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Seven Keys to Baldpate

by Earl Derr Biggers · English · Gutenberg #30836 · 421,013 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Seven Keys to Baldpate

Author: Earl Derr Biggers


        
Release date: January 2, 2010 [eBook #30836]
                Most recently updated: January 5, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE ***




Produced by Tor Martin Kristiansen, Joseph Cooper, Mary
Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
https://www.pgdp.net








                      SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE

                       BY EARL DERR BIGGERS



Buccaneer Books
NEW YORK

Copyright 1913 by The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-66864




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

       I "WEEP NO MORE, MY LADY"

      II ENTER A LOVELORN HABERDASHER

     III BLONDES AND SUFFRAGETTES

      IV A PROFESSIONAL HERMIT APPEARS

       V THE MAYOR CASTS A SHADOW BEFORE

      VI GHOSTS OF THE SUMMER CROWD

     VII THE MAYOR BEGINS A VIGIL

    VIII MR. MAX TELLS A TALE OF SUSPICION

      IX MELODRAMA IN THE SNOW

       X THE COLD GRAY DAWN

      XI A FALSEHOOD UNDER THE PALMS

     XII WOE IN NUMBER SEVEN

    XIII THE EXQUISITE MR. HAYDEN

     XIV THE SIGN OF THE OPEN WINDOW

      XV TABLE TALK

     XVI A MAN FROM THE DARK

    XVII THE PROFESSOR SUMS UP

   XVIII A RED CARD

     XIX EXEUNT OMNES, AS SHAKESPEARE HAS IT

      XX THE ADMIRAL'S GAME

     XXI THE MAYOR IS WELCOMED HOME

    XXII THE USUAL THING




SEVEN KEYS TO BALDPATE




CHAPTER I

"WEEP NO MORE, MY LADY"


A young woman was crying bitterly in the waiting-room of the railway
station at Upper Asquewan Falls, New York.

A beautiful young woman? That is exactly what Billy Magee wanted to know
as, closing the waiting-room door behind him, he stood staring just
inside. Were the features against which that frail bit of cambric was
agonizingly pressed of a pleasing contour? The girl's neatly tailored
corduroy suit and her flippant but charming millinery augured well.
Should he step gallantly forward and inquire in sympathetic tones as to
the cause of her woe? Should he carry chivalry even to the lengths of
Upper Asquewan Falls?

No, Mr. Magee decided he would not. The train that had just roared away
into the dusk had not brought him from the region of skyscrapers and
derby hats for deeds of knight errantry up state. Anyhow, the girl's
tears were none of his business. A railway station was a natural place
for grief--a field of many partings, upon whose floor fell often in
torrents the tears of those left behind. A friend, mayhap a lover, had
been whisked off into the night by the relentless five thirty-four
local. Why not a lover? Surely about such a dainty trim figure as this
courtiers hovered as moths about a flame. Upon a tender intimate sorrow
it was not the place of an unknown Magee to intrude. He put his hand
gently upon the latch of the door.

And yet--dim and heartless and cold was the interior of that
waiting-room. No place, surely, for a gentleman to leave a lady
sorrowful, particularly when the lady was so alluring. Oh, beyond
question, she was most alluring. Mr. Magee stepped softly to the ticket
window and made low-voiced inquiry of the man inside.

"What's she crying about?" he asked.

A thin sallow face, on the forehead of which a mop of ginger-colored
hair lay listlessly, was pressed against the bars.

"Thanks," said the ticket agent. "I get asked the same old questions so
often, one like yours sort of breaks the monotony. Sorry I can't help
you. She's a woman, and the Lord only knows why women cry. And sometimes
I reckon even He must be a little puzzled. Now, my wife--"

"I think I'll ask her," confided Mr. Magee in a hoarse whisper.

"Oh, I wouldn't," advised the man behind the bars. "It's best to let 'em
alone. They stop quicker if they ain't noticed."

"But she's in trouble," argued Billy Magee.

"And so'll you be, most likely," responded the cynic, "if you interfere.
No, siree! Take my advice. Shoot old Asquewan's rapids in a barrel if
you want to, but keep away from crying women."

The heedless Billy Magee, however, was already moving across the
unscrubbed floor with chivalrous intention.

The girl's trim shoulders no longer heaved so unhappily. Mr. Magee,
approaching, thought himself again in the college yard at dusk, with the
great elms sighing overhead, and the fresh young voices of the glee club
ringing out from the steps of a century-old building. What were the
words they sang so many times?

    "Weep no more, my lady,
    Oh! weep no more to-day."

He regretted that he could not make use of them. They had always seemed
to him so sad and beautiful. But troubadours, he knew, went out of
fashion long before railway stations came in. So his remark to the young
woman was not at all melodious:

"Can I do anything?"

A portion of the handkerchief was removed, and an eye which, Mr. Magee
noted, was of an admirable blue, peeped out at him. To the gaze of even
a solitary eye, Mr. Magee's aspect was decidedly pleasing. Young
Williams, who posed at the club as a wit, had once said that Billy Magee
came as near to being a magazine artist's idea of the proper hero of a
story as any man could, and at the same time retain the respect and
affection of his fellows. Mr. Magee thought he read approval in the lone
eye of blue. When the lady spoke, however, he hastily revised his
opinion.

"Yes," she said, "you can do something. You can go away--far, far away."

Mr. Magee stiffened. Thus chivalry fared in Upper Asquewan Falls in the
year 1911.

"I beg your pardon," he remarked. "You seemed to be in trouble, and I
thought I might possibly be of some assistance."

The girl removed the entire handkerchief. The other eye proved to be the
same admirable blue--a blue half-way between the shade of her corduroy
suit and that of the jacky's costume in the "See the World--Join the
Navy" poster that served as background to her woe.

"I don't mean to be rude," she explained more gently, "but--I'm crying,
you see, and a girl simply can't look attractive when she cries."

"If I had only been regularly introduced to you, and all that,"
responded Mr. Magee, "I could make a very flattering reply." And a true
one, he added to himself. For even in the faint flickering light of the
station he found ample reason for rejoicing that the bit of cambric was
no longer agonizingly pressed. As yet he had scarcely looked away from
her eyes, but he was dimly aware that up above wisps of golden hair
peeped impudently from beneath a saucy black hat. He would look at those
wisps shortly, he told himself. As soon as he could look away from the
eyes--which was not just yet.

"My grief," said the girl, "is utterly silly and--womanish. I think it
would be best to leave me alone with it. Thank you for your interest.
And--would you mind asking the gentleman who is pressing his face so
feverishly against the bars to kindly close his window?"

"Certainly," replied Mr. Magee. He turned away. As he did so he collided
with a rather excessive lady. She gave the impression of solidity and
bulk; her mouth was hard and knowing. Mr. Magee felt that she wanted to
vote, and that she would say as much from time to time. The lady had a
glittering eye; she put it to its time-honored use and fixed Mr. Magee
with it.

"I was crying, mamma," the girl explained, "and this gentleman inquired
if he could be of any service."

Mamma! Mr. Magee wanted to add his tears to those of the girl. This
frail and lovely damsel in distress owning as her maternal parent a
heavy unnecessary--person! The older woman also had yellow hair, but it
was the sort that suggests the white enamel pallor of a drug store, with
the soda-fountain fizzing and the bottles of perfume ranged in an
odorous row. Mamma! Thus rolled the world along.

"Well, they ain't no use gettin' all worked up for nothing," advised the
unpleasant parent. Mr. Magee was surprised that in her tone there was no
hostility to him--thus belying her looks. "Mebbe the gentleman can
direct us to a good hotel," she added, with a rather stagy smile.

"I'm a stranger here, too," Mr. Magee replied. "I'll interview the man
over there in the cage."

The gentleman referred to was not cheerful in his replies. There was, he
said, Baldpate Inn.

"Oh, yes, Baldpate Inn," repeated Billy Magee with interest.

"Yes, that's a pretty swell place," said the ticket agent. "But it ain't
open now. It's a summer resort. There ain't no place open now but the
Commercial House. And I wouldn't recommend no human being
there--especially no lady who was sad before she ever saw it."

Mr. Magee explained to the incongruous family pair waiting on the bench.

"There's only one hotel," he said, "and I'm told it's not exactly the
place for any one whose outlook on life is not rosy at the moment. I'm
sorry."

"It will do very well," answered the girl, "whatever it is." She smiled
at Billy Magee. "My outlook on life in Upper Asquewan Falls," she said,
"grows rosier every minute. We must find a cab."

She began to gather up her traveling-bags, and Mr. Magee hastened to
assist. The three went out on the station platform, upon which lay a
thin carpet of snowflakes. There the older woman, in a harsh rasping
voice, found fault with Upper Asquewan Falls,--its geography, its public
spirit, its brand of weather. A dejected cab at the end of the platform
stood mourning its lonely lot. In it Mr. Magee placed the large lady and
the bags. Then, while the driver climbed to his seat, he spoke into the
invisible ear of the girl.

"You haven't told me why you cried," he reminded her.

She waved her hand toward the wayside village, the lamps of which shone
sorrowfully through the snow.

"Upper Asquewan Falls," she said, "isn't it reason enough?"

Billy Magee looked; saw a row of gloomy buildings that seemed to list as
the wind blew, a blurred sign "Liquors and Cigars," a street that
staggered away into the dark like a man who had lingered too long at the
emporium back of the sign.

"Are you doomed to stay here long?" he asked.

"Come on, Mary," cried a deep voice from the cab. "Get in and shut the
door. I'm freezing."

"It all depends," said the girl. "Thank you for being so kind and--good
night."

The door closed with a muffled bang, the cab creaked wearily away, and
Mr. Magee turned back to the dim waiting-room.

"Well, what was she crying for?" inquired the ticket agent, when Mr.
Magee stood again at his cell window.

"She didn't think much of your town," responded Magee; "she intimated
that it made her heavy of heart."

"H'm--it ain't much of a place," admitted the man, "though it ain't the
general rule with visitors to burst into tears at sight of it. Yes,
Upper Asquewan is slow, and no mistake. It gets on my nerves sometimes.
Nothing to do but work, work, work, and then lay down and wait for
to-morrow. I used to think maybe some day they'd transfer me down to
Hooperstown--there's moving pictures and such goings-on down there. But
the railroad never notices you--unless you go wrong. Yes, sir, sometimes
I want to clear out of this town myself."

"A natural wanderlust," sympathized Mr. Magee. "You said something just
now about Baldpate Inn--"

"Yes, it's a little more lively in summer, when that's open," answered
the agent; "we get a lot of complaints about trunks not coming, from
pretty swell people, too. It sort of cheers things." His eye roamed with
interest over Mr. Magee's New York attire. "But Baldpate Inn is shut up
tight now. This is nothing but an annex to a graveyard in winter. You
wasn't thinking of stopping off here, was you?"

"Well--I want to see a man named Elijah Quimby," Mr. Magee replied. "Do
you know him?"

"Of course," said the yearner for pastures new, "he's caretaker of the
inn. His house is about a mile out, on the old Miller Road that leads up
Baldpate. Come outside and I'll tell you how to get there."

The two men went out into the whirling snow, and the agent waved a hand
indefinitely up at the night.

"If it was clear," he said, "you could see Baldpate Mountain, over
yonder, looking down on the Falls, sort of keeping an eye on us to make
sure we don't get reckless. And half-way up you'd see Baldpate Inn,
black and peaceful and winter-y. Just follow this street to the third
corner, and turn to your left. Elijah lives in a little house back among
the trees a mile out--there's a gate you'll sure hear creaking on a
night like this."

Billy Magee thanked him, and gathering up his two bags, walked up "Main
Street." A dreary forbidding building at the first corner bore the sign
"Commercial House". Under the white gaslight in the office window three
born pessimists slouched low in hotel chairs, gazing sourly out at the
storm.

    "Weep no more, my lady,
    Oh! weep no more to-day,"

hummed Mr. Magee cynically under his breath, and glanced up at the
solitary up-stairs window that gleamed yellow in the night.

At a corner on which stood a little shop that advertised "Groceries and
Provisions" he paused.

"Let me see," he pondered. "The lights will be turned off, of course.
Candles. And a little something for the inner man, in case it's the
closed season for cooks."

He went inside, where a weary old woman served him.

"What sort of candles?" she inquired, with the air of one who had an
infinite variety in stock. Mr. Magee remembered that Christmas was near.

"For a Christmas tree," he explained. He asked for two hundred.

"I've only got forty," the woman said. "What's this tree for--the
Orphans' Home?"

With the added burden of a package containing his purchases in the tiny
store, Mr. Magee emerged and continued his journey through the stinging
snow. Upper Asquewan Falls on its way home for supper flitted past him
in the silvery darkness. He saw in the lighted windows of many of the
houses the green wreath of Christmas cheer. Finally the houses became
infrequent, and he struck out on an uneven road that wound upward. Once
he heard a dog's faint bark. Then a carriage lurched by him, and a
strong voice cursed the roughness of the road. Mr. Magee half smiled to
himself as he strode on.

"Don Quixote, my boy," he muttered, "I know how you felt when you moved
on the windmills."

It was not the whir of windmills but the creak of a gate in the storm
that brought Mr. Magee at last to a stop. He walked gladly up the path
to Elijah Quimby's door.

In answer to Billy Magee's gay knock, a man of about sixty years
appeared. Evidently he had just finished supper; at the moment he was
engaged in lighting his pipe. He admitted Mr. Magee into the intimacy of
the kitchen, and took a number of calm judicious puffs on the pipe
before speaking to his visitor. In that interval the visitor cheerily
seized his hand, oblivious of the warm burnt match that was in it. The
match fell to the floor, whereupon the older man cast an anxious glance
at a gray-haired woman who stood beside the kitchen stove.

"My name's Magee," blithely explained that gentleman, dragging in his
bags. "And you're Elijah Quimby, of course. How are you? Glad to see
you." His air was that of one who had known this Quimby intimately, in
many odd corners of the world.

The older man did not reply, but regarded Mr. Magee wonderingly through
white puffs of smoke. His face was kindly, gentle, ineffectual; he
seemed to lack the final "punch" that send men over the line to success;
this was evident in the way his necktie hung, the way his thin hands
fluttered.

"Yes," he admitted at last. "Yes, I'm Quimby."

Mr. Magee threw back his coat, and sprayed with snow Mrs. Quimby's
immaculate floor.

"I'm Magee," he elucidated again, "William Hallowell Magee, the man Hal
Bentley wrote to you about. You got his letter, didn't you?"

Mr. Quimby removed his pipe and forgot to close the aperture as he
stared in amazement.

"Good lord!" he cried, "you don't mean--you've really come."

"What better proof could you ask," said Mr. Magee flippantly, "than my
presence here?"

"Why," stammered Mr. Quimby, "we--we thought it was all a joke."

"Hal Bentley has his humorous moments," agreed Mr. Magee, "but it isn't
his habit to fling his jests into Upper Asquewan Falls."

"And--and you're really going to--" Mr. Quimby could get no further.

"Yes," said Mr. Magee brightly, slipping into a rocking-chair. "Yes, I'm
going to spend the next few months at Baldpate Inn."

Mrs. Quimby, who seemed to have settled into a stout little mound of a
woman through standing too long in the warm presence of her stove, came
forward and inspected Mr. Magee.

"Of all things," she murmured.

"It's closed," expostulated Mr. Quimby; "the inn is closed, young
fellow."

"I know it's closed," smiled Magee. "That's the very reason I'm going to
honor it with my presence. I'm sorry to take you out on a night like
this, but I'll have to ask you to lead me up to Baldpate. I believe
those were Hal Bentley's instructions--in the letter."

Mr. Quimby towered above Mr. Magee, a shirt-sleeved statue of honest
American manhood. He scowled.

"Excuse a plain question, young man," he said, "but what are you hiding
from?"

Mrs. Quimby, in the neighborhood of the stove, paused to hear the reply.
Billy Magee laughed.

"I'm not hiding," he said. "Didn't Bentley explain? Well, I'll try to,
though I'm not sure you'll understand. Sit down, Mr. Quimby. You are
not, I take it, the sort of man to follow closely the light and
frivolous literature of the day."

"What's that?" inquired Mr. Quimby.

"You don't read," continued Mr. Magee, "the sort of novels that are sold
by the pound in the department stores. Now, if you had a daughter--a
fluffy daughter inseparable from a hammock in the summer--she could help
me explain. You see--I write those novels. Wild thrilling tales for the
tired business man's tired wife--shots in the night, chases after
fortunes, Cupid busy with his arrows all over the place! It's good fun,
and I like to do it. There's money in it."

"Is there?" asked Mr. Quimby with a show of interest.

"Considerable," replied Mr. Magee. "But now and then I get a longing to
do something that will make the critics sit up--the real thing, you
know. The other day I picked up a newspaper and found my latest
brain-child advertised as 'the best fall novel Magee ever wrote'. It got
on my nerves--I felt like a literary dressmaker, and I could see my
public laying down my fall novel and sighing for my early spring styles
in fiction. I remembered that once upon a time a critic advised me to go
away for ten years to some quiet spot, and think. I decided to do it.
Baldpate Inn is the quiet spot."

"You don't mean," gasped Mr. Quimby, "that you're going to stay there
ten years?"

"Bless you, no," said Mr. Magee. "Critics exaggerate. Two months will
do. They say I am a cheap melodramatic ranter. They say I don't go deep.
They say my thinking process is a scream. I'm afraid they're right. Now,
I'm going to go up to Baldpate Inn, and think. I'm going to get away
from melodrama. I'm going to do a novel so fine and literary that Henry
Cabot Lodge will come to me with tears in his eyes and ask me to join
his bunch of self-made Immortals. I'm going to do all this up there at
the inn--sitting on the mountain and looking down on this little old
world as Jove looked down from Olympus."

"I don't know who you mean," objected Mr. Quimby.

"He was a god--the god of the fruit-stand men," explained Magee.
"Picture me, if you can, depressed by the overwhelming success of my
latest brain-child. Picture me meeting Hal Bentley in a Forty-fourth
Street club and asking him for the location of the lonesomest spot on
earth. Hal thought a minute. 'I've got it', he said, 'the lonesomest
spot that's happened to date is a summer resort in mid-winter. It makes
Crusoe's island look like Coney on a warm Sunday afternoon in
comparison.' The talk flowed on, along with other things. Hal told me
his father owned Baldpate Inn, and that you were an old friend of his
who would be happy for the entire winter over the chance to serve him.
He happened to have a key to the place--the key to the big front door, I
guess, from the weight of it--and he gave it to me. He also wrote you to
look after me. So here I am."

Mr. Quimby ran his fingers through his white hair.

"Here I am," repeated Billy Magee, "fleeing from the great glitter known
as Broadway to do a little rational thinking in the solitudes. It's
getting late, and I suggest that we start for Baldpate Inn at once."

"This ain't exactly--regular," Mr. Quimby protested. "No, it ain't what
you might call a frequent occurrence. I'm glad to do anything I can for
young Mr. Bentley, but I can't help wondering what his father will say.
And there's a lot of things you haven't took into consideration."

"There certainly is, young man," remarked Mrs. Quimby, bustling forward.
"How are you going to keep warm in that big barn of a place?"

"The suites on the second floor," said Mr. Magee, "are, I hear, equipped
with fireplaces. Mr. Quimby will keep me supplied with fuel from the
forest primeval, for which service he will receive twenty dollars a
week."

"And light?" asked Mrs. Quimby.

"For the present, candles. I have forty in that package. Later, perhaps
you can find me an oil lamp. Oh, everything will be provided for."

"Well," remarked Mr. Quimby, looking in a dazed fashion at his wife, "I
reckon I'll have to talk it over with ma."

The two retired to the next room, and Mr. Magee fixed his eyes on a "God
Bless Our Home" motto while he awaited their return. Presently they
reappeared.

"Was you thinking of eating?" inquired Mrs. Quimby sarcastically, "while
you stayed up there?"

"I certainly was," smiled Mr. Magee. "For the most part I will prepare
my own meals from cans and--er--jars--and such pagan sources. But now
and then you, Mrs. Quimby, are going to send me something cooked as no
other woman in the county can cook it. I can see it in your eyes. In my
poor way I shall try to repay you."

He continued to smile into Mrs. Quimby's broad cheerful face. Mr. Magee
had the type of smile that moves men to part with ten until Saturday,
and women to close their eyes and dream of Sir Launcelot. Mrs. Quimby
could not long resist. She smiled back. Whereupon Billy Magee sprang to
his feet.

"It's all fixed," he cried. "We'll get on splendidly. And now--for
Baldpate Inn."

"Not just yet," said Mrs. Quimby. "I ain't one to let anybody go up to
Baldpate Inn unfed. I 'spose we're sort o' responsible for you, while
you're up here. You just set right down and I'll have your supper hot
and smoking on the table in no time."

Mr. Magee entered into no dispute on this point, and for half an hour he
was the pleased recipient of advice, philosophy, and food. When he had
assured Mrs. Quimby that he had eaten enough to last him the entire two
months he intended spending at the inn, Mr. Quimby came in, attired in a
huge "before the war" ulster, and carrying a lighted lantern.

"So you're going to sit up there and write things," he commented. "Well,
I reckon you'll be left to yourself, all right."

"I hope so," responded Mr. Magee. "I want to be so lonesome I'll sob
myself to sleep every night. It's the only road to immortality. Good-by,
Mrs. Quimby. In my fortress on the mountain I shall expect an occasional
culinary message from you." He took her plump hand; this motherly little
woman seemed the last link binding him to the world of reality.

"Good-by," smiled Mrs. Quimby. "Be careful of matches."

Mr. Quimby led the way with the lantern, and presently they stepped out
upon the road. The storm had ceased, but it was still very dark. Far
below, in the valley, twinkled the lights of Upper Asquewan Falls.

"By the way, Quimby," remarked Mr. Magee, "is there a girl in your town
who has blue eyes, light hair, and the general air of a queen out
shopping?"

"Light hair," repeated Quimby. "There's Sally Perry. She teaches in the
Methodist Sunday-school."

"No," said Mr. Magee. "My description was poor, I'm afraid. This one I
refer to, when she weeps, gives the general effect of mist on the sea at
dawn. The Methodists do not monopolize her."

