The Hunter and Other Stories Part 28

"Have you lost a bet that compels you to propose to me, and are you trying to arrange it in such a manner that I will have to refuse you?" she asked, and then her voice shifted from taunting softness to throaty anger. "What made you think I would recognize so insolent a question one way or the other?"

"Words!" scornfully. "You know my meaning."

"Your meaning! I know nothing but your impudence. A stranger I have seen once to come to me with such an outrageous demand!"

"More words! Impudent or not, there it is. A yes, a no, will settle it, save your breath."

"Surely you don't need an answer now"-the rosary broke in her fingers, spilling carved green beads on the floor, and neither noticed them-"don't expect one."

"I do."

"You are dull, Captain Elfinstone."

"Perhaps, but pettish evasions are not answers."

She started to repeat "pettish evasions," stopped, stood straight and silent, regarding him with unreadable green eyes. He glared at her, mouth thinned, brows indrawn, took a step forward, coming close.

"Give me an answer," he ordered harshly. "Give me an answer, Tamar!"

But the name shook on his tongue and her body was warm against his body, her arms warm around his body, their faces crushed together.

"But how am I ever to have any happiness with you so contrarily headstrong?" she complained when they were a little apart again.

"We'll be married Sat.u.r.day afternoon," he replied. "Our train leaves in the early evening."

"You-do you want to talk to Father now?" she asked dubiously.

"All right." He seemed to attach no importance to the matter.

"He-it may be a little difficult," she cautioned him. "I think it surely will be if you are as willful with him as with me. You'll try to make it no more difficult than it has to be?"

"All right."

Taking his hand, she drew him to the door, guided him down a long hall and into a smaller room severely business-like in spite of its luxury.

"Father, this is Captain Elfinstone."

The man at the red-bone-inlayed desk turned in his chair, rising as he faced them. Not tall, he was nevertheless of commanding stature even in the presence of Elfinstone's abnormal height. A man of fifty, his thick curly hair was long and black throughout, broad sloping forehead and cheeks were smooth and unlined as a young man's, his dark eyes as bright, his pale olive skin as clear. Hawk nose, full mouth, and cleft chin were ample in size, stamped with as much power as the tall man's lean features, and more suavely.

He held out a strong white hand to Elfinstone, smiling, bowing slightly, then moved a stamped leather chair a few inches forward. The girl was gone.

"Sit down, Captain Elfinstone."

The tall man said, "Thank you," standing still, "I have asked your daughter to marry me."

The black-haired man smiled.

"And she?"

"We plan to be married Sat.u.r.day."

"Isn't that rather precipitate?"

"I must leave for the Northwest then."

Gutman smiled again.

"May I ask how long you have known Tamar?"

"Since the day before yesterday, though not to talk to until today."

Gutman laughed, sat down, looked at his white hands and up at his daughter's suitor.

"I have no objection to you, Captain Elfinstone. True, all I know of you is what is common property; that is all in your favor. But even if I doubted the wisdom of Tamar's choice I shouldn't oppose her. However I do think that both of you are being more hasty than wise."

"Hasty, yes. I can understand your wanting caution, but I'm not cautious." Elfinstone frowned impatiently. "I ask your consent, Mr. Gutman, to my marriage with your daughter Sat.u.r.day."

The black-haired man shrugged.

"You have it," he said. "I know nothing of your means, but I a.s.sume you would not ask her to marry you unless you could provide adequately for her comfort."

"I would if I were a pauper," the tall man contradicted. "As it happens, I can give her-not this"-with a lean hand's gesture at the house's elaborate appointments-"but at least the fundamental comforts."

"Very good," said Gutman, "now sit down, Captain Elfinstone, and let us talk not so much as enemies. I begin to like you."

It was nearly midnight when the tall man returned to his hotel. With his key the night clerk gave him a telephone memorandum on which "Urgent" was penciled under a number. Frowning at the slip, Elfinstone carried it to the telephone booths, found General Dolliard's name in the telephone directory, found that his telephone number was the number on the slip, tore the slip twice across, dropped the fragments into a waste basket, and went up to his room.

He was taking off his collar when the telephone bell rang.

"Yes?" he said into the instrument.

General Dolliard's anxious voice: "Elfinstone, this is-"

"There is nothing between us," the tall man said, replacing receiver on p.r.o.ng.

The bell rang again. The tall man finished undressing and presently the ringing stopped.

He was in bed when the bell rang once more.

A woman's voice: "Captain Elfinstone? This is Helene Dolliard. I am downstairs. I must see you at once."

"You are alone?"

"Yes. You will come down?"

"In ten minutes," he promised without enthusiasm.

