Blacksheep! Blacksheep! Part 7

"You were asking for Mrs. Congdon; Mrs. Putney Congdon, I suppose? Well, I certainly could tell you a story if you would give me time! What I don't know about the Congdon family wouldn't make a large book! Ha, ha!

But if I had known Mrs. Congdon was a friend of yours I should have acted differently, very differently indeed."

He was attracting attention. The porter, the bell-boy supporting Isabel's bag, and a few pa.s.sers-by paused, amused by the spectacle of a heated gentleman earnestly addressing a young woman who seemed greatly annoyed by his attentions.

The taxi drew up and she stepped into it, but he landed beside her, flinging a handful of silver on the walk and taking her suitcase on his knees.

"This is unpardonable! If it hadn't been for making a scene I should have told the porter to throw you out!"

His teeth chattered as he tried to throw a conciliatory tone into his speech without losing his air of bravado.

"You know you're responsible for everything! I see life differently, really I do! And this is so beautifully romantic, running into you here, of all places!"

"I think," she said, sweeping him with a look of scorn, "that you've been following me or were put here to watch me!"

"Oh, that's unkind, most unkind! Purely chance,--the usual way, you know! How do you imagine I should be watching you with anything but the n.o.blest intentions?"

"You went to Bailey Harbor to look at a cottage for Mrs. Featherstone, didn't you? Putney Congdon was there, wasn't he? And why are you loitering here when you were so eager to get away to the Rockies?"

At the mention of Putney Congdon a laugh, the sharp concatenation of a lunatic caused the driver to glance round apprehensively.

"That's the scream of it, you know!" Archie cried. "I don't know for the life of me whether it was Putney Congdon I shot at the Congdon house or Hoky, the burglar. They're burying Hoky today and my partner in crime--wonderful chap--insisted on going to the funeral. You couldn't beat that! And it's so deliciously funny that you should be looking for Mrs. Congdon, who may be a widow for all I know!"

"A widow!" Isabel, with her hand clutching the door, swung upon him with consternation and fear clearly depicted in her face.

Her astonishment moved him to greater hilarity. Seeing that he had at last impressed her, he redoubled his efforts to be entertaining.

"Oh, that's the mystery just at present, whether poor old Putney is dead or not! No great loss, I imagine! But where do you suppose Mrs. Congdon went to hide her children from the brute?"

"That's exactly what I suspected!" she exclaimed furiously. "You are waiting here to find that out! How can you play the spy for him! You talk about shooting a man! Why, you haven't the moral courage to kill a flea! The kindest interpretation I can put upon your actions is to a.s.sume that you are hopelessly mad."

They had reached the station, and she jumped out and s.n.a.t.c.hed her bag.

He gave the driver a five dollar bill and dashed across the platform only to see her vanish into the vestibule of a Boston train just as it was drawing out.

He walked to the water front firmly resolved to drown himself, but his courage failing he yielded himself luxuriously to melancholy reflections. Instead of expressing delight at finding him reveling in villainy, Isabel had made it disagreeably clear that she not only was not delighted but that she thought him a dreadful liar, a spy upon her actions and possibly other things equally unflattering. Why she should think him capable of spying upon her movements, he did not know, nor was he likely to learn in the future that hung darkly before him. As he pondered there was nothing more startling in the fact that he had not hurried on to Banff than that she should be in Portsmouth when she had told him she was leaving Was.h.i.+ngton immediately for the girls' camp in Michigan.

Congdon was a name of evil omen. What business could Isabel have with that unhappy lady that would cause her to delay her departure for the West? His intimations that Putney Congdon might be dead had filled her with horror, and yet she had hinted at his sister's dinner that the taking of human life was a small matter. That a girl so wholly charming and persuasive at a dinner table could be so stern and unreasonable at a chance meeting afterward, shook his confidence in her s.e.x, which that memorable meeting had done much to establish upon firm ground. He had been wholly stupid and tactless in pouncing upon her with what he realized, under the calming influences of the brisk sea air, must have struck her as the vaporings of a dangerous lunatic. He had never been clever; he smarted now under the revelation that all things considered he was an immitigable a.s.s.

He went back to the hotel bitter but fortified by a resolution that nothing should check him now in his desperate career. He had quarreled with the inspiration of his new life, but in the end Isabel should have reason to know how unjust she had been. It was something after all to have seen her, perplexed, anxious and angry though she had been. She was still the most wonderful girl he had ever met, the more remarkable for the fact that now she had gone he had not the slightest idea of what had brought her into the strange world inhabited by the quarreling and fleeing Congdons. But men had suffered before for love of woman and he would bear his martyrdom manfully, keeping the humiliating interview carefully from the Governor.