"I read books, and I read newspapers," said Mr. Quimby, "but a lot of
your talk I don't understand."

"The critics," replied Billy Magee, "could explain. My stuff is only for
low-brows. Lead on, Mr. Quimby."

Mr. Quimby stood for a moment in dazed silence. Then he turned, and the
yellow of his lantern fell on the dazzling snow ahead. Together the two
climbed Baldpate Mountain.




CHAPTER II

ENTER A LOVELORN HABERDASHER


Baldpate Inn did not stand tiptoe on the misty mountain-top. Instead it
clung with grim determination to the side of Baldpate, about half-way
up, much as a city man clings to the running board of an open
street-car. This was the comparison Mr. Magee made, and even as he made
it he knew that atmospheric conditions rendered it questionable. For an
open street-car suggests summer and the ball park; Baldpate Inn, as it
shouldered darkly into Mr. Magee's ken, suggested winter at its most
wintry.

About the great black shape that was the inn, like arms, stretched broad
verandas. Mr. Magee remarked upon them to his companion.

"Those porches and balconies and things," he said, "will come in handy
in cooling the fevered brow of genius."

"There ain't much fever in this locality," the practical Quimby assured
him, "especially not in winter."

Silenced, Mr. Magee followed the lantern of Quimby over the snow to the
broad steps, and up to the great front door. There Magee produced from
beneath his coat an impressive key. Mr. Quimby made as though to assist,
but was waved aside.

"This is a ceremony," Mr. Magee told him, "some day Sunday newspaper
stories will be written about it. Baldpate Inn opening its doors to the
great American novel!"

He placed the key in the lock, turned it, and the door swung open. The
coldest blast of air Mr. Magee had even encountered swept out from the
dark interior. He shuddered, and wrapped his coat closer. He seemed to
see the white trail from Dawson City, the sled dogs straggling on with
the dwindling provisions, the fat Eskimo guide begging for gum-drops by
his side.

"Whew," he cried, "we've discovered another Pole!"

"It's stale air," remarked Quimby.

"You mean the Polar atmosphere," replied Magee. "Yes, it is pretty
stale. Jack London and Doctor Cook have worked it to death."

"I mean," said Quimby, "this air has been in here alone too long. It's
as stale as last week's newspaper. We couldn't heat it with a million
fires. We'll have to let in some warm air from outside first."

"Warm air--humph," remarked Mr. Magee. "Well, live and learn."

The two stood together in a great bare room. The rugs had been removed,
and such furniture as remained had huddled together, as if for warmth,
in the center of the floor. When they stepped forward, the sound of
their shoes on the hard wood seemed the boom that should wake the dead.

"This is the hotel office," explained Mr. Quimby.

At the left of the door was the clerk's desk; behind it loomed a great
safe, and a series of pigeon-holes for the mail of the guests. Opposite
the front door, a wide stairway led to a landing half-way up, where the
stairs were divorced and went to the right and left in search of the
floor above. Mr. Magee surveyed the stairway critically.

"A great place," he remarked, "to show off the talents of your
dressmaker, eh, Quimby? Can't you just see the stunning gowns coming
down that stair in state, and the young men below here agitated in their
bosoms?"

"No, I can't," said Mr. Quimby frankly.

"I can't either, to tell the truth," laughed Billy Magee. He turned up
his collar. "It's like picturing a summer girl sitting on an iceberg and
swinging her open-work hosiery over the edge. I don't suppose it's
necessary to register. I'll go right up and select my apartments."

It was upon a suite of rooms that bore the number seven on their door
that Mr. Magee's choice fell. A large parlor with a fireplace that a few
blazing logs would cheer, a bedroom whose bed was destitute of all save
mattress and springs, and a bathroom, comprised his kingdom. Here, too,
all the furniture was piled in the center of the rooms. After Quimby had
opened the windows, he began straightening the furniture about.

Mr. Magee inspected his apartment. The windows were all of the low
French variety, and opened out upon a broad snow-covered balcony which
was in reality the roof of the first floor veranda. On this balcony
Magee stood a moment, watching the trees on Baldpate wave their black
arms in the wind, and the lights of Upper Asquewan Falls wink knowingly
up at him. Then he came inside, and his investigations brought him,
presently to the tub in the bathroom.

"Fine," he cried, "a cold plunge in the morning before the daily
struggle for immortality begins."

He turned the spigot. Nothing happened.

"I reckon," drawled Mr. Quimby from the bedroom, "you'll carry your cold
plunge up from the well back of the inn before you plunge into it. The
water's turned off. We can't take chances with busted pipes."

"Of course," replied Magee less blithely. His ardor was somewhat
dampened--a paradox--by the failure of the spigot to gush forth a
response. "There's nothing I'd enjoy more than carrying eight pails of
water up-stairs every morning to get up an appetite for--what? Oh, well,
the Lord will provide. If we propose to heat up the great American
outdoors, Quimby, I think it's time we had a fire."

Mr. Quimby went out without comment, and left Magee to light his first
candle in the dark. For a time he occupied himself with lighting a few
of the forty, and distributing them about the room. Soon Quimby came
back with kindling and logs, and subsequently a noisy fire roared in the
grate. Again Quimby retired, and returned with a generous armful of
bedding, which he threw upon the brass bed in the inner room. Then he
slowly closed and locked the windows, after which he came and looked
down with good-natured contempt at Mr. Magee, who sat in a chair before
the fire.

"I wouldn't wander round none," he advised. "You might fall down
something--or something. I been living in these parts, off and on, for
sixty years and more, and nothing like this ever came under my
observation before. Howsomever, I guess it's all right if Mr. Bentley
says so. I'll come up in the morning and see you down to the train."

"What train?" inquired Mr. Magee.

"Your train back to New York City," replied Mr. Quimby. "Don't try to
start back in the night. There ain't no train till morning."

"Ah, Quimby," laughed Mr. Magee, "you taunt me. You think I won't stick
it out. But I'll show you. I tell you, I'm hungry for solitude."

"That's all right," Mr. Quimby responded, "you can't make three square
meals a day off solitude."

"I'm desperate," said Magee. "Henry Cabot Lodge must come to me, I say,
with tears in his eyes. Ever see the senator that way? No? It isn't
going to be an easy job. I must put it over. I must go deep into the
hearts of men, up here, and write what I find. No more shots in the
night. Just the adventure of soul and soul. Do you see? By the way,
here's twenty dollars, your first week's pay as caretaker of a New York
Quixote."

"What's that?" asked Quimby.

"Quixote," explained Mr. Magee, "was a Spanish lad who was a little
confused in his mind, and went about the country putting up at summer
resorts in mid-winter."

"I'd expect it of a Spaniard," Quimby said. "Be careful of that fire.
I'll be up in the morning." He stowed away the bill Mr. Magee had given
him. "I guess nothing will interfere with your lonesomeness. Leastways,
I hope it won't. Good night."

Mr. Magee bade the man good night, and listened to the thump of his
boots, and the closing of the great front door. From his windows he
watched the caretaker move down the road without looking back, to
disappear at last in the white night.

Throwing off his great coat, Mr. Magee noisily attacked the fire. The
blaze flared red on his strong humorous mouth, in his smiling eyes.
Next, in the flickering half-light of suite seven, he distributed the
contents of his traveling-bags about. On the table he placed a number of
new magazines and a few books.

Then Mr. Magee sat down in the big leather chair before the fire, and
caught his breath. Here he was at last. The wild plan he and Hal Bentley
had cooked up in that Forty-fourth Street club had actually come to be.
"Seclusion," Magee had cried. "Bermuda," Bentley had suggested. "A
mixture of sea, hotel clerks, and honeymooners!" the seeker for solitude
had sneered. "Some winter place down South,"--from Bentley. "And a
flirtation lurking in every corner!"--from Magee. "A country town where
you don't know any one." "The easiest place in the world to get
acquainted. I must be alone, man! Alone!" "Baldpate Inn," Bentley had
cried in his idiom. "Why, Billy--Baldpate Inn at Christmas--it must be
old John H. Seclusion himself."

Yes, here he was. And here was the solitude he had come to find. Mr.
Magee looked nervously about, and the smile died out of his gray eyes.
For the first time misgivings smote him. Might one not have too much of
a good thing? A silence like that of the tomb had descended. He recalled
stories of men who went mad from loneliness. What place lonelier than
this? The wind howled along the balcony. It rattled the windows. Outside
his door lay a great black cave--in summer gay with men and maids--now
like Crusoe's island before the old man landed.

"Alone, alone, all, all alone," quoted Mr. Magee. "If I can't think here
it will be because I'm not equipped with the apparatus. I will. I'll
show the gloomy old critics! I wonder what's doing in New York?"

New York! Mr. Magee looked at his watch. Eight o'clock. The great street
was ablaze. The crowds were parading from the restaurants to the
theaters. The electric signs were pasting lurid legends on a long
suffering sky; the taxis were spraying throats with gasoline; the
traffic cop at Broadway and Forty-second Street was madly earning his
pay. Mr. Magee got up and walked the floor. New York!

Probably the telephone in his rooms was jangling, vainly calling forth
to sport with Amaryllis in the shade of the rubber trees Billy
Magee--Billy Magee who sat alone in the silence on Baldpate Mountain.
Few knew of his departure. This was the night of that stupid attempt at
theatricals at the Plaza; stupid in itself but gay, almost giddy, since
Helen Faulkner was to be there. This was the night of the dinner to
Carey at the club. This was the night--of many diverting things.

Mr. Magee picked up a magazine. He wondered how they read, in the old
days, by candlelight. He wondered if they would have found his own
stories worth the strain on the eyes. And he also wondered if absolute
solitude was quite the thing necessary to the composition of the novel
that should forever silence those who sneered at his ability.

Absolute solitude! Only the crackle of the fire, the roar of the wind,
and the ticking of his watch bore him company. He strode to the window
and looked down at the few dim lights that proclaimed the existence of
Upper Asquewan Falls. Somewhere, down there, was the Commercial House.
Somewhere the girl who had wept so bitterly in that gloomy little
waiting-room. She was only three miles away, and the thought cheered Mr.
Magee. After all, he was not on a desert island.

And yet--he was alone, intensely, almost painfully, alone. Alone in a
vast moaning house that must be his only home until he could go back to
the gay city with his masterpiece. What a masterpiece! As though with a
surgeon's knife it would lay bare the hearts of men. No tricks of plot,
no--

Mr. Magee paused. For sharply in the silence the bell of his room
telephone rang out.

He stood for a moment gazing in wonder, his heart beating swiftly, his
eyes upon the instrument on the wall. It was a house phone; he knew that
it could only be rung from the switchboard in the hall below. "I'm going
mad already," he remarked, and took down the receiver.

A blur of talk, an electric muttering, a click, and all was still.

Mr. Magee opened the door and stepped out into the shadows. He heard a
voice below. Noiselessly he crept to the landing, and gazed down into
the office. A young man sat at the telephone switchboard; Mr. Magee
could see in the dim light of a solitary candle that he was a person of
rather hilarious raiment. The candle stood on the top of the safe, and
the door of the latter swung open. Sinking down on the steps in the
dark, Mr. Magee waited.

"Hello," the young man was saying, "how do you work this thing, anyhow?
I've tried every peg but the right one. Hello--hello! I want long
distance--Reuton. 2876 West--Mr. Andy Rutter. Will you get him for me,
sister?"

Another wait--a long one--ensued. The candle sputtered. The young man
fidgeted in his chair. At last he spoke again:

"Hello! Andy? Is that you, Andy? What's the good word? As quiet as the
tomb of Napoleon. Shall I close up shop? Sure. What next? Oh, see here,
Andy, I'd die up here. Did you ever hit a place like this in winter? I
can't--I--oh, well, if he says so. Yes. I could do that. But no longer.
I couldn't stand it long. Tell him that. Tell him everything's O. K.
Yes. All right. Well, good night, Andy."

He turned away from the switchboard, and as he did so Mr. Magee walked
calmly down the stairs toward him. With a cry the young man ran to the
safe, threw a package inside, and swung shut the door. He turned the
knob of the safe several times; then he faced Mr. Magee. The latter saw
something glitter in his hand.

"Good evening," remarked Mr. Magee pleasantly.

"What are you doing here?" cried the youth wildly.

"I live here," Mr. Magee assured him. "Won't you come up to my
room--it's right at the head of the stairs. I have a fire, you know."

Back into the young man's lean hawk-like face crept the assurance that
belonged with the gay attire he wore. He dropped the revolver into his
pocket, and smiled a sneering smile.

"You gave me a turn," he said. "Of course you live here. Are any of the
other guests about? And who won the tennis match to-day?"

"You are facetious." Mr. Magee smiled too. "So much the better. A lively
companion is the very sort I should have ordered to-night. Come
up-stairs."

The young man looked suspiciously about, his thin nose seemingly
scenting plots. He nodded, and picked up the candle. "All right," he
said. "But I'll have to ask you to go first. You know the way." His
right hand sought the pocket into which the revolver had fallen.

"You honor my poor and drafty house," said Mr. Magee. "This way."

He mounted the stairs. After him followed the youth of flashy
habiliments, looking fearfully about him as he went. He seemed surprised
that they came to Magee's room without incident. Inside, Mr. Magee drew
up an easy chair before the fire, and offered his guest a cigar.

"You must be cold," he said. "Sit here. 'A bad night, stranger' as they
remark in stories."

"You've said it," replied the young man, accepting the cigar. "Thanks."
He walked to the door leading into the hall and opened it about a foot.
"I'm afraid," he explained jocosely, "we'll get to talking, and miss the
breakfast bell." He dropped into the chair, and lighted his cigar at a
candle end. "Say, you never can tell, can you? Climbing up old Baldpate
I thought to myself, that hotel certainly makes the Sahara Desert look
like a cozy corner. And here you are, as snug and comfortable and at
home as if you were in a Harlem flat. You never can tell. And what now?
The story of my life?"

"You might relate," Mr. Magee told him, "that portion of it that has led
you trespassing on a gentleman seeking seclusion at Baldpate Inn."

The stranger looked at Mr. Magee. He had an eye that not only looked,
but weighed, estimated, and classified. Mr. Magee met it smilingly.

"Trespassing, eh?" said the young man. "Far be it from me to quarrel
with a man who smokes as good cigars as you do--but there's something I
haven't quite doped out. That is--who's trespassing, me or you?"

"My right here," said Mr. Magee, "is indisputable."

"It's a big word," replied the other, "but you can tack it to my right
here, and tell no lie. We can't dispute, so let's drop the matter. With
that settled, I'm encouraged to pour out the story of why you see me
here to-night, far from the madding crowd. Have you a stray tear? You'll
need it. It's a sad touching story, concerned with haberdashery and a
trusting heart, and a fair woman--fair, but, oh, how false!"

"Proceed," laughed Mr. Magee. "I'm an admirer of the vivid imagination.
Don't curb yours, I beg of you."

"It's all straight," said the other in a hurt tone. "Every word true. My
name is Joseph Bland. My profession, until love entered my life, was
that of haberdasher and outfitter. In the city of Reuton, fifty miles
from here, I taught the Beau Brummels of the thoroughfares what was
doing in London in the necktie line. I sold them coats with padded
shoulders, and collars high and awe inspiring. I was happy, twisting a
piece of silk over my hand to show them how it would look on their
heaving bosoms. And then--she came."

Mr. Bland puffed on his cigar.

"Yes," he said, "Arabella sparkled on the horizon of my life. When I
have been here in the quiet for about two centuries, maybe I can do
justice to her beauty. I won't attempt to describe her now. I loved
her--madly. She said I made a hit with her. I spent on her the profits
of my haberdashery. I whispered--marriage. She didn't scream. I had my
wedding necktie picked out from the samples of a drummer from Troy." He
paused and looked at Mr. Magee. "Have you ever stood, poised, on that
brink?" he asked.

"Never," replied Magee. "But go on. Your story attracts me, strangely."

"From here on--the tear I spoke of, please. There flashed on the scene a
man she had known and loved in Jersey City. I said flashed. He did--just
that. A swell dresser--say, he had John Drew beat by two mauve neckties
and a purple frock coat. I had a haberdashery back of me. No use. He
out-dressed me. I saw that Arabella's love for me was waning. With his
chamois-gloved hands that new guy fanned the ancient flame."

He paused. Emotion--or the smoke of the cigar--choked him.

"Let's make the short story shorter," he said. "She threw me down. In my
haberdashery I thought it over. I was blue, bitter. I resolved on a
dreadful step. In the night I wrote her a letter, and carried it down to
the box and posted it. Life without Arabella, said the letter, was
Shakespeare with Hamlet left out. It hinted at the river, carbolic acid,
revolvers. Yes, I posted it. And then--"

"And then," urged Mr. Magee.

Mr. Bland felt tenderly of the horseshoe pin in his purple tie.

"This is just between us," he said. "At that point the trouble began. It
came from my being naturally a very brave man. I could have died--easy.
The brave thing was to live. To go on, day after day, devoid of
Arabella--say, that took courage. I wanted to try it. I'm a courageous
man, as I say."

"You seem so," Mr. Magee agreed.

"Lion-hearted," assented Mr. Bland. "I determined to show my nerve, and
live. But there was my letter to Arabella. I feared she wouldn't
appreciate my bravery--women are dull sometimes. It came to me maybe she
would be hurt if I didn't keep my word, and die. So I had to--disappear.
I had a friend mixed up in affairs at Baldpate. No, I can't give his
name. I told him my story. He was impressed by my spirit, as you have
been. He gave me a key he had--the key of the door opening from the east
veranda into the dining-room. So I came up here. I came here to be
alone, to forgive and forget, to be forgot. And maybe to plan a new
haberdashery in distant parts."

"Was it your wedding necktie," asked Mr. Magee, "that you threw into the
safe when you saw me coming?"

"No," replied Mr. Bland, sighing deeply. "A package of letters, written
to me by Arabella at various times. I want to forget 'em. If I kept them
on hand, I might look at them from time to time. My great courage might
give way--you might find my body on the stairs. That's why I hid them."

Mr. Magee laughed, and stretched forth his hand.

"Believe me," he said, "your touching confidence in me will not be
betrayed. I congratulate you on your narrative power. You want my story.
Why am I here? I am not sure that it is worthy to follow yours. But it
has its good points--as I have thought it out."

He went over to the table, and picked up a popular novel upon which his
gaze had rested while the haberdasher spun his fabric of love and gloom.
On the cover was a picture of a very dashing maiden.

"Do you see that girl?" he asked. "She is beautiful, is she not? Even
Arabella, in her most splendid moments, could get a few points from her,
I fancy. Perhaps you are not familiar with the important part such a
picture plays in the success of a novel to-day. The truth is, however,
that the noble art of fiction writing has come to lean more and more
heavily on its illustrators. The mere words that go with the pictures
grow less important every day. There are dozens of distinguished
novelists in the country at this moment who might be haberdashers if it
weren't for the long, lean, haughty ladies who are scattered tastefully
through their works."

Mr. Bland stirred uneasily.

"I can see you are at a loss to know what my search for seclusion and
privacy has to do with all this," continued Mr. Magee. "I am an artist.
For years I have drawn these lovely ladies who make fiction salable to
the masses. Many a novelist owes his motor-car and his country house to
my brush. Two months ago, I determined to give up illustration forever,
and devote my time to painting. I turned my back on the novelists. Can
you imagine what happened?"

"My imagination's a little tired," apologized Mr. Bland.

"Never mind. I'll tell you. The leading authors whose work I had so long
illustrated saw ruin staring them in the face. They came to me, on their
knees, figuratively. They begged. They pleaded. They hid in the
vestibule of my flat. I should say, my studio. They even came up in my
dumb-waiter, having bribed the janitor. They wouldn't take no for an
answer. In order to escape them and their really pitiful pleadings, I
had to flee. I happened to have a friend involved in the management of
Baldpate Inn. I am not at liberty to give his name. He gave me a key. So
here I am. I rely on you to keep my secret. If you perceive a novelist
in the distance, lose no time in warning me."

Mr. Magee paused, chuckling inwardly. He stood looking down at the
lovelorn haberdasher. The latter got to his feet, and solemnly took
Magee's hand.

"I--I--oh, well, you've got me beat a mile, old man," he said.

"You don't mean to say--" began the hurt Magee.

"Oh, that's all right," Mr. Bland assured him. "I believe every word of
it. It's all as real as the haberdashery to me. I'll keep my eye peeled
for novelists. What gets me is, when you boil our two fly-by-night
stories down, I've come here to be alone. You want to be alone. We can't
be alone here together. One of us must clear out."

"Nonsense," answered Billy Magee. "I'll be glad to have you here. Stay
as long as you like."

The haberdasher looked Mr. Magee fully in the eye, and the latter was
startled by the hostility he saw in the other's face.

"The point is," said Mr. Bland, "I don't want you here. Why? Maybe
because you recall beautiful dames--on book covers--and in that way,
Arabella. Maybe--but what's the use? I put it simply. I got to be
alone--alone on Baldpate Mountain. I won't put you out to-night--"

"See here, my friend," cried Mr. Magee, "your grief has turned your
head. You won't put me out to-night, or to-morrow. I'm here to stay.
You're welcome to do the same, if you like. But you stay--with me. I
know you are a man of courage--but it would take at least ten men of
courage to put me out of Baldpate Inn."

They stood eying each other for a moment. Bland's thin lips twisted into
a sneer. "We'll see," he said. "We'll settle all that in the morning."
His tone took on a more friendly aspect "I'm going to pick out a downy
couch in one of these rooms," he said, "and lay me down to sleep. Say, I
could greet a blanket like a long-lost friend."

Mr. Magee proffered some of the covers that Quimby had given him, and
accompanied Mr. Bland to suite ten, across the hall. He explained the
matter of "stale air", and assisted in the opening of windows. The
conversation was mostly facetious, and Mr. Bland's last remark concerned
the fickleness of woman. With a brisk good night, Mr. Magee returned to
number seven.

