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The Midnight Passenger : A Novel

by Richard Savage · English · Gutenberg #6008 · 496,378 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Midnight Passenger : A Novel

Author: Richard Savage


        
Release date: July 1, 2004 [eBook #6008]
                Most recently updated: December 29, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6008

Credits: Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MIDNIGHT PASSENGER : A NOVEL ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.










THE MIDNIGHT PASSENGER

A NOVEL

By RICHARD HENRY SAVAGE






THE MIDNIGHT PASSENGER

BOOK I

UNDER THE ARCH

    I. The Danube Picture
   II. Tidings of Great Joy
  III. In Magdal's Pharmacy
   IV. Under the Shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge
    V. Breakers Ahead! Checkmate! Mr. Arthur Ferris Works in the Dark

BOOK II

AN INSIDE RING

   VI. Dreaming by the Sea
  VII. "This May Be My Last Bank Deposit"
 VIII. The Strange Tug's Voyage
   IX. The Lightning Stroke of Fate
    X. A Cruel Legacy

BOOK III

THE MESSAGE FROM AMOY

   XI. The Girl Bride's Rebellion
  XII. The Lonely Pursuer
 XIII. On the Yacht "Rambler"
  XIV. Irma Gluyas
   XV. Miss Worthington Shares Her Secret




BOOK I.

UNDER THE ARCH.




CHAPTER I.

THE DANUBE PICTURE.


There was no air of uncertainty upon the handsome countenance of
Mr. Randall Clayton as he stepped out of the elevator of a sedate
Fourteenth Street business building and approvingly sniffed the
April morning breeze.

On this particular Saturday of ninety-seven, the shopping multitude
was already pouring from the Scylla of Simpson, Crawford & Simpson's
on Sixth  Avenue--and its Charybdis of the Big Store--past the
jungles of Altman's, Ehrich's and O'Neill's--to dash feebly upon
the buttressed corner of Macy's, and then die away in refluent,
diverted waves, lost in the  fastnesses of McCreery's and Wanamaker's,
far down Broadway.

The pulses of the young man were vaguely thrilled with the coming
of spring, and so he complacently took in the never-ceasing tide
of eager women, on the street's shady side, with one comprehensive
and kindly glance.

For six long years he had cautiously studied that same sea of
always anxious faces! He well knew all the types from the disdainful
woman of fashion, the crafty daughter of sin, the vacuous country
visitor, down to the argus-eyed mere de famille, sternly resolute
in her set purpose of making three dollars take the place of five,
by some heaven-sent bargain.

Countless times he had threaded this restless multitude,  with an
alert devotion to the interests of the Western Trading Company. He
was, to the ordinary lounger, but the type of the average well-groomed
New York business man.

And yet, his watchful eyes swept keenly to right and left, as he
breasted the singularly inharmonious waves of the weaker sex.

His left hand firmly gripped a Russian leather  portmanteau of
substantial construction, while his right lay loosely in the pocket
of his modish spring overcoat.

To one having the gift of Asmodeus, that well-gloved right hand
would have been revealed as resting upon the handle of a heavy
revolver, and the contents of the tourist-looking portmanteau been
known as some thirty-eight thousand dollars in well-thumbed currency
and greasy checks of polyglot signatures.

It was the "short day" of the week's business, and the usual route
for making his bank deposit lay before him. Down University Place
to Eighth Street he was bent, thus avoiding the Broadway crush,
and over to the shaded counting rooms of the Astor Place Bank.

Clayton's mind was concentrated, as usual, upon his important
business. Few of the neighbors in the great office building knew of
the vast interests represented by the modest sign "Western Trading
Company."

Certain gray-bearded bookkeepers, a couple of brisk correspondents,
a stony-faced woman stenographer, with a couple of ferret-eyed
office boys were the office force, besides the travelling manager
and Mr. Randall Clayton, the cashier and personal representative of
the absent "head," who rarely left his Detroit home to  interfere
with the well-oiled movements of the "New York end."

But daily, rain or shine, Mr. Randall Clayton himself  took his
way to the bank to deposit the funds to meet their never-ceasing
outflow of Western exchange.  There was an air of grave prosperity
in the sober offices of the great cattle company which impressed
even the casual wanderer.

Silence and decorum marked all the transactions of the weekly
messengers, paying in the heavy accounts of the hundreds of New York
butchers who drew their daily supplies from these great occidental
cattle handlers.  The various departments of the great business were
always kept as sealed books to each other, and only Emil Einstein,
Clayton's own office boy, knew how much treasure was daily packed
away into that innocent looking portmanteau.

Mr. Somers, the head accountant, with a grave bow, always verified
the sealed delivery slip of the funds, and compared it with the
returned bank books, carefully  filing away all these in his own
private safe with Clayton's returned list of Western and Southern
exchange.

On the sunny April morning, Randall Clayton was weary of the confining
life of the silence haunted office rooms, where he patiently bore
the strain of his grave duties, with a cautious avoidance of useless
communication,  fencing him even from his fellow employees.

As he strode along the crowded street, his jaded soul yearned for
the wild majesty of the far off Montana mountains, and the untrammeled
life of the Western frontier, given up perforce, when his father's
death had left him, twelve years before, alone in the world.

"The same old daily grind," he murmured. "Oh!  For one good long
gallop on the lonely prairies--a day in the forest with the antlered
elk, an afternoon among the gray boulders of the McCloud River."

He sighed as he recalled his drudging rise in business,  since his
father's old partner had set his life work out before him, when
the lonely boy had finished with honor his course at Ann Arbor.

Four years at college, two with "the chief," under his own watchful
eye, and then that six years of a  dragging upward pull in the New
York office had made a man of him; but, only a self-contained and
prematurely jaded man.

"It's too much to lose," he muttered, as he thought of his hardly
earned promotion, his four thousand a year, and--the future
prospects. He was the envy of his limited coterie, even though his
few intimates looked with a certain awe upon a man who was obliged
to file a bond of fifty thousand dollars for his vast pecuniary
handlings.

For the great association of Western cattle men were hard taskmasters
and only the head lawyers in Detroit knew that Hugh Worthington
had annually sent in his own personal check to the Fidelity Company
to pay the dues of the bond of the son of a man to whom he had owed
his own first rise.

"It's too hard," mused his patron, "to spy on the lad and then
make him pay for it. But it has to be," he sighed. "There are the
snares and pitfalls."

Many an eye approvingly followed the stalwart young man still in
the flush of his unsapped vigor, at twenty-eight, as the tall form
swept on through the crowds of polyglot women.

There was a healthy tan on Clayton's face, his brown hair crisply
curled upon a well-set head, his keen blue eye and soldierly mustache
finely setting off a frank and engaging countenance.

The grave sense of gratitude, his place of trust, the stern admonitions
of his sententious patron, Worthington,  and the counsel of his
only chum--a hard-headed young New York lawyer--had kept him so
far from the prehensile clutches of the Jezebel-infested Tenderloin.

Clayton had fallen judiciously into the haven of a well-chosen
apartment, sharing his intimacy only with Arthur Ferris, the
brisk-eyed advocate whose curt office missive always enforced the
lagging collections of the New York branch.

Simultaneously with his last promotion, however, there came to
Clayton the knowledge that he was  continuously and systematically
watched by the unseen agents of the Fidelity Company.

And, yet strong in his own determination, he bore as a galling
chain, growing heavier with the months, the knowledge that the eye
of the secret agent would surely follow him, in all the "pleasures"
incident to his time of life and rising financial station.

The sword hung over his defenceless head!--too busy for the gad-fly
life of the clubs--a strong, lonely swimmer in the tide of New York
life, he was as yet a comparative stranger to Folly and her motley
crew of merry wantons in gay Gotham.

The theater, some good music, his athletics, and the hastily
snatched pleasures of vacation, together with the limp reading of
an overwearied man, afforded him such desultory pleasures as fell
in his path.

On his way now to a luncheon engagement with his comrade Ferris,
at Taylor's, his mind was busied only with the care of the daily
treasure trust.

Serenely confident, he swung along, his two score thousand
of dollars being a mere ordinary deposit, in a business which, in
holiday seasons, and at times of monthly settlements, often stuffed
the portmanteau with sums rising the hundred thousand.

His callous eye vainly rested on the peopled loneliness of the
bustling crowd, intent only upon the possibility of a sudden dash
of some sneak thief, or the chance malignity of some swell "mobsman."

Suddenly Randall Clayton paused in his swinging stride. For a
face, rapt in its intense earnestness, broke in upon his gnawing
loneliness. A lovely vision, a very Rose of Life's Garden!

"By Jove!" he murmured, as with a new-born craft he lingered for
a moment before a window with an "art" display, only to watch the
receding form of the unknown beauty, whose single glance had left
him standing there spellbound.

There was an exquisite artist proof of a romantic scene upon the
Danube displayed in the place of honor, a view of one of the grandly
witching defiles where the mighty stream immortalized by Strauss
breaks out of the smiling Austrian plains, dashing along into the
Iron Gates of gallant Hungary.

He could not, as yet, tell what manner of woman she might be, but
his spirit burned within him as he felt the lingering spell of
those dark, witching eyes, for they had rested upon his own, in an
instant, unguarded glance of sympathy.

Mechanically following on, Clayton noted the refinement of the
daintily cut dark dress, veiling a form of ravishing symmetry.
There was a single red rose in the Polish toque, and that one touch
of color guided him as he followed the gracefully gliding unknown
beauty.

Strangely stirred at heart, he marked the distinction of the lady's
bearing, her well-gloved hand, clasping a music roll--and even
the natty bottines had not escaped him. He saw all this before he
was aware that he had passed on beyond University Place, with no
other purpose than to gaze into those sweetly earnest eyes again.
"Twenty-three--no, twenty-five," his keen perception told him, by
right of the supple and imperially moulded form of womanly ripeness.
And he wondered vaguely what daughter of the gods this might be--what
heiress of the graces of the laughter-loving goddesses of old!

He quickened his pace in the narrow space between University Place
and Broadway, fearful that he would lose that dark-eyed vision in
the human breakers at the Broadway curve. But his grasp mechanically
tightened upon his treasure, his right hand clutched the pistol
butt more firmly, as his cheek reddened with an involuntary blush.

He had seen just such faces on the Prater in sparkling Vienna, and
in the antique streets of Buda-Pesth on the one summer European
run, snatched from the Moloch worship of the Almighty Dollar!

Such eyes, now soft and dreamy, then lit up with a merry challenge,
had rested on the handsome young American tourist in the vaulted
halls of the Wiener Café, where the Waltz King's witching melodies
ruled the happy hour.

And supple forms like this he had often seen flitting among the
copses of the Margarethe Insel, when the yellow sunset rays shone
golden on the gleaming Danube, and the purple shadows began to steal
over the old fortress high uplifted there above Hungary's capital.
Here was a truant beauty escaped from a land of dreams.

Clayton had followed the unknown over Broadway's dangerously choked
throat, before the music roll gave him his clue. He was now in the
musical center of New York, and in proximity to the modest foreign
theaters where a conscientious art flourishes, as yet unknown to
the garish play-houses of upper Broadway.

Some visiting singer, some transplanted "Künstlerinn," he conjectured
as, never ceasing that queenly stride, the unknown crossed Fourth
Avenue toward the vicinity of Steinway's and the Irving Place
Theater.

