As the car came under the big electric sign reading "Gonfaroni's" it shone up there in the heavens like a lighthouse to a homecoming mariner, and he blithely stepped off and hastened down the side street to the entrance of MacDougall Alley. It was dark, chill and deserted. Lights shone through the cracks of one window at the far end, but the studio which was his Mecca was rayless.

Jimmy stood for a long time in front of it, staring up at its darkened windows, and derided himself for his pangs of disappointment.

"This can't go on any longer," he told himself, savagely. "To-morrow I've just got to know Mary Allen's real name. I'm a big enough man now--prospectively at least--to dare to walk into that Martha Putnam hotel, glare at the ogress who guards the pearly gates, and tell her to send my card up to Miss So-and-so and to step lively. Here I am, just bubbling over with glad news like a tin tea kettle on a red hot stove spouting steam, and I can't go uptown to that hotel and send up my card because I've never had the courage to ask her real name. I've been a coward all along, but now it's got to stop."

Nevertheless he did return to the uptown precincts and for a long time stood guard in front of the distinguished woman's caravanserai, hoping against all common sense that Mary Allen might appear. He remembered reading an article in a Sunday newspaper on telepathy, and stood across the street frowning at the Martha Putnam and concentrating his mind on the object of his adoration, and beseeching her to come to the elevator, and thence down into the cold street in response to his great desire. But somehow the telepathy stuff didn't work at all according to propaganda. He shut his eyes and tried more earnestly until aroused by a voice. "Hey! You can't sleep in that doorway. Move on! Wiggle your stumps!"

A fat policeman stood regarding him. Jimmy was discouraged, for he knew that any policeman, anywhere, is an unfeeling wretch, who, if he met the great G.o.d Cupid on the street, would promptly arrest that light of the world for indecent exposure and perhaps carry him to the nearest station by the tips of his golden wings as if he were but a vagrant chicken destined for the sergeant's pot.

"Come! Fade away!" the enemy ordered, belligerently.

And Mr. James Gollop, crestfallen, faded.

CHAPTER XIV

At exactly three-thirty o'clock on the following day in the Engineers'

Club the taciturn Mr. Martin, after some further questioning, took from his pocket a contract and duplicate that a.s.sured Mr. James Gollop employment.

"I've been in a peculiar situation in this affair," said Martin. "I've had to fight against some personal likings and inclinations, and stand as a mediator; for I must look after the best interests of the Sayers Automobile Company as well as the interests of Jim Gollop. However, here you are. Sign these."

Jimmy signed the contracts with as glad a hand as if he had been affixing his signature to some doc.u.ment of inheritance that would bring him a million. He put his own copy in his pocket with as much care as if it were precious beyond computation.

"Now," he said, "when do I meet Mr. Sayers?"

"Sayers," said Martin, as he put the original contract into his pocket, "is going somewhere West to-day. You'll see him soon enough. His instructions are that you are to go immediately to San Augustine, Florida, to see what is being done by rival concerns down there at the beach races. I suppose he expects you to pick up points and information.

Keep track of your expense account. Learn all you can. Then report at Princetown."

"But--about Granger! Am I to----"

"You'll be away at least two weeks," said Martin. "Many things can happen in that time. If I were you, I'd forget that the Judge is on earth. I'll--I'll tell Sayers about this matter," said his benefactor, with the first sign of hesitancy that Jim had ever seen him display.

"And in the meantime, I'll do all I can to get that Judge to show some sense. You can be certain of that. Well, may good luck go with you!"

At exactly seven-thirty that evening Mr. James Gollop reluctantly departed from the street in front of the Martha Putnam hotel, where he had taken up sentry go after convincing himself that MacDougall Alley was dark.

"Got to catch my train to San Augustine," he warned himself. "Can't put it off a minute longer because the meeting is on there day after to-morrow, and it won't wait until I can tell Mary Allen all about it!

But if I don't straighten this matter out so that hereafter I can at least write her, or send her a wire, I'm no organizer at all and my chance with the Sayers Company isn't worth a tinker's curse."

As if he were forever sc.r.a.ping under the wire just before the barrier fell, Jimmy got the last vacant berth in the sleeper and, recovering from his Martha Putnam disappointment, whistled blithely as a porter carried his suitcase to the Pullman steps. He stood outside to enjoy the last of his cigar and was mildly interested in the final rush of pa.s.sengers when a porter came rapidly wheeling an invalid's chair in which sat a man bodily broken and hideously scarred. The porter halted the chair and the man asked, anxiously, if it were possible to secure a berth.

"Sorry, sir," said the Pullman conductor, "but we're full up. You should have engaged one earlier for this train. It's always crowded now."

"I didn't know until half an hour ago that I could come," said the man in the wheel chair with such evident disappointment that Jimmy's sympathy was enlisted. "Isn't there some place you can put me?

It's--it's like a day out of my life if I miss this train to San Augustine!"

That was more than Jimmy could endure.

"Give this man my berth," said Jimmy to the conductor. "No. 12 in this car. I can stick it through the night in the smoker. I've done it heaps of times!"

And with that he brushed the porter aside, bent forward, lifted the wreck from the chair and with his st.u.r.dy strength carried him up the steps and to the relinquished section.