But he made no move toward the chilly brass bed in the inner room.
Instead he sat a long time by the fire. He reflected on the events of
his first few hours in that supposedly uninhabited solitude where he was
to be alone with his thoughts. He pondered the way and manner of the
flippant young man who posed as a lovelorn haberdasher, and under whose
flippancy there was certainly an air of hostility. Who was Andy Rutter,
down in Reuton? What did the young man mean when he asked if he should
"close up shop"? Who was the "he" from whom came the orders? and most
important of all, what was in the package now resting in the great safe?

Mr. Magee smiled. Was this the stuff of which solitude was made? He
recalled the ludicrous literary tale he had invented to balance the
moving fiction of Arabella, and his smile grew broader. His imagination,
at least, was in a healthy state. He looked at his watch. A quarter of
twelve. Probably they were having supper at the Plaza now, and Helen
Faulkner was listening to the banalities of young Williams. He settled
in his seat to think of Miss Faulkner. He thought of her for ten
seconds; then stepped to the window.

The moon had risen, and the snowy roofs of Upper Asquewan Falls sparkled
in the lime-light of the heavens. Under one of those roofs was the girl
of the station--weeping no more, he hoped. Certainly she had eyes that
held even the least susceptible--to which class Mr. Magee prided himself
he belonged. He wished he might see her again; might talk to her without
interruption from that impossible "mamma."

Mr. Magee turned back into the room. His fire was but red glowing ashes.
He threw off his dressing-gown, and began to unlace his shoes.

"There _has_ been too much crude melodrama in my novels," he reflected.
"It's so easy to write. But I'm going to get away from all that up here.
I'm going--"

Mr. Magee paused, with one shoe poised in his hand. For from below came
the sharp crack of a pistol, followed by the crash of breaking glass.




CHAPTER III

BLONDES AND SUFFRAGETTES


Mr. Magee slipped into his dressing gown, seized a candle, and like the
boy in the nursery rhyme with one shoe off and one shoe on, ran into the
hall. All was silent and dark below. He descended to the landing, and
stood there, holding the candle high above his head. It threw a dim
light as far as the bottom of the stairs, but quickly lost the battle
with the shadows that lay beyond.

"Hello," the voice of Bland, the haberdasher, came out of the blackness.
"The Goddess of Liberty, as I live! What's your next imitation?"

"There seems to be something doing," said Mr. Magee.

Mr. Bland came into the light, partially disrobed, his revolver in his
hand.

"Somebody trying to get in by the front door," he explained. "I shot at
him to scare him away. Probably one of your novelists."

"Or Arabella," remarked Mr. Magee, coming down.

"No," answered Bland. "I distinctly saw a derby hat."

With Mr. Magee descended the yellow candlelight, and brushing aside the
shadows of the hotel office, it revealed a mattress lying on the floor
close to the clerk's desk, behind which stood the safe. On the mattress
was the bedding Magee had presented to the haberdasher, hastily thrown
back by the lovelorn one on rising.

"You prefer to sleep down here," Mr. Magee commented.

"Near the letters of Arabella--yes," replied Bland. His keen eyes met
Magee's. There was a challenge in them.

Mr. Magee turned, and the yellow light of the candle flickered wanly
over the great front door Even as he looked at it, the door was pushed
open, and a queer figure of a man stood framed against a background of
glittering snow. Mr. Bland's arm flew up.

"Don't shoot," cried Magee.

"No, please don't," urged the man in the doorway. A beard, a pair of
round owlish spectacles, and two ridiculous ear-muffs, left only a
suggestion of face here and there. He closed the door and stepped into
the room. "I have every right here, I assure you, even though my arrival
is somewhat unconventional. See--I have the key." He held up a large
brass key that was the counterpart of the one Hal Bentley had bestowed
upon Mr. Magee in that club on far-off Forty-fourth Street.

"Keys to burn," muttered Mr. Bland sourly.

"I bear no ill will with regard to the shooting," went on the newcomer.
He took off his derby hat and ruefully regarded a hole through the
crown. His bald head seemed singularly frank and naked above a face of
so many disguises. "It is only natural that men alone on a mountain
should defend themselves from invaders at two in the morning. My escape
was narrow, but there is no ill will."

He blinked about him, his breath a white cloud in the cold room.

"Life, young gentlemen," he remarked, setting down his bag and leaning a
green umbrella against it, "has its surprises even at sixty-two. Last
night I was ensconced by my own library fire, preparing a paper on the
Pagan Renaissance. To-night I am on Baldpate Mountain, with a
perforation in my hat."

Mr. Bland shivered. "I'm going back to bed," he said in disgust.

"First," went on the gentleman with the perforated derby, "permit me to
introduce myself. I am Professor Thaddeus Bolton, and I hold the Chair
of Comparative Literature in a big eastern university."

Mr. Magee took the mittened hand of the professor.

"Glad to see you, I'm sure," he said. "My name is Magee. This is Mr.
Bland--he is impetuous but estimable. I trust you will forgive his first
salute. What's a bullet among gentlemen? It seems to me that as
explanations may be lengthy and this room is very cold, we would do well
to go up to my room, where there is a fire."

"Delighted," cried the old man. "A fire. I long to see one. Let us go to
your room, by all means."

Mr. Bland sulkily stalked to his mattress and secured a gaily colored
bed quilt, which he wound about his thin form.

"This is positively the last experience meeting I attend to-night," he
growled.

They ascended to number seven. Mr. Magee piled fresh logs on the fire;
Mr. Bland saw to it that the door was not tightly closed. The professor
removed, along with other impedimenta, his ear tabs, which were
connected by a rubber cord. He waved them like frisky detached ears
before him.

"An old man's weakness," he remarked. "Foolish, they may seem to you.
But I assure you I found them useful companions in climbing Baldpate
Mountain at this hour."

He sat down in the largest chair suite seven owned, and from its depths
smiled benignly at the two young men.

"But I am not here to apologize for my apparel, am I? Hardly. You are
saying to yourselves 'Why is he here?' Yes, that is the question that
disturbs you. What has brought this domesticated college professor
scampering from the Pagan Renaissance to Baldpate Inn? For answer, I
must ask you to go back with me a week's time, and gaze at a picture
from the rather dreary academic kaleidoscope that is my life.

"I am seated back of a desk on a platform in a bare yellow room. In
front of me, tier on tier, sit a hundred young men in various attitudes
of inattention. I am trying to tell them something of the ideal poetry
that marked the rebirth of the Saxon genius. They are bored. I--well,
gentlemen, in confidence, even the mind of a college professor has been
known to wander at times from the subject in hand. And then--I begin to
read a poem--a poem descriptive of a woman dead six hundred years and
more. Ah, gentlemen--"

He sat erect on the edge of his great chair. Back of the thick lenses of
his spectacles he had eyes that still could flash.

"This is not an era of romance," he said. "Our people grub in the dirt
for the dollar. Their visions perish. Their souls grow stale. Yet, now
and then, at most inopportune times, comes the flash that reveals to us
the glories that might be. A gentleman of my acquaintance caught a
glimpse of perfect happiness while he was in the midst of an effort to
corner the pickle market. Another evolved the scheme of a perfect ode to
the essential purity of woman in--a Broadway restaurant. So, like
lightning across the blackest sky, our poetic moments come."

Mr. Bland wrapped his gay quilt more securely about him. Mr. Magee
smiled encouragement on the newest raconteur.

"I shall be brief," continued Professor Bolton. "Heaven knows that
pedagogic room was no place for visions, nor were those athletic young
men fit companions for a soul gone giddy. Yet--I lost my head. As I read
on there returned to my heart a glow I had not known in forty years. The
bard spoke of her hair:

    "'Her yellow lockes, crisped like golden wyre,
     About her shoulders weren loosely shed'

and I saw, as in a dream--ahem, I can trust you, gentlemen--a girl I
supposed I had forever forgot in the mold and dust of my later years. I
will not go further into the matter. My wife's hair is black.

"And reading on, but losing the thread of the poet's eulogy in the
golden fabric of my resurrected dream, it came to me to compare that
maid I knew in the long ago with the women I know to-day. Ah, gentlemen!
Lips, made but for smiling, fling weighty arguments on the unoffending
atmosphere. Eyes, made to light with that light that never was by land
or sea, blaze instead with what they call the injustice of woman's
servitude. White hands, made to find their way to the hands of some
young man in the moonlight, carry banners in the dusty streets. It
seemed I saw the blue eyes of that girl of long ago turned, sad,
rebuking, on her sisters of to-day. As I finished reading, my heart was
awhirl. I said to the young men before me:

"'There _was_ a woman, gentlemen--a woman worth a million suffragettes.'

"They applauded. The fire in me died down. Soon I was my old meek,
academic self. The vision had left no trace. I dismissed my class and
went home. I found that my wife--she of the black hair--had left my
slippers by the library fire. I put them on, and plunged into a pamphlet
lately published by a distinguished member of a German university
faculty. I thought the incident closed forever."

He gazed sorrowfully at the two young men.

"But, gentlemen, I had not counted on that viper that we nourish in our
bosom--the American newspaper. At present I will not take time to
denounce the press. I am preparing an article on the subject for a
respectable weekly of select circulation. Suffice it to record what
happened. The next day an evening paper appeared with a huge picture of
me on its front page, and the hideous statement that this was the
Professor Bolton who had said that 'One Peroxide Blonde Is Worth a
Million Suffragettes'.

"Yes, that was the dreadful version of my remark that was spread
broadcast. Up to the time that story appeared, I had no idea as to what
sort of creature the peroxide blonde might be. I protested, of course. I
might as well have tried to dam a tidal wave with a table fork. The
wrath of the world swept down upon me. I was deluged with telegrams,
editorials, letters, denouncing me. Firm-faced females lay in wait for
me and waved umbrellas in my eyes. Even my wife turned from me, saying
that while she did not ask me to hold her views on the question of
suffrage, she thought I might at least refrain from publicly commending
a type of woman found chiefly in musical comedy choruses. I received a
note from the president of the university, asking me to be more
circumspect in my remarks. Me--Thadeus Bolton--the most conservative man
on earth by instinct!

"And still the denunciations of me poured in; still women's clubs held
meetings resolving against me; still a steady stream of reporters flowed
through my life, urging me to state my views further, to name the ten
greatest blondes in history, to--heaven knows what. Yesterday I resolved
I Could stand it no longer. I determined to go away until the whole
thing was forgotten. 'But', they said to me, 'there is no place, on land
or sea, where the reporters will not find you'. I talked the matter over
with my old friend, John Bentley, owner of Baldpate Inn, and he in his
kindness gave me the key to this hostelry."

The old man paused and passed a silk handkerchief over his bald head.

"That, sirs," he said, "is my story. That is why you see me on Baldpate
Mountain this chill December morning. That is why loneliness can have no
terrors, exile no sorrows, for me. That is why I bravely faced your
revolver-shots. Again let me repeat, I bear no malice on that score. You
have ruined a new derby hat, and the honorarium of professor even at a
leading university is not such as to permit of many purchases in that
line. But I forgive you freely. Even at the cannon's mouth I would have
fled from reputation, to paraphrase the poet."

Wisely Professor Bolton blinked about him. Mr. Bland was half asleep in
his chair, but Mr. Magee was quick with sympathy.

"Professor," he said, "you are a much suffering man. I feel for you.
Here, I am sure, you are safe from reporters, and the yellow journals
will soon forget you in their discovery of the next distorted wonder.
Briefly, Mr. Bland and myself will outline the tangle of events that
brought us to the inn--"

"Briefly is right," broke in Bland. "And then it's me for that
mountainous mattress of mine. I can rattle my story off in short order,
and give you the fine points to-morrow. Up to a short time ago--"

But Billy Magee interrupted. An idea, magnificent delicious, mirthful,
had come to him. Why not? He chuckled inwardly, but his face was most
serious.

"I should like to tell my story first, if you please," he said.

The haberdasher grunted. The professor nodded. Mr. Magee looked Bland
squarely in the eye, strangled the laugh inside him, and began:

"Up to a short time ago I was a haberdasher in the city of Reuton. My
name, let me state, is Magee--William Magee. I fitted the gay
shoulder-blades of Reuton with clothing from the back pages of the
magazines, and as for neckties--"

Mr. Bland's sly eyes had opened wide. He rose to a majestic
height--majestic considering the bed quilt.

"See here--" he began.

"Please don't interrupt," requested Mr. Magee sweetly. "I was, as I have
said, a happy carefree haberdasher. And then--she entered my life.
Arabella was her name. Ah, Professor, you lady of the yellow locks,
crisped liken golden wire--even she must never in my presence be
compared with Arabella. She--she had--a--face--Noah Webster couldn't
have found words to describe it. And her heart was true to yours
truly--at least I thought that it was."

Mr. Magee rattled on. The haberdasher, his calling and his tragedy
snatched from him by the humorous Magee, retired with sullen face into
his bed quilt. Carefully Mr. Magee led up to the coming of the man from
Jersey City; in detail he laid bare the duel of haberdashery fought in
the name of the fair Arabella. As he proceeded, his enthusiasm grew. He
added fine bits that had escaped Mr. Bland. He painted with free hand
the picture of tragedy's dark hour; the note hinting at suicide he gave
in full. Then he told of how his courage grew again, of how he put the
cowardice of death behind him, resolved to dare all--and live. He
finished at last, his voice husky with emotion. Out of the corner of his
eye he glanced triumphantly at Bland. That gentleman was gazing
thoughtfully at the blazing logs.

"You did quite right," commented Professor Bolton, "in making up your
mind to live. I congratulate you on your common sense. And perhaps, as
the years go by, you will realize that had you married your Arabella,
you would not have found life all honey and roses. She was fickle,
unworthy of you. Soon you will forget. Youth--ah, youth throws off its
sorrow like a cloak. A figure not original with me. And now--the
gentleman in the--er--the bed quilt. Has he, too, a story?"

"Yes," laughed Mr. Magee, "let's hear now from the gentleman in the bed
quilt. Has he, too, a story? And if so, what is it?"

He smiled delightedly into the eyes of Bland. What would the
ex-haberdasher do, shorn of his fictional explanation? Would he rise in
his wrath and denounce the man who had stolen his Arabella? Mr. Bland
smiled back. He stood up. And a contingency that had not entered Mr.
Magee's mind came to be.

Mr. Bland walked calmly to the table, and picked up a popular novel that
lay thereon. On its cover was the picture of a very beautiful maiden.

"See that dame?" he inquired of the professor. "Sort of makes a man sit
up and take notice, doesn't she? Even the frost-bitten haberdasher here
has got to admit that in some ways she has this Arabella person looking
like a faded chromo in your grandmother's parlor on a rainy afternoon.
Ever get any notion, Professor, the way a picture like that boosts a
novel in the busy marts of trade? No? Well--"

Mr. Bland continued. Mr. Magee leaned back, overjoyed, in his chair.
Here was a man not to be annoyed by the mere filching of his story. Here
was a man with a sense of humor--an opponent worthy his foe's best
efforts. In his rôle of a haberdasher overcome with woe, Mr. Magee
listened.

"I used to paint dames like that," Bland was saying to the dazed
professor. He explained how his pictures had enabled many a novelist to
"eat up the highway in a buzz-wagon." As he approached the time when the
novelists besieged him, he gave full play to his imagination. One, he
said, sought out his apartments in an aeroplane.

"Say, Professor," he finished, "we're in the same boat. Both hiding from
writers. A fellow that's spent his life selling neckties--well, he can't
exactly appreciate our situation. There's what you might call a bond
between you and me. D'ye know, I felt drawn to you, just after I fired
that first shot. That's why I didn't blaze away again. We're going to be
great friends--I can read it in the stars."

He took the older man's hand feelingly, shook it, and walked away,
casting a covert glance of triumph at Mr. Magee.

The face of the holder of the Crandall Chair of Comparative Literature
was a study. He looked first at one young man, then at the other. Again
he applied the handkerchief to his shining head.

"All this is very odd," he said thoughtfully. "A man of
sixty-two--particularly one who has long lived in the uninspired circle
surrounding a university--has not the quick wit of youth. I'm afraid I
don't--but no matter. It's very odd, though."

He permitted Mr. Magee to escort him into the hall, and to direct his
search for a bed that should serve him through the scant remainder of
the night. Overcoats and rugs were pressed into service as cover. Mr.
Bland blithely assisted.

"If I see any newspaper reporters," he assured the professor on parting,
"I'll damage more than their derbies."

"Thank you," replied the old man heartily. "You are very kind. To-morrow
we shall become better acquainted. Good night."

The two young men came out and stood in the hallway. Mr. Magee spoke in
a low tone.

"Forgive me," he said, "for stealing your Arabella."

"Take her and welcome," said Bland. "She was beginning to bore me,
anyhow. And I'm not in your class as an actor." He came close to Magee.
In the dim light that streamed out from number seven the latter saw the
look on his face, and knew that, underneath all, this was a very much
worried young man.

"For God's sake," cried Bland, "tell me who you are and what you're
doing here. In three words--tell me."

"If I did," Mr. Magee replied, "you wouldn't believe me. Let such minor
matters as the truth wait over till to-morrow."

"Well, anyhow," Bland said, his foot on the top step, "we are sure of
one thing--we don't trust each other. I've got one parting word for you.
Don't try to come down-stairs to-night. I've got a gun, and I ain't
afraid to shoot."

He paused. A look of fright passed over his face. For on the floor above
they both heard soft footsteps--then a faint click, as though a door had
been gently closed.

"This inn," whispered Bland, "has more keys than a literary club in a
prohibition town. And every one's in use, I guess. Remember. Don't try
to come down-stairs. I've warned you. Or Arabella's cast-off Romeo may
be found with a bullet in him yet."

"I shan't forget, what you say," answered Mr. Magee. "Shall we look
about up-stairs?"

Bland shook his head.

"No," he said. "Go in and go to bed. It's the down-stairs that--that
concerns me. Good night."

He went swiftly down the steps, leaving Mr. Magee staring wonderingly
after him. Like a wraith he merged with the shadows below. Magee turned
slowly, and entered number seven. A fantastic film of frost was on the
windows; the inner room was drear and chill. Partially undressing, he
lay down on the brass bed and pulled the covers over him.

The events of the night danced in giddy array before him as he closed
his eyes. With every groan Baldpate Inn uttered in the wind he started
up, keen for a new adventure. At length his mind seemed to stand still,
and there remained of all that amazing evening's pictures but one--that
of a girl in a blue corduroy suit who wept--wept only that her smile
might be the more dazzling when it flashed behind the tears. "With
yellow locks, crisped like golden wire," murmured Mr. Magee. And so he
fell asleep.




CHAPTER IV

A PROFESSIONAL HERMIT APPEARS


Every morning at eight, when slumber's chains had bound Mr. Magee in his
New York apartments, he was awakened by a pompous valet named Geoffrey
whom he shared with the other young men in the building. It was
Geoffrey's custom to enter, raise the curtains, and speak of the weather
in a voice vibrant with feeling, as of something he had prepared himself
and was anxious to have Mr. Magee try. So, when a rattling noise came to
his ear on his first morning at Baldpate Inn, Mr. Magee breathed
sleepily from the covers: "Good morning, Geoffrey."

But no cheery voice replied in terms of sun, wind, or rain. Surprised,
Mr. Magee sat up in bed. About him, the maple-wood furniture of suite
seven stood shivering in the chill of a December morning. Through the
door at his left he caught sight of a white tub into which, he recalled
sadly, not even a Geoffrey could coax a glittering drop. Yes--he was at
Baldpate Inn. He remembered--the climb with the dazed Quimby up the
snowy road, the plaint of the lovelorn haberdasher, the vagaries of the
professor with a penchant for blondes, the mysterious click of the
door-latch on the floor above. And last of all--strange that it should
have been last--a girl in blue corduroy somewhat darker than her eyes,
who wept amid the station's gloom.

"I wonder," reflected Mr. Magee, staring at the very brassy bars at the
foot of his bed, "what new variations on seclusion the day will bring
forth?"

Again came the rattling noise that had awakened him. He looked toward
the nearest window, and through an unfrosted corner of the pane he saw
the eyes of the newest variation staring at him in wonder. They were
dark eyes, and kindly; they spoke a desire to enter.

Rising from his warm retreat, Mr. Magee took his shivering way across
the uncarpeted floor and unfastened the window's catch. From the
blustering balcony a plump little man stepped inside. He had a market
basket on his arm. His face was a stranger to razors; his hair to
shears. He reminded Mr. Magee of the celebrated doctor who came every
year to the small town of his boyhood, there to sell a wonderful healing
herb to the crowds on the street corner.

Magee dived hastily back under the covers. "Well?" he questioned.

"So you're the fellow," remarked the little man in awe. He placed the
basket on the floor; it appeared to be filled with bromidic groceries,
such as the most subdued householder carries home.

"Which fellow?" asked Mr. Magee.

"The fellow Elijah Quimby told me about," explained he of the long brown
locks. "The fellow that's come up to Baldpate Inn to be alone with his
thoughts."

"You're one of the villagers, I take it," guessed Mr. Magee.

"You're dead wrong. I'm no villager. My instincts are all in the other
direction--away from the crowd. I live up near the top of Baldpate, in a
little shack I built myself. My name's Peters--Jake Peters--in the
winter. But in the summer, when the inn's open, and the red and white
awnings are out, and the band plays in the casino every night--then I'm
the Hermit of Baldpate Mountain. I come down here and sell picture
post-cards of myself to the ladies."

Mr. Magee appeared overcome with mirth.

"A professional hermit, by the gods!" he cried. "Say, I didn't know
Baldpate Mountain was fitted up with all the modern improvements. This
is great luck. I'm an amateur at the hermit business, you'll have to
teach me the fine points. Sit down."

"Just between ourselves, I'm not a regular hermit," said the plump
bewhiskered one, sitting gingerly on the edge of a frail chair. "Not one
of these 'all for love of a woman' hermits you read about in books. Of
course, I have to pretend I am, in summer, in order to sell the cards
and do my whole duty by the inn management. A lot of the women ask me in
soft tones about the great disappointment that drove me to old Baldpate,
and I give 'em various answers, according to how I feel. Speaking to you
as a friend, and considering the fact that it's the dead of winter, I
may say there was little or no romance in my life. I married early, and
stayed married a long time. I came up here for peace and quiet, and
because I felt a man ought to read something besides time-tables and
tradesmen's bills, and have something over his head besides a first and
second mortgage."

