"No, no," said Jim, laughing. "I made it plain to her that she'd have to marry both of us."

"A kind of matrimonial sandwich, eh? But say, Jim, come to think of it, I have heard you tell several times lately just what bad weather we have been having on Sundays for the past three months. It's a clincher. No?"

Jim began to pound the bottom of the inverted boiler with the lid lifter to secure a release of the eggs, which he earnestly hoped would let go and land on the plate.

"Did you grease that thing?" I asked, as he tum-tummed in vain, for the eggs had glued into a fresco showing a rising and setting sun on opposite sides of the bottom.

"No; didn't know where you kept the grease. What would you recommend in a case of this kind?"

But before I could advise, Jim had made fair headway in transferring the eggs directly without the intervention of a plate, an economy we practiced frequently. The meal was served in the kitchen to save steps and progressed with customary smoothness, each getting up a dozen times or so to bring things from the shelves or the stove. While we were slicking up the dishes I got to chuckling and Jim began to blush and look foolish. I could see that he knew I had found him out. We made short work of the ch.o.r.es. I wound the alarm clock and sent down the milk bottle via the dumb waiter, which you can't tip with a dime, but have to push or pull clean to or from the cellar, unless it happens to be en route just as you get there and can chuck your load aboard.

We then stretched out in the cosy front room, and lighting our pipes warmed to the task of being comfortable. I was pained to feel that the day must come when woman would part us, but I said nothing more, determined to let time and Jim's confiding nature reveal the tender secrets of his heart now melting for that girl with the dancing brown eyes, the ma.s.s of filmy dark hair straying in wisps from a harness of braid, ribbon and pins, to Jim's utter distraction and the poor girl's despair.

All my efforts in Jim's behalf had been lost apparently, or Jim, having won the prizes in each case, became disenchanted for one reason or another. Perhaps like my love letters, the girls were works of art and would not bear too close an inspection. The coming case would make one more failure, I imagined; still, I was sorry I had remarked how she had coaxed her veil into shape; but with that wanton hair, a hat which was a department to manage in itself, a tailor-made primness of figure to superintend and the curvatures of Jim's conversation to follow, I could understand that she needed the help of all her senses to keep her pretty, light-hearted poise. I sighed to think of the trouble in store for Mrs. Jim, not in the least knowing what a remarkable woman she was; in my estimation of her at that time I think I was about as far off the track as I got at any subsequent turn.

Jim had been uninterested so long (nearly three years), I felt love was now a proposition which wouldn't find a crevice in his heart to trickle into and widen until it split him asunder. But with the clever young woman of business, in the rush and turmoil of the down-town hustle, it is such a gentle humidity it seems to work its corrosion unseen in the broad daylight. Thermometer readings don't show it. You have to keep close to the barometer of eyes and sighs to know anything definite of its ups and downs--unless it pa.s.ses into fog or pours, then everybody can see it dropping through the air. I began to feel that it would pour soon around Jim, and I shuddered, for I thought I already heard the patter of light feet in the hall. Some of the gray poetry of loneliness began to spread around my disturbed and anxious soul for fear no drippings like that would ever fall on me. Race suicide conscientiously practiced is a hard game. Nature abhors a vacuum, and especially human nature. Perhaps this girl had a sister. A comfortable introspection began to take the contract of illuminating my mind. Agreeable family scenery was thrown around by the magic of the thought. It scattered about six kids for Jim and the same-sized bunch for me--enough to prove that human nature abhors the inter-marrying of men as Jim and I had tried it.

We naturally drifted away from the subject we were both thinking about and got around to talking on old home matters--the day's doings and the state of the country; graft, buying and selling law, and what it all had to do with harming the government and the likelihood of losing our jobs.

It was about 8:30 o'clock as near as I can remember, when a timid knock on the front door startled both of us. I answered the call, expecting to find that fairy Miss Tescheron ready to pop in and oust me like a Republican hold-over on a Tammany Happy New Year's. I peeped out as charily as a jailer. The dim light revealed a tiny messenger boy--something awful had probably happened up home! A messenger boy was enough to startle both of us, for no one in the world would spend half a dollar to tell us anything unless they were scared into it. I swung the door open and the boy took off his cap and removed from its sweat-band stronghold a neat-looking note.

"Say, boss, does Mr. Benjamin Hopkins live up here?" he asked between breaths, for the five flights had tuckered him.

"That's me," said I, reaching for the note and carefully scanning the typewritten address, for upon second thought I believed love and not fright might have sent a note to Jim. But it was for me, so I opened it and leaning toward the lamp read in diplomatically suppressed wonder:

"Mr. Benjamin Hopkins,

"97 East Eighteenth Street, New York.