He found the officer's young wife in a small alcove off the lounge, now empty except for occasional guests pa.s.sing in from the night toward their rooms. Her pale hair was uncovered, her small body wrapped in a dark fur, with blue stockings, blue slippers set with rhinestones showing below.

She came eagerly to meet him, but he spoke first.

"You have come on your husband's account?"

"Yes." Her hands were on his wrist. "You would not talk to him. He-"

Elfinstone bowed with stiff formality.

"May I help you to your car?" he asked.

"But, Captain Elfinstone!"

"Haven't I made it plain enough," he asked impatiently, "that I want nothing more to do with him?"

"But you must-"

Her words stopped. She stared past him. He turned to face General Dolliard, white-faced, collar wilted, white tie askew.

"Elfinstone," he cried thickly, trying to catch the tall man's hand. "There is a train-"

Elfinstone struck the reaching hands aside, turned to bow rigidly to Mrs. Dolliard.

"You will excuse me," he said and turned toward the elevators.

"Elfinstone!" General Dolliard cried, loudly, despairingly enough to draw the curious faces of three guests in the other end of the lounge and a bellboy toward them.

Mrs. Dolliard screamed. The tall man spun around. Shaded lights sparkled pinkly on the weapon in the officer's hand. Elfinstone sprang. Mrs. Dolliard screamed again. The curious bellboy said, "Jesus!"

A revolver, flaming noisily, put a star in a gla.s.s door across the lounge.

A rug slid under Elfinstone's feet as he grasped General Dolliard's gun-arm. The tall man stumbled to his knees, could not disentangle the rug, but lurched to his feet again still holding the elder man's arm, bending it back. Excited voices, hurrying feet were in the lounge.

General Dolliard clung to his weapon, staggering back, Elfinstone, feet webbed in rug, swaying with him. Dolliard's round face panic-crazed, Elfinstone's lean and hard. The rug crawled higher between the tall man's legs, unbalancing him. The two men strained against each other as they fought to hold their footing, and failed. General Dolliard was underneath when they crashed to the floor full-length. The revolver, out of sight beneath the nether man, roared dully. Elfinstone took his hands away, standing up. General Dolliard lay still no matter how despairingly his young wife called to him, kneeling beside him, holding his head up from the floor. A thin breath of smoke came from under him to fade quickly.

Next morning Elfinstone was taken from his cell in the city jail to a small room furnished meagerly with a table and two chairs, where a little dapper man with an immense waxed white mustache trotted nervously up and down the floor on tiny feet encased in black mirrors.

"Ah, Captain Elfinstone!" he greeted the tall man, stopping his trotting to click his heels together and lean back on them, peering up into the lean face so far above him. "An unfortunate affair, to be sure, but you have, if reports be true, known many vicissitudes, and so this one, from which, I dare say, you will be extricated soon enough, will not disturb you unduly."

Gramhame Canavan, then well into his eighties, still retained all the nervous energy, the almost clinical attention to details that had made him, and kept him for fifty years, the most prominent criminal lawyer on the Atlantic Coast.

Elfinstone let the lawyer shake his hand and they sat in the chairs at the table.

"Mr. Gutman phoned me this morning," Canavan said, "before I was out of bed, and retained me to represent you, with your approval, I a.s.sume."

"My approval, certainly, though I didn't know of it."

"Quite so. Now, Captain Elfinstone, we have little enough time before the inquest, and I know nothing except that you are being held in connection with General Dolliard's unfortunate death this morning."

Elfinstone sat back in his chair, stretching his long legs under the table. Except that his lean cheeks, not having been shaved that morning, wore a reddish short stubble, he was in nothing the prisoner.

"Did you know Dolliard?" he asked.

"Oh, yes, though not intimately."

"His brother Don?"

"I knew Don better."

"So did I. Don and I worked together for a while in Central Europe during the war, you know. I was with him the night he was killed. I was the cause of his death. He died saving my life. He held the door of our flat in the Mala Strana against a squad of Austrian hussars while I hurried out of a hussar's uniform and into civilian clothes, burning the uniform and some memoranda. It cost Don half a dozen bullets in his lungs, but it saved me from being shot as a spy, and let me get out a few months later with the information we had collected. When I came back to the United States I hunted up Herbert Dolliard and told him of his brother's death and of the obligation it left me under.

"So a week ago, when he was in trouble, he sent for me. I'd rather not tell you the details unless it's necessary, and I don't think it will be. Is that all right?"

"Quite all right," the little attorney said promptly.

"Well, he was badly frightened when I went to see him in response to his call. The trouble had to do with some papers that had been stolen from him. I promised to try to get them back, and went to Baltimore the next day for that purpose. Dolliard came to my hotel there that night and asked me to let the matter drop. He was more frightened than he had been the previous day. I tried to persuade him that he was taking the wrong course, but finally promised to drop it.

