"Well, then, what is this check for?"

She drew back a little. "Why, it's to help you out, of course. Don't you want it?"

He felt himself grow suddenly cold as he stood and watched her recoil momentarily from his two-edged glance. "No!" he retorted.

She continued to back away from him. He followed her retreat.

"I don't think you quite get me, Helen," he heard himself say, with icy sharpness. "I wanted to see Hilmer _myself! I had a business proposition to put up to him. I want co-operation--not questionable charity!"

She flung back her head, but her voice lacked defiance as she said:

"Was that meant as an insult?"

"No," he returned, quietly, "as a warning."

She stood silent, facing him with that clear, disarming gaze that she knew how to achieve so perfectly. He felt a great yearning overwhelm him ... a desire to meet her halfway ... a vagrant displeasure at his ill-natured irritation.

"How is Mrs. Hilmer?" he asked, suddenly, as he reached for his hat.

She shrugged. "There isn't any change," she replied, almost inaudibly.

"Shall I bring you anything from the apartment?"

"No... I'll go myself this afternoon and get some things together... I need a little air, anyway." She followed him to the door. "Then I understand you don't want this?" she inquired, indicating the check in her hand.

His only answer was an incredulous stare.

"What excuse shall I make him?"

He put on his hat. The flame of his displeasure had cooled, but he was still inflexible. "None, so far as I am concerned."

A retort died on her lips. He could see that she was puzzled.

"Well, so long," he ventured.

She drew herself up with the swift movement of one parrying a blow.

"So long!" she echoed, and the door closed sharply.

He went down the steps. There was an air of finality in his retreat...

At the office he found a note from Brauer.

Your check has been returned to me... I shall put it through the bank again to-morrow.

He crumpled the sheet of paper and dropped it into the waste basket.

How much would Brauer dare? he wondered.

That night the friend who had first warned him against Kendrick met him on California Street.

"I see my prophecy came true, Fred," he hazarded. "Why didn't you tell me that Brauer was your partner?... By the way, I saw Kendrick and him going to lunch together to-day. What's the idea?"

Fred lifted his eyebrows and laughed a toneless reply. What _was_ the idea? He wished he knew.

CHAPTER VIII

The next day pa.s.sed in complete inaction. Frankly, Starratt did not know what move to make. He felt that he should have been trying to square matters, but to raise offhand six hundred-odd dollars was a feat too impossible to even attempt. He had few relations, and these few were remote and penniless, and his friends were equally lacking in financial resource. He was confident that he could convince Hilmer of the soundness of his new plan once he achieved an interview. But all his pride rose up to combat the suggestion that he present himself before Helen and plead for an audience. Once he had an impulse to go to the president of the bank and ask for an advance at the proper rate of interest. He knew scores of cases where banks loaned money on personality; he had heard many a bank official express himself to the effect that a poor man with a vision and integrity was a better chance any day than a millionaire lacking a goal or scruples. But in the end he was swung from any initiative by a pa.s.sive desire to even his score with Brauer. After all, it was diverting to wait for his ex-partner's next move. Brauer had had no compunctions in tricking him. Why, then, should he worry? No, it would be fun just to let Brauer stew in a sample of his own Teutonic duplicity.

He felt a relief at Helen's absence from the office. He had never wanted her there and he was determined not to have her back. Last night she had entirely misread the reason back of his desire for an interview with Hilmer, and he had been moved to a nasty rancor. But now he felt tolerant, rather than displeased. Women were often like that, a bit unethical regarding money. In wheedling a check out of Hilmer she had used the easiest weapons a woman possessed. She had meant well, Fred concluded, using that time-worn excuse which has served nearly every questionable act since the world began. And in the final a.n.a.lysis, he really blamed himself. Such humiliation was usually the price a man paid when he let the women of his household share in the financial responsibility. He should have hoed his own row and wiped the sweat of his labors upon his own coat sleeve. Well, Hilmer would be about in a few days and meanwhile Brauer would have some uncomfortable hours. In the end, no doubt, after Brauer had collected his six hundred dollars, he would go into a partnership with Kendrick.

That explained the mystery of these two linen-collared crooks lunching together... After all, there was an element of humor in the whole situation.