As yet he had not seen that bewitching face again, for he was a
laggard in pursuit, his coward conscience smiting him for his first
errant detour.

It seemed as if the money in that portmanteau rustled a portentous
warning, but "a spirit in his feet" led him to execute a quick
left-flank movement as he sped first across the triangle, passing
under the shadow of the Washington statue (pride of the job brass
founder), and, with a stolen side glance, he surveyed   the lady
once more, as she leisurely mounted the steps of the "Restaurant
Bavaria."

His eyes dropped in a strange confusion as he once more met the
sweetly serious glance of those wonderful eyes, now resting upon
him with a gleam of vaguely timid inquiry. The delicately moulded
arm and slender hand were revealed, as with a graceful sweep the
lady lifted her rustling drapery and disappeared within the doors
of the one foreign café lingering reluctant on Union Square.

With a sigh, Randall Clayton turned back toward the south, for a
hasty glance at a clock face told him that there was left him but
fifteen minutes wherein to reach the Bank, before the brazen bells
would clang high noon. His heart was beating strangely as he retraced
his steps, for the ichor of young blood was boiling in his veins
at last.

He was lost in a clouding day dream, as he recrossed Fourth Avenue
and only dimly saw the foxy face of his office boy flash out of
the jostling crowd on the corner before he darted over.

As he resolutely stemmed the tide pouring eastward, he had turned
down Broadway before he realized that there had been a half smile
of recognition on those rich red Hungarian lips, a wordless message
in the dark splendors of the gleaming eyes.

Could it be? They had lingered but a few moments together gazing
on the pictured glories of the distant Danube. Clayton felt that
some new influence had suddenly loosened all the pent-up longings
of his ardent nature. He was above all the vulgar pretenses of
the "boulevardier." He now realized in a single moment the hollow
loneliness of a life made up only of so many monthly pay days and
so many dull returns of the four unheeded seasons. For his life had
only been a heavy pathway of toil up an inclined plane of manifold
resistances.

He recalled, how on his one European voyage, the distant gleam
of a single silver sail far out on the blue   rim of the pathless
ocean had suddenly broken in upon the eternal loneliness of that
watery waste.

And now, in all the peopled loneliness of all New York--hitherto
a human desert for him--the glance of these same alien eyes had
suddenly awakened him to yearnings for another life.

He was half way down the bustling Broadway to the bank before he
dared ask himself if the bright, shy glances of these unforgotten
eyes were meant for him.

"Perhaps," he muttered, and then his whole nature stifled the
unworthy suggestion. No! On that fair face only truth and honor
were mirrored. He was left alone absently checking up his deposit
list before he recalled all the proud and womanly bearing of the
beautiful unknown.

There was in her every motion the distinction of an isolation from
the contact of the meaner world! How hungrily he had watched her
onward path he only knew now.

And, with a secret pride, he recalled how daintily, like the swift
Camilla, she had sped onward through all those human billows heaving
to and fro, "the world forgetting, by the world forgot."

He pocketed all his deposit slips, then glanced mechanically at
the bank-book's entries, and wearily parried the badinage of the
bright-faced young bank-teller.

Clayton slowly wandered over toward Taylor's, and he was still lost
in his day-dream when he joined his chum, Arthur Ferris, finding
the modest feast already on the table.

"By Jove, old man! You're 'way behind time," began the nervous
lawyer. "I've got to hustle. I leave for Detroit on the evening
train."

"What's up, Arthur?" demanded the laggard.

"I've just had a wire from Worthington," seriously replied his
room-mate. "He is going to take a trip around the world, via San
Francisco. It seems that Miss Alice's health is precarious. And,
the 'Chief' is going to put me in special charge of all his personal
interests during this stay of six or nine months. I am to go out
for my instructions, travel on to the Pacific Coast with them, and
then, returning, inspect all the cattle ranches on my way back to
Detroit."

"I'm right glad to hear it, Arthur," said Clayton, warmly grasping
his friend's hand. "I know Hugh Worthington's mental processes well!
He wants some one to watch over all his home business machinery
while he makes the grand tour. And he has selected one not in the
local ring. It means a substantial promotion for you."

"I fondly hope so," replied Ferris. "He must have some such ideas,
for I'm to turn over all my New York matters here to the senior
in our firm, and I'm also to have a special power of attorney from
the Chief.  The annual election comes off before his return."

The two young men had finished their luncheon before Clayton thought
of the loneliness which his chum's absence would entail upon him.
There were many matters of detail to talk over, and Clayton hastened
his return to the office to deposit his bank-book in order to be
free to give the afternoon to his departing friend.

"I've only my office desk to clear up; it's a short horse and soon
curried," laughed Ferris. "I'll run over to my place and then meet
you at our rooms, so you can see the last of me. We can talk things
over while I pack up."

Ferris was busied with the cashier as young Einstein darted into
Taylor's. The lad's face brightened as he saw Clayton.

"I brought you down this telegram marked 'Rush,'" he said, all out
of breath. "I feared that you might go away for the afternoon." He
was off like a shot, before Clayton tore open the yellow envelope.

It was a private despatch from Hugh Worthington announcing his own
impending departure, and then directing all his mail to be forwarded
to the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.

The last words were: "Kindly send me a private letter by Ferris, and
give me any personal suggestions for handling the firm's business
in my absence. Will write you fully on private affairs from San
Francisco."

When Clayton parted with Ferris at the door of Taylor's, the two
young men wended their separate ways, each busied with the vision
of a fair woman.

Arthur Ferris, the dark "Pride of Columbia," as his college-mates
fondly called him, now dreamed of nothing but Alice Worthington's
golden hair and sapphire blue eyes, as the cable-car bore him swiftly
downward to the office of Hatch & Ferris, at 105 Broad Street.

Seven years older than Clayton, the already successful lawyer
recalled on his way the first confidences of the great capitalist,
when Clayton was sent into Manhattan Island business whirlpool.

The silver-haired Detroit widower had forgotten that even New York
City lawyers have hearts, when he had frankly admitted to Ferris
the reasons for detaching Randall Clayton from his own household.

"You see, Ferris," reminiscently said the money magnate, "I owed
my own rise to Clayton's ambitious father. When he retired from
the old firm of Clayton & Worthington, Everett Clayton had a cool
million. It was 'big money' in the days of seventy. But, plunging
into a new railway with an end left hanging out on the wild prairies,
the panic of '72 soon carried Clayton down.

"When he died, out West, I helped the orphan lad along. There was
no trouble until Randall became an inmate of my household, after
his graduation.

"I woke up, however, one day to find that my little Alice had leaped
into womanhood at a bound. And so I have decided to push Clayton's
fortunes from a safe distance. For, the social freedom of the
college lad and the schoolgirl in short frocks cannot be allowed
to the man of twenty-four and the blossoming girl of sixteen."

Hugh Worthington, giving over his protégé to the watchful care of
Arthur Ferris, old beyond his years, never realized the boundless
ambitions of the aspiring New York lawyer.

Ferris, with an eye ambitiously fixed upon the Senate of the United
States, had quickly become a living spirit of boundless energy in
the Western Trading Company's service, and Miss Alice Worthington,
on her New York visits, a girlish tyro, saw only the man, and not
the lawyer, in her accomplished metropolitan cavalier.

And so the coming young advocate's heart bounded with delight at
the six-weeks' future companionship of the woman whose unguarded
heart had silently drifted toward him "along the line of least
resistance."

Arthur Ferris burned now to make his calling and election sure, before
this "round the world" trip should present an endless succession
of fortune hunters to the gaze of the Detroit heiress.

Clayton, hastening back toward the office, was only intent upon
the answer to his chief's despatch and he never noticed, across
the street, the progress of Emil Einstein, threading the crowds
swiftly, and yet furtively watching his master's progress. He
reached Fourteenth Street two blocks in advance of his unsuspecting
employer, and then paused for a moment in the shaded corridor of
a photographer's atelier.

With a whispered word, the young spy slipped, eel-like, into the
crowd and had regained his desk long before Randall Clayton reentered
the office. The lad's face glowed with a secret triumph.

Clayton's countenance was flushed by some strong emotion as he
absently entered the private office of the head accountant. The
sharp clang of his bell brought the office boy at once to his side,
when, ten minutes later, the young cashier handed to Einstein a
telegram.

The doors of the various rooms were now clanging with the snap of
the locks as the boy respectfully said, "Anything else for this
afternoon, sir?" Clayton carelessly nodded for the lad's dismissal
and then bowed his tired head upon his hands, as the nimble youth
eagerly sped away to the telegraph office and his half holiday.

The office staff were all filing out, wearied with the week's work,
and Robert Wade, Esq., the chief manager, stared in surprise as
Clayton passed him without a word, in answer to his stately greeting.
He watched the young man, who slowly descended by the stairway,
forgetting the ready elevator service.  "What's up with Clayton?"
murmured the pompous official. "He forgot his manners!"

All unconscious of his strange actions, Randall Clayton slowly sought
the street level, waiting until his colaborers had all departed.
He then moved along again toward the window where the Danube view
still charmed the passerby.

Then, turning abruptly, he hurried away to a Broadway car, seeking
the solitude of the cosy apartment in the still respectable
"Thirties," which he had so long shared with Ferris.

He dared not, as yet, ask himself why Fate had shown him, a second
time, at that very window, the graceful figure of the beautiful
unknown.

But, there, with the slender music roll still clasped in her
delicate hand, she stood, lingering a beautiful Peri in his path,
on his return from the meeting with Ferris.

And he was not deceived this time. For the blush of semi-recognition,
the womanly embarrassment as their eyes met in a sudden surprise,
told him that she also had lingered for a moment at their involuntary
trysting place.

It was in vain that he sought for any cogent reason for the
reappearance of the unknown dark-eyed beauty.

There was no veiled suggestion in her wistful eyes, no lure of the
fisher of men in the restrained mien of the lovely unknown. He
paced his room for half an hour, until the arrival of Ferris brought
about an active discussion of all their personal and business affairs
which lasted until the coupé arrived to bear them to the station.

In the long examination of their mutual interests, Clayton had strangely
forgotten to even mention the name of Miss Alice Worthington, for
he was still keenly aware of the gradual fading away of the ties
of friendly family intimacy which had once bound him to the Detroit
household.

Moreover, loyal to his chum as he was, he could not forget how
often, in the past two years, he had seen letters lying on Ferris'
table, bearing the superscription of the woman who had been graduated
by Fate from that dangerous rank of "Little Sister."

Before Ferris finally turned over his keys, the cool lawyer laid
his hand gravely on Clayton's shoulder.

"Randall, my boy!" he said. "It's only fair to you to tell you that
the Fidelity Company makes private reports to Hugh Worthington upon
the inner life of all the bonded employees. Some of these documents
have always been forwarded through me.  Evidently there have been
some new directions given on this matter.

"Worthington is a man who forgets nothing. You will be left alone.
You know your dangerous trust.  Be always on your guard!

"For, even though born in its whirl, there are dangers in New York
which are sealed books to me, even now; and, you are a stranger
here, after all.

"Take care of yourself! Be watchful! There will be many jealous
eyes spying upon your every movement, and strange eyes at that."