"Dear Sir: Do not mention this matter to Hosley, but I wish to see you at once at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. I have instructed the clerk to send you to my room immediately. Please come right away, as the matter cannot wait."

"Yours truly,

"ALBERT TESCHERON."

"Her pa," thought I; but I didn't let on. A stale actor in a play couldn't have pulled himself together in a more unconcerned-I-do-this-every-night fashion than I signed for the note, tipped the poor little shaver and closed the door.

Jim eyed me in surprise, but it was nothing to my own astonishment. What did old Tescheron want of me? No matter.

"Jim, I've got to run up-town for a few minutes about some work," was the wording of my deception, eased by the thought that it was in his behalf. I slipped on my hat and coat and started for the door, taking in at a glance that Jim was smoking hard and squirming uneasily.

CHAPTER III

One thing I liked about Tescheron--he talked business from the start. He jumped into it at once, so that I had no time to take notice of anything except that he talked without an accent, was probably French only in name and that he wore clothes which were superfine. I never saw such a dresser for a man with iron-gray hair and fifty-five years to contend against in the youth-preserving business, which I calculated was one of his pleasures in life, if not his vocation. Nothing I figured on coming up-town happened except that I found my man. A sixty-year old boy brought me to the room on the third floor.

I could see that Mr. Tescheron was a whole encyclopedia on manners, but he gave me the paper-covered digest which retails for ten cents, and began:

"Hope I reached you just at the close of the funeral."

"What funeral?" I asked.

"Say, see here, Hopkins, I want you to talk fair and square with me--no nonsense, you understand. You know of the funeral--Mrs. Browning's--and if you weren't there you know when it was over and when Hosley returned.

I am pretty hot in the collar over this business; all happened right under my nose; never thought of such a thing happening; but I'm not too late to stop this infernal impostor, not too late! Of course you don't know anything about my end of it, Hopkins, and I know that you, too, have been fooled at your end, for I've looked you up. I have reports from a dozen business men who say you are perfectly square and that is why I send for you now that we may work together and make the greatest headway. Do you know that the scoundrel Hosley has become infatuated with my daughter?--a pretense for criminal purposes, of course. To-day he seeks me out to tell me they are engaged! A few hours later I hear he is crying at the funeral of his wife!"

There was some French in Tescheron after all, for he waved his arms and danced about like a man whose tongue won't wag fast enough to please him.

If Jim had dealt with large business concerns as an inspector, instead of corner grocerymen and small storekeepers, they might have saved him.

The business men whom Tescheron had consulted regarding me, I afterward learned, were the manufacturers whose plants I had investigated for the city. Some of the best families in New York are connected with Newtown Creek glue and they, it seems, had stuck to me in this emergency. A fish man will believe anything a glue man tells him; I don't know why, but it's so, and the fact was certainly to my advantage.

When Tescheron had calmed I broke out with a hiss and a stutter; it wasn't a laugh, for I haven't laughed in years. All my laughing since 1889 has been a strictly intellectual process; but I did have an awful pain because I could not digest his statement with a bouncing laugh. All I could do was to stammer and splutter like a ba.s.s viol tuning up, while I sozzled around in my chair trying to break in with something that would count. Why should a man of my temperament take a hand in love, war or diplomacy? As a theoretical manipulator of fathers-in-law, as a text-book writer on the subject, I was in the extra fancy cla.s.s, but the part of Daniel in the lion's den could not be played by me unless I agreed to step in the marble-lined vestibule of open jaws and get kicked down the back stairs after a thorough overhauling. On the firing line my plans did not fit and I became a failure.

A smell of fish in the room restored me. I knew not whence it came, but its soft presence yielding to my keen detector restored my professional pride and self-respect. I then felt I was something of a detective after all. I eyed a revolving ventilator in the window-pane as a possible avenue of its entrance from the culinary department. I did not suspect Tescheron.

"I see you are not inclined to side with me in this matter," he rattled on. "To-night I notify the coroner. I--"

"Are you a fool?" I blurted with that rare presence of mind which will some day save me by putting me in jail. "Are you an idiot? You seem to be gone in the head. Call a dozen coroners, by all means, and be the laughing-stock of the town. Drag your whole family into the ill.u.s.trated newspapers. Go ahead and have a good time at your own expense. Get out the fire department and have them squirt on you!" I was surprised at the string of sarcasm which rolled forth when I did start.

Tescheron danced a first-cla.s.s vaudeville turn and shouted: "Say what you please, I notify the coroner! Hosley killed his wife so that he might marry my daughter; I have had detectives out, so I know and you don't. I--"

"How long have you had them out?"

