Wild Wings Part 22

"We do though," said Alan Ma.s.sey.

"Oh, yes, we do. It's the way we're made. We are always clinging to something, good or bad. Life, love, home, drink, power, money! Always something we are ready to sell our souls to get or keep. With you and me it was money. You sold your soul to me to keep money and I took it to get money."

He laughed raucously and Alan winced at the sound and cursed the morbid curiosity that had brought him to the bedside of this man who for three years past had held his own future in his dirty hand, or claimed to hold it. Alan Ma.s.sey had paid, paid high for the privilege of not knowing things he did not wish to know.

"What kind of a trail had you struck when you wired me, Ma.s.sey? I didn't know you were anxious for details about young John Ma.s.sey's career I thought you preferred ignorance. It was what you bought of me."

"I know it was," groaned Alan, dropping into a creaking rocker beside the bed. "I am a fool. I admit it. But sometimes it seems to me I can't stand not knowing. I want to squeeze what you know out of you as you would squeeze a lemon until there was nothing left but bitter pulp. It is driving me mad."

The sick man eyed the speaker with a leer of malicious satisfaction. It was meat to his soul to see this lordly young aristocrat racked with misery and dread, to hold him in his power as a cat holds a mouse, which it can crush and crunch at any moment if it will. Alan Ma.s.sey's mood filled Jim Roberts with exquisite enjoyment, enjoyment such as a gourmand feels on setting his teeth in some rare morsel of food.

"I know," he nodded. "It works like that often. They say a murderer can't keep away from the scene of his crime if he is left at large. There is an irresistible fascination to him about the spot where he d.a.m.ned his immortal soul."

"I'm not a criminal," snarled Alan. "Don't talk to me like that or you will never see another cent of my money."

"Money!" sneered the sick man. "What's that to me now? I've lost my taste for money. It is no good to me any more. I've got enough laid by to bury me and I can't take the rest with me. Your money is nothing to me, Alan Ma.s.sey. But you'll pay still, in a different way. I am glad you came. It is doing me good."

Alan made a gesture of disgust and got to his feet, pacing to and fro, his face dark, his soul torn, between conflicting emotions.

"I'll be dead soon," went on the malicious, purring voice from the bed.

"Don't begrudge me my last fling. When I am in my grave you will be safe.

n.o.body in the living world but me knows young John Ma.s.sey's alive. You can keep your money then with perfect ease of mind until you get to where I am now and then,--maybe you will find out the money will comfort you no longer, that nothing but having a soul can get you over the river."

The younger man's march came to a halt by the bedside.

"You shan't die until you tell me what you know about John Ma.s.sey," he said fiercely.

"You're a fool," said James Roberts. "What you don't know you are not responsible for--you can forget in a way. If you insist on hearing the whole story you will never be able to get away from it to your dying day.

John Ma.s.sey as an abstraction is one thing. John Ma.s.sey as a live human being, whom you have cheated out of a name and a fortune, is another."

"I never cheated him of a name. You did that."

The man grunted.

"Right. That is on my bill. Lord knows, I wish it wasn't. Little enough did I ever get out of that particular piece of deviltry. I over-reached myself, was a darned little bit too smart. I held on to the boy, thinking I'd get more out of it later, and he slid out of my hands like an eel and I had nothing to show for it, until you came along and I saw a chance to make a new deal at your expense. You fell for it like a lamb to the slaughter. I'll never forget your face when I told you John Ma.s.sey was alive and that I could produce him in a minute for the courts. If I had, your name would have been Dutch, young man. You'd never have gotten a look in on the money. You had the sense to see that. Old John died without a will. His grandson and not his grand-nephew was his heir provided anybody could dig up the fellow, and I was the boy that could do that. I proved that to you, Alan Ma.s.sey."

"You proved nothing. You scared me into handing you over a whole lot of money, you blackmailing rascal, I admit that. But you didn't prove anything. You showed me the baby clothes you said John Ma.s.sey wore when he was stolen. The name might easily enough have been stamped on the linen later. You showed me a silver rattle marked 'John Ma.s.sey.' The inscription might also easily enough have been added later at a crook's convenience. You showed me some letters purporting to have been written by the woman who stole the child and was too much frightened by her crime to get the gains she planned to win from it. The letters, too, might easily have been forgery. The whole thing might have been a c.o.c.k and bull story, fabricated by a rotten, clever mind like yours, to apply the money screw to me."

"True," chuckled Jim Roberts. "Quite true. I wondered at your credulity at the time."

"You rat! So it was all a fake, a trap?"