They entered the carriage in a constrained silence, in the early
nightfall, and were soon whirled away toward the Forty-second Street
Depot. Some overhanging shadow seemed to dampen the ardor of that
friendly farewell, when the gliding train bore the lawyer away from
his friend's sight.

At that very instant the office boy, Einstein, darted out of the
great depot's main entrance and mingled with the passers by. "Now
for Fritz Braun," he chuckled. "She has caught on at last! He
followed her to the 'Bavaria.' The lawyer is gone for good!  The
field is clear. There's a twenty now in sight, and many a twenty
to follow."




CHAPTER II.

TIDINGS OF GREAT JOY.


While Randall Clayton was lingering moodily over a lonely dinner
at the Grand Union, his office boy was dallying with a cigarette
on the front platform of a Fourth Avenue car.

Emil Einstein had safely sized up the friendly adieu of the two
room-mates, and was now hastening down to report his successful
infamy.

"Too late for Sixth Avenue!" the hard-faced boy muttered. "Catch
him at 'the Bavaria,' sure."

The round, gloating eyes of the young New York-nurtured Jew were
ablaze with a fierce thirst for pleasure.

Round shouldered, strongly built, his Semitic countenance was all
aglow with a superabundant vitality, and the pleasure-loving mouth
alone belied the keen intelligence of the wide set Hebraic eyes.

An elève of the gutters of New York's East-Side ghetto, dangerously
half educated at the free public schools, Einstein, now nearing
seventeen, joined the dashing villainy of the Bowery tough to the
crafty long-headed scheming of the low-grade Israelite.

He had drank in all the precocious wiles of the Manhattan urchins
quickly after his sturdy Odalisque mother had dragged him, a
squalling urchin, out of the steerage confines of a cheap Hamburg
steamer.

A reckless, resolute, conscienceless sinner was the handsome Leah
Einstein; already, when, on the voyage, she fell under the influence
of a man who found his ready tool in this greasy but symmetrical
Esther, clad in her Polish rags.

When the decamping Viennese pharmacist had wearied of his low-life
Venus, their joint operations soon made the East Side too hot for
the man who boldly dared all, and who now yearned for a share of
the fleecing of the fatuous New Yorkers.

The Austrian criminal fugitive, after some years of varied adventure,
had circled back to New York City at last, and rejoiced to find in
Leah's son, now a burly youth, a fit companion and second for his
own craftily laid villanies. It was a capital for him, the legacy
of her nurture and his own training.

Mr. Fritz Braun's broad white brow was gathered in an impatient
frown as he strode out of Magdal's Pharmacy on Sixth Avenue and
paced with dignity past all the minor notables of the street.

Hulking policemen, loquacious barber, marketman and newsdealer,
small shop-keeper, and the saloon magnates, all knew the stolid
reticent German who presided over the veiled mysteries of Magdal's.

The whole region of Sixth Avenue, between Twenty-third and Thirtieth,
had its floating contingent of "sporting" men and women who well
knew the crafty wisdom lurking behind the blue spectacles which
veiled the pharmacist's piercing glances. Fritz Braun's "contingent"
were a brood of the Devil's own children.

Fritz Braun was strangely three hours late upon this especial
evening, but his step was evenly sedate as he entered Zimmermann's
for his before dinner Kümmel. A prosperous figure was he in his
mouse-colored top-coat of fashionable cut, his immaculate silk hat,
with the red dogskin gloves, and the heavy ivory-headed cane.

With his antique cameo scarf pin, his coat collar turned up around
his flowing golden beard, he was the very type of the sedate burgher
of Dresden or Leipzig.  And yet many a dark secret lurked in that
busy brain of his.

A dozen necks were craned after him, though, as he silently left
the saloon and caught the down-town car.

For from Greely Square to Eighth Street, from the cork room of
Koster & Bial's to the purlieus of old Clinton Place, all the "off
color" men and women of New York's "fly" circles knew and feared
the steady eyes gleaming through the cerulean lenses.

"He's a deep one, the Professor," grunted the Hanoverian barkeeper.
"Vat a lot 'e knows!" The Teuton rinsed his beer glasses with a
vicious twirl as he exclaimed: "Like as not, choost so like, he's
up to some new devilment! Niemand know vere 'e hangs out! He's a
wonder, he is, dat same Fritz!"

But the pharmacist lost all his sedateness as he sprang out of the
crosstown car after his transfer at Fourteenth Street and Fourth
Avenue.

He was the nimblest crosser of the busy corner, and then gazed
anxiously up and down the street, in front of the Restaurant Bavaria.

Wasting but a moment he smartly entered the café and then, with an
air of proprietorship, entered a curtain-shaded alcove.

The waiter silently placed the carte du jour before him, and merely
shook his head when Braun sharply demanded, "Any one here for me?"

A luxurious dinner was ordered, and the silent man was busied scanning
the convives when Emil Einstein, cautiously entering without haste,
furtively regarded all the diners.

They were the better class of artists--musical virtuosos, and
floating foreigners of the Teutonic business circles of lower New
York.

Frank, pleasure-loving continental women mingled freely with these
materialistic Romeos, who preferred the comforting cuisine to the
fiery and seductive cocktails of "The Opera" on the corner.

The artful Einstein was warily assuring himself that he was quite
unknown to the convives before making his report to his real master
and evil genius. For, young as he was, Emil Einstein well knew that
the tyrant master, who had been his mother's cruel lover, might
some day lure him on to the electric chair.

A guilty pride thrilled the depraved boy's heart to feel that he,
alone, in all the crowded ward, knew what manner of human devil
lurked behind those innocent-looking blue spectacles.

He had seen the ferocious grin which relaxed Fritz Braun's bearded
lips into a cruel grin, as the sly lad made a gesture which
indicated tidings of great joy.  Einstein's dress and bearing was
fully worthy of his respectable business station. He might well be
taken for the precious "only son" of some well-to-do Jewish-American
merchant.

Quick to learn, he had aped the mien of his American fellow
employees, and his "educational evenings" at the "Irving Place,"
the "Thalia," and the "Germania" had given to his bearing what he
fondly deemed an "irresistible social swing."

Greedy of pleasures, gluttonous and covetous, the young Ishmael
ardently looked forward to a comfortable ill-gotten revenue at the
hands of the man, who--through a skilful manipulation of the German
janitor of the Western Trading Company's office--had obtained the
place of office boy, "with substantial references," for the son of
his cast-off paramour.

Leah Einstein had long forgotten the face of the reckless Polish
country noble who was the real father of this budding criminal, and
the lad himself but dimly discerned the drift of his Mephistophelian
patron's proposed villainy.

Timid and cowardly at heart, the young waif would have shuddered
had he known of the callous-handed and desperate murders which had
shocked Vienna just before Hugo Landor, a talented and handsome
young chemist, disappeared forever in flight, lost under a cloud
of scandal caused by drink and a maddening devotion to a baby-faced
devil of the Ring Strasse Theater chorus, a woman at whose
feet the hungry-eyed aristocrats had knelt to sue, a man-eater, a
hard-hearted, velvet-eyed, reckless and defiant devil.

At an almost imperceptible nod Einstein drew near to his patron,
taking the vacant place in the little alcove, à deux, with his
back prudently screening him from any chance visitor who might know
the Western Trading  Company's personnel. Braun was eager for his
spy's report now.

"All right, at last!" the youth huskily whispered.  "I watched him
meet her, at the picture window, you know. I had posted her! And
then he slyly followed her over here and went three blocks out of
his way to pipe her off here! So, after his lunch at Taylor's, I
put her again onto his homeward way! And he's caught on! No matter!
She will tell you the rest herself!"

When the eager lad had finished, Fritz Braun growled under his
breath, "You are sure you made no bungle?"

"Dead sure," gaily answered the boy, draining his bock of Muenchner,
"I followed him to the bank and to Taylor's, and he is unsuspecting
of any plant, I know."

Braun's face relaxed as he pushed over a twenty-dollar bill to the
young Judas. "Come in Monday, about ten," he said, carelessly. "You
can go, now! I must hurry over to the river. I am late!"

There was a shifty light in Einstein's eyes as he mumbled, "I
can tell you something else, if you'll do the right thing." Braun
searched the young villain's face. "Go ahead! I'll pay you."

Emboldened by his success, Einstein loudly rapped to replenish his
glass. He was now panting to escape for certain tender engagements
of his own.

"The firm's lawyer, Ferris, the man who lived with Mr. Clayton,
has gone West for six months, so he will be left alone! I followed
them and saw Ferris off on the train. I took a telegram to the
office for Ferris and Clayton, so Clayton will be alone in the
rooms.  He's going to keep them, and I'm to go around there Monday
and pack up all Mr. Ferris' little things."

"Good, capital!" said Fritz Braun, his eyes gleaming.  "You must
manage to get me a duplicate key of Clayton's rooms!"

"Easy enough," proudly answered the young rascal.  "Mr. Clayton
trusts me in all things, and often gives me his latch-key and the
room keys when he wants anything from the apartment. Anything else?"

"Yes," stammered the lad, surprised at the stern glare of Braun's
expectant eyes. "The Fidelity fellows have been piping off all Mr.
Clayton's movements. They watch him on account of the big money that
he handles  every day. I know the man who shadows Clayton,  twice
a week, regular, on all his evening trips.  They've got their
spotters, too, in all the big bar-rooms, and all around the gambling
houses, the race courses, Wall Street and the Tenderloin.

"Now, after Clayton left, to-day, Ferris the lawyer came in and
told Mr. Robert Wade, that's our chief manager, that the Fidelity
Company would make their written reports twice a month to him,
while the lawyer's gone."

"I must have these reports!" cried Braun, forgetting  the raised
pitch of his voice, but the Venus and Tannhauser coterie around
were all now fondly busied with each other.

"I can get them! I have a key to Wade's own desk," glibly mouthed
the young spy.

"How did you get it?" eagerly demanded the astonished Braun.

"I had it made to get at his cigars," proudly boasted the unabashed
lad. "Wade keeps a couple of boxes of the best Havanas on Company
account, for the 'big customers.' Yes, and a drop of good old
cognac, too.

"There's often a bit of fun behind the ground glass partitions.
I've scraped a little eye hole."

"You are your sly mother's own darling imp," growled Braun, bringing
out his pocketbook. "She was the devil's own, too, before she got
old and lost her good looks," he sighed.

"Tell me," said he, selecting a note with grave  deliberation, "how
much did Clayton deposit to-day?"

"Only thirty-eight thousand," contemptuously answered  the boy, as
he clutched the note now held out to him. "Sometimes it's a round
hundred thousand," continued Emil, eager to show off his knowledge,
"and on the annual settlements, July 1 to 4th, last year we put
in two hundred thousand into the Astor Place.  That's our biggest
monthly settlement. I always help Mr. Clayton pack it up, in his
own room, after he verifies the accountant's tabs."

Fritz Braun suddenly awoke from a reverie. "Get out of here now, and
see that you post me on all that this Clayton is up to at night,
on his Sundays and  vacations. I'll give you a third twenty for
the two keys.  I may want to take a look at his rooms some Sunday
when you are sporting out of town.

"And watch the spotters, too! You might do a good turn in pocket
money by posting him, but only as I tell you, mind that! Now, don't
go to the devil too fast. Do you ever give your mother any money?"