"There," he said cheerfully, as the porter came bearing the cushions with which to make the invalid comfortable. "Now you'll be right as a top."

The train took on motion and Jimmy was starting to carry his suitcase forward when the Pullman conductor, proving that kindliness commands kindliness, came hurrying forward and said, "Here! Let the porter find a seat for you. It's pretty crowded out there now. Or, if the gentleman has no objections, you might sit here with him until it's time to make the berths down. The day coaches and smokers usually get thinned out a little by ten o'clock at night."

And thus it was that Jimmy made a new friend.

"You see," explained the man he had befriended, "this race meeting down there means a lot to a chap smashed up as I am. It's about the only thrill I ever get since--since--I had to live in a chair. My name is Carver. Dan Carver. What's yours?"

"Jim Gollop," said Jimmy, puzzling his excellent memory to recall why it was that the name Dan Carver suggested something, and then, after an interval, blurting, "Carver? Are you the man who used to be a famous race driver two or three years ago? The man who wrecked himself in the Vanderbilt Cup races rather than take a chance on throwing his machine into the crowd at a turn?"

"The same--what's left of him," Carver admitted.

"Then," said Jimmy, "I wish I could have given you a whole Pullman instead of just one berth! By gosh! You deserve it. The firm you drove for ought to have seen to that."

"Firms forget, when a man is no longer of use," said Carver with a shake of his head.

"Some of 'em do. Mine isn't that sort. But, you see, my firm is head and shoulders above the others--in some ways. The Sayers Automobile Company isn't one of these big, swollen concerns. Old Tom Sayers looks after his people."

He was in true form again, proud of his firm, boasting its merits, advertising it and ready to defend it quite as valiantly as if he had been with it from its beginnings.

"I've heard of it," admitted Carver, politely. "Suppose it's because I'm so out of the game that I don't know more about it than I do. My fault!

How long you been with 'em?"

"Since about five o'clock this afternoon," said Jimmy.

The crippled record breaker took out his watch, consulted it, and slipped it back in his pocket.

"Long time, isn't it?" he commented. "That's nearly three hours. I've broken a few records in my time, but you beat anything I've come across.

It took thirteen years for me to learn that one concern I worked for was no good. It took you three hours to learn the one you work for is the best there is."

"But I believe it!" declared Jimmy, with his unquenchable enthusiasm.

"Why? Because I believe in Tom Sayers. I believe in his honesty, and his reputation, and--well--because he gave me a chance."

"Know him very well?" his seat mate asked.

"Never met him," Jimmy admitted.

"Know anything about his cars?" Carver somewhat cynically asked.

"I know that some of those who have them brag about them," said Jimmy.

"And I know that the men who work for him, from the superintendent down to the yard boy, believe in them and say so, and would tear to pieces a man who says they aren't the best. That's good enough for me. Know anything about cars? Um-m-m-mh! I reckon I don't know a thing on earth about 'em. If my life depended upon starting a car that somebody had handed me on a platter, I suppose I'd be a deader. But a man doesn't have to know it all to succeed. Noah couldn't have started the _Aquitania_; but he did navigate the ark pretty successfully, and n.o.body denies that he was the first admiral that ever sailed the seas. Admiral Nelson and Commodore Paul Jones got there, somehow, but if they had seen a motor launch tearing down on them at twenty miles an hour, I can imagine both of them diving off the p.o.o.p!"

Before they parted that night, the expert and the novice had become friends. Before the race meeting was over, Mr. James Gollop knew more about the merits of cars, the advantages of one over the other, and the prevailing failings and universal obstacles than he had ever dreamed before. Incidentally, he had established a friendship that lasted and was to be of mutual benefit thereafter. He jubilated when considering fortune. All things were coming his way. He would have accepted it as a part of the regular procedure had he found a twenty dollar gold piece on the pavement. His luck was in.

And so, like a happy victor, Mr. James Gollop of the Sayers Automobile Company returned to New York one evening and, knowing that it was too late to base any hope on either MacDougall Alley or the Martha Putnam hotel, repaired, in lieu thereof, to the palm-garden precincts of the place in which he had last dined with Mary Allen. He made plans for the morrow, thought of what he might say to her, determined that the mystery should end, and was anything but discontented. He ate leisurely, enjoyed his food, and perused an evening paper. He liked the black coffee, and felt civilized when he resorted to the finger bowl. He got to his feet leisurely, well content, and then stopped, bent to one side, moved a pace and through a screen of palm fronds stared as if transfixed. What he saw was Mary Allen seated at a nice little table, inspecting a bunch of violets in her hand, whilst across from her, stiff, pompous, self-conscious, but entirely self-satisfied, sat the man who might have been Mr. James Gollop but who was, indubitably one J. Woodworth-Granger, Judge of the Fourth District Court. Others might not identify him, but Mr. James Gollop did and for a moment his mind was in a turmoil of surprise and anger. Granger! That wind bag had somehow, probably by mere accident, met the only girl on earth, taken base advantage of his likeness to one Jim Gollop, and was profiting thereby! How dare he! To impersonate another man under ordinary circ.u.mstances was in itself sufficiently culpable, but in private affairs, extraordinary and personal, it became outrageous.