The Governor returned from Hoky's funeral somewhat wistful, but he described the burial with his accustomed enthusiasm.

"It will be one of the satisfactions of my life that I went," he declared. "They didn't have the decency to bring in a minister--fancy it! Blessed if I didn't step into the breach and make a few remarks myself! I did, indeed, Archie, right there in the undertaker's joint, with a lot of b.u.mpkins staring! No man sinks so low that he hasn't got some good in him; that was the burden of my argument. The sheriff came up and wrung my hand when it was all over. He had heard my little sermon and I suppose thought I was some rich and influential philanthropist; so I let it go at that."

IV

The next morning he announced Cornford as their next stopping point, a town, he explained, whose history thrust far back into colonial times.

When they were seated in the parlor car he tossed a bundle of magazines into Archie's lap.

"It will amuse you to know that one of the policemen we met on the road looking for Hoky's accomplice is standing on the platform. He's just inspected the day coaches;--never occurs to him that knaves of our degree travel de luxe."

He yawned as the train started and drew a small volume from his pocket.

"I shall lose myself in old Horatius Flaccus for an hour. It's odd but I always do my best concentrating with a poet before me. And what you said yesterday about those new bank notes Leary has hid up here disturbed me just a little. You can't trust fellows of old Leary's type with a matter so delicate as launching new money, where the numbers, as you so sagely remarked, are being looked for by every bank teller in America. I have a hunch that something unusual will happen before the summer's over, and we must be primed for every emergency."

Archie saw that it was really a volume of the Horatian odes in which his singular companion had become engrossed. The Governor was utterly beyond him and he stared out moodily at the flying landscape, hating himself cordially as he thought of Isabel Perry and living over again the exciting moments in the Congdon house that preluded this strange journeying with a scholarly criminal who evidently derived the deepest satisfaction from the perusal of Latin poetry. The Governor broke in upon his reflections occasionally to read him a favorite pa.s.sage or to ask questions, flattering to Archie's learning, as to possible interpretations of the venerated text.

The Cornford Inn proved to be a quaint old tavern, modernized, and its patrons, the Governor explained, were limited to cultivated people who sought the peace and calm of the hills. After a leisurely luncheon they took their coffee in a pleasant garden on one side of the house.

"One might be in France or Italy," remarked the Governor, lighting a cigar. "An ideal place; socially most exclusive, and I trust we shall have no reason to regret our visit."

"That depends," said Archie, inspecting the end of his cigarette, "on whether we are transferred to the county jail or not."

"Your apprehensions are as absurd as they are groundless, my dear boy.

We could cash checks for any reasonable sum in this caravanserai merely on our appearance as men of education and property. Even in stolen clothes you look like a capitalist."

Two men came into the garden and seated themselves at a table on the other side of a screen of shrubbery. They ordered coffee and one of them remarked upon the recent prevalence of crime in New England.

"A thief was shot at Bailey Harbor night before last and there seems to be a band of crooks operating all along the coast."

"We need a better type of men in Congress," said the Governor in a loud tone, with a wink at Archie. "There's a steady deterioration in the quality of our representatives in both houses."

"You are right," Archie responded, remembering with a twinge of conscience his congressman brother-in-law.

The Governor nodded to Archie to keep on talking, while he played the role of eavesdropper.

"You oughtn't to have carried that cash up here," came in a low tone from the hedge. "The old man is a fool or he wouldn't have suggested such a thing."

"Well, he wrote that he was coming here to spend a week and in his characteristic fas.h.i.+on said if I wanted his stock I could bring the currency here and close the transaction. The Congdons are all a lot of cranks, you know. This old curmudgeon carries a small fortune around with him all the time, and never accepts a check in any transaction."

The Governor grew more eloquent in his attempt to convince Archie of the decadence of American statesmans.h.i.+p, while their unseen neighbors, feeling themselves secure, continued their discussion of the errand that had brought them to Cornford.

"You're paying the old skunk a big price for his shares!"

"Well, I've got to to keep them out of hostile hands," said the second voice irritably. "I don't like the idea of carrying yellowbacks around in a satchel just to humor a lunatic. And he's had the nerve to write that he won't be here until tomorrow!"

"But the cash--"

"Oh, it's all safe enough. No one knows but that I'm here just for a rest."

"Let's stroll about a little," said the Governor. "We're not getting our usual amount of exercise and there's a good bit of colonial history tucked away in Cornford."

He led the way through the garden to the street, and bade Archie proceed slowly to the post office while he walked toward the main entrance of the inn.

Archie was buying stamps for which he had no immediate use when the Governor joined him.

"These chaps were quite providentially in the office calling for their keys so I had no trouble in identifying them. Seebrook and Walters are the names. Seebrook, the older chap, has his daughter with him. They have rooms on the floor below us."