Einstein's vicious leer was a silent answer. "Tell her she shall
have a new silk dress from me, if you keep your wits about you.
Remember, Monday!"

The lad sped away at a curt nod of dismissal, and was soon lost in
the devil's whirlpool of the Bowery.

But, as Mr. Fritz Braun sedately finished his cosy dinner, he saw
strange golden gleams in the blue, wreathing smoke mists of his
Perfectos.

"Two hundred thousand; that would be a stake.  And July, too; this
lawyer fellow gone. What a chance! There must be no mistake now! He
must lead himself on, now. One prick of the hidden hook and this
fat trout would be off forever I must see Irma and coach her.
Donnerwetter! It's too good to be true. After all this waiting.
And now I've got to keep my eyes on both the spider and the fly.
Irma is such a tempestuous devil. If Leah only had her years and
looks and dash, she would twist any man in the world around her
finger. But I can never teach this Hungarian madcap, Leah's velvet
softness and never-tiring patience."

The prosperous pharmacist gleefully paid for his dinner and nimbly
chased an East-side ferry-bound car. He laughed in spite of himself
at Emil's unflagging  deviltry. "He is a credit to Leah's Polish
blood and my Austrian nurture," mused Braun. "The young wretch
might be dangerous, too. He must know nothing of my deep game."

"If this Clayton will only break into the flirtation in the right
way, the victory is assured. But, if he were to show her off around
town, or try and dodge these spotter fellows in New York, then I
should lose a year's time, my expenses, and this heavy money stake.
It's the one chance of a life time."

In half an hour, Fitz Braun, crossing on the Tenth Street Ferry to
Greenpoint, was soon lost, as was his wont, in the human hive of
Brooklyn toilers. Men had seen him go over for years invariably on
this ferry, his burly figure was always seen on the Fulton Ferry
daily at half-past eight each morning, but not a soul among the
thousand clients of Magdal's Pharmacy  knew where the human fox,
Fritz Braun, laid his head to rest at night.

From nine till four he lurked behind the high  dispensing screen
of Magdal's Pharmacy, his inner life and antecedents a sealed book
to all the sleuth-eyed votaries of vice on Sixth Avenue.

And yet, for all his craft, on this balmy night of spring, the
man who had buried Hugo Landor's stormy past forever under staid
Fritz Braun's  impenetrable mask, shivered while plotting his new
iniquities lest the panther-footed pursuer might even now demand at
his hand a life in return for those victims who had lain, staring
eyed, cold in death, mute witness against him in far away Vienna.
The terrible  record of his past evil days haunted his every footstep
now. He saw these avenging eyes even in his dreams.

There was but one who could lift the veil of the awful past. On
this eventful night Fritz Braun hid, within his heart, an awful
resolve, born of the fear of the disguised felon, floating uneasily
in the maelstrom  of a great city. "If she should betray me, and
women are women, after all," he mused in his  cowardly ferocity.
"If she pulls this off for me, I'll"--he ceased, with an inward
shudder, for he dared not give the awful thought its fitting frame.

"Only at the last," he murmured, as he sped along in Brooklyn's
dingy water streets to take on another mask to veil his wolfishly
evil life.

While snares and pitfalls were being laid for Randall  Clayton's
careless feet, that gentleman sat in a wrathful mood, pondering
over Arthur Ferris' half-hearted disclosures. Clayton's face had
frankly  disclosed his displeasure at the false attitude of his
chum, when Ferris reluctantly disclosed the fact of the secret
financial espionage.

The three years of their past intimacy now took on a different
color, at once, to the jaundiced eyes of the young cashier.

He had almost abruptly declined Ferris' invitation to spend Sunday
at Seneca Lake, with the prosperous lawyer's mother and two sisters.

A feeling of bitter envy gnawed at Clayton's heart as he counted
up the rapid rise of his quondam friend.

"So, he has been playing this double game for years; it must have
been at Worthington's bidding.  And why?"

It began to dawn at last upon Clayton that his Detroit patron had
certainly followed a singular course in his apparent beneficence.

All unused to social intrigue, Clayton ignored the possible effect
of his further presence in Worthington's  household as an attractive
young man when little  Alice, at a bound, passed through the gates
of girlhood and became the beautiful Miss Worthington.  He had
never seen the angel at his side, and yet Ferris, clearer eyed,
had conquered in silent craft a golden future.

Clayton lingered at his table in the Grand Union café long after the
waiter had removed his half-tasted dinner. He ordered an unaccustomed
"highball"  as he pondered over some means of circumventing  the
social treason of his dethroned "friend."

Clayton easily found a valid reason, for the semi-treason of Ferris.

"He is, after all, a stranger to me. His ambition leads him onward
and upward. He would tread on my body gladly in mounting to the
great monopolist's confidence. It is easy enough to see why Ferris
has played both the spy and lickspittle. It has paid him well.
Here's a jump to handling Worthington's power of attorney. Of course,
Ferris seeks the position  of the one Eastern lawyer of the great
Trust.

"But," and a wave of anger swept away all the grateful memoirs
of his youth, "why did this cool old badger, Worthington, take me
to his home, later back me through college, and then, and there
railroad me off here to be fenced around with his spies? He could
have easily dropped me at any time. If he really cared to advance
me, why not have made me a lawyer and breed me up to share his
secrets?" There came no answer to his troubled mind as he sat there,
alone, despising Ferris and doubting even Worthington's  candor.

He had revolved several future plans of action in his mind before
reaching the vitreous substratum of the generous high-ball. His
first indignant impulse was to give up the joint apartment in a
fortnight.

May the first was rapidly coming on by Nature's calendar of leaf
and bird, of deepening green in the park and light-hearted woman's
smartening attire.

"No," he resentfully cried, as he threw his cigar away and paid his
bill, "that would only show them my hand. I'll make no open enemy
of Ferris."

"But I will dodge Worthington's spies and then lock up my heart.
I will keep on good terms with Worthington's lickspittle and try
and later reach the secret of all this strange behavior. The old
man seems unwilling to let me go out of his control, and yet he
has tied me down to this ironclad money mill--as a slave rubbing
the lamp for him." It opened a gloomy future to him, this dreary
hour of introspection.

Randall Clayton had not lost all the opportunities of his New York
life for a peep behind the metropolitan  scenes. He knew that there
was an inside view to be had of the clubs, the great hotels, the
show life of the smart set, the pretentious apartment houses, the
banks and theaters, the ambitious schemes of  business and professional
men.

One by one the shams had yielded to his prying gaze, and, but too
well, he knew the truth of Tom Moore's trite remark, "False the
light on glory's plume!"

But, straightforward and sincere, he had never watched his
own environment. The loss of his mother in his childhood and his
father's lonely struggle to retrieve his fallen fortunes had left
the boy without happy memories of boyhood, with no family history
to aid him, and the embarrassment of his dependence upon Hugh
Worthington had robbed him of the  confidences incident to young
manhood.

Only in his books had he learned of the passionate, hot hearts
beating behind the silken armor of womanhood.

For who had noticed the dependent, the poor, plodding  college boy?

Worthington's Detroit home was a mere social  machine-shop, a place
of vanished glories during the adolescence of Miss Alice, and no
Diana had stooped to kiss the forgotten young Endymion sleeping
in the Lethe of a New York business obscurity. Clayton's life had
been gilded by few joys.

His whole nature rose up in a sudden rebellion against this "personally
conducted" career in life.  "I am to be a mere hoodwinked worker
in this  millionaire's treadmill. A bond slave to one of the great
Trusts which are chaining the whole American population  to the
galley-oar for life.

"I must be fairly paid, decently dressed, sufficiently fed, to play
my part as a decent workman; that is all.  We will see!"

He had now crushed out all lingering remnant of a friendly feeling
for Ferris.

Even the last social invitation rankled in his mind.  "I suppose
that he wanted to pump me, at ease, under the guise of a homelike
hospitality. If there is any little game being played around me,
I will now take a hand in it."

As he moved to the door, the memory of that  bewitching woman's
face rose up once more to thrill the very core of his lonely heart.
"She looked lonely.  Perhaps she is, like myself, a solitary sail on
Life's lonely ocean. And I shall never see her again! Lost in New
York's human flood. But I'll buy that picture, if I live till Monday.
It will call her back to me; bring back her vanished loveliness."

A motley crowd was pouring into the various doors of the huge
hostelry, for the evening trains were  depositing the flotsam and
jetsam of humanity into busy Gotham.

Prosperous tourists, crafty schemers, brazen  politicians, overdressed
drummers, and flashy sporting men were pouring in to seek the "first
aid to the weary," which the nearest available hotel affords to
the cramped and jaded traveler.

Even the sidewalks were now thronged with anxious-eyed women, some
of them with wildly-beating hearts, awaiting the kind "gentleman
friend" who so often mysteriously appears at the cross-roads of
Life.

From the Forty-second Street Station the "new departure"  of many
a life has begun, the radial lines often curving downward into the
sheer depths of ruin of the Morgue, or the darkened abysses of the
Tenderloin.

Alas! That no angel with a flaming sword stands ready to warn away
the helpless from the gates which close behind the unwary with a
deadly clang.

Randall Clayton drew back as a stalwart traveler jostled him, only
to spring forward in the ardor of mutual recognition.

"Jack Witherspoon, by all the gods," cried the  delighted New
Yorker. "What brings you here?"

"The Chicago Limited, my boy!" coolly answered the jovial Westerner
as he dragged his friend back into the café. "I do confess the need
of an 'eye-opener' after my meal of cinders."

In ten minutes Clayton knew all the salient facts of Jack's career.

Their lives had diverged at the college gates, and the bustling
Witherspoon, now the lawyer of a great Michigan railway company,
was on his way to Europe for a six-months' tour.

Clayton's spirits vastly rose in their reminiscent  chat, and, in
ten minutes, the two ex-collegians were on their way to Clayton's
apartment. Members of the same fraternity, it was natural that
Witherspoon should gladly accept the offered hospitality of his
old-time comrade,

"I am tied down to business," said Clayton, "but I can put you up
here far better than Room 999 of any Broadway hotel. We can have
our nights together,  at least, until the 'Fuerst Bismarck' takes
you out on the blue."

They had returned from a jolly supper, after  dismissing the
carriage, and the pipes were lit before Witherspoon found time to
go into his friend's affairs.  The memories of old days were still
upon them when the Detroit lawyer, after a close study of his
friend's face, demanded flatly, "And are you satisfied here?"

"You see my surroundings, Jack," replied Clayton.  "I've told you
about where I stand."

"But," protested his friend, "your life is too lonely.  You know
what a genial circle we have in Detroit.  You would have already
risen to be a man of mark among us! And our old set are now rising
to be the men in power. You were easily our leader."

Clayton uneasily replied, for he saw the questioning glances of his
friend's eyes, "I have very little time to throw away. And I have
had Arthur Ferris with me here."

"In your position you should have already married and settled down,"
resolutely contended Witherspoon.  "Besides, you'll lose Ferris
soon. He's slated to marry Alice Worthington, I hear."

The smoking-table between them went over with a crash as Clayton
sprang to his feet.

"Impossible!" cried the cashier. "Ferris never told me anything of
it."

"Certainly not," calmly replied Jack Witherspoon, as Clayton busied
himself with the wreck and ruin.  "It's not in his game to do anything
but hoodwink you. What did he tell you now of this Western trip?"
Clayton frankly unbosomed himself to his visitor, pacing up and
down in a sudden indignation.

