Colonel Wallifarro stepped from the train at Marlin Town and turned up the collar of his heavy coat, while an edged and searching wind carried its chill through clothing and flesh and seemed to strike at the marrow of a man's bones.

The Colonel felt the dismal and bleak oppressiveness of a picture blotted from visual record by the reeking blackness of a winter dawn. A railway schedule apparently devised for purposes of human torture had deposited him in a sleeping town gloomed down on by sleeping mountains at the hour when mortal spirits are at their zero of vitality, and the train that had marooned him there wailed on its way like a strident banshee.

In his pocket was the telegram that had brought him. It had come from Larry Masters and had succeeded only in bewildering and alarming its recipient with words that explained nothing except that the sender stood in some desperate need of instant help. The words had startled Tom Wallifarro like a scream heard in a dark street.

He had responded in person and at once. Now Larry was not even at the station to meet him, so the Colonel turned and trudged forebodingly through the viscid slop of unpaved streets, churned by yesterday's feet of men and mules and oxen, toward that edge of the town where the mine superintendent had his bungalow.

Through the windows of the house when he drew near he caught the pallid glimmer of lamplight, but to his first rapping on the door there was no response. A vigorous repet.i.tion, which started echoes up and down the empty dark, brought at length a dull voice of summons, "Come in," and on turning the k.n.o.b the visitor looked upon a man who sat at the centre of his room in apathetic collapse.

A kerosene lamp, guttering now to the inanition of spent fuel and wick, revealed a face of pasty pallor and eyes deep sunk in dark sockets. It was cold in the room, for on the hearth, where the fire had been long unmended, only a few expiring embers glinted in the gray of the ash bed.

Colonel Wallifarro's first impression was that the man who had called on him for help had turned meantime to the more immediate solace of alcohol, and that now he was whiskey sodden, but a second glance dispelled that conjecture. This torpidity was not born of drunkenness but despair.

"I'm here, Larry," said Colonel Wallifarro, as he fumbled with chilled fingers into a breast pocket and fished out a telegraph envelope. "I took it the case was urgent."

Aroused a little out of his stupefaction by the matter-of-fact steadiness of the voice, Masters came wearily to his feet. Through an open door which gave upon the sleeping-room, Colonel Wallifarro caught a glimpse of an untouched bed and knew that the other must have spent the night sitting here, wakeful yet forgetful of the hearth-fire that had sputtered to its death.

"I'm ruined, Tom," announced Larry Masters in an intonation which ran level and unmodulated, as though even the voice of the man had lost all flexibility, and having made that startling a.s.sertion the speaker sank again into his chair and his former inertness of posture.

To press with questions at the moment seemed useless, so the lawyer threw off his overcoat and knelt down to rekindle and replenish the fire.

When at last it was again blazing he found and poured whiskey, and at the end of ten minutes he prompted again, "I've come in answer to your summons, Larry. Hadn't you better try to tell me about it?"

The man nodded, and with an effort pulled himself somewhat together.

"This time it's not only ruin but disgrace--prison, I expect."

"What have you done?"

"The fund. All of it. It's gone."

"The fund--gone? I don't understand." Colonel Wallifarro spoke with a forehead corrugated in bewilderment. "Begin at the start of the story.

You forget that I haven't the remotest idea of what this is all about."

"The fund, I tell you," reiterated Masters stupidly. "Gone!"

"Gather yourself together, man. Drink that whiskey."

For once the gla.s.s had stood unregarded at the Englishman's elbow. Now he lifted it abstractedly to his lips, but this time he only sipped it and set it down. Then with an effort he rose and went to the hearth, where he stood with trembling hands outspread and limbs shivering before the rekindled blaze.

"I met Cantwell in Lexington.... We talked the matter over as to the final details.... The rest had been arranged, you see.... Finally he gave me the money ... in cash ... $20,000 it was."

"Twenty thousand--gone? Whose money?"

"The company's."

Colonel Wallifarro braced himself as he had braced himself against many other shocks. Patiently his legal capacity for bringing coherence out of obscurity led his dazed companion through the mazes of his torpor.

Direct questioning found a trail of broken narrative and followed it with a hound's pertinacity, until the story rounded into some sort of shape.

Larry the visionary, with the plunger's mirage always teasing him through the arid conditions of a low salaried exile, had, it seemed, caught at the fringes of success--and slipped into disaster. Through years he had h.o.a.rded small savings out of his frugal income with the gambler's eagerness to have a "stake" against the swift pa.s.sing of the golden opportunity. Finally he had thought that it had not all been in vain. His eye had appraised other fields where the coal ran out in spa.r.s.e and attenuated veins but where the "sand blossom" spoke of oil.