"Back to nature, in other words," remarked Mr. Magee.

"Yes, sir--back with a rush. I was down to the village this morning for
a few groceries, and I stopped off at Quimby's, as I often do. He told
me about you. I help him a lot around the inn, and we arranged I was to
stop in and start your fire, and do any other little errands you might
want done. I thought we ought to get acquainted, you and me, being as
we're both literary men, after a manner of speaking."

"No?" cried Mr. Magee.

"Yes," said the Hermit of Baldpate. "I dip into that work a little now
and then. Some of my verses on the joys of solitude have appeared in
print--on the post-cards I sell to the guests in the summer. But my
life-work, as you might call it, is a book I've had under way for some
time. It's called simply _Woman_. Just that one word--but, oh, the
meaning in it! That book is going to prove that all the trouble in the
world, from the beginning of time, was caused by females. Not just say
so, mind you. Prove it!"

"A difficult task, I'm afraid," smiled Magee.

"Not difficult--long," corrected the hermit. "When I started out, four
years ago, I thought it would just be a case of a chapter on Eve, and
honorable mention for Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, and a few more like
that, and the thing would be done. But as I got into the subject, I was
fairly buried under new evidence. Then Mr. Carnegie came along and gave
Upper Asquewan Falls a library. It's wonderful to think the great works
that man will be responsible for. I've dedicated _Woman_ to him. Since
the new library, I've dug up information about a thousand disasters I
never dreamed of before, and I contend that if you go back a ways in any
one of 'em, you'll find the fluffy little lady that started the whole
rumpus. So I hunt the woman. I reckon the French would call me the
greatest _cherchez la femme_ in history."

"A fascinating pursuit," laughed Mr. Magee. "I'm glad you've told me
about it, and I shall watch the progress of the work with interest.
Although I can't say that I entirely agree with you. Here and there is a
woman who more than makes amends for whatever trouble her sisters have
caused. One, for instance, with golden hair, and eyes that when they
weep--"

"You're young," interrupted the little man, rising. "There ain't no use
to debate it with you. I might as well try to argue with a storm at sea.
Some men keep the illusion to the end of their days, and I hope you're
one. I reckon I'll start your fire."

He went into the outer room, and Mr. Magee lay for a few moments
listening to his preparations about the fireplace. This was comfort, he
thought. And yet, something was wrong. Was it the growing feeling of
emptiness inside? Undoubtedly. He sat up in bed and leaning over, gazed
into the hermit's basket. The packages he saw there made his feeling of
emptiness the more acute.

"I say, Mr. Peters," he cried, leaping from bed and running into the
other room, where the hermit was persuading a faint blaze, "I've an
idea. You can cook, can't you?"

"Cook?" repeated the hermit. "Well, yes, I've had to learn a few things
about it, living far from the rathskellars the way I do."

"The very man," rejoiced Mr. Magee. "You must stay here and cook for
me--for us."

"Us?" asked the hermit, staring.

"Yes. I forgot to tell you. After Mr. Quimby left me last night, two
other amateur hermits hove in view. One is a haberdasher with a broken
heart--"

"Woman," cried the triumphant Peters.

"Name, Arabella," laughed Magee. "The other's a college professor who
made an indiscreet remark about blondes. You won't mind them, I'm sure,
and they may be able to help you a lot with your great work."

"I don't know what Quimby will say," studied the hermit. "I reckon he'll
run 'em out. He's against this thing--afraid of fire."

"Quimby will come later," Mr. Magee assured him, drawing on a
dressing-gown. "Just now the idea is a little water in yonder tub, and a
nice cheerful breakfast after. It's going to pay you a lot better than
selling post-cards to romantic ladies, I promise you. I won't take you
away from a work for which the world is panting without more than making
it up to you financially. Where do you stand as a coffee maker?"

"Wait till you taste it," said Peters reassuringly. "I'll bring you up
some water."

He started for the door, but Mr. Magee preceded him.

"The haberdasher," he explained, "sleeps below, and he's a nervous man.
He might commit the awful error of shooting the only cook on Baldpate
Mountain."

Mr. Magee went out into the hall and called from the depths the figure
of Bland, fully attired in his flashy garments, and looking tawdry and
tired in the morning light.

"I've been up hours," he remarked. "Heard somebody knocking round the
kitchen, but I ain't seen any breakfast brought in on a silver tray. My
inside feels like the Mammoth Cave."

Mr. Magee introduced the Hermit of Baldpate.

"Pleased to meet you," said Bland. "I guess it was you I heard in the
kitchen. So you're going to cater to this select few, are you? Believe
me, you can't get on the job any too soon to suit me."

Out of a near-by door stepped the black-garbed figure of Professor
Thaddeus Bolton, and him Mr. Magee included in the presentation
ceremonies. After the hermit had disappeared below, burdened with his
market basket and the supplies Mr. Magee had brought the night before,
the three amateurs at the hermit game gathered by the fire in number
seven, and Mr. Bland spoke feelingly:

"I don't know where you plucked that cook, but believe me, you get a
vote of thanks from yours truly. What is he--an advertisement for a hair
restorer?"

"He's a hermit," explained Magee, "and lives in a shack near the
mountain-top. Hermits and barbers aren't supposed to mix. He's also an
author, and is writing a book in which he lays all the trouble of the
ages at the feet of woman. Please treat him with the respect all these
dignified activities demand."

"A writer, you say," commented Professor Bolton. "Let us hope it will
not interfere with his cooking abilities. For even I, who am not much
given to thought about material things, must admit the presence of a
gnawing hunger within."

They talked little, being men unfed, while Jake Peters started
proceedings in the kitchen, and tramped up-stairs with many pails of
water. Mr. Magee requested warm water for shaving; whereupon he was
regarded with mingled emotions by his companions.

"You ain't going to see any skirts up here," Mr. Bland promised him. And
Mr. Peters, bringing the water from below, took occasion to point out
that shaving was one of man's troubles directly attributable to woman's
presence in the world.

At length the hermit summoned them to breakfast, and as they descended
the broad stair the heavenly odor of coffee sent a glow to their hearts.
Peters had built a rousing fire in the big fireplace opposite the
clerk's desk in the office, and in front of this he had placed a table
which held promise of a satisfactory breakfast. As the three sat down,
Mr. Bland spoke:

"I don't know about you, gentlemen, but I could fall on Mr. Peters' neck
and call him blessed."

The gentleman thus referred to served them genially. He brought to Mr.
Magee, between whom and himself he recognized the tie of authorship, a
copy of a New York paper that he claimed to get each morning from the
station agent, and which helped him greatly, he said, in his eternal
search for the woman. As the meal passed, Mr. Magee glanced it through.
Twice he looked up from it to study keenly his queer companions at
Baldpate Inn. Finally he handed it across the table to the haberdasher.
The dull yellow sun of a winter morning drifted in from the white
outdoors; the fire sputtered gaily in the grate. Also, Mr. Peters'
failing for literature interfered in no way with his talents as cook.
The three finished the repast in great good humor, and Mr. Magee handed
round cigars.

"Gentlemen," he remarked, pushing back his chair, "we find ourselves in
a peculiar position. Three lone men, knowing nothing of one another, we
have sought the solitude of Baldpate Inn at almost the same moment. Why?
Last night, before you came, Professor Bolton, Mr. Bland gave me as his
reason for being here the story of Arabella, which I afterward
appropriated as a joke and gave as my own reason. I related to Mr. Bland
the fiction about the artist and the besieging novelists. We swapped
stories when you came--it was our merry little method of doubting each
other's word. Perhaps it was bad taste. At any rate, looking at it in
the morning light, I am inclined to return Mr. Bland's Arabella, and no
questions asked. He is again the lovelorn haberdasher. I am inclined to
believe, implicitly, your story. That is my proposition. No doubts of
one another. We are here for whatever reasons we say we are."

The professor nodded gravely.

"Last night," went on Mr. Magee, "there was some talk between Mr. Bland
and myself about one of us leaving the inn. Mr. Bland demanded it. I
trust he sees the matter differently this morning. I for one should be
sorry to see him go."

"I've changed my mind," said Mr. Bland. The look on his thin face was
not a pleasant one. "Very good," went on Mr. Magee. "I see no reason why
we should not proceed on friendly terms. Mr. Peters has agreed to cook
for us. He can no doubt be persuaded to attend to our other wants. For
his services we shall pay him generously, in view of the circumstances.
As for Quimby--I leave you to make your peace with him."

"I have a letter to Mr. Quimby from my old friend, John Bentley," said
the professor, "which I am sure will win me the caretaker's warm
regard."

Mr. Magee looked at Bland.

"I'll get Andy Rutter on the wire," said that gentleman. "Quimby will
listen to him, I guess."

"Maybe," remarked Magee carelessly. "Who is Rutter?"

"He's manager of the inn when it's open," answered Bland. He looked
suspiciously at Magee. "I only know him slightly," he added.

"Those matters you will arrange for yourselves," Mr. Magee went on. "I
shall be very glad of your company if you can fix it to stay. Believe it
or not--I forgot, we agreed to believe, didn't we?--I am here to do some
writing. I'm going up to my room now to do a little work. All I ask of
you gentlemen is that, as a favor to me, you refrain from shooting at
each other while I am gone. You see, I am trying to keep crude melodrama
out of my stuff."

"I am sure," remarked Professor Bolton, "that the use of firearms as a
means of social diversion between Mr. Bland and myself is unthought of."

"I hope so," responded Magee. "There, then, the matter rests. We are
here--that is all." He hesitated, as though in doubt. Then, with a
decisive motion, he drew toward him the New York paper. With his eyes on
the head-lines of the first page, he continued: "I shall demand no
further explanations. And except for this once, I shall make no
reference to this story in the newspaper, to the effect that early
yesterday morning, in a laboratory at one of our leading universities, a
young assistant instructor was found dead under peculiar circumstances."
He glanced keenly at the bald-headed little man across from him. "Nor
shall I make conversation of the fact," he added, "that the professor of
chemistry at the university, a man past middle age, respected highly in
the university circle, is missing."

An oppressive silence followed this remark. Mr. Bland's sly eyes sought
quickly the professor's face. The older man sat staring at his plate;
then he raised his head and the round spectacles were turned full on
Magee.

"You are very kind," said Professor Bolton evenly.

"There is another story in this paper," went on Mr. Magee, glancing at
the haberdasher, "that, it seems to me, I ought to taboo as table talk
at Baldpate Inn. It relates that a few days ago the youthful cashier of
a bank in a small Pennsylvania town disappeared with thirty thousand
dollars of the bank's funds. No," he concluded, "we are simply here,
gentlemen, and I am very glad to let it go at that."

Mr. Bland sneered knowingly.

"I should think you would be," he said. "If you'll turn that paper over
you'll read on the back page that day before yesterday a lot of
expensive paintings in a New York millionaire's house were cut from
their frames, and that the young artist who was doing retouching in the
house at the time has been just careless enough not to send his address
to the police. It's a small matter, of course, and the professor and I
will never mention it again."

Mr. Magee threw back his head and laughed heartily.

"We understand one another, it seems," he said. "I look forward to
pleasant companionship where I had expected solitude. You will excuse me
now--there is the work to which I referred. Ah, here's Peters," he added
as the hermit entered through the dining-room door at the side of the
stairs.

"All finished, gentlemen?" he asked, coming forward. "Now, this is solid
comfort, ain't it? I reckon when you get a few days of this, you'll all
become hermits, and build yourselves shacks on the mountain. Solid
comfort. No woman to make you put on overshoes when you go out, or
lecture you about the effects of alcohol on the stomach. Heaven, I call
it."

"Peters," said Mr. Magee, "we have been wondering if you will stay on
here and cook for us. We need you. How about it?"

"Well--I'll be glad to help you out," the hermit replied. "I guess I can
manage to give satisfaction, seeing there ain't no women around. If
there was, I wouldn't think of it. Yes, I'll stay and do what I can to
boost the hermit life in your estimation. I--"

He stopped. His eyes were on the dining-room door, toward which Mr.
Magee's back was turned. The jaw of Peters fell, and his mouth stood
wide open. Behind the underbrush of beard a very surprised face was
discernible.

Mr. Magee turned quickly. A few feet inside the door stood the girl of
the station, weeping no more, but radiant with smiles. Back of her was
the determined impossible companion of yesterday.

"Oh, mamma," laughed the girl, "we're too late for breakfast! Isn't it a
shame?"

Mr. Bland's lean hands went quickly to adjust his purple tie. Professor
Bolton looked every inch the owl as he blinked in dazed fashion at the
blue corduroy vision. Gingerly Mr. Peters set down the plates he had
taken from the table, still neglecting his open mouth.

Mr. Magee rose from the table, and went forward with outstretched hand.




CHAPTER V

THE MAYOR CASTS A SHADOW BEFORE


"From tears to smiles," said Mr. Magee, taking the girl's hand. "What
worked the transformation? Not the Commercial House, I know, for I
passed it last evening."

"No, hardly the Commercial House," laughed the girl. "Rather the
sunshine of a winter morning, the brisk walk up the mountain, and the
sight of the Hermit of Baldpate with eyes like saucers staring at a
little girl who once bought his postal cards."

"Then you know Mr. Peters?" inquired Magee.

"Is that his name? You see, I never met him in private life--he was just
the hermit when I knew him. I used to come to Baldpate in the summers,
and send his cards back to the folks at home, and dream dreams of his
love-story when from my window I saw the light of his shack at night.
I'm so glad to meet Mr. Peters informally."

She held out her hand, but Peters, by long practise wary of women, had
burdened himself with breakfast plates which prevented his clasping it.
He muttered "How d'ye do?" and fled toward the door, narrowly averting
what would have proved a serious collision with the large woman on the
way.

"Mr. Peters meets so few of your sex in winter," Magee apologized, "you
must pardon his clumsiness. This gentleman"--he indicated the professor,
who arose--"is Thaddeus Bolton, a distinguished member of a certain
university faculty, who has fled to Baldpate to escape the press of
America. And this is Mr. Bland, who hides here from the world the scars
of a broken heart. But let us not go into details."

The girl smiled brightly. "And you--" she asked.

"William Hallowell Magee," he returned, bowing low. "I have a neat
little collection of stories accounting for my presence here, from which
I shall allow you to choose later. Not to mention the real one, which is
simple almost to a fault."

"I am so happy to meet you all," said the girl. "We shall no doubt
become very good friends. For mamma and I have also come to Baldpate
Inn--to stay."

Mr. Bland opened wide his usually narrow eyes, and ran his hand
thoughtfully over his one day's beard. Professor Bolton blinked his
astonishment. Mr. Magee smiled.

"I, for one, am delighted to hear it," he said.

"My name," went on the girl, "is Mary Norton. May I present my mother,
Mrs. Norton?"

The older woman adopted what was obviously her society manner. Once
again Mr. Magee felt a pang of regret that this should be the parent of
a girl so charming.

"I certainly am pleased to meet you all," she said in her heavy voice.
"Ain't it a lovely morning after the storm? The sun's almost blinding."

"Some explanation," put in Miss Norton quickly, "is due you if I am to
thrust myself thus upon you. I am perfectly willing to tell why I am
here--but the matter mustn't leak out. I can trust you, I'm sure."

Mr. Magee drew up chairs, and the two women were seated before the fire.

"The bandits of Baldpate," he remarked flippantly, glancing at the two
men, "have their own code of honor, and the first rule is never to
betray a pal."

"Splendid!" laughed the girl. "You said, I believe, that Professor
Bolton was fleeing from the newspapers. I am fleeing for the
newspapers--to attract their attention--to lure them into giving me that
thing so necessary to a woman in my profession, publicity. You see, I am
an actress. The name I gave you is not my stage name. That, perhaps, you
would know. I employ a gentleman to keep me before the public as much as
possible. It's horrid, I know, but it means bread and butter to me. That
gentleman, my press-agent, evolved the present scheme--a mysterious
disappearance."

She paused and looked at the others. Mr. Magee surveyed her narrowly.
The youthful bloom of her cheek carried to him no story of grease paint;
her unaffected manner was far from suggesting anything remotely
connected with the stage. He wondered.

"I am to disappear completely for a time," she went on. "'As though the
earth had swallowed me' will be the good old phrase of the reporters. I
am to linger here at Baldpate Inn, a key to which my press-agent has
secured for me. Meanwhile, the papers will speak tearfully of me in
their head-lines--at least, I hope they will. Can't you just see
them--those head-lines? 'Beautiful Actress Drops from Sight'." She
stopped, blushing. "Every woman who gets into print, you know, is
beautiful."

"But it'd be no lie in your case, dearie," put in Mrs. Norton, feeling
carefully of her atrociously blond store hair.

"Your mother takes the words from my mouth," smiled Mr. Magee. "Guard as
they will against it, the newspapers let the truth crop out
occasionally. And this will be such an occasion."

"From what part of Ireland do you come?" laughed the girl. She seemed
somewhat embarrassed by her mother's open admiration. "Well, setting all
blarney aside, such will be the head-lines. And when the last clue is
exhausted, and my press-agent is the same, I come back to appear in a
new play, a well-known actress. Of such flippant things is a Broadway
reputation built."

"We all wish you success, I'm sure." Mr. Magee searched his memory in
vain for this "actress's" name and fame. Could it be possible, he
wondered, at this late day, that any one would try for publicity by such
an obvious worn-out road? Hardly. The answer was simple. Another fable
was being spun from whole cloth beneath the roof of Baldpate Inn. "We
have a New York paper here," he went on, "but as yet there seems to be
no news of your sad disappearance."

"Wouldn't it be the limit if they didn't fall for it?" queried the older
woman.

"Fall for it," repeated Professor Bolton, not questioningly, but with
the air of a scientist about to add a new and rare specimen to his
alcohol jar.

"She means, if they didn't accept my disappearance as legitimate news,"
explained the girl "That would be very disappointing. But surely there
was no harm in making the experiment."

"They're a clever lot, those newspaper guys," sneered Mr. Bland, "in
their own opinion. But when you come right down to it, every one of 'em
has a nice little collection of gold bricks in his closet. I guess
you've got them going. I hope so."

"Thank you," smiled the girl. "You are very kind. You are here, I
understand, because of an unfortunate--er--affair of the heart?"

Mr. Bland smoothed back his black oily hair from his forehead, and
smirked. "Oh, now--" he protested.

"Arabella," put in Mr. Magee, "was her name. The beauties of history and
mythology hobbled into oblivion at sight of her."

"I'm quick to forget," insisted Mr. Bland.

"That does you no credit, I'm sure," replied the girl severely. "And
now, mamma, I think we had better select our rooms--"

She paused. For Elijah Quimby had come in through the dining-room door,
and stood gazing at the group before the fire, his face reflecting what
Mr. Magee, the novelist, would not have hesitated a moment in terming
"mingled emotions".

"Well," drawled Mr. Quimby. He strode into the room. "Mr. Magee," he
said, "that letter from Mr. Bentley asked me to let you stay at Baldpate
Inn. There wasn't anything in it about your bringing parties of friends
along."

"These are not friends I've brought along," explained Magee. "They're
simply some more amateur hermits who have strolled in from time to time.
All have their individual latch-keys to the hermitage. And all, I
believe, have credentials for you to examine."

Mr. Quimby stared in angry wonder.

"Is the world crazy?" he demanded. "Any one 'd think it was July, the
way people act. The inn's closed, I tell you. It ain't running."

Professor Bolton rose from his chair.

"So you are Quimby," he said in a soothing tone. "I'm glad to meet you
at last. My old friend John Bentley has spoken of you so often. I have a
letter from him." He drew the caretaker to one side, and took an
envelope from his pocket. The two conversed in low tones.

Quickly the girl in the corduroy suit leaned toward Mr. Magee. She
whispered, and her tone was troubled:

"Stand by me. I'm afraid I'll need your help."

"What's the matter?" inquired Magee.

"I haven't much of any right here, I guess. But I had to come."

"But your key?"

"I fear my--my press-agent--stole it."

A scornful remark as to the antiquated methods of that mythical
publicity promoter rose to Mr. Magee's lips, but before he spoke he
looked into her eyes. And the remark was never made. For in their
wonderful depths he saw worry and fear and unhappiness, as he had seen
them there amid tears in the station.

"Never mind," he said very gently, "I'll see you through."

Quimby was standing over Mr. Bland. "How about you?" he asked.

"Call up Andy Rutter and ask about me," replied Bland, in the tone of
one who prefers war to peace.

"I work for Mr. Bentley," said Quimby. "Rutter hasn't any authority
here. He isn't to be manager next season, I understand. However the
professor wants me to let you stay. He says he'll be responsible." Mr.
Bland looked in open-mouthed astonishment at the unexpected sponsor he
had found. "And you?" went on Quimby to the women.

"Why--" began Miss Norton.

"Absolutely all right," said Mr. Magee. "They come from Hal Bentley,
like myself. He's put them in my care. I'll answer for them." He saw the
girl's eyes; they spoke her thanks.

Mr. Quimby shook his head as one in a dream.

"All this is beyond me--way beyond," he ruminated. "Nothing like it ever
happened before that I've heard of. I'm going to write all about it to
Mr. Bentley, and I suppose I got to let you stay till I hear from him. I
think he ought to come up here, if he can."

"The more the merrier," said Mr. Magee, reflecting cheerfully that the
Bentleys were in Florida at last accounts.

"Come, mamma," said Miss Norton, rising, "let's go up and pick out a
suite. There's one I used to have a few years ago--you can see the
hermit's shack from the windows. By the way, Mr. Magee, will you send
Mr. Peters up to us? He may be able to help us get settled."

"Ahem," muttered Mr. Magee, "I--I'll have a talk with Peters. To be
quite frank, I anticipate trouble. You see, the Hermit of Baldpate
doesn't approve of women--"

"Don't approve of women," cried Mrs. Norton, her green eyes flashing.
"Why not, I'd like to know?"

"My dear madam," responded Mr. Magee, "only echo answers, and it but
vacuously repeats, 'Why not?'. That, however, is the situation. Mr.
Peters loathes the sex. I imagine that, until to-day, he was not
particularly happy in the examples of it he encountered. Why, he has
even gone so far as to undertake a book attributing all the trouble of
the world to woman."