"All that story of Miss Worthington's illness is mere moonshine,"
confidently answered the Western lawyer. "Hugh Worthington is one
of the coldest business calculators in America."

"Our road and its allies are naturally inside of all the secrets
of the big cattle trust. I have watched the old Croesus' career for
years. It's only since I got into possession of the law business
of this branching-out railroad that I have been able to fathom old
Worthington's designs.

"He has used young Ferris for years to quietly gather in all the
loose stock of his unsuspicious partners.  You may not know that
Arthur Ferris is the favorite nephew of Senator Durham, Chairman
of the Committee on Interstate Commerce.

"This Western visit of old Worthington's is only a betrothal trip
for Ferris and Miss Alice. The  Senator and his friends will put
up the legislation.

"Worthington is craftily frightening out all his Western partners
and Mr. Arthur Ferris will bob up at the annual election with a
stack of proxies and a power of attorney from Worthington.

"The new deal will follow the annual election, old Hugh captures
the whole concern, Mr. Ferris will be not only Hugh's son-in-law
but the new managing vice-president in the East. The trick will
double old Hugh's fortune. Once husband of the old miser's only
child, he can be trusted to guard his own. So, look out for yourself!"
Clayton's eyes burned with a sudden anger.

"You asked me why I did not marry," he fiercely cried. "I have
a fair salary. True; but at a word, on a single telegram from old
Hugh, out I go.  Dropped, cast off like a squeezed lemon." Clayton's
eyes gleamed in a sudden rage.

"Have you saved much?" demanded his friend.  Clayton shook his
head. "I have a couple of thousand in bank, that's all."

"Then you are dependent upon this old skinflint's bounty," answered
the lawyer, "for you have no  profession, no backing, no capital.
He wished to leave you helpless in his hands; I see it all. The
crafty old fox! To watch you during your boyhood, to railroad  you
away from Michigan, and to hoodwink you as to your possible rights.
Never mind, old man; I will be back in three months, and if you
will confide in me, we may frighten a good sum out of Worthington.

"But you must let this annual election go on  undisturbed. Smile
and keep your counsel. Let this sleek ferret Ferris, go on and marry
the girl, for I, alone, can aid you. Worthington fears me. I know
too much of his secret operations.

"When I get you a slice of your lost patrimony, you can break loose,
find yourself a fitting mate, and lead the life of a man, and not
a galley-slave. Oh!  It has been a beautifully worked scheme. The
parchment-faced old wretch!"

"What do you mean? Explain yourself! Have I been tricked like a
dog my whole life?" cried Randall  Clayton, the hidden espionage
and Ferris' duplicity returning to arouse him into a glow of rage.

"I mean only this," coolly answered Jack Witherspoon,  "our railroad
has just agreed to pay Hugh Worthington two millions of dollars for
two hundred acres of outlying city lands, to be used as our lumber
and ore and stock-handling depots. The lake commerce  has increased
a thousand fold.

"I had still supposed it was only railroad rivalry which caused our
people to keep the purchase secret and to record only a ninety-nine
year lease, when they had Hugh Worthington's guarantee deed in
their possession.

"He takes the whole purchase price out in freights, paid in to him
by your cattle trust, and with this same money he buys the majority
of the outlying stock."

"How does this touch me?" cried the now thoroughly  angered Clayton.

"Because your father deeded all the real estate holdings of Clayton
& Worthington to his partner before the old trouble came on. Only
this, a then valueless,  tract was forgotten.

"In honor and equity you are entitled to one-half as Everett
Clayton's heir."

The young cashier clenched his fists in anguish, as Witherspoon
sadly said: "But he has had twenty-one  years' unbroken possession.
You were of age seven years ago, and he allowed it to be sold
for taxes every year, and has also secretly bought up all the tax
titles. It is too late. But wait, keep silent, and trust to me."




CHAPTER III.

IN MAGDAL'S PHARMACY.


Randall Clayton and his friend heard the "chimes at midnight" after
the disquieting disclosures.  Witherspoon finally allayed Clayton's
sudden distrust. The Detroit lawyer succeeded in lamely explaining
his own delay in making the fraud known.

"You see, Randall," he finally said at parting for the night, "I
must live my life in Detroit under the heel of these great operators.

"I intended to take this long hidden matter up on my return from
this trip, but I have been carried on, into a premature confidence.

"Just take care of yourself and bide your time! I want Worthington
to consummate the whole deal. I wish the marriage and the election
to take place  undisturbed by clamor. For Worthington has put a
fancy price on the land. It is to-day only worth a million at market
rates. We, however, get immediate  possession and pay in hauling,
but the real extra million comes out of the pockets of the Cattle
Trust, for as President, Worthington sells his own land really to
the Cattle Company for two million dollars.

"He has duties as a Trustee to all the stockholders  of the cattle
association. When all is over, when Ferris  is his son-in-law,
I will have Senator Durham connected  with this matter. The young
couple will set up in royal style.

"I will then open out on Hugh Worthington, lay all the uncontested
facts before him, and bring him to bay! I will soon squeeze out of
him a fortune for you and also one for me. I only want twenty-five
per cent. of the recovery. That will be a guarantee against my
losing my place as railroad attorney. But old Hugh will never dare
to "squeal." He wants social quiet, and he does not care to have
his toga of  respectability ripped up."

"Your motive?" agnostically demanded Clayton.  I am poor, friendless;
you will risk much in this."

"There's a sweet little dark-eyed French-descended angel in
Detroit, whom I will then marry at once," smilingly answered Jack
Witherspoon, "that is, as soon as Papa Worthington has given me the
sinking fund. Any college man is a fool now who marries in these
days unless he has the assured income on the principal of a quarter
of a million."

"Money is the one thing, my boy," sighed Jack.  "Without it, Venus
herself, ever young and ever fair, would be a millstone around
any man's neck, in these later days. Great God! How you missed it!
If I had only stumbled on this discovery sooner. You could have
antedated Ferris' crafty game.

"You could have easily married Alice. She has often told my Francine
that you were the noblest of men."

But the moody Randall Clayton had tired already of hearing Miss
Francine Delacroix's praises in divers keys.

"Poor Little Sister," muttered Randall Clayton.  "Traded off
to a senator's nephew, for an illicit  government pull. Damn all
treachery!" he growled, as he stalked off to bed.

He felt that he was powerless in his calculating friend's hands,
and yet, the possibilities of a coming  future swept him from his
feet. He wanted money now but for one purpose--revenge upon Arthur
Ferris.

"Of course," he growled, "the dog knew the whole deal, and has
been a secret guardian over me, in the interest of the thief who
has robbed my father's grave.  Poor, dear old Dad! If he had only
remembered these cheap lands and set them aside for me. It was
the only real estate holding forgotten in the hard-driven  bargain
which vastly enriched old Hugh. But old Hugh shall pay; yes, to
the last farthing. I will lock up my heart. I will circumvent his
spies, and then await my own hour of triumph. It will be a fight
to the finish and no quarter asked or given. I swear it!"

A thorough confidence was reestablished between the two collegians
before the coming of Monday morning  took Randall Clayton back
to his money mill. His first impulse to give up the apartment had
returned to him. He now loathed the memory of Arthur Ferris as the
slimy snake in the grass; and yet he resisted his desire to shove
all the traitor's traps into a storage warehouse.

"Be ruled by me, Randall," urged Jack Witherspoon,  as he set out
on Monday morning for his last business conferences with the New
York end of his railroad employers.

"I will surely make Hugh give up the million. You shall have your
three-quarters, for it would be ruin to Worthington to drag out
his relations with Durham."

"Play the honest Iago. Keep your counsel. Dismiss  this from you
mind. Make love to some pretty girl, amuse yourself. Do anything
but drink or gamble.  Keep up a jolly mien. Go in to the summer
pleasures a little. It will throw these two crafty ones off their
guard. The weeks will soon roll around.  I will cable you of my
return.

"Then we will jointly descend upon this new  combination of
Worthington, Durham, and Ferris. But I  must first be in Detroit,
back in my impregnable railroad  law fortress. Then, at my nod,
he settles or down come the gates of Gaza on him! Remember that
you have no one in your matrimonial eye. I want to win Francine
Delacroix's home from these robbers.  And then install the little
dainty therein. I will go in and win for you!"

The college comrades had now unravelled all the past, and their
Sunday outing had after all been a jolly one. Thoroughly reassured,
Clayton had given Jack Witherspoon his whole history, and the future
campaign was laid out in all its details.

"As for these Fidelity Company men," said Jack, "you can give them
the go by in only frequenting secluded places.

"As long as you avoid the public resorts of New York, they cannot
reach you. But keep your eyes always open. And, remember, secrecy
above all. If Hugh Worthington should divine our plan to unveil
his devilment, you might be the victim of some 'strange accident!'

"Money has a long arm in these days," ominously said the lawyer,
"and, it can strike with remorseless power. So, keep on here, but
look out for yourself.

"I shall not come back to your rooms. I will send for my luggage;
go down to the Astor House, and you must not be seen in the streets
with me. I want Worthington to think that I have dug up his villainy
all alone.

"Otherwise you would suffer in some strange way.

"When I open my battery, you must publicly resign your place by a
simple telegram. And then jump out of New York to some secret haunt
until I telegraph you to come to Detroit and make your deeds for
the stolen property."

Clayton saw the cogency of his friend's reasoning, and, after
agreeing to meet Witherspoon in the Astor Rotunda each evening until
the sailing of the "Fuerst  Bismarck," he proceeded to the office
to take up the white man's burden.

Swinging down Fourteenth Street from Broadway, he paused once more
to look at the lovely Danube scene smiling out from the window of
the Newport Art Gallery.

It was an exquisite artist proof and bore the name of the Viennese
artist and a pencilled address. "I'll buy it at once," thought the
man whose memory now brought back that lovely, wistful face.

As his foot was on the doorstep he paused. "No!  It may bring her
back to me! When I go out to the bank I can step in and secure it.
It can remain on exhibition in the window for a few days. She may
be there again to-day, who knows?"

He was under the spell of the unknown beauty again, as he absently
exclaimed, "Pardon me!" when he rudely jostled a sedate-looking
gentleman emerging from the gallery. "My fault, sir," courteously
remarked Mr. Fritz Braun, beaming benevolently through his blue
glass eye screens.

The pharmacist turned and raised a warning finger as Clayton hastened
away to resume his morning  duties.

In the doorway, following Braun's mouse-colored overcoat, as he
mingled with the "madding crowd," stood Mr. Adolph Lilienthal, the
proprietor of the "Art Emporium."

Briskly rubbing his hands, the art dealer murmured "Vot devilment
is Fritz up to, now?"

He was only one of the many comrades in evil of the Sixth Avenue
chemist, for Mr. Lilienthal boasted a "private view" room, in rear
of his pretentious "Art Gallery," where many conveniently arranged
interviews habitually took place.

Not one in one hundred of his patrons knew the secret of that room
with its cosy divans and a private entrance to the stairway of an
adjoining fashionable photograph gallery.

But the dealers in the "queer," the handlers of lottery  tickets,
the pool-sellers, the oily green-goods man, and many a velvet-voiced,
silken clad Delilah knew the pathway to that inner room.

