"He honored me----" And recovering from the surprise I continued, "Reproducing our kind is of the greatest use, and naturally yields the greatest pleasure. Of course, you were happy? Does that end your list of benefactions?"

She struggled hard for composure. She was still delightfully unconscious of her physical charms.

"That's all I can think of now, unless, perhaps, that I still love my husband so much that the lure of men, to a lone, and, in a sense, deposed woman, is transparent and childishly laughable. This has enabled me to keep my womanhood as it should be," she added quietly, a soft glow spreading over her face. I was mystified.

"You have some big items on the credit side of the ledger; now for red ink--but, remember, no tears. You are brave and I don't like to see a brave woman cry. Tell me about everything as though it happened to another, and you a mere witness. Something has happened that was a part of your destiny. You will come to look at it that way later."

"Mr. Wood, you are encouraging and helpful. I will try to be brave but you will not think badly of me if I fail--will you?" she pleaded across the table, full, honest, fearless, glorious, but after all, a woman. No one could have resisted her appeal.

"I have thought of my situation so much I hardly know where to begin to make the fearful enormity of it intelligible to you. It involves business of which I know so little I have never tried to tell it before. No one would understand. I have no confidants. But I knew I would find you some time and somehow I thought it would be such a relief to tell you. I know you will understand!"

"Begin at the middle, anywhere--I'll understand. Take your time; but recollect, this happened to someone else." I insisted, to keep her confident and resolute.

"It appears," she began slowly, "you advised Howard against the bond issue to build the railroad. He took a strong stand against it at first, but father and Mr. Potter finally wore him down and won him over. It was done. This compelled his being in Georgia for almost a year." I nodded.

"A Mr. Ramund was introduced by the bank to take the bonds and he finally came into our homes, welcomed especially by my sister, Mrs.

Potter, who was attracted by the glitter of his high position in the financial world. He spoke several languages and was what many would call handsome and polished. To me he was a male person whose sincerity I doubted, but my sister bowed low and endeavored constantly to throw him in my way. I tolerated him, but soon began to look upon him as a possible source of serious trouble."

"The railroad was built, I take it?" I queried.

"The railroad was built and cost more than expected. Howard was barely at home again when there were ominous signs in the business world that upset him. He was not the same man. Then came fearful and dreadful times. I shudder when I recall them. With the change of administration came the crashing panic. Once, during the negotiations with the bank, he told me you had warned him against large borrowing. You were right.

Heavy loans from the bank were called seemingly as though part of a plan to get the property. I believe it was. Through it all Howard was kind and affectionate, except when wild, savage moods came on. He would sometimes look the way he did that morning when he carried me away from that terrible island in Georgia. In an incredibly short time the bonds were foreclosed and the bank took the plant and all--everything Howard owned. We were absolutely penniless and had to sacrifice our beautiful home for ready funds. I went to mother. Father lost everything also. It killed him, and mother soon followed."

I was shocked at this news but silently awaited her effort to compose herself.

"Howard went to Georgia. At least, he said he was going there," she continued with an effort. "Then the serpent in this Ramund was unmasked. He became boldly insistent."

Norma hesitated. I could see that the real crux of her story was at hand. "Yes?" said I, gently.

"Urged by my sister, I went to his hotel on the representation that he could and would do something to enable Howard to regain control and finally save his property--the result of his life's labors. You can understand how I wanted to help Howard. Mr. Ramund said the hotel parlor was too public, and asked me to his suite. Obsessed by such intense desire to save my husband, and having so little worldly knowledge, I indiscreetly went. After a little talk on the business matter, this man began to offer protestations of love for me, and told me, brazenly, how much more he could do for me than a bankrupt, discredited husband. Insulted, shocked, and stunned into sheer numbness, which he mistook for silent consent, he grasped me bodily, embraced me and kissed me violently before I could recover. Then the door opened and Howard entered--quiet, fierce, determined. It seems in retrospect a part of a play. With wonderfully polite self-control he, as though requesting an ordinary favor, asked me to please run on home.

"What happened after I left I never knew. Fearful of a great tragedy, and with a sense of injury and mortification, I walked all the way. I was actually afraid to go home. When I finally plucked up sufficient courage to do so, I found he had been there and taken little Jim. I have not heard of them since." It was some moments before she could quiet down, after her painful recital.

"The bank is running the plant now?" I asked, turning away from the subject she had voluntarily introduced. I was through with it. I could see the villainy and perfidy behind Ramund's action. I knew what I would have done were I in Howard Byng's place and I afterward learned that he did that very thing.

"Yes--but there is something wrong," she replied. "It does not prosper. My father's entire fortune went along with the crash. Mr.

Potter returned to a bank clerkship where he was when he married sister. She blames me, attributing the disaster to my att.i.tude toward Mr. Ramund, raved about my senseless scruples, and still resists all my attempts at reconciliation. She apparently loves only money. So, you see, I am quite alone. Do you--do you think of any possible way to find my husband and child?" she asked in whispered agony. "You know he took little Jim, then only a year old, because--because--he thought me unfit. I am terribly depressed at times for fear they may be dead. I would have found them if living. He may have done something terrible and had to go. I have tried every way within my meager means to find them. Do you think you can help me?" she implored, reaching out her hands toward me.

"I might, but I sail for Europe to-morrow. I am compelled to go." My words sounded brutal to my own ears after such an appeal.

"Isn't there--isn't there something you can suggest?"

I meditated for some minutes. Howard Byng, if not desperate enough to destroy himself and child, would go back to the pine woods of his birth, I reasoned. Finally I said, "I will give you a letter to a friend of mine in the Excise Department, who travels the turpentine country constantly. He might get trace of him. Howard would return there if living."