"You would like to believe that, wouldn't you? You would like to have a dying man's oath that there was nothing but a pack of lies to the whole thing, blackmail of the crudest, most unsupportable variety?"

Alan bent over the man, shook his fist in the evil, withered old face.

"d.a.m.n you, Jim Roberts! Was it a lie or was it not?"

"Keep your hands off me, Alan Ma.s.sey. It was the truth. Sarah Nelson did steal the child just as I told you. She gave the child to me when she was dying a few months later. I'll give my oath on that if you like."

Alan brushed his hand across his forehead, and sat down again limply in the creaking rocker.

"Oh, you are willing to believe that again now, are you?" mocked Roberts.

"I've got to, I suppose. Go on. Tell me the rest. I've got to know. Did you really make a circus brat of John Ma.s.sey and did he really run away from you? That is all you told me before, you remember."

"It was all you wanted to know. Besides," the man smiled his diabolical grin again, "there was a reason for going light on the details. At the time I held you up I hadn't any more idea than you had where John Ma.s.sey was, nor whether he was even alive. It was the weak spot in my armor.

But you were so panic stricken at the thought of having to give up your gentleman's fortune that you never looked at the hollowness of the thing.

You could have bowled over my whole scheme in a minute by being honest and telling me to bring on your cousin, John Ma.s.sey. But you didn't. You were only too afraid I would bring him on before you could buy me off. I knew I could count on your being blind and rotten. I knew my man."

"Then you don't know now whether John Ma.s.sey is alive or not?" Alan asked after a pause during which he let the full irony of the man's confession sink into his heart and turn there like a knife in a wound.

"That is where you're dead wrong. I do know. I made it my business to find out. It was too important to have an invulnerable shield not to patch up the discrepancy as early as possible. It took me a year to get my facts and it cost a good c.h.i.n.k of the filthy, but I got them. I not only know that John Ma.s.sey is alive but I know where he is and what he is doing. I could send for him to-morrow, and cook your goose for you forever, young man."

He pulled himself up on one elbow to peer into Alan's gloomy face.

"I may do it yet," he added. "You needn't offer me hush money. It's no good to me, as I told you. I don't want money. I only want to pa.s.s the time until the reaper comes along. You'll grant that it would be amusing to me to watch the see-saw tip once more, to see you go down and your cousin John come up."

Alan was on his feet again now, striding nervously from door to window and back again. He had wanted to know. Now he knew. He had knowledge bitter as wormwood. The man had lied before. He was not lying now.

"What made you send that wire? Were you on the track, too, trying to find out on your own where your cousin is?"

"Not exactly. Lord knows I didn't want to know. But I had a queer hunch.

Some coincidences bobbed up under my nose that I didn't like the looks of. I met a young man a few days ago that was about the age John would have been, a chap with a past, who had run away from a circus. The thing stuck in my crop, especially as there was a kind of shadowy resemblance between us that people noticed."

"That is interesting. And his name?"

"He goes under the name of Carson--Richard Carson."

Roberts nodded.

"The same. Good boy. You have succeeded in finding your cousin.

Congratulations!" he cackled maliciously.

"Then it really is he?"

"Not a doubt of it. He was taken up by a family named Holiday in Dunbury, Ma.s.sachusetts. They gave him a home, saw that he got some schooling, started him on a country newspaper. He was smart, took to books, got ahead, was promoted from one paper to another. He is on a New York daily now, making good still, I'm told. Does it tally?"

Alan bowed a.s.sent. It tallied all too well. The lad he had insulted, jeered at, hated with instinctive hate, was his cousin, John Ma.s.sey, the third, whom he had told the other was quite dead. John Ma.s.sey was very much alive and was the rightful heir to the fortune which Alan Ma.s.sey was spending as the heavens had spent rain yesterday.

It was worse than that. If the other was no longer nameless, had the right to the same fine, old name that Alan himself bore, and had too often disgraced, the barrier between him and Tony Holiday was swept away. That was the bitterest drop in the cup. No wonder he hated d.i.c.k--hated him now with a c.u.mulative, almost murderous intensity. He had mocked at the other, but how should he stand against him in fair field?

It was he--Alan Ma.s.sey--that was the outcast, his mother a woman of doubtful fame, himself a follower of false fires, his life ign.o.ble, wayward, erratic, unclean? Would it not be John rather than Alan Ma.s.sey Tony Holiday would choose, if she knew all? This ugly, venomous, sin-scarred old rascal held his fate in the hollow of his evil old hand.

The other was watching him narrowly, evidently striving to follow his thoughts.

"Well?" he asked. "Going to beat me at my own game, give your cousin his due?"

"No," curtly.