Benevolent-looking old capitalists with gold-rimmed spectacles;
soft-eyed sirens of the Four Hundred, and the splendid Aspasias of
the apartment-house clique, brisk clubmen, and the reckless jeunesse
doreé, were all in the secret of the "private view" rooms.

A meek, furtive cat-like connoisseur was Mr. Adolph Lilienthal,
and the "diamond coterie" of smugglers often hastily exchanged in
the safe retirement of the "art parlors" packages of glittering
gems all innocent of Uncle Sam's imposts. The "Newport Art Gallery"
was a gem, a very gem in itself and judiciously protected.

Mr. Fritz Braun enjoyed the crystalline spring air as he hastened
along to catch his avenue car. There was a gleam of triumph behind
the blue shields as he murmured, "If she only plays her part as I
laid it down yesterday, he is a hooked fish, sure enough."

Randall Clayton sat for an hour in his office,  dispatching his
accumulated two-days' mail, all unobservant  of the cat-like tread
of Einstein, the office boy, moving in and out. He lingered in a
gloomy reverie, after checking up his correspondence, and a half
hour's sharp dictations, absorbed in the cautious letter of Hugh
Worthington, Esq., the man who had robbed him of his birthright.

It was in vain that he tried to be cool. Every drop of blood in
his heart now throbbed through his pulses in an eager unrest. He
had suddenly lost faith in all men. "Wait, only wait," he murmured,
and then started up as Einstein touched his arm.

"Mr. Somers has the deposits all ready, now, sir.  It's a quarter
of twelve," the boy remarked, with a veiled scrutiny of the
restless-eyed cashier. Clayton sprang to his feet and then, with
lightning rapidity, packed up the treasure which the old accountant
had gathered out of the morning mail, and received from the prompt
and timorous debtors fearful of having their "credit cut."

He was fifteen minutes late as he stepped out upon Fourteenth Street,
valise in hand and the ready pistol once more in his pocket. The
day's "haul" was rich in checks and light in cash, but the total
was a considerable  fortune.

"Serve the old brute right if I'd bolt some day with a good stake,"
wrathfully murmured Clayton. "He would be in for fifty thousand
dollars' bond! Damn his famed benevolence. He wished to anchor me
here for life, and, so cover his tracks. He might even put up a
fancied theft on me if I quarrel. I'll be out of this slavery the
very moment that Jack opens his guns.  And he shall pay the last
score, to the last stiver!"

In a vain effort at self deception Randall Clayton avoided glancing
at the art window where he had seen the mysterious beauty until
he was abreast of it. But his beating heart told him already that
she was not there. He paused a moment, once more to feast his eyes
upon the picture which he proposed to order  reserved for him on
his return from the Astor Place Bank. It was gone!

He started back in surprise as he saw the place of honor vacated.
There was only a mawkish color  reprint of "Mary Stuart and Rizzio"
parading its faded romance in the show window. Resolutely entering,
he quickly called for the proprietor.

In his momentary excitement, Clayton failed to notice  the sly twinkle
of Mr. Adolph Lilienthal's crow-footed eyes. "You had a beautiful
artist proof of a Hungarian scene in your window this morning,"
began  Clayton.

"Sold, sir; you are but a few moments too late," blandly replied
Lilienthal, in his best manner. "We are just packing it up for a
lady. An exquisite thing; sorry I cannot replace it, sir," remarked
the vendor, "Show you anything else?"

"You could not order me another, could you?" blankly demanded
Clayton, with a baffled sense of  losing both the lady and the art
gem.

"It was a unique proof," volubly continued Lilienthal.  "I might,
however,"--he briskly turned to an assistant, and after a few words,
led the annoyed Clayton back to a counter.

There a packing case was lying, plainly marked "Fräulein Irma
Gluyas, No. 192 Layte Street, Brooklyn."

"I might open it," hesitated the dealer, "and yet, the lady might
not like it. She paid a round price for it, a hundred dollars. And
some persons do not like to have a proof duplicated. Still, I could
get the  artist's name and address, and then my agents in Vienna
perhaps could get one. I might see the lady. She is a patron of
mine. This is Mr. Randall Clayton, is it not?"

The young man started in surprise, as his hand  involuntarily
closed upon the handle of his portmanteau.  "Oh, we are neighbors,"
laughed Lilienthal. "Your Mr. Robert Wade frequently drops in here
to pick up an etching or a bit of French color. I do a good deal
of business with the gentlemen of the Western Trading Company."

Clayton dropped his hand, instantly mollified. "I wish you would
see what you can do," he cordially said.  "Perhaps the lady only
purchased it to fill a place on the walls of her drawing room. I,
at least, would like to be allowed to open it and have you take the
particulars.  If she has no objection, you might be able to order
me a replica."

Lilienthal stood musing for a moment with his ferret  eyes gleaming
under their bushy brows. "I might try! Suppose you look in here
after your lunch. The fact is," laughed the dealer, "Fräulein
Gluyas only took a sudden fancy to the Danube view a few days ago.
And she has gone down to the bank to get the money to gratify her
whim. She seemed to think some one else might claim it, and she
dropped in a half an hour ago, and ordered it packed up. She will
take it home in her carriage, as such a proof can be easily injured."

Randall Clayton's eyes were fixed on the floor, as he nodded an
assent. "I'll be back in half an hour. See what you can do," he
pleasantly said. "And at any rate, I'll be thankful to be allowed
to have the data."

"I think I can fix it all right," genially remarked Lilienthal.
"Fräulein Gluyas is a Hungarian prima donna of rare merit, an artist,
too, of no mean order.  She may be heard here in grand opera this
winter.  She is living in retirement until Mr. Grau's return, as
she does not want to be heralded before the public."

Clayton tried to appear unconcerned as he asked, "Is she married?"

"She is single," carelessly remarked Lilienthal, showing Clayton to
the door. "And I am told she has refused some very eligible offers
at home. But she is a Magyar of an old and noble family and they
detest the Austrian nobility, who have now all the fortunes and
privileges of the old Hungarian noblesse."

With crimsoned cheeks Randall Clayton was speeding  away to the bank
before he had digested the crafty dealer's story. He was reassured
at the mention of Robert Wade's name and, hemmed in, all in ignorance
that his grave-mannered superior often met a bit of very lively
"French color" in the luxurious solitude of the "private view"
room, as yet a terra incognita to the young cashier.

For Mr. Robert Wade had a "Sunday-school reputation"  to support,
and was dignified, worldly wise, a pillar of a fashionable church,
and hence, duly sly.  His left hand often wisted not the doings of
his right hand, and Lilienthal found in Mr. Robert Wade a judicious
and accommodating patron.

"This is a simple-minded youth," grinned Lilienthal,  as he turned
away. "He has swallowed my story, and--I fancy I see Mr. Fritz
Braun's little game. I wonder if the Vienna witch is still over
there. I must hurry up and post her. This young chap may be a good
customer, for he handles plenty of money." And the brisk Figaro darted
away, his eyes gleaming in the ardor of the undying covetousness
of the Israelite.

While Mr. Adolph Lilienthal was cautiously  conducting a Philadelphia
money magnate into the  "Private Gallery," a closely veiled lady
was entering that sanctum from the photographer's hall. The secret
of the two double rings of the push button admitted her to the
"packing room," where an innocent-faced young German lad stood guard
over the complicated system of letter boxes, telegraph racks, and
telephones in that jealously guarded "packing room."

It had been a busy morning with the astute Lilienthal,  and the sudden
arrival of the "big fish," a wary "customer" from the Schuylkill,
caused the dealer to temporarily forget Randall Clayton. He scented
only an ordinary amorous intrigue in the young man's  ardent desire
to make that particular "artist proof" his own.

Besides, the postman had just staggered in with a considerable
bundle of letters all addressed to the  Newport Art Gallery. There
was a good hour's work for the rosy-faced graduate of a Viennan
cafe in removing the decoy wrappers and assorting the private
correspondence which alone paid the rental of Mr.  Lilienthal's
"emporium."

Randall Clayton was already hastening back from the Astor Place Bank,
forgetting his own luncheon in his eagerness to hear once more of
Fräulein Irma Gluyas, when Mr. Fritz Braun had at last disposed
of the morning swarm of "privately attended" customers at Magdal's
Pharmacy.

The blue-spectacled chemist had been working with lightning rapidity
behind his effective screen,  following the whispered directions
of his depraved London assistant. It was for him an anxious morning.

His heart would have leaped up in a wild joy had he known how
carefully Randall Clayton had already entered  the accidentally
found address in the little silver-clasped address book, in which
he had recorded, with judicious cabalistic cloudiness, the combinations
of his safes and certain vital private business memoranda.

These secrets were all hidden in a mass of artfully inserted
characters so as to defy the curious eye of any stranger in case
of mishap, but the young cashier's fingers trembled with eagerness
as he had paused on his way in a corridor to boldly enter an already
beloved name.

"I can easily find her out over there," Clayton murmured.  "She
shall not drift out of my life. I must some day read the secret of
those wistful eyes."

But Fritz Braun, anxiously waiting in his den on Sixth Avenue, was
chafing until his labors of the day should cease. "I'm all right,"
he mused, "if that sheepshead Lilienthal does not blunder. I do
not dare to tell him too much. And then, if only Irma follows my
instructions.

"But the wild-hearted witch may speculate in love a little on her
own account. She is only to be trusted as far as any other woman."
He snorted in disdain.  "And the fellow is young, eager, good
looking. At any rate, I shall steer them both out of Lilienthal's
clutches. The game is too risky for 'mein frent Adolph.' He is
wrapped up in his greed, his blackmail  schemes, his 'sure thing'
villainies.

"Here is the prize of a life to fight for, and--the electric chair
to face--should I be betrayed. Neither of them shall ever know my
little game." The master plotter was busy with dreams of an ill-gotten
harvest soon to ripen.

Braun peered out into his shop, sneeringly glanced at two shop girls
lingering at the soda fountain, drew up a chair, picked up the
Staats-Zeitung, and lit a cheroot, while he waited for the advance
guard of the afternoon customers.

"I dare not go over to the 'Bavaria' until three o'clock," mused
the chemist. "It will never do to let Clayton see me with either
Irma or Lilienthal. Once hooked, though, I can give him plenty
of line, and play him, in the shadows of water too deep for him.
Einstein  has given me a fair insight into his character and habits.
I must go and see Leah and take her that promised dress. I need
that boy, for he is true to Leah, his dam, and she at least loves
me as fondly yet as the dumb dog that licks the hand. The other one,
I can never rule that way. Never mind, you proud-hearted Hungarian
devil, I'll tame you yet." There was an ugly cloud on his broad
brow as he dreamed of a yet unshapen crime.

Fritz Braun, gliding out behind the high sample cases, swept the
morning's receipts out of the large bill compartment of the cash
drawer. "Seventy-five dollars.  Not so bad," he grinned, as he
clutched the only thing on earth which he loved.

The crumpled, greasy green bills! Passed from hand to hand, as the
hard wage of toil, the prize of  infamy, the badge of shame! Tossed
from the fingers of the spendthrift, dragged from the reluctant
miser, filched from yokel and rounder, slyly stolen by thieving
domestic or dishonest clerk, still the "long green" was as sacred
to Fritz Braun as Mahomet's emerald banner hanging over the pulpit
of magnificent Saint  Sophia to the Moslem heart.