On Sat.u.r.day morning Starratt overslept and he did not get down to the office until nearly ten o'clock. He was picking up the mail that had been dropped through the door when the janitor came close to him. Fred gave a sharp glance and the man said:

"There's been a guy waiting around since eight o'clock, watching your door... I think he must have a paper or something to serve on you...

Matter of fact, he looked like a fly cop to me... I asked him what he wanted and he just smiled..."

Fred laughed a careless rejoinder and the janitor went down the hall, brushing the marble dado with his bedraggled feather duster.

Fred Starratt closed the door softly and sat down at his desk, trying to concentrate on his mail. He felt a sudden chill. But he managed, after a fashion, to fix his mind upon immediate problems. Twice during the morning he made a move toward leaving to do some soliciting, but almost at once he invented an excuse which dissuaded him.

When he went out to lunch he pa.s.sed a man loitering in the hall. A crowded elevator shot past. Fred decided to walk down the stairs ...

the man followed at a nonchalant and discreet distance. Starratt lingered in the marble-flanked doorway... The man crossed the street and stood on the corner.

Fred decided to lunch at Hjul's. During the short walk to his destination he dismissed everything from his mind except the antic.i.p.ation of food. He discovered he was very hungry and it struck him that he had forgotten to breakfast. He had come away from the house with the idea of getting a cup of coffee in a waffle kitchen on Kearny Street and his preoccupation had routed this vague plan. He was chuckling over his lapse when he swung into Hjul's and took a seat near the window. He ordered a hot roast-beef sandwich and coffee as he shared his joke with the waitress. She brushed some crumbs from the table with a napkin, laughed, and went scampering for the order.

Fred's eyes followed her retreat and fell sharply upon the line of men drifting in the narrow entrance. At the tag end loomed the figure of the man who had followed him down the stairs from his office. Fred picked up a newspaper. The man sat down at a table in a far corner.

Over the edge of the newspaper Fred stole a furtive glance. The man was of slippery slenderness, with a rather round, expressionless face.

His eyes were beady and shifting, and his lips thin and pale and cruel. The waitress came tripping back with Starratt's order. Fred fell to.

Presently Fred finished. He rose deliberately, taking time to brush every crumb from his lap. At the door he reached for a whisk broom and wielded it conspicuously. He could not have said whether bravado or contempt was moving him to such flamboyant dawdling. Or was he merely trying to persuade himself that he had nothing to fear in any case? He stepped out into a shower of noonday sunshine flooding through a rift in the high fog of a July morning in San Francisco. A delicious thrill from open s.p.a.ces communicated itself to him. No, he would not go back to the office--it was Sat.u.r.day, anyway, and, besides, he felt a vague desire for freedom and the tang of wind-clean air. He would ride out to Golden Gate Park and stroll leisurely through its length to the ocean... He walked briskly down Montgomery Street to Market, waited a few seconds at a safety station, and finally swung on a car... He was standing before a tiny lake at the Haight Street entrance to the Park, watching a black swan ruffling its feathers, when he felt a presence near him. He did not lift his eyes for some moments, but when he did look up it was to see his shifty friend of the morning pretending to be amused at a group of noisy sparrows quarreling over a windfall of crumbs... Fred Starratt moved on.

All afternoon Fred Starratt wandered about--sometimes dawdling defiantly, sometimes dropping into a brisk pace, but at every turn his new-found shadow followed at an inconspicuous distance. The afternoon sun was gracious, tinged with a pleasant coolness, and far to the west a blue-gray fog bank waited for evening to let down the day's warm barriers. Fred Starratt's thoughts were abrupt and purposeless, like the unsustained flights of wing-clipped birds. He knew that he was being followed, and he had a confused sense of something impending, and yet he was unable or unwilling to face the issue honestly. There were moments when he glimpsed the truth, but he seemed unmoved by these truant realizations. Was he too tired to care? He used to wonder, when he read in the newspapers of some man overtaken by an overwhelming disgrace, how it was possible to go on living under such circ.u.mstances. Was his indifference of this afternoon the preliminary move in a long series of heartbreaking compromises and retreats? he asked himself. But he did not attempt to answer any of these darting questions. After all, the sun was shining and about him the world seemed to be swinging on with disarming normality. Upon the trimmed lawns peac.o.c.ks strutted and shrieked and from remoter distances the soft call of the quail echoed caressingly. It was good to be alive, with one's feet firmly planted on the earth. To be alive and _free_!