"The idiot!" cried Mrs. Norton.

"Delicious!" laughed the girl.

"I shall ask Peters to serve you," said Magee. "I shall appeal to his
gallant side. But I must proceed gently. This is his first day as our
cook, and you know how necessary a good first impression is with a new
cook. I'll appeal to his better nature."

"Don't do it," cried the girl. "Don't emphasize us to him in any way, or
he may exercise his right as cook and leave. Just ignore us. We'll play
at being our own bell-boys."

"Ignore you," cried Mr. Magee. "What Herculean tasks you set. I'm not
equal to that one." He picked up their traveling-bags and led the way
up-stairs. "I'm something of a bell-boy myself, when roused," he said.

The girl selected suite seventeen, at the farther end of the corridor
from Magee's apartments. "It's the very one I used to have, years and
years ago--at least two or three years ago," she said. "Isn't it stupid?
All the furniture in a heap."

"And cold," said Mrs. Norton. "My land, I wish I was back by my own
fire."

"I'll make you regret your words, Mrs. Norton," cried Magee. He threw up
the windows, pulled off his coat, and set to work on the furniture. The
girl bustled about, lightening his work by her smile. Mrs. Norton
managed to get consistently in the way. When he had the furniture
distributed, he procured logs and tried his hand at a fire. Then he
stood, his black hair disheveled, his hands soiled, but his heart very
gay, before the girl of the station.

"I hope you don't expect a tip," she said, laughing.

"I do," he said, coming closer, and speaking in a voice that was not for
the ear of the chaperon. "I want a tip on this--do you really act?"

She looked at him steadily.

"Once," she said, "when I was sixteen, I appeared in an amateur play at
school. It was my first and last appearance on the stage."

"Thanks, lady," remarked Mr. Magee in imitation of the bell-boy he was
supposed to be. He sought number seven. There he made himself again
presentable, after which he descended to the office.

Mr. Bland sat reading the New York paper before the fire. From the
little card-room and the parlor, the two rooms to the right and left of
the hotel's front door, Quimby had brought forth extra chairs. He stood
now by the large chair that held Professor Bolton, engaged in
conversation with that gentleman.

"Yes," he was saying, "I lived three years in Reuton and five years in
New York. It took me eight years--eight years to realize the truth."

"I heard about it from John Bentley," the professor said gently.

"He's been pretty kind to me, Mr. Bentley has," replied Quimby. "When
the money was all gone, he offered me this job. Once the Quimbys owned
most of the land around Baldpate Mountain. It all went in those eight
years. To think that it took all those years for me to find it out."

"If I'm not impertinent, Quimby," put in Magee, "to find what out?"

"That what I wanted, the railroad men didn't want," replied Quimby
bitterly, "and that was--the safety of the public. You see, I invented a
new rail joint, one that was a great improvement on the old kind. I had
sort of an idea, when I was doing it--an idea of service to the
world--you know. God, what a joke! I sold all the Quimby lands, and went
to Reuton, and then to New York, to place it. Not one of the railroad
men but admitted that it was an improvement, and a big one--and not one
but fought like mad to keep me from getting it down where the public
would see it. They didn't want the expense of a change."

Mr. Quimby looked out at the sunlit stretch of snow.

"Eight years," he repeated, "I fought and pleaded. No, I begged--that
was the word--I begged. You'd be surprised to know the names of some of
the men who kept me waiting in their private offices, and sneered at me
over their polished desks. They turned me down--every one. Some of them
played me--as though I'd been a fish. They referred me to other ends of
the same big game, laughing in their sleeves, I guess, at the knowledge
of how hopeless it was. Oh, they made a fine fool of me."

"You might have put down some of your joints at your own expense,"
suggested the professor.

"Didn't I try?" cried Quimby. "Do you think they'd let me? No, the
public might see them and demand them everywhere. Once, I thought I had
convinced somebody. It was down in Reuton--the Suburban Railway." There
was a rustle as Mr. Bland let his paper fall to the floor. "Old Henry
Thornhill was president of the road--he is yet, I guess--but young
Hayden and a fellow named David Kendrick were running it. Kendrick was
on my side--he almost had Hayden. They were going to let me lay a
stretch of track with my joints. Then--something happened. Maybe you
remember. Kendrick disappeared in the night--he's never been seen
since."

"I do remember," said the professor softly.

"Hayden turned me down," went on Quimby. "The money was all gone. So I
came back to Upper Asquewan--caretaker of an inn that overlooks the
property my father owned--the property I squandered for a chance to save
human lives. It's all like a dream now--those eight years. And it nearly
drives me mad, sometimes, to think that it took me eight years--eight
years to find it out. I'll just straighten things around a bit."

He moved away, and the men sat in silence for a time. Then the professor
spoke very gently:

"Poor devil--to have had his dream of service--and then grow old on
Baldpate."

The two joined Mr. Bland by the fire. Mr. Magee had put from his mind
all intention of work. The maze of events through which he wandered held
him bewildered and enthralled. He looked at the haberdasher and the
university scholar and asked himself if they were real, or if he was
still asleep in a room on a side street in New York, waiting for the
cheery coming of Geoffrey. He asked himself still more perplexedly if
the creature that came toward him now through the dining-room door was
real--the hairy Hermit of Baldpate, like a figure out of some old print,
his market basket on his arm again, his coat buttoned to the chin.

"Well, everything's shipshape in the kitchen," announced the hermit
cheerfully. "I couldn't go without seeing to that. I wish you the best
of luck, gentlemen--and good-by."

"Good-by?" cried the professor.

"By the gods, he's leaving us," almost wept Mr. Bland.

"It can't be," said Mr. Magee.

"It has to be," said the Hermit of Baldpate, solemnly shaking his head.
"I'd like to stay with you, and I would of, if they hadn't come. But
here they are--and when women come in the door, I fly out of the window,
as the saying is."

"But, Peters," pleaded Magee, "you're not going to leave us in the hole
like this?"

"Sorry," replied Peters, "I can please men, but I can't please women. I
tried to please one once--but let the dead past bury its dead. I live on
Baldpate in a shack to escape the sex, and it wouldn't be consistent for
me to stay here now. I got to go. I hate to, like a dog, but I got to."

"Peters," said Mr. Magee, "I'm surprised. After giving your word to
stay! And who knows--you may be able to gather valuable data for your
book. Stick around. These women won't bother you. I'll make them promise
never to ask about the love-affair you didn't have--never even to come
near you. And we'll pay you beyond the dreams of avarice of a Broadway
chef. Won't we, gentlemen?"

The others nodded. Mr. Peters visibly weakened.

"Well--" he began. "I--" His eyes were on the stair. Mr. Magee also
looked in that direction and saw the girl of the station smiling down.
She no longer wore coat and hat, and the absence of the latter revealed
a glory of golden hair that became instantly a rival to the sunshine in
that drear bare room.

"No, Peters," she said, "you mustn't go. We couldn't permit it. Mamma
and I will go."

She continued to smile at the obviously dazzled Peters. Suddenly he
spoke in a determined tone:

"No--don't do that. I'll stay." Then he turned to Magee, and continued
for that gentleman's ear alone: "Dog-gone it, we're all alike. We
resolve and resolve, and then one of them looks at us, and it's all
forgot. I had a friend who advertised for a wife, leastways, he was a
friend until he advertised. He got ninety-two replies, seventy of 'em
from married men advising against the step. 'I'm cured,' he says to me.
'Not for me.' Did he keep his word? No. A week after he married a widow
just to see if what the seventy said was true. I'm mortal. I hang around
the buzz-saw. If you give me a little money, I'll go down to the village
and buy the provisions for lunch."

Gleefully Mr. Magee started the hermit on his way, and then went over to
where the girl stood at the foot of the stairs.

"I promised him," he told her, "you'd ask no questions regarding his
broken heart. It seems he hasn't any."

"That's horrid of him, isn't it?" she smiled. "Every good hermit is
equipped with a broken heart. I certainly shan't bother him. I came down
to get some water."

They went together to the kitchen, found a pail, and filled it with icy
water from the pump at the rear of the inn. Inside once more, Mr. Magee
remarked thoughtfully:

"Who would have guessed a week ago that to-day I would be climbing the
broad staircase of a summer hotel carrying a pail of water for a lady
fair?"

They paused on the landing.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio," smiled the girl,
"than are dreamed of, even by novelists." Mr. Magee started. Had she
recognized him as the Magee of light fiction? It seemed hardly likely;
they read his books, but they rarely remembered his name. Her face went
suddenly grave. She came closer. "I can't help wondering," she said,
"which side you are on?"

"Which side of what?" asked Magee.

"Why, of this," she answered, waving her hand toward the office below.

"I don't understand," objected Mr. Magee.

"Let's not be silly," she replied. "You know what brought me here. I
know what brought you. There are three sides, and only one is honest. I
hope, so very much, that you are on that side."

"Upon my word--" began Magee.

"Will it interest you to know," she continued, "I saw the big mayor of
Reuton in the village this morning? With him was his shadow, Lou Max.
Let's see--you had the first key, Mr. Bland the second, the professor
the third, and I had the fourth. The mayor has the fifth key, of course.
He'll be here soon."

"The mayor," gasped Mr. Magee. "Really, I haven't the slightest idea
what you mean. I'm here to work--"

"Very well," said the girl coldly, "if you wish it that way." They came
to the door of seventeen, and she took the pail from Mr. Magee's hand.
"Thanks."

"'Where are you going, my pretty maid?'" asked Magee, indicating the
pail.

"'"I'll see you at luncheon, sir," she said,'" responded Miss Norton,
and the door of seventeen slammed shut.

Mr. Magee returned to number seven, and thoughtfully stirred the fire.
The tangle of events bade fair to swamp him.

"The mayor of Reuton," he mused, "has the fifth key. What in the name of
common sense is going on? It's too much even for melodramatic me." He
leaned back in his chair. "Anyhow, I like her eyes," he said. "And I
shouldn't want to be quoted as disapproving of her hair, either. I'm on
her side, whichever it may be."




CHAPTER VI

GHOSTS OF THE SUMMER CROWD


"I wonder," Miss Norton smiled up into Mr. Magee's face, "if you ever
watched the people at a summer hotel get set on their mark for the
sprint through the dining-room door?"

"No," answered Magee, "but I have visited the Zoo at meal-time. They
tell me it is much the same."

"A brutal comparison," said the girl. "But just the same I'm sure that
the head waiter who opens the door here at Baldpate must feel much the
same at the moment as the keeper who proffers the raw meat on the end of
the pitchfork. He faces such a wild determined mob. The front rank is
made up of hard-faced women worn out by veranda gossip. Usually some
stiff old dowager crosses the tape first. I was thinking that perhaps we
resembled that crowd in the eyes of Mr. Peters now."

It was past one o'clock, and Mr. Magee with his four mysterious
companions stood before the fire in the office, each with an eager eye
out for the progress of the hermit, who was preparing the table beside
them. Through the kindness of Quimby, the board was resplendent with
snowy linen.

"We may seem over-eager," commented Professor Bolton. "I have no doubt
we do. It is only natural. With nothing to look forward to but the next
meal, the human animal attaches a preposterous importance to his
feeding. We are in the same case as the summer guests--"

"Are we?" interrupted Mr. Magee. "Have we nothing but the next meal to
look forward to? I think not. I haven't. I've come to value too highly
the capacity for excitement of Baldpate Inn in December. I look forward
to startling things. I expect, before the day is out, at least two
gold-laced kings, an exiled poet, and a lord mayor, all armed with keys
to Baldpate Inn and stories strange and unconvincing."

"Your adventures of the last twenty-four hours," remarked the professor,
smiling wanly, "have led you to expect too much. I have made inquiries
of Quimby. There are, aside from his own, but seven keys in all to the
various doors of Baldpate Inn. Four are here represented. It is hardly
likely that the other three will send delegates, and if they should, you
have but a slim chance for kings and poets. Even Baldpate's capacity for
excitement, you see, is limited by the number of little steel keys which
open its portals to exiles from the outside world. I am reminded of the
words of the philosopher--"

"Well, Peters, old top," broke in Mr. Bland in robust tones, "isn't she
nearly off the fire?"

"Now see here," said the hermit, setting down the armful of dishes with
which he had entered the office, "I can't be hurried. I'm all upset, as
it is. I can't cook to please women--I don't pretend to. I have to take
all sorts of precautions with this lunch. Without meaning to be
impolite, but just because of a passion for cold facts, I may say that
women are faultfinding."

"I'm sure," said Miss Norton sweetly, "that I shall consider your
luncheon perfect."

"They get more faultfinding as they get older," replied Mr. Peters
ungallantly, glancing at the other woman.

Mrs. Norton glared.

"Meaning me, I suppose," she rasped. "Well, don't worry. I ain't going
to find anything wrong."

"I ain't asking the impossible," responded Mr. Peters. "I ain't asking
you not to find anything wrong. I'm just asking you not to mention it
when you do." He retired to the kitchen.

Mrs. Norton caressed her puffs lovingly.

"What that man needs," she said, "is a woman's guiding hand. He's lived
alone too long. I'd like to have charge of him for a while. Not that I
wouldn't be kind--but I'd be firm. If poor Norton was alive to-day he'd
testify that I was always kindness itself. But I insisted on his living
up to his promises. When I was a girl I was mighty popular. I had a lot
of admirers."

"No one could possibly doubt that," Mr. Magee assured her.

"Then Norton came along," she went on, rewarding Magee with a smile,
"and said he wanted to make me happy. So I thought I'd let him try. He
was a splendid man, but there's no denying that in the years we were
married he sometimes forgot what he started out to do. I always brought
him up sharp. 'Your great desire,' I told him, 'is to make me happy. I'd
keep on the job if I was you!' And he did, to the day of his death. A
perfectly lovely man, though careless in money matters. If he hadn't had
that failing I wouldn't be--"

Miss Norton, her cheeks flushed, broke in hurriedly.

"Mamma, these gentlemen can't be at all interested." Deftly she turned
the conversation to generalities.

Mr. Peters at last seated the winter guests of Baldpate Inn, and opened
his luncheon with a soup which he claimed to have wrested from a can.
This news drew from Professor Bolton a learned discourse on the tinned
aids to the hermit of to-day. He pictured the seeker for solitude
setting out for a desert isle, with canned foods for his body and canned
music for his soul. "Robinson Crusoe," he said, "should be rewritten
with a can-opener in the leading rôle." Mrs. Norton gave the talk a more
practical turn by bringing up the topic of ptomaine poisoning.

While the conversation drifted on, Mr. Magee pondered in silence the
weird mesh in which he had become involved. What did it all mean? What
brought these people to Baldpate Christmas week? His eyes sought the
great safe back of the desk, and stayed there a long time. In that safe,
he was sure, lay the answer to this preposterous riddle. When his
thoughts came back to the table he found Mr. Bland eying him narrowly.
There was a troubled look on the haberdasher's lean face that could
never be ascribed to the cruelty of Arabella.

The luncheon over, Miss Norton and her mother prepared to ascend to
their rooms. Mr. Magee maneuvered so as to meet the girl at the foot of
the stairs.

"Won't you come back," he whispered softly, "and explain things to a
poor hermit who is completely at sea?"

"What things?" she asked.

"What it all means," he whispered. "Why you wept in the station, why you
invented the story of the actress, why you came here to brighten my drab
exile--what this whole comedy of Baldpate Inn amounts to, anyhow? I
assure you I am as innocent of understanding it as is the czar of Russia
on his golden throne."

She only looked at him with unbelieving eyes.

"You can hardly expect me to credit that," she said. "I must go up now
and read mamma into the pleasant land of thin girlish figures that is
her afternoon siesta. I may come back and talk to you after a while, but
I don't promise to explain."

"Come back," pleaded Mr. Magee. "That is all I ask."

"A tiny boon," she smiled. "I grant it."

She followed the generous figure of the other woman up the stair and,
casting back a dazzling smile from the landing, disappeared. Mr. Magee
turned to find Professor Bolton discoursing to Mr. Bland on some aspects
of the Pagan Renaissance. Mr. Bland's face was pained.

"That's great stuff, Professor," he said, "and usually I'd like it. But
just now--I don't seem in the mood, somehow. Would you mind saving it
for me till later?"

"Certainly," sighed the professor. Mr. Bland slouched into the depths of
his chair. Professor Bolton turned his disappointed face ceilingward.
Laughing, Mr. Magee sought the solitude of number seven.

"After all, I'm here to work," he told himself. "Alarms and excursions
and blue eyes must not turn me from my task. Let's see--what was my
task? A deep heart-searching novel, a novel devoid of rabid melodrama.
It becomes more difficult every minute here at Baldpate Inn. But that
should only add more zest to the struggle. I devote the next two hours
to thought."

He pulled his chair up before the blazing hearth, and gazed into the red
depths. But his thoughts refused to turn to the masterpiece that was to
be born on Baldpate. They roamed to far-off Broadway; they strolled with
Helen Faulkner--the girl he meant to marry if he ever got round to
it--along dignified Fifth Avenue. Then joyously they trooped to a far
more alluring, more human girl, who pressed a bit of cambric to her face
in a railway station, while a ginger-haired agent peeped through the
bars. How ridiculously small that bit of cambric had been to hide so
much beauty. Soon Mr. Magee's thoughts were climbing Baldpate Mountain,
there to wander in a mystic maze of ghostly figures which appeared from
the shadows, holding aloft in triumph gigantic keys. Mr. Magee had slept
but little the night before. The quick December dusk filled number seven
when he awoke with a start.

He remembered that he had asked the girl to come back to the office, and
berated himself to think that probably she had done so only to find that
he was not there. Hastily straightening his tie, and dashing the traces
of sleep from his eyes with the aid of cold water, he ran down-stairs.

The great bare room was in darkness save for the faint red of the fire.
Before the fireplace sat the girl of the station, her hair gleaming with
a new splendor in that light. She looked in mock reproval at Mr. Magee.

"For shame," she said, "to be late at the trysting-place."

"A thousand pardons," Mr. Magee replied. "I fell asleep and dreamed of a
girl who wept in a railway station--and she was so altogether charming I
could not tear myself away."

"I fear," she laughed, "you are old in the ways of the world. A passion
for sleep seems to have seized the hermits. The professor has gone to
his room for that purpose. And Mr. Bland, his broken heart forgot,
slumbers over there." She pointed to the haberdasher inert in a big
chair drawn up near the clerk's desk. "Only you and I in all the world
awake."

"Pretty lonesome, isn't it?" Mr. Magee glanced over his shoulder at the
shadows that crept in on them.

"I was finding it very busy when you came," she answered. "You see, I
have known the inn when it was gay with summer people, and as I sat here
by the fire I pretended I saw the ghosts of a lot of the people I knew
flitting about in the dusk. The rocking-chair fleet sailed by--"

"The what?"

"Black flag flying, decks cleared for action--I saw the rocking-chair
fleet go by." She smiled faintly. "We always called them that. Bitter,
unkind old women who sat hour after hour on the veranda, and rocked and
gossiped, and gossiped and rocked. All the old women in the world seem
to gather at summer hotels. And, oh, the cruel mouths the fleet
had--just thin lines of mouths--I used to look at them and wonder if any
one had ever kissed them."

The girl's eyes were very large and tender in the firelight.

"And I saw some poor little ghosts weeping in a corner," she went on; "a
few that the fleet had run down and sunk in the sea of gossip. A little
ghost whose mother had not been all she should have been, and the fleet
found it out, and rocked, and whispered, and she went away. And a few
who were poor--the most terrible of sins--to them the fleet showed no
mercy. And a fine proud girl, Myra Thornhill, who was engaged to a man
named Kendrick, and who never dared come here again after Kendrick
suddenly disappeared, because of the whispered dishonors the fleet
heaped upon his head."

"What wicked women!" said Magee.

"The wickedest women in the world," answered the girl. "But every summer
resort must have its fleet. I doubt if any other ever had its admiral,
though--and that makes Baldpate supreme."

"Its admiral?"

"Yes. He isn't really that, I imagine--sort of a vice, or an assistant,
or whatever it is, long ago retired from the navy. Every summer he comes
here, and the place revolves about him. It's all so funny. I wonder if
any other crowd attains such heights of snobbishness as that at a summer
resort? It's the admiral this, and the admiral that, from the moment he
enters the door. Nearly every day the manager of Baldpate has a new
picture of the admiral taken, and hangs it here in the hotel. I'll show
them to you when it's light. There's one over there by the desk, of the
admiral and the manager together, and the manager has thrown his arm
carelessly over the admiral's shoulder with 'See how well I know him'
written all over his stupid face. Oh, what snobs they are!"

"And the fleet?" asked Mr. Magee.

"Worships him. They fish all day for a smile from him. They keep track
of his goings and comings, and when he is in the card-room playing his
silly old game of solitaire, they run down their victims in subdued
tones so as not to disturb him."

"What an interesting place," said Mr. Magee. "I must visit Baldpate next
summer. Shall--shall you be here?"

"It's so amusing," she smiled, ignoring the question. "You'll enjoy it.
And it isn't all fleet and admiral. There's happiness, and romance, and
whispering on the stairs. At night, when the lights are all blazing, and
the band is playing waltzes in the casino, and somebody is giving a
dinner in the grill-room, and the girls flit about in the shadows
looking too sweet for words--well, Baldpate Inn is a rather entrancing
spot. I remember those nights very often now."

Mr. Magee leaned closer. The flicker of the firelight on her delicate
face, he decided, was an excellent effect.

"I can well believe you do remember them," he said. "And it's no effort
at all to me to picture you as one of those who flitted through the
shadows--too sweet for words. I can see you the heroine of whispering
scenes on the stair. I can see you walking with a dazzled happy man on
the mountain in the moonlight. Many men have loved you."

"Are you reading my palm?" she asked, laughing.

"No--your face," answered Mr. Magee. "Many men have loved you, for very
few men are blind. I am sorry I was not the man on the stair, or on the
mountain in the moonlight. Who knows--I might have been the favored one
for my single summer of joy."

"The autumn always came," smiled the girl.

"It would never have come for me," he answered. "Won't you believe me
when I say that I have no part in this strange drama that is going on at
Baldpate? Won't you credit it when I say that I have no idea why you and
the professor and Mr. Bland are here--nor why the Mayor of Reuton has
the fifth key? Won't you tell me what it all means?"