Magdal's Pharmacy was an innocent enough looking  place of business.
Few of the neighboring  shopkeepers dated back to the time, long
years ago, when the real Magdal ran upon the breakers of bankruptcy
and disappeared in the "eternal smash" of a final pecuniary ruin.

The crafty Braun, once a co-laborer with Magdal, had jumped
eagerly at the opportunity of burying the identity of Hugo Landor,
the criminal fugitive, under the banner of the hopelessly wrecked
Magdal.

Fritz Braun had been a good enough name to use until the crafty
employee had robbed drunken old Magdal's till of money enough to
purchase the now valueless  fixtures.

Magdal, the victim of an expensive liason with a dashing neighboring
French modiste, had tried to keep up a "regular" business.

All this was foreign to the ideas of the quick-witted Braun, safe
now under his humble alias, and his flowing  false beard and the
never absent blue glass eye screens. Braun duly closed the doors
for a "reopening."

A few dollars spent in paint and gilding, a "gorgeous"  soda
fountain "on lease," had soon transformed  the dingy interior. A
couple of dozen cheap red plush stools wooed the tawdy Phrynes of
Sixth Avenue, and the light-headed shop girls to a repose from the
crash and roar of the shopping street.

From a dealer in "fake" goods, Braun cheaply  obtained the empty
packages, the jars of colored water, and the stacks of imitation "put
up" goods, which gave to the pharmacy its air of rosy prosperity.
To cater to his natural patrons, cheap perfumes,  confectionery,
gaudy nostrums, theatrical make-up, and a round of disguised
narcotics and "headache" medicines  were always at hand.

Braun picked up a waif of the street, an ex-Prussian soldier, who
for a pittance and his daily "rum," slaved in the "Pharmacy" like
a dog, polishing and cleaning until it was the smartest show place
of the neighboring  blocks.

But the citadel of the real business was the huge marble soda fountain,
with its bewildering array of gaudy silver-plated faucets. Above
the rows of bottled  "bitters," the fiery drink of the temperance
frauds, high over the three score jars of "nervines" and pick-me-up
preparations, towered a life-size marble statue of Hygeia, glowing
in a voluptuous Parian nakedness.

Behind the fountain counter, with its serried rows of crystal
glasses in artistic silver holders, there lurked on watch, now,
the factotum, the thieving London-bred drug-clerk who had escaped
"transportation," at Her Gracious Majesty's behest, by slipping
over to New York City disguised as a stoker.

To him alone was entrusted the traffic in slops and the flimsy
produce of the soda fountain, to him the drudgery of the illicit
Sunday liquor trade, when the "regulars" entered by the side door
from the hall, bearing the portentous sign, "Hugo Adler, M.D.,
Physician and Surgeon."

No mortal had ever gazed upon the legendary Adler,  but Timmins
the cockney, and Braunschweiger the ex-Prussian grenadier, gaily
dispensed from jugs and bottles the "spiritual comforts" stacked
up in the "dark room" every Saturday against the Sunday of legally
enforced thirst and resultant sadness.

But while these minor villains slaved for the master who greedily
snatched every bill from the till, and held them up to a keen return
for every measured drink in the stock of the Sunday "bar" of the
mock drug-store, it was the taciturn Fritz Braun himself who murmured
in confidence to the important patrons of the den.

The morning run beginning at nine, embraced the haggard-eyed devotees
of pleasure--Wall Street men, clerk and financiers, habitues of
the Tenderloin--actors and men about town.

In subdued murmurs the skilful Fritz Braun trafficked  with these
"shaky" mortals, while Timmins covered their "prescriptions" with
an innocent layer of Vichy.

Sometimes the favored few entered behind Braun's screen, until the
chemist solved their varying problems by manipulating his vials in
the closely locked cabinet, the key of which never left his person.

There were little packages by the gross ready in that capacious
lock box. Opium, hasheesh, chorodyne, sulphonal, cocaine, "dope,"
all the life-stealing  narcotics in every form.

There were medicines the traffic in which leads even the innocent
behind the bars.

And it was from the sale of these "nervines,"  forbidden medicines,
and poisonous agents that the  runaway Vienna criminal drew his
increasing revenue.  There was an aristocracy among the motley
customers.

From the "hypodermic" regulars, men and women, laying down their
syringes to be filled with the soul-stealing morphia solution--faded
men and trembling women, down to the shattered wretch, with his
pitiful twenty-five cents for a bit of "dope," no one with money
was turned away.

Yet all of these passed under Fritz Braun's watchful scrutiny.
The disguised criminal trembled lest some ugly-minded detective or
crank journalist might entrap him into the meshes of the law.

Alas! Nearly all the customers bore the seal of safety in their
imploring eyes. By the freemasonry of the degenerates, Magdal's
was a known haven of refuge to all the weaklings of Manhattan.

The frequent ringing of "Doctor Adler's" bell  admitted to the
little dimly-lighted rear room the sullen-eyed visitors who bore
away the colorless vials of "knock-out drops," for which five- and
ten-dollar bills were eagerly thrust into Braun's itching palm.

This important traffic was confided to no one but the real proprietor.
And stealthily-treading, matronly-looking women often found their
way into the den, where nameless "remedies" were sold, often for
their weight in diamonds, the weapons of that hidden guild which
paves New York's streets with the bones of  ignorant and martyred
women. For all the thirty-third degree trade of the "consulting-room,"
an "introduction"  was stiffly demanded.

Thanks to his craft, to his fear of the awful doom hanging over
him from the unpunished Viennese murders,  Hugo Landor had so far
defied detection and avoided all awkward inquiry. Mr. Fritz Braun
always had a prime cigar and a drop of "medicinal cognac" at the
disposal of the visiting policeman. His perfunctory  "loans" had
gladdened the hands of several minor officials, whose argus eyes
had noted the Sunday run of Dr. Adler's many friends.

All these dangerous wares were distributed in  unlabelled vials,
and no witnesses had ever verified the transfer of the felonious
knock-out drops. Each week brought to Braun customers from adjacent
cities, many of whom, disguised or veiled, hurried away with the means
of cowardly crime to work the devil's charms at a safe distance.

Taciturn, morose and keeping his own counsel, Fritz Braun was a
cautious trader with the great supply houses. His bills of purchase
were made out to the welcome "Mr. Cash," and the old prescription
books of Magdal were ostentatiously displayed with a few family
orders dropping in now and then from some befogged  physician. The
bond between Lilienthal and Braun had been strengthened by the aid
of the "picture dealer" in smuggling from Hamburg and Bremen much
of the dangerous ware of this mind-wrecking business.

And so, peddling the means of murder, filling his yawning pocketbook,
Fritz Braun had thrived in solitude  until Irma Gluyas sought the
refuge of New York City.

For the discovery of her picture in the stiffened hands of a suicide,
a young noble officer, ruined by her extravagance, had caused the
Viennese siren to flee the vengeance of a powerful Austrian family.

And so the lives of these two, linked by folly, sin, crime and mad
extravagance, had run together again far from the scenes where,
led on by her dark eyes, Hugo Landor had stumbled along on the dark
road from theft and forgery to callous murder.

On this particular April early afternoon, the eager plotter was
willing to leave his afternoon customers to the sly Timmins. The
actresses and lazy demi-monde queens fluttered in always before
sunset, together with a bevy of quacks, whose doubtful prescriptions
were always put up by Timmins, easily capable of brazenly swearing
to "a mistake," or denying upon oath the sale of any clumsy weapon
of medical butchery.

It was also the time when the floating "shopping women" drifted in
to reinforce their luncheons with Timmins' artfully veiled alcoholic
preparations.

His row of bottles labelled "Vin Mariani," "Moxie," and "Nervura"
were never empty, and the oldest toper would have found them
veritable "well springs of joy in the desert."

All the simple machinery of the mock pharmacy was so well oiled
that even an expert could detect no  commerce more dangerous than
Lubin's Powders, crimson lip salve, or a powder puff.

"Fritz Braun, Manager," came and went with  regularity, no man
knowing of his home or family ties; the old golden sign of "Magdal's
Pharmacy" covering whatever mystery was not hidden behind those
gleaming  blue glasses.

Save for his regular luncheon at the Café Bavaria, no Sixth Avenue
habitué had ever seen Mr. Fritz Braun at concert, theater, or any
of the places of local or suburban amusement.

As to woman, he seemed to be sternly indifferent, Save to the
semi-professionals who were as anxious to escape Sing Sing's gloomy
embrace as the man who supplied them with the drugs for their various
"Ladies' Homes." These were welcome "Greeks bearing gifts" of the
coveted "long green" which was Fritz Braun's god.

Braun was never in the pharmacy after six o'clock, and from that
evening hour when all well-conducted men and women turn to dinner
as the day's culmination,  no one had ever set their eyes upon the
bustling manager.

Friendless he seemed, yet ever cheerful, a man  distantly respected
for the open frankness of his business dealings, the order and quiet
of his shop, and his rare capacity for minding his own business.

It was only in the evening that Mr. Ben Timmins' reign was uncontested.
The flashy young fellows of his caught-up friendships then lurked
around Magdal's Pharmacy where Timmins dispensed complimentary drinks
and lorded over his fluctuating harem of  unemployed "soubrettes"
and light-headed shop girls freed from their daily toil.

In a rough average at a half-way honesty, Timmins "turned in"
habitually about half of the evening's  receipts of the "joint,"
which, to use his own language, he "ran for all it was worth."

He had soon lost all fear of his stern employer visiting  him at
random, and the clever London rascal now laughed detection to scorn.

For he always kept in hand one day's stealings so that, if suddenly
"called down," he could glibly  explain, "Slipped it in my pocket
in my hurry! The shop was full!"

While Timmins, returning from his breakfast on this busy Monday,
wondered at Mr. Fritz Braun delaying his comfortable luncheon,
Mr. Adolph Lilienthal was anxiously awaiting his secret partner in
villainy at the "Newport Art Gallery."

Perhaps the crowning secret of Braun's remarkable success was his
clear-headed avoidance of mixing up the details of his various
schemes.

Lilienthal knew nothing of Braun's whereabouts as to a real residence,
and the colloquies and settlements of the two always took place in
Lilienthal's little  private office, proof against all eavesdroppers.

The Art Emporium, thronged with the curious, was the safest place
in New York City for casual meetings, and, with a keen suspicion
of his man, Lilienthal never visited Magdal's Pharmacy. He realized
that there might be danger and deception in his fellow villain's
hospitality.

A doubt of Braun's ultimate end as a citizen had caused the smug
dealer to always avoid Braun at the jolly Restaurant Bavaria, where
the good-natured foreign  convives often joined each other over a
stein.

The "private interests" of the Newport Art Gallery were as jealously
guarded as the inner secrets of  Magdal's Pharmacy; furthermore, the
hidden post-office, telegraph exchange, and "private room" busied
the dealer from morn till eve.

Lilienthal was in a particularly good humor when he at last dispatched
the Danube "artist proof" by an especial messenger to Mr. Randall
Clayton's own rooms. It had all fallen about in a spirit of graceful
courtesy. And three hearts bounded with a hidden  delight when the
happy incident occurred.