"Since two o'clock to-day--soon as he left me."

"Since two o'clock to-day, eh? And what did you have against Mr. Hosley before that hour, pray?"

"Oh, nothing except a strong personal dislike to him--but I have enough against him now; I have enough now! I had told him he was too old; that he had done nothing to merit her--just to gain time, you see. I wanted time to find out; to look him over with care; with the same precaution I would use in a cold matter of business. It was well I did; it's a mighty good thing I used my business sense in this matter. You see, you are no man of business. You--"

"Well," said I with a calmness affected to aggravate the man who was sure, "you couldn't have hired a better lot of men. They pa.s.s you out Jim Hosley, married, and a widower by murdering his wife, and have him engaged to your daughter in six hours. It is as pretty a story as I ever read. A man who wouldn't ring up the coroner on that needs one for his own autopsy. Why, any man would be proud to have a coroner in the family on the strength of all that. Tescheron, let's talk about the pleasant memories of the past. What asylums that you have been in do you prefer--eh?"

Tescheron proceeded to give me the repertoire of the dancing school.

When he began to polka and upset the furniture he dropped his cologned handkerchief. I tossed it up on the ventilator, for somebody had ordered a lot more fish.

"So he has fooled you, too? Yes? You have been living with him there and did not know he was married to a woman in a flat right below yours--her name is Browning. I saw that you remembered it. Strange, ain't it? Do you know how she died? No? I see you do not. You are very smart, very clever. You have talked just as I hoped you would. Let me introduce Mr.

Smith."

And from behind a screen stepped a slight, middle-aged man with keen blue eyes and fair complexion. I shook hands with Mr. Smith. He was a wide-awake little man, not in the least embarra.s.sed by the eavesdropping, as it was part of his business. I have lived long enough to know that there are all kinds of Smiths. He was one of them.

Of course I began to feel that they were crowding me to turn State's evidence against my faithful Jim. The thought of the funeral in the early evening in the flat below ours, and Jim's innocent inquiry concerning it, had flashed upon me. I still felt that Mr. Smith was only making out a good case to match a big bill. If Jim Hosley had been leading a double life at such short range without my knowing it I must be a chuckle-head. I knew Jim Hosley was honest; that easy as his conscience was in trifling matters, he knew no guile. If a Mrs. Browning had been living below us she was as much a stranger to him as her relative's poetry--in fact it might have been hers for all Jim knew or cared.

Smith answered a knock on the door and stepped into the hall for half a minute.

"You don't begin to know this scoundrel," continued Mr. Tescheron, eyeing me like a man with the facts. "Perhaps you will deny that this fellow Hosley served two years in prison at Joliet, Illinois; that he was indicted for forgery in Michigan and got into a mix-up in Arizona, whence he skipped at the point of a pistol and made his way down into Mexico. This fellow Hosley has pa.s.sed under a dozen different names. He is notorious in criminal annals. He is so clever that he can completely fool you and deceive my daughter, who, I would have you understand, is a smart woman--one not easily fooled. It is lucky I took this thing in hand when I did, or, as you say, we would have all been shown up in the papers."

Well, I let the old codger run along at this clip. It beat anything I had ever heard, but it didn't disturb me, as I have stated, except to create a pain that a good laugh would have cured. What could I say up against a know-it-all combination? Hadn't the detectives been at work a whole six hours? What kind of records did they keep in their office if they couldn't bunch a choice bouquet of crime for a fellow willing to pay for it? You can buy anything in New York. The detective bureau had found good enough clues in Mr. Tescheron's desire for a discovery and in his commercial rating which showed that he could pay top prices for the disgrace of a would-be son-in-law in the estimation of his devoted daughter. The detective bureaus, lawyers' offices and "society" papers that deal in this blasting powder and take contracts to shatter good names were common enough; everybody knew them. People like Tescheron, though, only knew their names, not their reputations, and like many honest folks went to one of these concerns because he had seen its name frequently in print. Publicity draws trade sometimes without reputation, especially first customers. Tescheron was a new hand at this business of ruining character with the aid of a criminal detective bureau and its lawyer allies and a.s.sociates on the slanderous "society"

papers that fatten on the frailties of human beings with money to buy exemption, but too weak to fight the slimy devils whose pens drip this filth from the social sewage pots; he knew not the parasites who cling to the maggoty exudations of every form of social disorder. That is the way I figured it. I want it straight on the record here that my devotion to Jim Hosley at that interview began to tighten like the Damon-and-Pythias grip of a two-ton grab bucket. I was figuring to die beside Jim with a Nathan Hale poise of the head and some pat remark.