"The next day-yesterday-I came back to Washington. Last night when I returned to my hotel I found a message from him, asking me to call him up. I didn't call him. Our talk in Baltimore hadn't been pleasant. A little later he phoned me again. I wouldn't talk to him. It was perhaps three quarters of an hour after that that Mrs. Dolliard phoned me. She was downstairs in the hotel, alone, she said, and wanted to talk to me. I went down and told her as firmly as I could that I wanted nothing else to do with her husband or his affairs. He appeared and I turned to leave them. Then she screamed and when I turned I saw he had a revolver in his hand. His first bullet missed me. I tried to take the revolver from him. We fell down together, the gun went off again, shooting him in the back, killing him instantly."

"Quite so. And did anyone besides you three see it? Were there other guests or employees of the hotel around?"

"Yes, though I don't know how much they saw. I hadn't any attention to spare, but I heard people running and talking when he fired the first time."

The little man twisted his mustache.

"I doubt that we'll have much difficulty," he said. "The hotel people, some of them, should know that Dolliard had been trying to reach you by phone, that you did not call him, and that Mrs. Dolliard came to the hotel. In any event, his wife will know it and can hardly testify otherwise. Too, you were not armed and he fired at you before you were within hand's reach of him. No, a.s.suredly, we should have no trouble clearing you even if no impartial witnesses saw the beginning of the struggle."

But the inquest showed clearly that even though a man may for fifty years be a leader in acquaintance with the intricacies of criminal legal procedure, still it may hold surprises for him.

Mrs. Dolliard's story of the circ.u.mstances surrounding immediately her husband's death was accurate in every detail, and her manner when she told it was no more truthful than when she told what she knew of the circ.u.mstances leading up to it. Her husband had been obviously worried for some weeks, she said, and then, three days ago had told her that he expected a Captain Elfinstone-of whom she knew nothing except what was common knowledge-would probably arrive soon to be their guest for a while. General Dolliard's manner when he mentioned this had been embarra.s.sed, and she had gotten the impression that he was afraid of something, of somebody, of Elfinstone in fact. He had cautioned her to be especially cordial to the visitor as it was important that his good graces be kept. Elfinstone had arrived, had talked with her husband, declining to stay at the house. Her husband had been extremely nervous after the interview, and she had heard him pacing the floor of his room that night. She went in to him, asking him what was the matter. He replied evasively that he was in trouble but expected it to be over soon, "one way or the other." She could not remember his exact words beyond that, but the impression she had received was that Elfinstone was the source of the trouble and Dolliard expected to clear it up now that the tall man was in Washington.

She did not know what callers or mail or phone calls her husband had had the next day, but he had told her that night that he had been to Baltimore, had had a most unpleasant session with Elfinstone and that he thought he had settled the matter for good and all. The next day he had been in quite good spirits until early evening when, after talking to someone over the phone (and she knew not who or what had been said) he suddenly went completely to pieces. Half a dozen times that evening he tried to get Elfinstone on the phone, failed, and finally succeeded. He told her Elfinstone would pay no attention to him, would not talk to him, and asked her to go see Elfinstone, to beg him to leave the city and return to his home at once, to spare her husband. She had gone to the hotel at about half past twelve with her husband, who had remained some distance away, where Elfinstone could not see him.

Out of this honestly told story the coroner's jury got the obvious meaning: Elfinstone had some sort of hold on the dead man, was either blackmailing him or threatening him, and General Dolliard, goaded beyond endurance, had been killed trying to kill his tormentor. There was little doubt that technically the tall man had killed Dolliard in self defense, but the jury refused to bring in that verdict, returning instead a rather evasive verdict in which one thing was clear: their opinion was that Elfinstone should be held, the affair sifted to the bottom, and him tried for murder if possible.

Elfinstone, having told no more of his relations with Dolliard than he had told his attorney, was taken back to his cell in the city jail.

"Murder certainly can't be made of it," the attorney said as he prepared to leave his client, "but manslaughter perhaps, if there are grounds for believing you had been threatening Dolliard with something. If it comes to that, you'll tell the whole thing, of course?"

"Yes, but we'll wait until then."

This time Canavan was right. Four days later, awaiting trial for manslaughter, Elfinstone was released on heavy cash bond arranged through a bail broker by the attorney.

Cameras clicked as he pa.s.sed out of the building to the taxicab waiting at the curb, and reporters followed him to its door with questions.

"I've nothing to say. See Mr. Canavan," he answered.

The youngest of the reporters refused to be put off. He was a slim youth with the vaguest of fair mustaches.

"But can't you say anything about your removal from office?" he insisted, one foot in the taxicab after the tall man, his hand on the door.