"That's so. I never thought of that before. As lowly as was his start in life, he never ceased loving the woods," she recalled, brightening. "How long will you be away?"

Knowing the disappointment the truth would bring to her, I answered ambiguously. "I hardly know. One never can tell, but I hope not very long. Meanwhile keep up a stout heart. Everything straightens out in time. Keep busy, don't brood, be brave." I will never forget how forlorn she looked as she bade me good-bye. If she had known I would be away for several years she would have broken down completely. She felt that I could help her.

I gave her a letter to Charlie Haines, and that was the last I saw of Norma Byng for eight or nine years. Charlie told me that he spent three or four years beating every pine bush in the South without results, and, moreover, that he had somehow lost track of Mrs. Byng.

He decided she had married again, as she was too attractive to stay single. Eight or nine years work wonderful changes in any life. It appeared to me that Charlie might be right.

CHAPTER XI

Seemingly some people never observe the fact that the calendar travels on a non-stop schedule, and the longer we live the faster it speeds.

After my talk with Charlie Haines about Norma Byng, I spent another four years in Europe, and by that time we were up to the catastrophe that rocked the world and butchered millions of people.

It caught us short of men in all departments. I was given some odd jobs outside the regular schedule, while we were trying hard to be neutral, and waiting for the Monarch of Death and his cohorts of three-cornered, degenerate minds, to discover they had overlooked another big bet besides Belgium and Italy.

Suddenly I drew a trip to Florida. I was to attach myself to the United States' Court as an ostensible necessity, for the purpose of learning what the Boche were doing toward helping themselves to our cotton, copper and crude rubber in the Gulf by means of undersea cargo carriers, and also, if they were trying to cash in on their mortgage on Mexico.

One morning the judge, hard-headed and practical, called me into his chambers and gave me two warrants to produce dead or alive the body of a certain man in court to answer charges of smuggling tobacco from Cuba, and violating our neutrality. He said the "Paper case," which meant the affidavits, upon which the warrants were based, were altogether regular, but there was a distinctive odor about them that indicated "a n.i.g.g.e.r in the woodpile." And that meant that if I went slow, it was believed that I would find out something worth while.

The clerk and myself studied elementary geography for a while, and found that the best we could do was to locate the defendant by longitude and lat.i.tude, either on the barren Keys, or on one of the numerous islands nearby. The affidavits appeared to be made by members of the firm of Bulow and Company, in Key West, and thither I went at once.

Bulow and Company were big handlers, wholesale and retail, of heavy hardware, ship chandlery, and spongefishers' supplies. They had a few sponge boats themselves, deep-sea vessels, also docks and tugs. I saw nothing to justify the honorable judge's angle on the case, but took his advice and went slow.

At the hotel in Key West I met Ike Barry, a traveling man in just such a line.

"Been selling the Bulow people for twenty-five years," he informed me.

"Always discount. The manager is director in the People's National.

The Bulows were German--all dead now. Will take you down and introduce you to present managers--fine people. No--well, I'm going to be here a week or two fishing--see me if I can make you happy--I know what Key West has for breakfast."

I was making no progress in getting a line on the man Canby charged in the warrants. Finally I changed clothes and went down to the waterfront looking for a job as marine engineer, or anything in that line. It may have been an accident that I got on the Bulow wharf first with my license, membership card, and enough letters to convince even a doubting Thomas that I was fit and willing.

I found Scotty in the engine room of a speedy gasoline craft and pried his mouth open with a hard-luck story. This boat was used as sort of scout for trade all the way from the Bermudas and Cuba to Vera Cruz and New Orleans.

Scotty soon showed his Highland Scotch by starting in to brag.

"It'll split the water faster than anything on the Gulf," said he, looking proud, "but I've got to give the Devil his due--there's one boat down here that pa.s.ses us at our best, like we hadn't cast off yet, and the old man is wild about it--or maybe it's something else that's the real reason."

This was the first information I had received regarding Canby. It was his boat that excited Scotty, and I soon had the story and enough geography to locate him.

Scotty walked uptown with me, and before parting said, after swearing me to secrecy, that unless things looked better on the other side he was going back home to take his old place in the Royal Navy, and that if I stuck around awhile I might have his job. In fact, there were some things about his job he didn't like, he informed me, getting more friendly before I left him.

I had to get an order from the superintendent to have the train stop the next morning about midway between Key West and the Everglades. The conductor, a veteran on the road, said he had never stopped there. As far as he knew it was a sort of a Sat.u.r.day and Sunday rendezvous for spongers and thought that, without an a.r.s.enal on my person, I was taking chances. "Queer fish," he added, shaking his head, "but someone there knows something about flowers."

I wondered what he meant.

He let me off at the open back door of a rambling building of many additions, perhaps one hundred and fifty feet long, beginning near the track, and ending with two stories near the water on the Gulf side.

Not a soul was in sight and everything as still as a country church on a weekday. I went through the store stocked with fishermen's supplies, encountering no signs of life, until I emerged at the other end on a wide veranda with a double-canvas roof. Here I saw an old-time darkey standing near the side rail, sharpening an eighteen-inch, murderous-looking knife on a big whetstone held in his palm.

He jerked his head toward me and double-tracked his face from ear to ear, but did not speak. Then I saw a boy of about twelve, with a rifle beside him, a hundred feet away, his bare legs dangling over the pier, which began at the veranda and extended out into the water, terminating at a corrugated warehouse that looked like a daddy-long-legs, in the retreating tide.