His h.o.a.rdings had gone straightway into options, at prices based on farming valuations where farms were cheap.

It had remained then to enlist the interest of capital in taking up these many options and securing others, and that required a large sort of sum. Larry had gone to the directors of the company that employed him. He had haunted their offices and they had endured his obdurate besieging only because he was an efficient man cheaply employed, and, as such, ent.i.tled to one hare-brained eccentricity.

Columbus striving to raise money from a world convinced of the earth's flatness, with which to sail round a sphere, encountered a scepticism no more stolid, and yet in the end Masters had convinced them. The persuasion was accomplished only when other adventurers were beginning to clip coupons from just such enterprises in adjacent fields. When, to the monied men, "Masters' folly" became "Masters' discovery," the native landowners were growing as wary as ducks that have been decoyed, and dealing with them at a tempting profit required subterfuge. Besides the options already held there were more to be secured before the proposition was rounded into unity. Masters had therefore lined up, as his purchasing agents, men of native blood and apparently of no organized unity. Employing cash instead of checks bearing tell-tale signatures, they could still acquire at a song, and a poor song, too, large oil-bearing tracts virgin to the drill.

So, with his plan patiently built, like a house of cards that had often tumbled but which at last seemed steady, Masters had turned away from the Lexington interview with a black bag containing treasure enough to awaken all the old, long-prostrate dreams. A life tarnished with futility seemed on the bright verge of redemption. A share in the Eldorado would be his own, and after years of eating the bread of discontent his crushed pride could rise and stand erect, fuller nourished.

These grandiose prospects of the altered future called for celebration, very moderate, of course, because now above all other times he needed a dependable and clear brain. With the tingling of the alcohol in his arteries his dreams expanded--and he drank more.

Then he had been robbed.

"But how in G.o.d's name could it happen?" demanded the Colonel. "You were stopping overnight at the Phoenix. Didn't you put your money in the safe?"

Masters raised a pair of nerveless hands in a deprecatory gesture.

"I was drinking. I had certain memoranda in the same bag and I took it up to my room to run over some details--then he came and knocked at the door."

"Who came?"

"I don't know. He called me by name and seemed to be a man of means and cultivation. We drank and chatted together. It was in my bedroom in a city hotel, mind you. I didn't drink much.... The bag was locked ... the key was on the table by my hand.... Of course in some fashion he had learned of the money being turned over to me. How?"

The response was dry.

"I don't know. What happened?"

"G.o.d knows. I suppose it was some variation of the old device of knock-out drops or some sort of drug. I awoke sitting in my chair--very sick at my stomach--and had just time to make my train by rushing off without breakfast. I had been there all night. I glanced in the bag and seeing the packet there with the rubber bands around it right as rain, I failed to suspect. It was when I got here that I found it had been rifled."

"And the man?"

"I talked with the hotel by long distance. No one by the name he gave me had been registered there. The description meant nothing to them."

"Why," inquired the Colonel presently, "didn't you tell me of this plan of yours in advance--this enterprise?"

Masters shook his head. "You'd only have laughed at me like the rest. I was getting fed up on being laughed at. It gets on a man's nerves in time. For just once in my life I wanted to be the one who could say 'I told you so!'"

"What steps have you taken--toward catching the thief?"

The victim groaned. "Don't you see that I couldn't take any? To report to the police would be an admission to the company. The whole thing was trusted to my hands after much reluctance. Can't you see that my story would seem a bit thin?"

Masters' words ended with a gulp, and in his eyes was the stark terror of panic reacting after the comatose silence of lethargy.

Colonel Wallifarro's face, too, had become drawn and distrait. For a time he paced the floor up and down without a word, his hands tight held at his back and his head bowed low on his breast. As he walked, Masters, from his chair by the table, followed his movements with eyes that held no light except that of fear and wretchedness.

Finally the lawyer halted before the chair. His brow was drawn, but in face and att.i.tude was the p.r.o.nouncement of a decision reached. Tom Wallifarro had been wrestling with complex and intermingled elements of the problem as he walked. When he halted, the shifting perplexities had resolved and settled into determination.

"I've got to see you through this, Larry, and it's going to be a hard scratch. I suppose you think of me as wealthy. Most people do, but it's necessary to be frank with you. I have a very handsome practice, and I have for many years lived well up to that income--at times I've overstepped the boundary. I have my farm in Woodford and my house in town. I have a considerable insurance, and that about sums up my resources. I draw from the running channel of my law fees and it's a generous flow, but one I've never dammed providently into a reservoir of surplus. If I have to raise twenty thousand dollars off-hand, I shall have to borrow. Thank G.o.d my credit will stand it."