The Window at the White Cat Part 2

"What do you think about the eleven twenty-two?" I asked as he got up and b.u.t.toned his coat.

"Well, it might mean almost anything. It might be that many dollars, or the time a train starts, or it might be the eleventh and the twenty-second letters of the alphabet--k--v."

"K--v!" I repeated, "Why that would be the Latin _cave_--beware."

Hunter smiled cheerfully.

"You'd better stick to the law, Mr. Knox," he said from the door. "We don't use Latin in the detective business."

CHAPTER II

UNEASY APPREHENSIONS

Plattsburg was not the name of the capital, but it will do for this story. The state doesn't matter either. You may take your choice, like the story Mark Twain wrote, with all kinds of weather at the beginning, so the reader could take his pick.

We will say that my home city is Manchester. I live with my married brother, his wife and two boys. Fred is older than I am, and he is an exceptional brother. On the day he came home from his wedding trip, I went down with my traps on a hansom, in accordance with a prearranged schedule. Fred and Edith met me inside the door.

"Here's your latch-key, Jack," Fred said, as he shook hands. "Only one stipulation--remember we are strangers in the vicinity and try to get home before the neighbors are up. We have our reputations to think of."

"There is no hour for breakfast," Edith said, as she kissed me. "You have a bath of your own, and don't smoke in the drawing-room."

Fred was always a lucky devil.

I had been there now for six years. I had helped to raise two young Knoxes--bully youngsters, too: the oldest one could use boxing-gloves when he was four--and the finest collie pup in our end of the state. I wanted to raise other things--the boys liked pets--but Edith was like all women, she didn't care for animals.

I had a rabbit-hutch built and stocked in the laundry, and a dove-cote on the roof. I used the general bath, and gave up my tub to a young alligator I got in Florida, and every Sunday the youngsters and I had a great time trying to teach it to do tricks. I have always taken it a little hard that Edith took advantage of my getting the measles from Billy, to clear out every animal in the house. She broke the news to me gently, the day the rash began to fade, maintaining that, having lost one cook through the alligator escaping from his tub and being mistaken, in the gloom of the back-stairs, for a rubber boot, and picked up under the same misapprehension, she could not risk another cook.

On the day that Margery Fleming came to me about her father, I went home in a state of mixed emotion. Dinner was not a quiet meal: Fred and I talked politics, generally, and as Fred was on one side and I on the other there was always an argument on.

"What about Fleming?" I asked at last, when Fred had declared that in these days of corruption, no matter what the government was, he was "forninst" it. "Hasn't he been frightened into reform?"

"Bad egg," he said, jabbing his potato as if it had been a politician, "and there's no way to improve a bad egg except to hold your nose.

That's what the public is doing; holding its nose."

"Hasn't he a daughter?" I asked casually.

"Yes--a lovely girl, too," Edith a.s.sented. "It is his only redeeming quality."

"Fleming is a rascal, daughter or no daughter," Fred persisted. "Ever since he and his gang got poor Butler into trouble and then left him to kill himself as the only way out, I have felt that there was something coming to all of them--Hansen, Schwartz and the rest. I saw Fleming on the street to-day."

"What!" I exclaimed, almost jumping out of my chair.

Fred surveyed me quizzically over his coffee cup.

"'Hasn't he a daughter!'" he quoted. "Yes, I saw him, Jack, this very day, in an unromantic four-wheeler, and he was swearing at a policeman."

"Where was it?"

"Chestnut and Union. His cab had been struck by a car, and badly damaged, but the gentleman refused to get out. No doubt you could get the details from the corner-man."

"Look here, Fred," I said earnestly. "Keep that to yourself, will you?

And you too, Edith? It's a queer story, and I'll tell you sometime."

As we left the dining-room Edith put her hand on my shoulder.

"Don't get mixed up with those people, Jack," she advised. "Margery's a dear girl, but her father practically killed Henry Butler, and Henry Butler married my cousin."

"You needn't make it a family affair," I protested. "I have only seen the girl once."

But Edith smiled. "I know what I know," she said. "How extravagant of you to send Bobby that enormous hobby-horse!"

"The boy has to learn to ride sometime. In four years he can have a pony, and I'm going to see that he has it. He'll be eight by that time."

Edith laughed.

"In four years!" she said, "Why, in four years you'll--" then she stopped.

"I'll what?" I demanded, blocking the door to the library.

"You'll be forty, Jack, and it's a mighty unattractive man who gets past forty without being sought and won by some woman. You'll be buying--"

"I will be thirty-nine," I said with dignity, "and as far as being sought and won goes, I am so overwhelmed by Fred's misery that I don't intend to marry at all. If I do--_if I do_--it will be to some girl who turns and runs the other way every time she sees me."

"The oldest trick in the box," Edith scoffed. "What's that thing Fred's always quoting: 'A woman is like a shadow; follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows.'"

"Upon my word!" I said indignantly. "And you are a woman!"

"I'm different," she retorted. "I'm only a wife and mother."

In the library Fred got up from his desk and gathered up his papers. "I can't think with you two whispering there," he said, "I'm going to the den."

As he slammed the door into his workroom Edith picked up her skirts and scuttled after him.

"How dare you run away like that?" she called. "You promised me--" The door closed behind her.

I went over and spoke through the panels.

"'Follow her, she flies; fly from her, she follows'--oh, wife and mother!" I called.

"For Heaven's sake, Edith," Fred's voice rose irritably. "If you and Jack are going to talk all evening, go and sit on _his_ knee and let me alone. The way you two flirt under my nose is a scandal. Do you hear that, Jack?"

"Good night, Edith," I called, "I have left you a kiss on the upper left hand panel of the door. And I want to ask you one more question: what if I fly from the woman and she doesn't follow?"

"Thank your lucky stars," Fred called in a m.u.f.fled voice, and I left them to themselves.