"I mustn't," she replied, shaking her head. "I can trust no one--not
even you. I mustn't believe that you don't know--it's preposterous. I
must say over and over--even he is simply--will you pardon me--flirting,
trying to learn what he can learn. I must."

"You can't even tell me why you wept in the station?"

"For a simple silly reason. I was afraid. I had taken up a task too big
for me by far--taken it up bravely when I was out in the sunlight of
Reuton. But when I saw Upper Asquewan Falls, and the dark came, and that
dingy station swallowed me up, something gave way inside me and I felt I
was going to fail. So--I cried. A woman's way."

"If I were only permitted to help--" Mr. Magee pleaded.

"No--I must go forward alone. I can trust no one, now. Perhaps things
will change. I hope they will."

"Listen," said Mr. Magee. "I am telling you the truth. Perhaps you read
a novel called _The Lost Limousine_." He was resolved to claim its
authorship, tell her of his real purpose in coming to Baldpate, and urge
her to confide in him regarding the odd happenings at the inn.

"Yes," said the girl before he could continue. "I did read it. And it
hurt me. It was so terribly insincere. The man had talent who wrote it,
but he seemed to say: 'It's all a great big joke. I don't believe in
these people myself. I've just created them to make them dance for you.
Don't be fooled--it's only a novel.' I don't like that sort of thing. I
want a writer really to mean all he says from the bottom of his heart."

Mr. Magee bit his lip. His determination to claim the authorship of _The
Lost Limousine_ was quite gone.

"I want him to make me feel with his people," the girl went on
seriously. "Perhaps I can explain by telling you of something that
happened to me once. It was while I was at college. There was a blind
girl in my class and one night I went to call on her. I met her in the
corridor of her dormitory. Somebody had just brought her back from an
evening lecture, and left her there. She unlocked her door, and we went
in. It was pitch dark in the room--the first thing I thought of was a
light. But she--she just sat down and began to talk. She had forgot to
light the gas."

The girl paused, her eyes very wide, and it seemed to Mr. Magee that she
shivered slightly.

"Can you imagine it?" she asked. "She chatted on--quite cheerfully as I
remember it. And I--I stumbled round and fell into a chair, cold and
trembly and sick with the awful horror of blindness, for the first time
in my life. I thought I had imagined before what it was to be
blind--just by shutting my eyes for a second. But as I sat there in the
blackness, and listened to that girl chatter, and realized that it had
never occurred to her to light a lamp--then for the first time--I
knew--I knew."

Again she stopped, and Mr. Magee, looking at her, felt what he had never
experienced before--a thrill at a woman's near presence.

"That's what I ask of a writer," she said, "that he make me feel for his
people as I felt for that girl that night. Am I asking too much? It need
not be for one who is enmeshed in tragedy--it may be for one whose heart
is as glad as a May morning. But he must make me feel. And he can't do
that if he doesn't feel himself, can he?"

William Hallowell Magee actually hung his head.

"He can't," he confessed softly. "You're quite right. I like you
immensely--more than I can say. And even if you feel you can't trust me,
I want you to know that I'm on your side in whatever happens at Baldpate
Inn. You have only to ask, and I am your ally."

"Thank you," she answered. "I may be very glad to ask. I shall
remember." She rose and moved toward the stairs. "We had better disperse
now. The rocking-chair fleet will get us if we don't watch out." Her
small slipper was on the first step of the stair, when they heard a door
slammed shut, and the sound of steps on the bare floor of the
dining-room. Then a husky voice called "Bland".

Mr. Magee felt his hand grasped by a much smaller one, and before he
knew it he had been hurried to the shadows of the landing. "The fifth
key," whispered a scared little voice in his ear. And then he felt the
faint brushing of finger-tips across his lips. A mad desire seized him
to grasp those fingers and hold them on the lips they had scarcely
touched. But the impulse was lost in the thrill of seeing the
dining-room door thrown open and a great bulk of a man cross the floor
of the office and stand beside Bland's chair. At his side was a thin
waif who had not unjustly been termed the mayor of Reuton's shadow.

"Asleep," bellowed the big man. "How's this for a watch-dog, Lou?"

"Right on the job, ain't he?" sneered the thin one.

Mr. Bland started suddenly from slumber, and looked up into the eyes of
the newcomers.

"Hello, Cargan," he said. "Hello, Lou. For the love of heaven, don't
shout so. The place is full of them."

"Full of what?" asked the mayor.

"Of spotters, maybe--I don't know what they are. There's an old
high-brow and a fresh young guy, and two women."

"People," gasped the mayor. "People--here?"

"Sure."

"You're asleep, Bland."

"No I'm not, Cargan," cried the haberdasher. "Look around for yourself.
The inn's overrun with them."

Cargan leaned weakly against a chair.

"Well, what do you know about that," he said. "And they kept telling me
Baldpate Inn was the best place--say, this is one on Andy Rutter. Why
didn't you get it out and beat it?"

"How could I?" Mr. Bland asked. "I haven't got the combination. The safe
was left open for me. That was the agreement with Rutter."

"You might have phoned us not to come," remarked Lou, with an uneasy
glance around.

Mr. Cargan hit the mantelpiece with his huge fist.

"By heaven, no," he cried. "I'll lift it from under their very noses.
I've done it before--I can do it now. I don't care who they are. They
can't touch me. They can't touch Jim Cargan. I ain't afraid."

Mr. Magee, on the landing, whispered into his companion's ear. "I think
I'll go down and greet our guests." He felt her grasp his arm suddenly,
as though in fear, but he shook off her hand and debonairly descended to
the group below.

"Good evening, gentlemen," he said suavely. "Welcome to Baldpate! Please
don't attempt to explain--we're fed up on explanations now. You have the
fifth key, of course. Welcome to our small but growing circle."

The big man advanced threateningly. Mr. Magee saw that his face was very
red, his neck very thick, but his mouth a cute little cupid's bow that
might well have adorned a dainty baby in the park.

"Who are you?" bellowed the mayor of Reuton in a tone meant to be
cowering.

"I forget," replied Mr. Magee easily. "Bland, who am I to-day? The
cast-off lover of Arabella, the fleeing artist, or the thief of
portraits from a New York millionaire's home? Really, it doesn't matter.
We shift our stories from time to time. As the first of the Baldpate
hermits, however, it is my duty to welcome you, which I hereby do."

The mayor pointed dramatically to the stair.

"I give you fifteen minutes," he roared, "to pack up and get out. I
don't want you here. Understand?"

To Cargan's side came the slinking figure of Lou Max. His face was the
withered yellow of an old lemon; his garb suggested shop-windows on
dirty side streets; unpleasant eyes shifted behind a pair of gold-rimmed
glasses. His attitude was that of the dog who crouches by its master.

"Clear out," he snarled.

"By no means," replied Magee, looking the mayor squarely in the eye. "I
was here first. I'm here to stay. Put me out, will you? Well, perhaps,
after a fight. But I'd be back in an hour, and with me whatever police
Upper Asquewan Falls owns to."

He saw that the opposing force wavered at this.

"I want no trouble, gentlemen," he went on. "Believe me, I shall be
happy to have your company to dinner. Your command that I withdraw is
ill-timed, not to say ill-natured and impolite. Let us all forget it."

The mayor of Reuton turned away, and his dog slid into the shadows.

"Have I your promise to stay to dinner?" went on Magee. No answer came
from the trio in the dusk. "Silence gives consent," he added gaily. "You
must excuse me while I dress. Bland, will you inform Mr. Peters that we
are to have company to dinner? Handle him gently. Emphasize the fact
that our guests are men."

He ran up the stairs. At the top of the second flight he met the girl,
and her eyes, he thought, shone in the dark.

"Oh, I'm so glad," she whispered.

"Glad of what?" asked Magee.

"That you are not on their side," she answered.

Mr. Magee paused at the door of number seven.

"I should say not," he remarked. "Whatever it's all about, I should say
not. Put on your prettiest gown, my lady. I've invited the mayor to
dinner."




CHAPTER VII

THE MAYOR BEGINS A VIGIL


One summer evening, in dim dead days gone by, an inexperienced head
waiter at Baldpate Inn had attempted to seat Mrs. J. Sanderson Clark, of
Pittsburgh, at the same table with the unassuming Smiths, of Tiffin,
Ohio. The remarks of Mrs. Clark, who was at the time busily engaged in
trying to found a first family, lingered long in the memory of those who
heard them. So long, in fact, that Miss Norton, standing with Mr. Magee
in the hotel office awaiting the signal from Peters that dinner was
ready, could repeat them almost verbatim. Mr. Magee cast a humorous look
about.

"Lucky the manners and customs of the summer folks aren't carried over
into the winter," he said. "Imagine a Mrs. Clark asked to sit at table
with the mayor of Reuton and his picturesque but somewhat soiled friend,
Mr. Max. I hope the dinner is a huge success."

The girl laughed.

"The natural nervousness of a host," she remarked. "Don't worry. The
hermit and his tins won't fail you."

"It's not the culinary end that worries me," smiled Magee. "It's the
repartee and wit. I want the mayor to feel at home. Do you know any good
stories ascribed to Congressman Jones, of the Asquewan district?"

Together they strolled to a window. The snow had begun to fall again,
and the lights of the little hamlet below showed but dimly through the
white blur.

"I want you to know," said the girl, "that I trust you now. And when the
time comes, as it will soon--to-night--I am going to ask you to help me.
I may ask a rather big thing, and ask you to do it blindly, just
trusting in me, as I refused to trust in you." She stopped and looked
very seriously into Mr. Magee's face.

"I'm mighty glad," he answered in a low tone. "From the moment I saw you
weeping in the station I've wanted to be of help to you. The station
agent advised me not to interfere. He said to become involved with a
weeping woman meant trouble. The fool. As though any trouble--"

"He was right," put in the girl, "it probably will mean trouble."

"As though any storm," finished Mr. Magee "would not be worth the
rainbow of your smile at the end."

"A very fancy figure," laughed she. "But storms aren't nice."

"There are a few of us," replied Magee, "who can be merry through the
worst of them because of the rainbow to come."

For answer, she flattened her finely-modeled nose into shapelessness
against the cold pane. Back of them in the candle-lighted room, the
motley crew of Baldpate's winter guests stood about in various attitudes
of waiting. In front of the fire the holder of the Chair of Comparative
Literature quoted poetry to Mrs. Norton, and probably it never occurred
to the old man that the woman to whom he talked was that nightmare of
his life--a peroxide blonde. Ten feet away in the flickering half-light,
the immense bulk of the mayor of Reuton reposed on the arm of a leather
couch, and before him stood his lithe unpleasant companion, Lou Max,
side by side with Mr. Bland, whose talk of haberdashery was forever
stilled. The candles sputtered, the storm angrily rattled the windows;
Mr. Peters flitted like a hairy wraith about the table. So the strange
game that was being played at Baldpate Inn followed the example of good
digestion and waited on appetite.

What Mr. Magee flippantly termed his dinner party was seated at last,
and there began a meal destined to linger long in the memories of those
who partook if it. Puzzled beyond words, the host took stock of his
guests. Opposite him, at the foot of the table, he could see the lined
tired face of Mrs. Norton, dazed, uncomprehending, a little frightened.
At his right the great red acreage of Cargan's face held defiance and
some amusement; beside it sneered the cruel face of Max; beyond that Mr.
Bland's countenance told a story of worry and impotent anger. And on Mr.
Magee's left sat the professor, bearded, spectacled, calm, seemingly
undisturbed by this queer flurry of events, beside the fair girl of the
station who trusted Magee at last. In the first few moments of silence
Mr. Magee compared her delicate features with the coarse knowing face of
the woman at the table's foot, and inwardly answered "No."

Without the genial complement of talk the dinner began. Mr. Peters
appeared with another variety of his canned soup, whereupon the silence
was broken by the gastronomic endeavors of Mr. Max and the mayor. Mr.
Magee was reflecting that conversation must be encouraged, when Cargan
suddenly spoke.

"I hope I ain't putting you folks out none," he remarked with obvious
sarcasm. "It ain't my habit to drop in unexpected like this. But
business--"

"We're delighted, I'm sure," said Mr. Magee politely.

"I suppose you want to know why I'm here," the mayor went on.
"Well--" he hesitated--"it's like this--"

"Dear Mr. Cargan," Magee broke in, "spare us, I pray. And spare
yourself. We have had explanations until we are weary. We have decided
to drop them altogether, and just to take it for granted that, in the
words of the song, we're here because we're here."

"All right," replied Cargan, evidently relieved. "That suits me. I'm
tired explaining, anyhow. There's a bunch of reformers rose up lately in
Reuton--maybe you've heard about 'em. A lovely bunch. A white necktie
and a half-portion of brains apiece. They say they're going to do for me
at the next election."

Mr. Max laughed harshly from the vicinity of his soup.

"They wrote the first joke book, them people," he said.

"Well," went on Cargan, "there ain't nobody so insignificant and
piffling that people won't listen to 'em when they attack a man in
public life. So I've had to reply to this comic opera bunch, and as I
say, I'm about wore out explaining. I've had to explain that I never
stole the town I used to live in in Indiana, and that I didn't stick up
my father with a knife. It gets monotonous. So I'm much obliged to you
for passing the explanations up. We won't bother you long, me and Lou. I
got a little business here, and then we'll mosey along. We'll clear out
about nine o'clock."

"No," protested Magee. "So soon? We must make it pleasant for you while
you stay. I always hate hosts who talk about their servants--I have a
friend who bores me to death because he has a Jap butler he believes was
at Mukden. But I think I am justified in calling your attention to
ours--Mr. Peters, the Hermit of Baldpate Mountain. Cooking is merely his
avocation. He is writing a book."

"That guy," remarked Cargan, incredulous.

"What do you know about that?" asked Mr. Bland. "It certainly will get a
lot of hot advertising if it ever appears. It's meant to prove that all
the trouble in the world has been caused by woman."

The mayor considered.

"He's off--he's nutty, that fellow," he announced. "It ain't women that
cause all of the trouble."

"Thank you, Mr. Cargan," said Miss Norton, smiling.

"Anybody'd know it to look at you, miss," replied the mayor in his most
gallant manner. Then he added hastily: "And you, ma'am," with a nod in
the other woman's direction.

"I don't know as I got the evidence in my face," responded Mrs. Norton
easily, "but women don't make no trouble, I know that. I think the man's
crazy, myself, and I'd tell him so if he wasn't the cook." She paused,
for Peters had entered the room. There was silence while he changed the
courses. "It's getting so now you can't say the things to a cook you can
to a king," she finished, after the hermit had retired.

"Ahem--Mr. Cargan," put in Professor Bolton, "you give it as your
opinion that woman is no trouble-maker, and I must admit that I agree
with your premise in general, although occasionally she may cause a--a
slight annoyance. Undeniably, there is a lot of trouble in the world. To
whose efforts do you ascribe it?"

The mayor ran his thick fingers through his hair.

"I got you," he said, "and I got your answer, too. Who makes the
trouble? Who's made it from the beginning of time? The reformers, Doc.
Yes, sir. Who was the first reformer? The snake in the garden of Eden.
This hermit guy probably has that affair laid down at woman's door. Not
much. Everything was running all right around the garden, and then the
snake came along. It's a twenty to one shot he'd just finished a series
of articles on 'The Shame of Eden' for a magazine. 'What d'ye mean?' he
says to the woman, 'by letting well enough alone? Things are all wrong
here. The present administration is running everything into the ground.
I can tell you a few things that will open your eyes. What's that? What
you don't know won't hurt you? The old cry', he says, 'the old cry
against which progressives got to fight,' he says. 'Wake up. You need a
change here. Try this nice red apple, and you'll see things the way I
do.' And the woman fell for it. You know what happened."

"An original point of view," said the dazed professor.

"Yes, Doc," went on Mr. Cargan, evidently on a favorite topic, "it's the
reformers that have caused all the trouble, from that snake down. Things
are running smooth, folks all prosperous and satisfied--then they come
along in their gum shoes and white neckties. And they knock away at the
existing order until the public begins to believe 'em and gives 'em a
chance to run things. What's the result? The world's in a worse tangle
than ever before."

"You feel deeply on the subject, Mr. Cargan," remarked Magee.

"I ought to," the mayor replied. "I ain't no writer, but if I was, I'd
turn out a book that would drive this whiskered hermit's argument to the
wall. Woman--bah! The only way women make trouble is by falling for the
reform gag."

Mr. Peters here interrupted with the dessert, and through that course
Mr. Cargan elaborated on his theory. He pointed out how, in many states,
reform had interrupted the smooth flow of life, set everything awhirl,
and cruelly sent "the boys" who had always been faithful out into the
cold world seeking the stranger, work. While he talked, the eyes of Lou
Max looked out at him from behind the incongruous gold-rimmed glasses,
with the devotion of the dog to its master clearly written in them. Mr.
Magee had read many articles about this picturesque Cargan who had
fought his way with his fists to the position of practical dictator in
the city of Reuton. The story was seldom told without a mention of his
man Max--Lou Max who kept the south end of Reuton in line for the mayor,
and in that low neighborhood of dives and squalor made Cargan's a name
to conjure with. Watching him now, Mr. Magee marveled at this cheap
creature's evident capacity for loyalty.

"It was the reformers got Napoleon," the mayor finished. "Yes, they sent
Napoleon to an island at the end. And him without an equal since the
world began."

"Is your--begging your pardon--is your history just straight?" demurred
Professor Bolton timidly.

"Is it?" frowned Cargan. "You can bet it is. I know Napoleon from the
cradle to the grave. I ain't an educated man, Doc--I can hire all the
educated men I want for eighteen dollars a week--but I'm up on
Bonaparte."

"It seems to me," Miss Norton put in, "I have heard--did I read it in a
paper?--that a picture of Napoleon hangs above your desk. They say that
you see in your own career, a similarity to his. May I ask--is it true?"

"No, miss," replied Cargan. "That's a joking story some newspaper guy
wrote up. It ain't got no more truth in it than most newspaper yarn. No,
I ain't no Napoleon. There's lots of differences between us--one in
particular." He raised his voice, and glared at the company around the
table. "One in particular. The reformers got Napoleon at the end."

"But the end is not yet," suggested Mr. Magee, smiling.

Mr. Cargan gave him a sudden and interested look.

"I ain't worrying," he replied. "And don't you, young fellow."

Mr. Magee responded that he was not one to indulge in needless worry,
and a silence fell upon the group. Peters entered with coffee, and was
engaged in pouring it when Mr. Bland started up wildly from the table
with an expression of alarm on his face.

"What's that?" he cried.

The others looked at him in wonder.

"I heard steps up-stairs," he declared.

"Nonsense," said Mr. Cargan, "you're dreaming. This peace and quiet has
got to you, Bland."

Without replying, Mr. Bland rose and ran up the stair. In his absence
the Hermit of Baldpate spoke into Magee's ear.

"I ain't one to complain," he said; "livin' alone as much as I do I've
sort of got out of the habit, having nobody to complain to. But if folks
keep coming and coming to this hotel, I've got to resign as cook. Seems
as though every few minutes there's a new face at the table, and it's a
vital matter to me."

"Cheer up, Peters," whispered Mr. Magee. "There are only two more keys
to the inn. There will be a limit to our guests."

"What I'm getting at is," replied Mr. Peters, "there's a limit to my
endurance."

Mr. Bland came down-stairs. His face was very pale as he took his seat,
but in reply to Cargan's question he remarked that he must have been
mistaken.

"It was the wind, I guess," he said.

The mayor made facetious comment on Mr. Bland's "skittishness", and Mr.
Max also indulged in a gibe or two. These the haberdasher met with a wan
smile. So the dinner came to an end, and the guests of Baldpate sat
about while Mr. Peters removed all traces of it from the table. Mr.
Magee sought to talk to Miss Norton, but found her nervous and distrait.

"Has Mr. Bland frightened you?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I have other things to think of," she replied.

Mr. Peters shortly bade the company good-by for the night, with the
warmly expressed hope in Mr. Magee's ear that there would be no further
additions to the circle in the near future. When he had started off
through the snow for his shack, Mr. Cargan took out his watch.

"You've been pretty kind to us poor wanderers already," he said. "I got
one more favor to ask. I come up here to see Mr. Bland. We got some
business to transact, and we'd consider it a great kindness if you was
to leave us alone here in the office."

Mr. Magee hesitated. He saw the girl nod her head slightly, and move
toward the stairs.

"Certainly, if you wish," he said. "I hope you won't go without saying
good-by, Mr. Cargan."

"That all depends," replied the mayor. "I've enjoyed knowing you, one
and all. Good night."

The women, the professor and Mr. Magee moved up the broad stairway. On
the landing Mr. Magee heard the voice of Mrs. Norton, somewhere in the
darkness ahead.

"I'm worried, dearie--real worried."

"Hush," came the girl's voice. "Mr. Magee-we'll meet again--soon."

Mr. Magee seized the professor's arm, and together they stood in the
shadows.

"I don't like the looks of things," came Bland's hoarse complaint from
below. "What time is it?"

"Seven-thirty." Cargan answered. "A good half-hour yet."

"There was somebody on the second floor when I went up," Bland
continued. "I saw him run into one of the rooms and lock the door."

"I've got charge now," the mayor reassured him, "don't you worry."

"There's something doing." This seemed to be Max's voice.

"There sure is," laughed Cargan. "But what do I care? I own young
Drayton. I put him where he is. I ain't afraid. Let them gumshoe round
as much as they want to. They can't touch me."

"Maybe not," said Bland. "But Baldpate Inn ain't the grand idea it
looked at first, is it?"

"It's a hell of an idea," answered Cargan. "There wasn't any need of all
this folderol. I told Hayden so. Does that phone ring?"

"No--it'll just flash a light, when they want us," Bland told him.

Mr. Magee and Professor Bolton continued softly up the stairs, and in
answer to the former's invitation, the old man entered number seven and
took a chair by the fire.

"It is an amazing tangle," he remarked, "in which we are involved. I
have no idea what your place is in the scheme of things up here. But I
assume you grasp what is going on, if I do not. I am not so keen of wit
as I once was."

