Part 41 (1/2)

Colonel Wallifarro stepped from the train at Marlin Town and turned up the collar of his heavy coat, while an edged and searching wind carried its chill through clothing and flesh and seemed to strike at the marrow of a man's bones.

The Colonel felt the dismal and bleak oppressiveness of a picture blotted from visual record by the reeking blackness of a winter dawn. A railway schedule apparently devised for purposes of human torture had deposited him in a sleeping town gloomed down on by sleeping mountains at the hour when mortal spirits are at their zero of vitality, and the train that had marooned him there wailed on its way like a strident banshee.

In his pocket was the telegram that had brought him. It had come from Larry Masters and had succeeded only in bewildering and alarming its recipient with words that explained nothing except that the sender stood in some desperate need of instant help. The words had startled Tom Wallifarro like a scream heard in a dark street.

He had responded in person and at once. Now Larry was not even at the station to meet him, so the Colonel turned and trudged forebodingly through the viscid slop of unpaved streets, churned by yesterday's feet of men and mules and oxen, toward that edge of the town where the mine superintendent had his bungalow.

Through the windows of the house when he drew near he caught the pallid glimmer of lamplight, but to his first rapping on the door there was no response. A vigorous repet.i.tion, which started echoes up and down the empty dark, brought at length a dull voice of summons, ”Come in,” and on turning the k.n.o.b the visitor looked upon a man who sat at the centre of his room in apathetic collapse.

A kerosene lamp, guttering now to the inanition of spent fuel and wick, revealed a face of pasty pallor and eyes deep sunk in dark sockets. It was cold in the room, for on the hearth, where the fire had been long unmended, only a few expiring embers glinted in the gray of the ash bed.

Colonel Wallifarro's first impression was that the man who had called on him for help had turned meantime to the more immediate solace of alcohol, and that now he was whiskey sodden, but a second glance dispelled that conjecture. This torpidity was not born of drunkenness but despair.

”I'm here, Larry,” said Colonel Wallifarro, as he fumbled with chilled fingers into a breast pocket and fished out a telegraph envelope. ”I took it the case was urgent.”

Aroused a little out of his stupefaction by the matter-of-fact steadiness of the voice, Masters came wearily to his feet. Through an open door which gave upon the sleeping-room, Colonel Wallifarro caught a glimpse of an untouched bed and knew that the other must have spent the night sitting here, wakeful yet forgetful of the hearth-fire that had sputtered to its death.

”I'm ruined, Tom,” announced Larry Masters in an intonation which ran level and unmodulated, as though even the voice of the man had lost all flexibility, and having made that startling a.s.sertion the speaker sank again into his chair and his former inertness of posture.

To press with questions at the moment seemed useless, so the lawyer threw off his overcoat and knelt down to rekindle and replenish the fire.

When at last it was again blazing he found and poured whiskey, and at the end of ten minutes he prompted again, ”I've come in answer to your summons, Larry. Hadn't you better try to tell me about it?”

The man nodded, and with an effort pulled himself somewhat together.

”This time it's not only ruin but disgrace--prison, I expect.”

”What have you done?”

”The fund. All of it. It's gone.”

”The fund--gone? I don't understand.” Colonel Wallifarro spoke with a forehead corrugated in bewilderment. ”Begin at the start of the story.

You forget that I haven't the remotest idea of what this is all about.”

”The fund, I tell you,” reiterated Masters stupidly. ”Gone!”

”Gather yourself together, man. Drink that whiskey.”

For once the gla.s.s had stood unregarded at the Englishman's elbow. Now he lifted it abstractedly to his lips, but this time he only sipped it and set it down. Then with an effort he rose and went to the hearth, where he stood with trembling hands outspread and limbs s.h.i.+vering before the rekindled blaze.

”I met Cantwell in Lexington.... We talked the matter over as to the final details.... The rest had been arranged, you see.... Finally he gave me the money ... in cash ... $20,000 it was.”

”Twenty thousand--gone? Whose money?”

”The company's.”

Colonel Wallifarro braced himself as he had braced himself against many other shocks. Patiently his legal capacity for bringing coherence out of obscurity led his dazed companion through the mazes of his torpor.

Direct questioning found a trail of broken narrative and followed it with a hound's pertinacity, until the story rounded into some sort of shape.