He pa.s.sed the conservatory and the sunken gardens, flamboyant with purple-and-gold pansies; he dawdled over the aviary and the bear cages. He even stopped for tea at the j.a.panese garden, throwing bits of sweetened rice-flour cakes to the goldfishes in their chocolate-colored pond near the tea pavilion. He found himself later skirting Stow Lake, pursued by flocks of ubiquitous coots, bent upon any stray crumbs flung in their direction. Finally he dipped suddenly down into the wilder reaches of the Park, taking aimless trails that wandered off into sandy wastes or fetched up quite suddenly upon the trimly bordered main driveway. He always had preferred the untamed stretches that lay beyond Stow Lake. Here, as a young boy, he had organized scouting parties when it was still a remote, almost an unforested sand pile. Later, when the trees had conquered its bleakness, Helen and he had spent many a Sat.u.r.day afternoon tramping briskly through the pines to the ocean. How long ago that seemed, and yet how very near! Not long in point of time, somehow, but long in point of accessibility. He seemed to be standing, as it were, upon the threshold of a past that he could glimpse, but not re-enter. Even Helen seemed remote--a part of the background that had been, instead of an equal spectator with him in a review of these dead events.

It was nearly five o'clock when he drew near the first wind-stunted pine trees heralding the ocean. He quickened his step. Already the breeze was tearing across the unscreened s.p.a.ces and carrying damp wisps of fog with it. As he found his steps swinging into the ocean highway he turned and looked back. His discreet pursuer had disappeared. There was not a soul in sight!

His heart gave a sudden leap. He hurried forward. A street car was rounding the terminal loop on its return to town. He clattered aboard.

He felt suddenly free and light hearted, almost gay. What would he do now? Look up Helen at Hilmer's and persuade her to dine with him somewhere downtown?... He remembered that he had not even telephoned her for two days. The conviction that had settled upon him during his walk through the Park woods descended again. Helen seemed impersonal and unapproachable... He felt a desire for noise and conviviality and laughter. He decided to look in at the St. Francis bar and see if he could chance upon a hilarious friend or two.

Starratt had overlooked the fact of war-time prohibition when he picked the St. Francis bar as a place of genial fellowship. The memory of its old-time six-o'clock gayety was still fresh enough to trick him. He swung into its screened entrance to find it practically deserted. The old bustle and hoa.r.s.e conversation and hearty laughter were replaced by dreary silence. The provocative rattle of ice in the highball gla.s.s, the appetizing smell of baked ham from the free-lunch counter, the thick, pungent clouds of tobacco smoke--all had been routed by chill, hypocritical virtue. One or two of the tables were surrounded by solemn circles of males getting speedily drunk in an effort to finish up the melancholy remains filched from some private stock, but their attempts at light-heartedness were very sad and maudlin. Fred was moving away when he heard his name called. He turned to find a group of business a.s.sociates from California Street sitting before two bottles of Scotch, which were ministering to their rather dour conviviality. Starratt started to wave a mingled greeting and farewell when his raised hand fell heavily against his side--in the polished depths of the bar's flawless mirror loomed the unwelcome figure that had pursued him all day!... He went over and joined his friends.

He had one drink ... two ... another. Then he lost count ... but the supply seemed inexhaustible. A sudden rush of high spirits keyed him tensely. He talked and laughed and waved his arms about, calling upon everybody to witness his light-heartedness. Through the confused blur of faces surrounding him he caught an occasional glimpse of the thin, cruel lips and the shifting, beady eyes of his pursuer sitting over a flat drink which he left untouched.

Presently somebody in the party suggested a round of the bohemian joints. The motion was noisily seconded... Fred staggered to his feet.

They began with the uptown tenderloin, drifting in due time through the Greek cafes on Third Street. Finally they crossed Market Street and began to chatter into the tawdry dance halls of upper Kearny.