The Ragged Edge Part 12

"I've got a proposition to make," said O'Higgins.

"So long as it is open and above board."

"It's that, but it interferes with the college spirit stuff. Would a hundred dollars interest you?"

"Very much, if I can earn it without offending my conscience."

"It won't. Here goes. I've come all these miles for this young fellow; but I don't cotton to the idea of lallygagging four weeks in this burg. I've an idea it'll be that long before the chap gets up. My proposition is for you to keep an eye on him, and the moment he puts on his clothes to send me a telegram, care of the Hong-Kong Hotel. Understand me. Double-crossing wouldn't do any good. For all you might know, I might have someone watching you. This time he couldn't get far. He will have to return to Hong-Kong."

"Not necessarily. There is a railroad."

"He won't be taking that. The only safe place for him is at sea; and if he had kept to the sea, I shouldn't have found him so easily. Well, what about it?"

"I accept."

"As an honest Chinaman?"--taking out the offensiveness of the query by smiling.

"As an honest Chinaman."

O'Higgins produced his wallet. "Fifty now and fifty when I return."

"Agreed. Here are the jade carvers. Would you like to see them at work?"

"Lead on, Macduff!"

Ah c.u.m raised the skirt of his fluttering blue silk robe and stored the bill away in a trouser wallet. It was the beginning and the end of the transaction. When he finally telegraphed his startling information to Hong-Kong, it was too late for O'Higgins to act. The quarry had pa.s.sed out into the open sea.

From the comatose state, Spurlock pa.s.sed into that of the babbling fever; but that guarding instinct which is called subconsciousness held a stout leash on his secret. He uttered one word over and over, monotonously:

"Fool! ... Fool!"

But invariably the touch of Ruth's hand quieted him, and his head would cease to roll from side to side. He hung precariously on the ragged edge, but he hung there. Three times he uttered a phrase:

"A djinn in a blue-serge coat!"

And each time he would follow it with a chuckle--the chuckle of a soul in d.a.m.nation.

Neither the American Express nor Cook's had received mail for Howard Taber; he was not on either list. This was irregular. A man might be without relatives, but certainly he would not be without friends, that is to say, without letters. The affair was thick with sinister suggestions. And yet, the doctor recalled an expression of the girl's: that it was not a dissipated face, only troubled.

The whole affair interested him deeply. That was one of the compensations for having consigned himself to this part of the world. Over here, there was generally some unusual twist to a case.

He would pull this young fellow back; but later he knew that he would have to fight the boy's lack of will to live. When he recovered his mental faculties, he would lie there, neutral; they could save him or let him die, as they pleased; and the doctor knew that he would wear himself out forcing his own will to live into this neutrality. And probably the girl would wear herself out, too.

To fight inertia on the one hand and to study this queer girl on the other. Any financial return was inconsiderable against the promise of this psychological treat. The girl was like some north-country woodland pool, penetrated by a single shaft of sunlight--beautifully clear in one spot and mysteriously obscured elsewhere. She would be elemental; there would be in her somewhere the sleeping tigress. The elemental woman was always close to the cat: as the elemental man was always but a point removed from the wolf.

It was so arranged that Ruth went on duty after breakfast and remained until noon. The afternoon was her own; but from eight until midnight she sat beside the patient. At no time did she feel bodily or mental fatigue. Frequently she would doze in her chair; but the slightest movement on the bed aroused her.

At luncheon, on the third day, a thick-set man with a blue jaw smiled across his table at her. She recognized him as the man who had blundered into the wrong room.

"How is the patient?" he asked.

"He will live," answered Ruth.

"That's fine," said O'Higgins. "I suppose he'll be on his feet any day now."

"No. It will take at least three weeks."

"Well, so long as he gets on his feet in the end. You're a friend of the young man?"

"If you mean did I know him before he became ill, no."

"Ah." O'Higgins revolved this information about, but no angle emitted light. Basically a kindly man but made cynical and derisive by sordid contacts, O'Higgins had almost forgotten that there was such a thing as unselfishness. The man or woman who did something for nothing always excited his suspicions; they were playing some kind of a game. "You mean you were just sorry for him?"

"As I would be for any human being in pain."

"Uh-huh." For the life of him, O'Higgins could not think of anything else to say. Just because she was sorry for that young fool! "Uh-huh," he repeated, rising and bowing as he pa.s.sed Ruth's table. He wished he had the time to solve this riddle, for it was a riddle, and four-square besides. Back in the States young women did not offer to play the Good Samaritan to strange young fools whom Jawn D. Barleycorn had sent to the mat for the count of nine: unless the young fool's daddy had a bundle of coin. Maybe the girl was telling the truth, and then again, maybe she wasn't.

The situation bothered him considerably. Things happened frequently over here that wouldn't happen in the States once in a hundred years. Who could say that the two weren't in collusion? When a chap like Spurlock jumped the traces, _cherchez la femme_, every time.

He hadn't gambled or played the horses or hit the booze back there in little old New York....

"Aw, piffle!" he said, half aloud and rather disgustedly, as he stepped out into the sunshine. "My old coco is disintegrating. I've b.u.mped into so much of the underside that I can't see clean any more. No girl with a face like that.... And yet, dang it! I've seen 'em just as innocent looking that were prime vipers. Let's get to Hong-Kong, James, and hit the high spots while there is time."

He signalled to Ah c.u.m; and the two of them crossed on foot into the city.

It was not until the morning of the fifth day that the constant vigil was broken. The patient fell into a natural and refreshing sleep. So Ruth found that for a while her eyes were free. She tiptoed to the stand and gathered up the ma.n.u.scripts which she carried to a chair by the window. Since the discovery of them, she had been madly eager to read these typewritten tales. Treasure caves to explore!

All through these trying days she had recurrently wondered what this strange young man would have to say that d.i.c.kens and Hugo had not already said. That was the true marvel of it. No matter how many books one read, each was different, as each human being was different. Some had the dignity and the aloofness of a rock in the sea; and others were as the polished pebbles on the sands--one saw the difference of pebble from pebble only by close scrutiny. Ruth, without suspecting it, had fallen upon a fundamental truth: that each and every book fitted into the scheme of human moods and intelligence.

Ruth was at that stage where the absorption of facts is great, but where the mental digestion is not quite equal to the task. She was acquiring truths, but in a series of shocks rather than by the process of a.n.a.lysis.

There were seven tales in all--short stories--a method of expression quite strange to her, after the immense canvases of d.i.c.kens and Hugo. When she had finished the first tale, there was a sense of disappointment. She had expected a love story; and love was totally absent. It was a tale of battle, murder, and sudden death on the New York waterfront. Sordid; but that was not Ruth's term for it; she had no precise commentary to offer.

From time to time she would come upon a line of singular beauty or a paragraph full of haunting music; and these would send her rushing on for something that never happened. Each ma.n.u.script was like the other: the same lovely treatment of an unlovely subject.

Abruptly would come the end. It was as if she had come upon the beautiful marble facade of a fairy palace, was invited to enter, and behind the door--nothing.

She did not realize that she was offering criticisms. The word "criticism" had no concrete meaning to her then; no more than "compromise." Some innate sense of balance told her that something was wrong with these tales. She could not explain in words why they disappointed her or that she was disappointed.

Two hours had come and gone during this tantalizing occupation. At the least, the tales had the ability to make her forget where she was; which was something in their favour.

"My coat!"

Ruth did not move but stared astonishedly at the patient.

"My coat!" he repeated, his glance burning into hers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Distinctive Pictures Corporation. The Ragged Edge._ A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.]