Part 15 (1/2)
”Twelve! Why, it was three when I left the banquet table. Twelve!”
”Twelve,” said Mr. Middleton, pointing gravely to the clock on the desk.
”It--is--twelve. Don't tell me it is the day after.”
”I am compelled to do so. You were at the banquet of the Sons of Andrew Jackson's Wars, twenty-four hours ago.”
”Great Scott!” exclaimed Mr. Brockelsby, thrusting his hands through his hair, or rather making the motion of doing so. ”Great Scott!” he repeated, ”I am bald-headed. What the devil have I been into? Where the devil have I been?”
”I found you here this morning. Your wife has been here.”
”Oh, lord! Oh, lord! What did she say when she saw me dead to the world--and bald-headed?”
”She did not see you. I had concealed you.”
”Good boy, good boy.”
”She offered me two hundred dollars reward to bring you home,” and Mr.
Middleton related all that Mrs. Brockelsby had said.
”It would be all off when she saw me bald-headed. What the devil wouldn't she suspect? I don't know. I would say I didn't know where I had been. That would certainly sound fishy. It would sound like a preposterous excuse to cover up something pretty questionable. People don't go out in good society and get their heads shaved. She's pretty independent and uppish now. She said the next time she knew of me cutting up any didoes, she would get a divorce. She comes into two hundred thousand from her grandfather's estate in six months and she's pretty independent. Say, my boy, can't you take a check for the money she wants? She's going to Was.h.i.+ngton to-morrow. Tell her I went out of town and sent the money. I _will_ go out of town. But the boys will see my bald head. Where do you suppose I was? What sort of crowd was I with? I must have a wig. You must get it for me. The boys would josh me to death, and if the story got to my wife it would be all off. I'll go to Battle Creek and get a new lot of hair started.”
Mr. Middleton sat down and wrote busily for a moment. He handed a sheet of paper to Mr. Brockelsby.
”What's this? You resign? You're not going to help me out?”
”I am no longer in your employ. I will undertake to do all you ask of me for a proper compensation, say one hundred and fifty a day for two days.”
”What?” screamed Mr. Brockelsby. ”This is robbery, extortion, blackmail.”
”It is what you often charge yourself. Very well. Get your own wig and be seen on the streets going after it. Leave your wife to wonder why I do not come to report what progress is made in the search for you and to start a rigorous investigation herself. I am under no obligations not to ease her worry, to calm her disturbed mind by telling her I have found you. She'll be hot foot after you then.”
”She'd spot the wig at once. It would fool others, but not her. She'd see I had been jagged. You've got me foul. I'll have to accede to your terms. You'll not give me away?”
”Sir, I would not, in this, my first employment as an independent attorney, be so derelict to professional honor, as to betray the secrets of my client. We have chosen to call this three hundred dollars--a check for which you will give me in advance--payment for the services I am about to perform. In reality, I consider it only part of what you owe for the miserably underpaid services of the past three years.”
As Mr. Middleton wended his way homeward, it was with some melancholy that he recalled how, on previous occasions when good fortune had added to his stock of wealth, he had rejoiced in it because he saw his dreams of marriage with the young lady of Englewood approaching realization more and more. But now they had drifted apart. Not once had he seen her since that fatal night. On several evenings he had made the journey to Englewood and walked up and down before her house, but not so much as her shadow on the curtain had he seen. Let her make the first move toward a reconciliation. If she expected him to do so after her treatment of him, she was sadly mistaken.
_The Adventure of Achmed Ben Daoud._
Being curious to hear of the young ladies who had inquired concerning the emir in the restaurant, and to learn what their connection with that prince might be, Mr. Middleton repaired to the bazaar on Clark Street on the succeeding night. But the emir was not in. Mesrour apparently having experienced one of those curious mental lesions not unknown in the annals of medicine, where a linguist loses all memory of one or more of the languages he speaks, while retaining full command of the others--Mesrour having experienced such a lesion, which had, at least temporarily, deprived him of his command of the English language, Mr. Middleton was unable to learn anything that he desired to know, until bethinking himself of the fact that alcohol loosens the thought centers and that by its agency Mesrour's atrophied brain cells might be stimulated, revivified, and the coma dispelled, he made certain signs intelligible to all races of men in every part of the world and took the blackamore into a neighboring saloon, where, after regaling him with several beers, he learned that only an hour before an elegant turnout containing two young women, beautiful as houris, had called for the emir and taken him away.
”He done tole me that if I tole anybody whar he was gwine, he'd bowstring me and feed mah flesh to the dawgs.”
Mr. Middleton shuddered as he heard this threat, so characteristically Oriental.
”Where _was_ he going?” he inquired with an air of profound indifference and irrelevance, signalling for another bottle of beer.
The blackamore silently drank the beer, a gin fizz, and two Scotch high-b.a.l.l.s, his countenance the while bearing evidence that he was struggling with a recalcitrant memory.