"If you think," answered Mr. Magee, proffering a cigar, "that I am in on
this little game of 'Who's Who', then you are vastly mistaken. As a
matter of fact, I am as much in the dark as you are."

The professor smiled.

"Indeed," he said in a tone that showed his unbelief. "Indeed."

He was deep in a discussion of the meters of the poet Chaucer when there
came a knock at the door, and Mr. Lou Max's unpleasant head was thrust
inside.

"I been assigned," he said, "to sit up here in the hall and keep an eye
out for the ghost Bland heard tramping about. And being of a sociable
nature, I'd like to sit in your doorway, if you don't mind."

"By all means," replied Magee. "Here's a chair. Do you smoke?"

"Thanks." Mr. Max placed the chair sidewise in the doorway of number
seven, and sat down. From his place he commanded a view of Mr. Magee's
apartments and of the head of the stairs. With his yellow teeth he
viciously bit the end from the cigar. "Don't let me interrupt the
conversation, gentlemen," he pleaded.

"We were speaking," said the professor calmly, "of the versification of
Chaucer. Mr. Magee--"

He continued his discussion in an even voice, Mr. Magee leaned back in
his chair and smiled in a pleased way at the settings of the stage: Mr.
Max in a cloud of smoke on guard at his door; the mayor and Mr. Bland
keeping vigil by a telephone switchboard in the office below, watching
for the flash of light that should tell them some one in the outside
world wanted to speak to Baldpate Inn; a mysterious figure who flitted
about in the dark; a beautiful girl who was going to ask Mr. Magee to do
her a service, blindly trusting her.

The professor droned on monotonously. Once Mr. Magee interrupted to
engage Lou Max in spirited conversation. For, through the squares of
light outside the windows, he had seen the girl of the station pass
hurriedly down the balcony, the snowflakes falling white on her yellow
hair.




CHAPTER VIII

MR. MAX TELLS A TALE OF SUSPICION


An hour passed. Mr. Max admitted when pressed that a good cigar soothed
the soul, and accepted another from Magee's stock. The professor
continued to talk. Obviously it was his favorite diversion. He seemed to
be quoting from addresses; Mr. Magee pictured him on a Chautauqua
platform, the white water pitcher by his side.

As he talked, Mr. Magee studied that portion of his delicate scholarly
face that the beard left exposed to the world. What part had Thaddeus
Bolton, holder of the Crandall Chair of Comparative Literature, in this
network of odd alarms? Why was he at Baldpate? And why was he so little
moved by the rapid changes in the make-up of the inn colony--changes
that left Mr. Magee gasping? He took them as calmly as he would take his
grapefruit at the breakfast-table. Only that morning Mr. Magee, by way
of experiment, had fastened upon him the suspicion of murder, and the
old man had not flickered an eyelash. Not the least strange of all the
strange figures that floated about Baldpate, Mr. Magee reflected, was
this man who fiddled now with Chaucer while, metaphorically, Rome
burned. He could not make it out.

Mr. Max inserted a loud yawn into the professor's discourse.

"Once I played chess with a German," he said, "and another time I went
to a lecture on purifying politics, but I never struck anything so
monotonous as this job I got now."

"So sorry," replied Magee, "that our company bores you."

"No offense," remarked the yellow-faced one. "I was just thinking as I
set here how it all comes of people being suspicious of one another. Now
I've always held that the world would be a better place if there wasn't
no suspicion in it. Nine times out of ten the suspicion ain't got a leg
to stand on--if suspicion can be said to have a leg."

Evidently Mr. Max desired the floor; graciously Professor Bolton
conceded it to him.

"Speaking of suspicion," continued the drab little man on the threshold,
turning his cigar thoughtfully between his thin lips, "reminds me of a
case told me by Pueblo Sam, a few years ago. In some ways it's real
funny, and in others it's sad as hell. Pueblo Sam was called in them
terms because he'd never been west of Sixth Avenue. He was a swell
refined gentleman who lived by his wits, and he had considerable."

"A confidence man," suggested Magee.

"Something along that order," admitted Mr. Max, "but a good sport among
his friends, you understand. Well, this case of suspicion Sam tells me
about happened something like this. One scorching hot day in summer Sam
gets aboard the Coney boat, his idea being to put all business cares
away for an hour or two, and just float calm and peaceful down the bay,
and cool off. So he grabs out a camp chair and hustles through the crowd
up to the top deck, beside the pilot's hangout, and sits down to get
acquainted with the breeze, if such there was.

"Well, he'd been sitting there about ten minutes, Sam tells me, when
along came about the easiest picking that ever got loose from the old
homestead--"

"I beg your pardon," protested Professor Bolton.

"The ready money, the loosened kale, the posies in the garden waiting to
be plucked," elucidated Mr. Max. "This guy, Sam says, was such a perfect
rube he just naturally looked past him to see if there was a trail of
wisps of hay on the floor. For a while Sam sits there with a grouch as
he thought how hard it was to put business aside and get a little rest
now and then, and debating whether, being on a vacation, as it was, he'd
exert himself enough to stretch forth his hand and take whatever money
the guy had. While he was arguing the matter with himself, the jay
settled the question by coming over and sitting down near him.

"He's in the city, he tells Sam, to enjoy the moving pictures of the
streets, and otherwise forget the trees back home that grow the cherries
in the bottom of the cocktail glasses. 'And believe me,' he says to Sam,
'there ain't none of those confidence men going to get me. I'm too
wise,' he says.

"'I'll bet money you are,' Sam tells him laughing all over at the fish
that was fighting to get into the net.

"'Yes, siree,' says the last of the Mohicans, 'they can't fool me. I can
tell them as fur away as I can see 'em, and my eyesight's perfect. One
of 'em comes up to me in City Hall park and tries to sell me some mining
stock. I guess he ain't recovered yet from what I said to him. I tell
you, they can't fool Mark Dennen,' says the guy.

"Sam told me that at them words he just leaned back in his seat and
stared at the jay and whistled under his breath. Years ago, it seemed,
Sam had lived in the town of Readsboro, Vermont, and run up and down the
streets with one suspender and a stone bruise, and the kid that had run
with him was Mark Dennen. And Sam says he looked at this guy from the
woods that was running round crying to high heaven he needed a guardian,
and he sees that sure enough it was the tow-head Mark Dennen and--Sam
told me--something seemed to bust inside him, and he wanted to stretch
out his arms and hug this guy.

"'Mark Dennen,' shouts Sam, 'as I live. Of Readsboro, Vermont. The kid I
used to play with under the arc lights--don't you remember me?'

"But Sam says the guy just looked him straight in the eye and shut his
jaw, and says: 'I suppose you'll be asking after my brother George
next?'

"'You ain't got any brother George, you idiot,' laughs Sam. He told me
he was thinking how he'd treat his old friend Mark to a dinner that
would go down in history in Readsboro. 'Mark, you old rascal,' he says,
'don't you remember me--don't you remember little Sam Burns that used to
play andy-over with you, and that stole your girl in 1892? Don't you
remember the old days in Readsboro?' He was all het up by this time, Sam
tells me, and all the old memories came creeping back, and he kept
thinking he never was so glad to run across anybody in his life. 'You
remember little Sam Burns, don't you?' he asks once more.

"But this guy just looks back into Sam's eye with his own cold as steel,
and he says, says he: 'You're pretty clever, mister, but you don't fool
me. No, you don't come any games on Mark Dennen.'

"'But, Mark,' says Sam, 'I swear to you by all that's holy that I'm that
kid--I'm Sam Burns. What proof do you want? Do you remember old Ed
Haywood that used to keep the drug store right across from the
post-office? The guy that never washed his windows? I do. And Miss
Hunter that taught the sixth grade school when we went there--a little
woman with washed-out gray eyes and a broken front tooth? And that
pretty little girl, Sarah somebody--wait a minute, I'll get it or
bust--Sarah--Sarah--Sarah Scott, you used to be so sweet on? Did you
marry her, Mark? And old Lafe Perkins, who used to be on hand whenever
there was any repairs being made anywhere--rheumatism and a cane and a
high squeaky voice that he used to exercise giving orders about things
that wasn't any of his business. Why, Mark, I remember 'em all. Good
lord, man,' says Sam, 'do you want any more proof?'

"But this country blockhead just looked Sam up and down, and remarks
judicious: 'It's certainly wonderful how you know all these things.
Wonderful. But you can't fool me,' he says, 'you can't fool Mark
Dennen.'"

Mr. Max paused in his narrative for a moment. The sound of voices came
up from the office of Baldpate Inn. One, that of the mayor, boomed
loudly and angrily. In an evident desire to drown it, Mr. Max went on
with spirit:

"Well, gentlemen, it got to be a point of honor, as you might say, for
Sam to convince that guy. He told me he never wanted anything so much in
his life as for Mark Dennen to give in. It was a hot afternoon, and he'd
come aboard that boat for a rest, but he peeled off his collar and
started in. He gave Mark Dennen the number of bricks in the Methodist
Church, as reported in the Readsboro _Citizen_ at the time it was built.
He told him the name of the piece Mark's sister recited at the school
entertainment in the spring of 1890. He bounded on all four sides the
lot where the circuses played when they came to Readsboro. He named
every citizen of the town, living or dead, that ever got to be known
outside his own family, and he brought children into the world and
married them and read the funeral service over them, and still that
bonehead from the woods sat there, his mouth open, and says: 'It's
beyond me how you know all that. You New Yorkers are slicker then I give
ye credit for. But you can't fool me. You ain't Sam Burns. Why, I went
to school with him.'

"They was drawing near Coney now," went on Mr. Max, "and Sam's face was
purple and he was dripping with perspiration, and rattling off Readsboro
happenings at the rate of ten a second, but that Mark Dennen he sat
there and wouldn't budge from his high horse. So they came up to the
pier, Sam almost weeping real tears and pleading like his heart would
break: 'Mark, don't you remember that time we threw little Bill Barnaby
into the swimming hole, and he couldn't swim a stroke and nearly drowned
on us?' and still getting the stony face from his old pal.

"And on the pier this Dennen held out his hand to Sam, who was a
physical wreck and a broken man by this time, and says: 'You sure are
cute, mister. I'll have great times telling this in Readsboro. Once you
met one too smart for ye, eh? Much obliged for your company, anyhow!'
And he went away and left Sam leaning against the railing, with no faith
in human nature no more. 'I hope somebody got to him,' says Sam to me,
'and got to him good. He's the kind that if you work right you can sell
stock in a company for starting roof gardens on the tops of the pyramids
in Egypt. I'd trimmed him myself,' says Sam to me, 'but I hadn't the
heart.'"

Mr. Max finished, and again from below came the sound of voices raised
in anger.

"An interesting story, Mr. Max," commented Professor Bolton. "I shall
treasure it."

"Told with a remarkable feeling for detail," added Mr. Magee. "In fact,
it seems to me that only one of the two participants in it could
remember all the fine points so well. Mr. Max, you don't exactly look
like Mark Dennen to me, therefore--if you will pardon the liberty--"

"I get you," replied Max sadly. "The same old story.
Suspicion--suspicion everywhere. It does a lot of harm, believe me. I
wouldn't--"

He jumped from his chair and disappeared, for the voice of Cargan had
hailed him from below. Mr. Magee and the professor with one accord
followed. Hiding in the friendly shadows of the landing once again, they
heard the loud tones of the mayor's booming voice, and the softer tones
of Bland's.

"How about this?" bellowed the mayor. "Hayden's squealed. Phones to
Bland--not to me. Whines about the courts--I don't know what rot. He's
squealed. He didn't phone the combination."

"The rat!" screamed Mr. Max.

"By the Lord Harry," said the mayor, "I'll have it open, anyhow. I've
earned what's in there, fair and--I've earned it. I'm going to have it,
Max."

"See here, Cargan--" put in Mr. Bland.

"Keep out of the way, you," cried Cargan. "And put away that pop-gun
before you get hurt. I'm going to have what's mine by justice. That safe
comes open to-night. Max, get your satchel."

Mr. Magee and the professor turned and ascended to the second floor. In
front of number seven they paused and looked into each other's eyes.
Professor Bolton shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm going to bed," he said, "and I advise you to do the same."

"Yes," replied Mr. Magee, but had no idea what he had said. As for the
old man's advice, he had no intention of taking it. Melodrama--the thing
he had come to Baldpate Inn to forget forever--raged through that home
of solitude. Men spoke of guns, and swore, and threatened. What was it
all about? And what part could he play in it all?

He entered number seven, and paused in amazement. Outside one of his
windows Miss Norton stood, rapping on the glass for him to open. When he
stood facing her at last, the window no longer between, he saw that her
face was very pale and that her chin trembled as it had in the station.

"What is it?" cried Magee.

"I mustn't come in," she answered. "Listen. You said you wanted to help
me. You can do so now. I'll explain everything later--this is all I need
tell you just at present. Down-stairs in the safe there's a package
containing two hundred thousand dollars. Do you hear--two hundred
thousand. I must have that package. Don't ask me why. I came here to get
it--I must have it. The combination was to have been phoned to Cargan at
eight o'clock. I was hiding outside the window. Something went
wrong--they didn't phone it. He's going to open the safe by force. I
heard him say so. I couldn't wait to hear more--I saw him."

"Who?" asked Mr. Magee.

"I don't know--a tall black figure--hiding outside a window like myself.
The man with one of the other keys, I suppose. The man Mr. Bland heard
walking about to-night. I saw him and I was terribly frightened. It's
all right when you know who the other fellow is, but when--it's all so
creepy--I was afraid. So I ran--here."

"The thing to do," approved Mr. Magee. "Don't worry. I'll get the money
for you. I'll get it if I have to slay the city administration of Reuton
in its tracks."

"You trust me?" asked the girl, with a little catch in her voice. The
snow lay white on her hair; even in the shadows her eyes suggested June
skies. "Without knowing who I am, or why I must have this money--you'll
get it for me?"

"Some people," said Mr. Magee, "meet all their lives long at pink little
teas, and never know one another, while others just smile at each other
across a station waiting-room--that's enough."

"I'm so glad," whispered the girl. "I never dreamed I'd meet any one
like you--up here. Please, oh, please, be very careful. Neither Cargan
nor Max is armed. Bland is. I should never forgive myself if you were
hurt. But you won't be--will you?"

"I may catch cold," laughed Mr. Magee; "otherwise I'll be perfectly
safe." He went into the room and put on a gay plaid cap. "Makes me look
like Sherlock Holmes," he smiled at the girl framed in the window. When
he turned to his door to lock it, he discovered that the key was gone
and that it had been locked on the outside. "Oh, very well," he said
flippantly. He buttoned his coat to the chin, blew out the candles in
number seven, and joined the girl on the balcony.

"Go to your room," he said gently. "Your worries are over. I'll bring
you the golden fleece inside an hour."

"Be careful," she whispered, "Be very careful, Mr.--Billy."

"Just for that," cried Magee gaily, "I'll get you _four_ hundred
thousand dollars."

He ran to the end of the balcony, and dropping softly to the ground, was
ready for his first experiment in the gentle art of highway robbery.




CHAPTER IX

MELODRAMA IN THE SNOW


The justly celebrated moon that in summer months shed so much glamour on
the romances of Baldpate Inn was no where in evidence as Mr. Magee crept
along the ground close to the veranda. The snow sifted down upon him out
of the blackness above; three feet ahead the world seemed to end.

"A corking night," he muttered humorously, "for my debut in the hold-up
business."

He swung up over the rail on to the veranda, and walked softly along it
until he came to a window opening into the office. Cautiously he peered
in. The vast lonely room was lighted by a single candle. At the foot of
the broad stair he could discern a great bulk, seated on the lowest
step, which he correctly took to be the mayor of Reuton. Back of the
desk, on which stood the candle, Mr. Max's head and shoulders were
visible. He was working industriously in the immediate vicinity of the
safe door. Occasionally he consulted the small traveling-bag that stood
on the desk. Many other professions had claimed Mr. Max before his
advent into Reuton politics; evidently he was putting into operation the
training acquired in one of them. Mr. Bland was nowhere in sight.

Shivering with cold and excitement, Mr. Magee leaned against the side of
Baldpate Inn and waited. Mr. Max worked eagerly, turning frequently to
his bag as a physician might turn to his medicine-case. No word was
spoken in the office. Minutes passed. The bulk at the foot of the stairs
surged restlessly. Mr. Max's operations were mostly hidden by the desk
at which, in summer, timid old ladies inquired for their mail. Having
time to think, Mr. Magee pictured the horror of those ladies could they
come up to the desk at Baldpate now.

Suddenly Mr. Max ran out into the center of the office. Almost on the
instant there was a white puff of smoke and a roar. The inn seemed about
to roll down the mountain after all those years of sticking tight. The
mayor looked apprehensively up the stair behind him; Mr. Max ran to the
open safe door and came back before the desk with a package in his hand.
After examining it hastily, Mr. Cargan placed the loot in his pocket.
The greedy eyes of Max followed it for a second; then he ran over and
gathered up his tools. Now they were ready to depart. The mayor lifted
the candle from the desk. Its light fell on a big chair by the fire, and
Mr. Magee saw in that chair the figure of Mr. Bland, bound and gagged.

Mr. Cargan and his companion paused, and appeared to address triumphant
and jesting comment in Mr. Bland's direction. Then they buttoned their
coats and, holding aloft the candle, disappeared through the dining-room
door.

"I must have that package." Standing on the balcony of Baldpate Inn, her
yellow hair white with snow, her eyes shining even in shadow, thus had
the lady of this weird drama spoken to Mr. Magee. And gladly he had
undertaken the quest. Now, he knew, the moment had come to act. Max he
could quickly dispose of, he felt; Cargan would require time and
attention.

He hurried round to the front door of the inn, and taking the big key
from his pocket, unlocked it as a means of retreat where the men he was
about to attack could not follow. Already he heard their muffled steps
in the distance. Crossing the veranda, he dropped down into the snow by
the side of the great stone steps that led to Baldpate Inn's chief
entrance.

He heard Cargan and Max on the veranda just above his head. They were
speaking of trains to Reuton. In great good humor, evidently, they
started down the steps. Mr. Magee crouched, resolved that he would
spring the moment they reached the ground. They were on the last
step--now!

Suddenly from the other side of the steps a black figure rose, a fist
shot out, and Mr. Max went spinning like a whirling dervish down the
snowy path, to land in a heap five feet away. The next instant the mayor
of Reuton and the black figure were locked in terrific conflict. Mr.
Magee, astounded by this turn of affairs, could only stand and stare
through the dark.

For fifteen seconds, muttering, slipping, grappling, the two figures
waltzed grotesquely about in the falling snow. Then the mayor's feet
slid from under him on the treacherous white carpet, and the two went
down together. As Mr. Magee swooped down upon them he saw the hand of
the stranger find the mayor's pocket, and draw from it the package that
had been placed there in the office a few moments before.

Unfortunately for the demands of the drama in which he had become
involved, Mr. Magee had never been an athlete at the university. But he
was a young man of average strength and agility, and he had the
advantage of landing most unexpectedly on his antagonist. Before that
gentleman realized what had happened, Magee had wrenched the package
from his hand, thrown him back on the prostrate form of the highest
official of Reuton, and fled up the steps. Quickly the stranger regained
his feet and started in pursuit, but he arrived at the great front door
of Baldpate Inn just in time to hear the lock click inside.

Safe for the moment behind a locked door, Mr. Magee paused to get his
breath. The glory of battle filled his soul. It was not until long
afterward that he realized the battle had been a mere scuffle in the
dark. He felt his cheeks burn with excitement like a sweet girl
graduate's--the cheeks of a man who had always prided himself he was the
unmoved cynic in any situation.

With no thought for Mr. Bland, bound in his uneasy chair, Mr. Magee
hurried up the broad staircase of Baldpate. Now came the most gorgeous
scene of all. A fair-haired lady; a knight she had sent forth to battle;
the knight returned. "You asked me to bring you this, my lady." Business
of surprise and joy on the lady's part--business also, perhaps, of
adoration for the knight.

At the right of the stairs lay seventeen and the lady, at the left a
supposedly uninhabited land. As Mr. Magee reached the second floor,
blithely picturing the scene in which he was to play so satisfactory a
part--he paused. For half-way down the corridor to the left an open door
threw a faint light into the hall, and in that light stood a woman he
had never seen before. In this order came Mr. Magee's impressions of
her, fur-coated, tall, dark, handsome, with the haughty manner of one
engaging a chauffeur.

"I beg your pardon," she said, "but are you by any chance Mr. Magee?"

The knight leaned weakly against the wall and tried to think.

"I--I am," he managed to say.

"I'm so glad I've found you," replied the girl. It seemed to the dazed
Magee that her dark eyes were not overly happy. "I can not ask you in,
I'm afraid. I do not know the custom on such an occasion--does anybody?
I am alone with my maid. Hal Bentley, when I wrote to him for a key to
this place, told me of your being here, and said that I was to put
myself under your protection."

Mr. Magee arranged a bow, most of which was lost in the dark.

"Delighted, I'm sure," he murmured.

"I shall try not to impose on you," she went on. "The whole affair is so
unusual as to be almost absurd. But Mr. Bentley said that you were--very
kind. He said I might trust you. I am in great trouble. I have come here
to get something--and I haven't the least idea how to proceed. I came
because I must have it--so much depends on it."

Prophetically Mr. Magee clutched in his pocket the package for which he
had done battle.

"I may be too late." The girl's eyes grew wide. "That would be terribly
unfortunate. I do not wish you to be injured serving me--" She lowered
her voice. "But if there is any way in which you can help me in--in this
difficulty--I can never be grateful enough. Down-stairs in the safe
there is, I believe, a package containing a large sum of money."

Mr. Magee's hand closed convulsively in his pocket.

"If there is any way possible," said the girl, "I must obtain that
package. I give you my word I have as much right to it as any one who
will appear at the inn. The honor and happiness of one who is very dear
to me is involved. I ask you--made bold as I am by my desperation and
Hal Bentley's assurances--to aid me if you find you can."

With the eyes of a man in a dream Mr. Magee looked into the face of the
latest comer to Baldpate.

