had closed behind him.

"Vickery's Washington superintendent," the bald man corrected.

"One of your men shadowed me last night."

"So it was you, was it? Ha! Ha! Ha! That's a good one! He's sent to Union Station to pick up a Canadian forger and he picks up Captain Elfinstone. Whatever did you do to him, Cap? He was considerable bruised around the face."

"I knocked him for a loop."

The bald man grinned indulgently.

"I felt like doing it again before I fired him."

"I thought you would," said Elfinstone, not smiling. "Another man shadowed me here from the hotel this morning."

"Is that so?"

"A thick-shouldered man in gray."

"Is that so? Well, whoever he is he's not one of my men."

"If he stays with me the chances are I'll hurt him."

"I would by all means," the bald man agreed jovially.

By half past eleven that morning the tall man was in Baltimore. Registering and leaving his pigskin bags at a downtown hotel, he went into the financial district in search of information about the Chesapeake Trust Company and its personnel, a task involving few difficulties. In no business field is information about a.s.sociates and compet.i.tors more widespread than among bankers and brokers. Constantly overlapping interests, the necessity for watchfulness and caution, and the comparative permanence of employment combine to make the utmost intimacy general.

Thus, without ever going in sight of the Chesapeake Trust Company's square gray home, Elfinstone by the time he had interviewed two bankers and two stockbrokers-interviews smoothed by his status as acting captain of detectives in his northwestern city and by the discretion of his inquiries-was abundantly supplied with information concerning the company. Its president, Carl Bayless, was a man with no known vices and at least all the more austere virtues. The lesser officials and employees, down to the youngest runner, were Carl Baylesses in degrees approximating their positions. Employment in the Chesapeake Trust Company was said by local wits to be subject to the same major condition as a place in the Hall of Fame: the candidate must have been safely dead for ten years or more.

It was a little after five that evening when Elfinstone returned to his hotel. He found General Dolliard, his hands clasped behind him, his round face anxious, striding up and down beside a row of potted trees. The retired officer put joy on his face like a clumsy disguise when he saw the tall man.

"They're back! They're in my box again!"

"That was to be expected," the tall man said without enthusiasm. "Copies, photographs, would probably serve as well as the originals. It was never meant that you'd know they had been taken."

"Oh, I don't think that." Muscles writhed jerkily in the elder man's face trying to hold satisfaction there. "I think there was a mistake of some sort. It must have been a mistake, Elfinstone, and so there's no good-it won't be necessary for-it isn't-"

"You're trying to tell me you don't want me to go ahead?"

"Well, I- That is- Yes."

"I don't like that, Dolliard! Come up to my room."

In his room the tall man turned the key in the door and faced the soldier.

"Somebody phoned you today," he accused Dolliard coldly, "told you the stuff was back in your box, told you to call me off, told you where to find me-I've been shadowed ever since I got off the train yesterday-and made it emphatic enough that you'd do what you were told to do."

General Dolliard flushed darkly, shaking his head in the negative. His mask of joy was gone.

"How did you happen to come over here, then? How did you know where to find me?" Elfinstone demanded.

The soldier's coloring grew warmer. He hunched his square shoulders.

"There's no use going into all that!" He achieved authoritative gruffness. "I'm sorry I brought you all this distance, but I'd rather you stopped now and let the matter alone."

"You don't owe me any apology for calling me. But I don't like this. You're lying down, Dolliard, crawling."

"What if I am?" Anger in the elder man's voice sounded not quite genuine, as if it were another mask. "After all it's my trouble, and I prefer to lie down, as you call it. I will give you a check for-"

"d.a.m.n your check! Can't you see you're playing into their hands?"

General Dolliard looked at the floor, pressing his full lips tightly together. The lips parted to shape low-spoken, deliberate words.

"The truth is, Elfinstone, I'd rather my secret didn't get into your hands."

Air hissed shrilly through the tall man's nostrils. His lean hands flashed of their own accord to the old soldier's shoulders, flung him back against the wall. Elfinstone, brows down over hot copperish eyes, crouched toward the man staggering against the wall-stopped sharply-laughed without humor.

"Go away, Dolliard," he said. "You needn't have said that."

Elfinstone remained in Baltimore that night and part of the following day. He made no more inquiries, showed no more interest in the Chesapeake Trust Company. The greater part of the time he spent in his hotel room, in bed or chair, staring at some inner matter with unblinking red-brown eyes.

He returned to Washington in the afternoon, left his bags at the Pennsylvania Avenue hotel, consulted a copy of the Blue Book and gave a taxicab chauffeur the number of a house in I Street.

There a swarthy footman conducted him, after a brief wait, into a square room whose carved, gilded, and painted leather walls ran up high to a beamed ceiling no less richly treated. In the center of the room, one hand on the heavy walnut back of a bra.s.s-studded Spanish chair, the other fingering the engraved jade beads of a Buddhist rosary, Tamar Gutman stood facing the door. Her eyes-the green of the beads and of the gown that fell straight from shoulder to ankle-were unwontedly large, her mouth drawn small.

A little behind her and to one side a sallow man with thinning blond hair stood looking at the newcomer with astonished blue eyes. At him Elfinstone barely glanced, going straight across the tiled floor to the girl.

"I expected you yesterday." Her voice was throaty, opulent, her words almost absent-minded in their lack of conscious direction, her hand alive in his.

"I was out of the city." His eyes were shiny with metallic brightness, his words a little slurred.

The sallow forgotten man cleared his throat, said vaguely he fancied he shouldn't keep her father waiting. She, remembering him then, introduced him to Elfinstone. His name was Pauson. He bowed with hesitant friendliness, edging toward the door, muttering indefinite excuses, and went out as if escaping.

No one watched him go. The tall man's gaze was on the girl, a hard possessive stare that went deliberately from her black hair to her feet and to her face again. Under this rude examination she was motionless, her green eyes on his lean face, dreaming.

"I go back to the Northwest Sat.u.r.day," he said. "I've three or four months work still to do there. You will go with me?"

The least of sighs whispered between her red lips, now curving in a gentle smile.

"You learned this manner of wooing in your Northwest?"

"Wooing? No. I do none of that."

"Oh!" Her smile curved higher, less gentle. "You snap your fingers and they come to you, perhaps?"

He shook his head impatiently, light waving across his reddish hair.

"Nonsense!" curtly. "If I wanted you-just that-I'd woo you with all the tricks and flattery and persistence I thought you worth. But I want you and I love you, so there will be none of that. I want you unurged or I don't want you."

"I must throw myself at you?"

"That isn't the best way of saying it."

"But it is a way. And I have until Sat.u.r.day-three days-to answer this-it is an ultimatum, isn't it?"

Scowling Elfinstone said nothing.

"Suppose I should say 'No' on Sat.u.r.day and then on Sunday change my mind. Would it be too late?"

"You know your mind. If you don't, your answer is 'No.' Say it."

"And you will take that 'No' without a murmur, without trying to change it"

"I'll take it as final, if that is what you mean."