"Hal Bentley is an old friend and a bully chap," he said. "It will be a
great pleasure to serve a friend of his." He paused, congratulating
himself that these were words, idle words. "When did you arrive, may I
ask?"

"I believe you were having dinner when I came," she answered. "Mr.
Bentley gave me a key to the kitchen door, and we found a back stairway.
There seemed to be a company below--I wanted to see only you."

"I repeat," said Mr. Magee, "I shall be happy to help you, if I can."
His word to another lady, he reflected, was binding. "I suggest that
there is no harm in waiting until morning."

"But--I am afraid it was to-night--" she began.

"I understand," Magee replied. "The plans went wrong. You may safely let
your worries rest until to-morrow." He was on the point of adding
something about relying on him, but remembered in time which girl he was
addressing. "Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?"

The girl drew the fur coat closer about her shoulders. She suggested to
Magee a sheltered luxurious life--he could see her regaling young men
with tea before a fireplace in a beautiful room--insipid tea in
thimble-like cups.

"You are very kind," she said. "I hardly expected to be here the night
through. It is rather cold, but I am sure we have rugs and coats
enough."

Mr. Magee's duty was clear.

"I'll build you a fire," he announced. The girl seemed distressed at the
thought.

"No, I couldn't let you," she said. "I am sure it isn't necessary. I
will say good night now."

"Good night. If there is anything I can do--"

"I shall tell you," she finished, smiling. "I believe I forgot to give
you my name. I am Myra Thornhill, of Reuton. Until to-morrow." She went
in and closed the door.

Mr. Magee sat limply down on the cold stair. All the glory was gone from
the scene he had pictured a moment ago. He had the money, yes, the money
procured in valiant battle, but at the moment he bore the prize to his
lady, another appeared from the dark to claim it. What should he do?

He got up and started for number seventeen. The girl who waited there
was very charming and attractive--but what did he know about her? What
did she want with this money? He paused This other girl came from Hal
Bentley, a friend of friends. And she claimed to have every right to
this precious package. What were her exact words?

Why not wait until morning? Perhaps, in the cold gray dawn, he would see
more clearly his way through this preposterous tangle. Anyhow, it would
be dangerous to give into any woman's keeping just then a package so
earnestly sought by desperate men. Yes, he would wait until morning.
That was the only reasonable course.

Reasonable? That was the word he used. A knight prating of the
reasonable!

Mr. Magee unlocked the door of number seven and entered. Lighting his
candles and prodding the fire, he composed a note to the waiting girl in
seventeen:

"Everything all right. Sleep peacefully. I am on the job. Will see you
to-morrow. Mr.--Billy."

Slipping this message under her door, the ex-knight hurried away to
avoid an interview, and sat down in his chair before the fire.

"I must think," he muttered. "I must get this thing straight."

For an hour he pondered, threshing out as best he could this mysterious
game in which he played a leading part unequipped with a book of rules.
He went back to the very beginning--even to the station at Upper
Asquewan Falls where the undeniable charm of the first of these girls
had won him completely. He reviewed the arrival of Bland and his babble
of haberdashery, of Professor Bolton and his weird tale of peroxide
blondes and suffragettes, of Miss Norton and her impossible mother, of
Cargan, hater of reformers, and Lou Max, foe of suspicion. He thought of
the figure in the dark at the foot of the steps that had fought so
savagely for the package now in his own pocket--of the girl who had
pleaded so convincingly on the balcony for his help--of the colder, more
sophisticated woman who came with Hal Bentley's authority to ask of him
the same favor. Myra Thornhill? He had heard the name, surely. But
where?

Mr. Magee's thoughts went back to New York. He wondered what they would
say if they could see him now, whirling about in a queer romance not of
his own writing--he who had come to Baldpate Inn to get away from mere
romancing and look into men's hearts, a philosopher. He laughed out
loud.

"To-morrow is another day," he reflected. "I'll solve this whole thing
then. They can't go on playing without me--I've got the ball."

He took the package from his pocket. Its seals had already been broken.
Untying the strings, he began carefully to unwrap the paper--the thick
yellow banking manila, and then the oiled inner wrapping. So finally he
opened up the solid mass of--what? He looked closer. Crisp, beautiful,
one thousand dollar bills. Whew! He had never seen a bill of this size
before. And here were two hundred of them.

He wrapped the package up once more, and prepared for bed. Just as he
was about to retire, he remembered Mr. Bland, bound and gagged below. He
went into the hall with the idea of releasing the unlucky haberdasher,
but from the office rose the voices of the mayor, Max, and Bland
himself. Peace, evidently, had been declared between them. Mr. Magee
returned to number seven, locked all the windows, placed the much-sought
package beneath his pillow, and after a half-hour of puzzling and
tossing, fell asleep.

It was still quite dark when he awoke with a start. In the blackness he
could make out a figure standing by the side of his bed. He put his hand
quickly beneath his pillow; the package was still there.

"What do you want?" he asked, sitting up in bed.

For answer, the intruder sprang through the door and disappeared in the
darkness of the outer room. Mr. Magee followed. One of his windows
slammed back and forth in the wind. Slipping on a dressing-gown and
lighting a candle, he made an investigation. The glass above the lock
had been broken. Outside, in the snow on the balcony, were recent
footprints.

Sleepily Mr. Magee procured the precious package and put it in the
pocket of his gown. Then drawing on his shoes, he added a greatcoat to
his equipment, took a candle, and went out on to the balcony.

The storm had increased; the snow flurried and blustered; the windows of
Baldpate Inn rattled wildly all about. It was difficult to keep the
candle burning in that wind. Mr. Magee followed the footprints along the
east side of the inn to the corner, then along the more sheltered rear,
and finally to the west side. On the west was a rather unlovely annex to
the main building, which increasing patronage had made necessary. It was
connected with the inn by a covered passageway from the second floor
balcony. At the entrance to this passageway the footprints stopped.

Entering the dark passageway, Mr. Magee made his way to the door of the
annex. He tried it. It was locked. But as he turned away, he heard
voices on the other side.

Mr. Magee had barely enough time to extinguish his candle and slip into
the shadows of the corner. The door of the annex opened. A man stepped
out into the passageway. He stood there The light from a candle held by
some one in the doorway whom Mr. Magee could not see fell full upon his
face--the bespectacled wise face of Professor Thaddeus Bolton.

"Better luck next time," said the professor.

"Keep an eye an him," said the voice from inside. "If he tries to leave
the inn there'll be a big row. We must be in on it--and win."

"I imagine," said Professor Bolton, smiling his academic smile, "that
the inmates of Baldpate will make to-morrow a rather interesting day for
him."

"It will be an interesting day for every one," answered the voice.

"If I should manage to secure the package, by any chance," the professor
went on, "I shall undoubtedly need your help in getting away with it.
Let us arrange a signal. Should a window of my room be open at any time
to-morrow, you will know the money is in my hands."

"Very good," replied the other. "Good night--and good luck."

"The same to you," answered Professor Bolton. The door was closed, and
the old man moved off down the passageway.

After him crept Mr. Magee. He followed the professor to the east
balcony, and saw him pause at the open window of number seven. There the
old man looked slyly about, as though in doubt. He peered into the room,
and one foot was across the sill when Mr. Magee came up and touched him
on the arm.

Professor Bolton leaped in evident fright out upon the balcony.

"It's--it's a wonderful night," he said. "I was out for a little walk on
the balcony, enjoying it. Seeing your open window, I was afraid--"

"The night you speak so highly of," replied Mr. Magee, "is at your left.
You have lost your way. Good night, Professor."

He stepped inside and closed the window. Then he pulled down the
curtains in both rooms of his suite, and spent some time exploring.
Finally he paused before the fireplace, and with the aid of a knife
unloosed a brick. Under this he placed the package of money, removing
the traces of his act as best he could.

"Now," he said, standing up, "I'm a regular hermit with a buried
treasure, as per all hermit specifications. To-morrow I'm going to hand
my treasure to somebody--it's too much for a man who came up here to
escape the excitement and melodrama of the world."

He looked at his watch. It was past three o'clock. Entering the inner
room, for the second time that night he sought to sleep. "They can't
play without me--I've got the ball," he repeated with a smile. And, safe
in this thought, he closed his eyes, and slumbered.




CHAPTER X

THE COLD GRAY DAWN


The gayest knight must have a morning after. Mr. Magee awakened to his
to find suite seven wrapped again in its favorite polar atmosphere.
Filling the door leading to the outer room, he beheld the cause of his
awakening--the mayor of Reuton. Mr. Cargan regarded him with the cold
steely eye of a Disraeli in action, but when he spoke he opened the jaws
of a cocktail mixer.

"Well, young fellow," he remarked, "it seems to me it was time you got
up and faced the responsibilities of the day. First of which, I may
mention, is a little talk with me."

He stepped into the room, and through the doorway he vacated Mr. Max
came slinking. The unlovely face of the foe of suspicion was badly
bruised, and he looked upon the world with no cheerful eye. Pushing
aside one of the frail bedroom chairs as untrustworthy, the mayor sat
down on the edge of Mr. Magee's bed. It creaked in protest.

"You used us pretty rough last night in the snow," Cargan went on.
"That's why I ain't disposed to go in for kid gloves and diplomacy this
morning. It's my experience that when you're dealing with a man who's
got the good old Irish name of Magee, it's best to hit first and debate
afterward."

"I--I used you roughly, Mr. Cargan?" said Magee.

"No debate, mind you," protested the mayor. "Lou and me are making this
morning call to inquire after a little package that went astray
somewhere last night. There's two courses open to you--hand over the
package or let us take it. I'll give you a tip--the first is the best.
If we have to take it, we might get real rough in our actions."

Mr. Max slipped closer to the bed, an ugly look on his face. The mayor
glared fixedly into Magee's eyes. The knight who fought for fair ladies
in the snow lay on his pillow and considered briefly.

"I get what I go after," remarked Cargan emphatically.

"Yes," sparred Magee, "but the real point is keeping what you get after
you've gone after it. You didn't make much of an impression on me last
night in that line, Mr. Cargan."

"I never cared much for humor," replied the mayor, "especially at this
early hour of the morning."

"And I hate a fresh guy," put in Max, "like poison."

"I'm not fresh," Mr. Magee smiled, "I'm stating facts. You say you've
come for that package. All right--but you've come to the wrong room. I
haven't got it."

"The hell you haven't," roared the mayor. "Lou, look about a bit."

"Look about all you like," agreed Magee. "You won't find it. Mr. Cargan,
I admit that I laid for you last night. I saw you open the safe
according to the latest approved methods, and I saw you come forth with
a package of money. But I wasn't rough with you. I might have been, to
be frank, but somebody beat me to it."

"Who?"

"The man with the seventh key, I suppose. The man Bland heard walking
about last night when we were at dinner. Don't tell me you didn't see
him in that mix-up at the foot of the steps?"

"Well--I did think there was another guy," the mayor answered, "but Lou
said I was crazy."

"Lou does you an injustice. There was another guy, and if you are
anxious to recover your precious package, I advise you to wake him up to
the responsibilities of the day, not me."

The mayor considered. Mr. Max, who had hastily made the rounds of the
three rooms, came back with empty hands.

"Well," said the mayor, "I might as well admit it. I'm up in the air. I
don't know just at this minute where to get off. But that state of
affairs don't last long with me, young fellow. I'll go to the bottom of
this before the day is out, believe me. And if I can't do anything else,
I'll take you back to Reuton myself and throw you in jail for robbery."

"I wouldn't do that," smiled Magee. "Think of the awful job of
explaining to the white necktie crowd how you happened to be dynamiting
a safe on Baldpate Mountain at midnight."

"Oh, I guess I can get around that," said the mayor. "That money belongs
to a friend of mine--Andy Rutter. I happen to go to the inn for a little
rest, and I grab you dynamiting the safe. I'll keep an eye on you
to-day, Mr. Magee. And let me tell you now that if I catch you or any of
the bunch that's with you trying to make a getaway from Baldpate,
there's going to be a war break out."

"I don't know about the other hermits," laughed Magee, "but personally,
I expect to be here for several weeks to come. Whew! It's cold in here.
Where's the hermit? Why hasn't he been up to fix my fire?"

"Yes, where is he?" repeated Mr. Cargan. "That's what everybody'd like
to know. He hasn't showed up. Not a sign of breakfast, and me as hollow
as a reformer's victory."

"He's backslid," cried Magee.

"The quitter," sneered Max. "It's only a quitter would live on the
mountain in a shack, anyhow."

"You're rather hard on poor old Peters," remarked Magee, "but when I
think that I have to get up and dress in a refrigerating plant--I can't
say I blame you. If only the fire were lighted--"

He smiled his most ingratiating smile on his companion.

"By the way, Mr. Cargan, you're up and dressed. I've read a lot of
magazine articles about you, and they one and all agree that you're a
good fellow. You'll find kindling and paper beside the hearth."

"What!" The mayor's roar seemed to shake the windows. "Young man, with a
nerve like yours, you could wheedle the price of a battleship from
Carnegie. I--I--" He stood for a moment gazing almost in awe at Magee.
Then he burst forth into a whole-souled laugh. "I am a good fellow," he
said. "I'll show you."

He went into the other room, and despite the horrified protests of Lou
Max, busied himself amid the ashes of the fireplace. When he had a blaze
under way, Mr. Magee came shivering from the other room and held out his
hand.

"Mr. Cargan," he laughed, "you're a prince." He noted with interest that
the mayor's broad shoes were mighty near two hundred thousand, dollars.

While Mr. Magee drew on his clothes, the mayor and Max sat thoughtfully
before the fire, the former with his pudgy hands folded over the vast
expanse where no breakfast reposed. Mr. Magee explained to them that the
holder of the sixth key had arrived.

"A handsome young lady," he remarked; "her name is Myra Thornhill."

"Old Henry Thornhill's daughter," reflected the mayor. "Well, seems I've
sort of lost the habit of being surprised now. I tell you, Lou, we're
breaking into the orchid division up here."

While Mr. Magee shaved--in ice-cold water, another black mark against
the Hermit of Baldpate--he turned over in his mind the events of the
night before. The vigil in the office, the pleading of the fair girl on
the balcony, the battle by the steps, the sudden appearance of Miss
Thornhill, the figure in his room, the conversation by the annex
door--like a moving picture film the story of that weird night unrolled
itself. The film was not yet at an end. He had given himself the night
to think. Soon he would stand before the girl of the station; soon he
must answer her questions. What was he to do with the fortune that lay
beneath the feet of the mayor of Reuton at this minute? He hardly knew.

He was ready to descend at last, and came into the parlor of his suite
with greatcoat and hat. In reply to Mr. Cargan's unasked question, he
said:

"I'm going up the mountain presently to reason with our striking cook."

"You ain't going to leave this inn, Magee," said the mayor.

"Not even to bring back a cook. Come, Mr. Cargan, be reasonable. You may
go with me, if you suspect my motives."

They went out into the hall, and Mr. Magee passed down the corridor to
the farther end, where he rapped on the door of Miss Thornhill's room.
She appeared almost immediately, buried beneath furs and wraps.

"You must be nearly frozen," remarked Mr. Magee pityingly. "You and your
maid come down to the office. I want you to meet the other guests."

"I'll come," she replied. "Mr. Magee, I've a confession to make. I
invented the maid. It seemed so horribly unconventional and shocking--I
couldn't admit that I was alone. That was why I wouldn't let you build a
fire for me."

"Don't worry," smiled Magee. "You'll find we have all the conveniences
up here. I'll present you to a chaperon shortly--a Mrs. Norton, who is
here with her daughter. Allow me to introduce Mr. Cargan and Mr. Max."

The girl bowed with a rather startled air, and Mr. Cargan mumbled
something that had "pleasure" in it. In the office they found Professor
Bolton and Mr. Bland sitting gloomily before the fireplace.

"Got the news, Magee?" asked the haberdasher. "Peters has done a
disappearing act."

It was evident to Magee that everybody looked upon Peters as his
creature, and laid the hermit's sins at his door. He laughed.

"I'm going to head a search party shortly," he said. "Don't I detect the
odor of coffee in the distance?"

"Mrs. Norton," remarked Professor Bolton dolefully, "has kindly
consented to do what she can."

The girl of the station came through the dining-room door. It was
evident she had no share in the general gloom that the hermit's absence
cast over Baldpate. Her eyes were bright with the glories of morning on
a mountain; in their depths there was no room for petty annoyances.

"Good morning," she said to Mr. Magee. "Isn't it bracing? Have you been
outside? Oh, I--"

"Miss Norton--Miss Thornhill," explained Magee. "Miss Thornhill has the
sixth key, you know. She came last night without any of us knowing."

With lukewarm smiles the two girls shook hands. Outwardly the glances
they exchanged were nonchalant and casual, but somehow Mr. Magee felt
that among the matters they established were social position, wit,
cunning, guile, and taste in dress.

"May I help with the coffee?" asked Miss Thornhill.

"Only to drink it," replied the girl of the station. "It's all made now,
you see."

As if in proof of this, Mrs. Norton appeared in the dining-room door
with a tray, and simultaneously opened an endless monologue:

"I don't know what you men will say to this, I'm sure--nothing in the
house but some coffee and a few crackers--not even any canned soup, and
I thought from the way things went yesterday he had ten thousand cans of
it at the very least--but men are all alike--what name did you say?--oh
yes, Miss Thornhill, pleased to meet you, I'm sure--excuse my not
shaking hands--as I was saying, men are all alike--Norton thought if he
brought home a roast on Saturday night it ought to last the week out--"

She rattled on. Unheeding her flow of talk, the hermits of Baldpate Inn
swallowed the coffee she offered. When the rather unsatisfactory
substitute for breakfast was consumed, Mr. Magee rose briskly.

"Now," he said, "I'm going to run up to the hermit's shack and reason
with him as best I can. I shall paint in touching colors our sad plight.
If the man has an atom of decency--"

"A walk on the mountain in the morning," said Miss Thornhill quickly.
"Splendid. I--"

"Wonderful," put in Miss Norton. "I, for one, can't resist. Even though
I haven't been invited, I'm going along." She smiled sweetly. She had
beaten the other girl by the breadth of a hair, and she knew it. New
glories shone in her eyes.

"Good for you!" said Magee. The evil hour of explanations was at hand,
surely. "Run up and get your things."

While Miss Norton was gone, Mr. Cargan and Lou Max engaged in earnest
converse near a window. After which Mr. Max pulled on his overcoat.

"I ain't been invited either," he said, "but I reckon I'll go along. I
always wanted to see what a hermit lived like when he's really buckled
down to the hermit business. And then a walk in the morning has always
been my first rule for health. You don't mind, do you?"

"Who am I," asked Magee, "that I should stand between you and health?
Come along, by all means."

With the blue corduroy suit again complete, and the saucy hat perched on
her blond head, Miss Norton ran down the stairs and received the news
that Mr. Max also was enthralled by the possibilities of a walk up
Baldpate. The three went out through the front door, and found under the
snow a hint of the path that led to the shack of the post-card merchant.

"Will you go ahead?" asked Magee of Max.

"Sorry," grinned Max, "but I guess I'll bring up the rear."

"Suspicion," said Mr. Magee, shaking his head, "has caused a lot of
trouble in the world. Remember the cruelty practised on Pueblo Sam."

"I do," replied Mr. Max, "and it nearly breaks my heart. But there's a
little matter I forgot to mention last night. Suspicion is all right in
its place."

"Where's that?" asked Mr. Magee.

Mr. Max tapped his narrow chest. "Here," he said. So the three began the
climb, Mr. Magee and the girl ahead, Mr. Max leering at their heels.

The snow still fell, and the picture of the world was painted in grays
and whites. At some points along the way to the hermit's abode it had
drifted deep; at others the foot-path was swept almost bare by the wind.
For a time Mr. Max kept so close that the conversation of the two in the
lead was necessarily of the commonplaces of the wind and sky and
mountain.

Covertly Mr. Magee glanced at the girl striding along by his side. The
red flamed in her cheeks; her long lashes were flecked with the white of
the snow; her face was such a one as middle-aged men dream of while
their fat wives read the evening paper's beauty hints at their side. Far
beyond the ordinary woman was she desirable and pleasing. Mr. Magee told
himself he had been a fool. For he who had fought so valiantly for her
heart's desire at the foot of the steps had faltered when the time came
to hand her the prize. Why? What place had caution in the wild scheme of
the night before? None, surely. And yet he, dolt, idiot, coward, had in
the moment of triumph turned cautious. Full confession, he decided, was
the only way out.

Mr. Max was panting along quite ten feet behind. Over her shoulder the
girl noted this; she turned her questioning eyes on Magee; he felt that
his moment had come.

"I don't know how to begin," muttered the novelist whose puppets'
speeches had always been so apt. "Last night you sent me on a sort
of--quest for the golden fleece. I didn't know who had been fleeced, or
what the idea was. But I fared forth, as they say. I got it for you--"

The eyes of the girl glowed happily. She was beaming.

"I'm so glad," she said. "But why--why didn't you give it to me last
night? It would have meant so much if you had."

"That," replied Mr. Magee, "is what I'm coming to--very reluctantly. Did
you note any spirit of caution in the fellow who set forth on your
quest, and dropped over the balcony rail? You did not. I waited on the
porch and saw Max tap the safe. I saw him and Cargan come out. I waited
for them. Just as I was about to jump on them, somebody--the man with
the seventh key, I guess--did it for me. There was a scuffle. I joined
it. I emerged with the package everybody seems so interested in."

"Yes," said the girl breathlessly. "And then--"

"I started to bring it to you," went on Magee, glancing over his
shoulder at Max. "I was all aglow with romance, and battle, and all that
sort of thing. I pictured the thrill of handing you the thing you had
asked. I ran up-stairs. At the head of the stairs--I saw her."

The light died in her eyes. Reproach entered there.

"Yes," continued Magee, "your knight errant lost his nerve. He ceased to
run on schedule. She, too, asked me for that package of money."

"And you gave it to her," said the girl scornfully.

"Oh, no," answered Magee quickly. "Not so bad as that. I simply sat down
on the steps and thought. I got cautious. I decided to wait until
to-day. I--I did wait."

He paused. The girl strode on, looking straight ahead. Mr. Magee thought
of ad

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