When Randall Clayton returned from the Astor Place Bank he had
discovered Mr. Adolph Lilienthal in a particularly cheerful frame
of mind. The young cashier had hastened to his office and delivered
over his bundle of exchange and checked-up bank-book.  "I shall be
out for an hour," he sharply called to Einstein.  "Wait here in my
office and let any callers return  at two o'clock!"

There was a glow of expectancy on the handsome face of the customer
as Lilienthal rubbed his hands.  "I have been fortunate enough to
carry out your wishes, Mr. Clayton," he obsequiously said. "Fräulein
Gluyas has called and paid for her picture. I have told her of your
longing for a replica, and, by telephoning  down to my importer,
I have learned that I can get a duplicate in six weeks.

"She is not altogether satisfied with the framing of this one, and
I have begged her to allow me to sell you this one, so that I can
import one for her framed in our own Viennese manner.

"The lady awaits your wishes, through me. It certainly is very
courteous on her part. I have done her certain little business
favors and she is kindly  willing to oblige."

"If I could only meet her," murmured Randall Clayton,  with lips
dry with all the eagerness of a newly born passion. He was in a
defiant mood now, his whole being stirred with the treason of the
friend of years and the unmasked villainy of his pseudo-benefactor.
This fair mystery allured him strangely.

"Nothing easier," smiled the dealer, reaching out for his silk
hat. "The Fräulein is taking her usual luncheon at the Restaurant
Bavaria, and I agreed to notify her of your wishes, as she may
travel, and would be willing to wait for the arrival of my Vienna
importation. I will be very glad to present you to her."

The world took on a new brightness as Randall Clayton passed out
of the shop with the dealer. He scarcely dared to trust himself to
bring up the subject now nearest his heart.

But the careful directions of Mr. Fritz Braun had given Lilienthal
his cue. The dealer babbled on of pleasant trivial things as they
stemmed the tide of the crowded streets. "I hope that Fräulein
Gluyas will soon appear in opera and achieve the success which she
deserves. She is really here incognito, and spends all her time
in private musical practice at Chickering Hall and the study of
languages."

"Why this secrecy?" asked Clayton.

"Ah! My dear sir! These are the ways of impresarios.  If Grau does
not secure a certain great operatic star with whom he has quarrelled,
then Fräulein  Gluyas will be brought out with a great flourish of
trumpets under a stage name to be selected later.  She will then
be heralded as a 'wonder of the world.' It will pay Grau, and he
will also have his revenge!"

"And if the great star relents?" smilingly asked Clayton, as they
neared the Restaurant Bavaria.

"Then," cheerfully answered the dealer, "the lady will make a grand
concert tour, adequately supported.  It is for that contingency
she is studying English ballads  and the language."

Clayton suddenly remembered the unromantic address  of 192 Layte
Street, Brooklyn. "Fräulein Gluyas resides in Brooklyn?" he said,
with a fine air of carelessness.

Lilienthal's eyes swept obliquely the young man's distrustful face.
"Fräulein Gluyas ordered the picture  sent to the rooms of her
music master, 192 Layte Street, Brooklyn. Poor old Raffoni was once
a world-wide star, a velvet tenor. Now he is literally a voice maker,
a master of technique for Maurice Grau. The Hungarian nightingale
studies there, and only takes her hall practice here in the off
season, in Chickering's empty salon. There is a jealous professional
mystery in this secrecy. The summer is the opera's off season,
just as the winter is the same for the great circus and travelling
shows. The hardest work is thus veiled from the public. The impresario
is always a wily individual."

"And the lady's real residence?" impatiently queried the budding
lover. "That is an absolute secret, for Grau carefully hides away
his coming stars. Somewhere  on Long Island an old Hungarian noble
family have had a retreat since the days of Kossuth.

"The Fräulein is their guest, and, for other reasons than complete
faith with Grau, she receives no one.  She is as proud and haughty as
she is beautiful, and rumor has it that the pursuit of an Austrian
Archduke drove her to the safety of our shores. All this I have
gathered from my old friend, Signore Raffoni."

Clayton mutely followed Lilienthal to the door of a private room
in the "Bavaria" and, with a wildly beating  heart, was bowing low
before the woman whose shining eyes had brought to his bosom such
strange unrest.

"It is like a page from a novel," the flute-like voice murmured,
"that this lucky picture should have brought us together again, as
it strangely did once face to face."

Randall Clayton's ears drank in that soft, wooing accent, and all
the ardor of his eyes betrayed the  instant recognition which lay
behind the diva's merry words.

When he had murmured his thanks, the presence of Lilienthal seemed
to be a bar to any rapprochement.  Clayton was fain to accept Fräulein
Gluyas' courtesy in allowing him a choice as to the handling of
the picture or its replica.

"If Mademoiselle will allow me," said Clayton, "I will give Mr.
Lilienthal my cheque for the coming proof, and retain in my possession
the one framed in our American manner."

This was soon settled, and then, with a glance at his watch, the
dealer, bowing low, hurried away.

"We artists have to be unconventional," frankly said the Magyar
beauty.

"I await Madame Raffoni here for a little tour of the wonderful
New York shops."

It was a natural passage from the picture to the memories of the
Danube, and then, under the kindling glances of the diva, Randall
Clayton talked, with spirit, of his happy summer ramblings through
Austria and Hungary.

Irma Gluyas' magnetic eyes burned into his soul as she followed
the young stranger in his itinerary. It was only when the maître
d'hôtel entered, announcing Madame Raffoni as in waiting in her
carriage, that Randall Clayton's castle in Spain came crashing down
around him.

The Magyar witch dropped her eyes when Clayton took her hands in
adieu. "You have made me forget time, and my workaday world," he
said. "I have now something to live for--to hear you sing! It seems
so hard to meet only to part. I may never see your coming picture;
you may never see mine again.  But I cannot lose you from my life.
It seemed, Fräulein  Irma," he said, earnestly, "when I first met
the glance of your dreaming eyes, that I had known you in some
other world."

"I receive no one; I am a recluse," murmured Irma, with eyes
smiling through down dropped lashes; "but, if you care, you may
come, a week from to-day, and breakfast with me here! Dear old
Raffoni will play propriety. As for the singing, I am pledged to
be mute, parôle d'honneur. But you must be in my first audience.
I must keep an artist's faith with my manager."

"I shall have the loge d'honneur at your début,"  enthusiastically
cried Clayton, as he lingered over her frankly extended hand after
murmuring his acceptance.

The woman who sat, with her head bowed upon her hands, listened to
his receding footsteps. "Il Regalantuomo," she murmured. "It is a
pity, too!  What does Fritz want of him?"

Then gliding serpent-like from the darkened corridor,  she joined
the waiting woman in the carriage below,  a woman whose form was
but dimly defined beyond  the half-lowered silken curtain of the
carriage as Randall Clayton sped along to his money mill.

Some indefinable impulse kept Clayton from speaking  of his breakfast
engagement as he strode into the Newport Art Gallery. His cheque
for one hundred and twenty-five dollars was soon transferred to
Lilienthal  in return for the coveted picture, which was dispatched
to the young man's lonely apartment.

"Not a bad turn," mused Adolf Lilienthal. "I raised him seventy-five
dollars! He paid like a prince, and, if I mistake not, this is his
first and last  transaction here. The picture that he wanted is
burned into his heart now."

It was but one of a hundred similar intrigues to which Lilienthal
had been the successful Leporello, and he calmly betook himself to
the continued villainy of his daily life. He feared also to follow
on the footsteps  of the crafty Fritz Braun, for in the years of
their illicit dealings the weaker nature had been molded by the
daring master villain into a habitual subjection.  "He has some
little game of his own," chuckled Lilienthal.  "Friend Fritz is a
sly one."

But the man, now burning with a new purpose in life, the puppet of
strange destinies, dreamed only of a golden future as he lingered
late that night at the Astor House with Jack Witherspoon.

It was two o'clock before he returned to his lonely rooms to gloat
over the picture and its promise of the future meeting.

"I shall be rich," he mused, "and I will follow her to the end of
the earth until I read the secret of those wonderful eyes."

He little dreamed that even before he had paid Lilienthal the
cheque, a carriage had stopped for a moment before Magdal's Pharmacy,
and Mr. Fritz Braun had heard, with a wild delight, the whispered
words, "The game is won; he will come!" The busy devil prisoned in
Braun's heart laughed for very joy.




CHAPTER IV.

UNDER THE SHADOWS OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE.


When the "Fuerst Bismarck" moved grandly away from her wharf and
glided down the stream, Jack Witherspoon paced the deck with clouded
brows. The acute Detroit lawyer had rightly estimated the crushing
effect of his disclosure of Hugh Worthington's treachery.

The two college mates were now banded together, however, by a secret
compact, and both of them realized  the craft of the foe whom they
were fighting.  "Not a letter, not a cable, not a single scrap of
paper," said the wary Jack. "And you must keep away from me and be
sure to dissemble all your wrath."

Clayton appreciated the prudence which had separated  them in
the last three days of his friend's stay, and minutely followed
Witherspoon's final descriptions of the hidden plans of the great
syndicate. "You must be ever on your guard," said the new champion,
"and remember the annual election and this strange wedding must be
allowed to take place without  suspicion.

"On my return I shall frankly mingle with the 'upper ten' of the
Trust. You are never to be seen alone in my company. But you can
meet me over in Jersey City; there we can arrange a simple cipher
for future use, and, when the blow falls, you are then to demand
a month's leave of absence. So no word to any one of your destination.

"If Hugh Worthington lurks on the Pacific Coast until he has made
the coup, I will find him out there.  You can be in hiding near,
ready to appear, and then boldly claim your rights. Arthur Ferris
will probably  be back in New York City in charge, and Worthington
will yield rather than have the world, his beloved  daughter, and
all society know of his inward baseness. I shall delve further
into the old records, under pretense of following up the title to
our purchase.  Perhaps we may even now unearth other unconveyed
property."

Randall Clayton, brave as he was, shuddered when Witherspoon solemnly
said: "Remember! Your life is in your own hands. For God's sake,
be prudent!  One little self-betrayal in sudden anger, and then
either Worthington or Ferris would surely compass your death for
this tempting million. You will fight for your birthright, and I
for the future happiness of  darling Francine Delacroix."

When they wrung each other's hands in the last good-bye, "each
heart recalled a different name."

For, burning on the altars of that lonely heart of Clayton's
was the fierce fire which bound him now as the worshipper of the
velvet-voiced Magyar witch.  He, too, had some one to fight for
now, and his ardent fancy painted her in every glowing color of
the  passion of young manhood.

Left alone to his daily affairs, Randall Clayton now lived behind
an impenetrable mask. He knew not which of the higher employees
was charged with that secret espionage so necessary to the final
success of the Worthington, Durham and Ferris conspiracy.

Was it the pale-faced Somers, the smooth old  accountant, his
pompous chief, Mr. Robert Wade, or some one of those who had broken
his bread and drank his wine in the occasional friendship of the
business coterie. And now Clayton hated the old money-lover who was
foisting a husband on his only child merely to chain a Senator to
the wheels of the money chariot.

Seated alone, in the evening, watching the treasured picture, and
waiting for the day of the diva's breakfast, a fierce desire for
stern reprisals took possession of Clayton. "I have it!" he murmured.
The pathway  seemed clear at last. And the next day, following out
his self-protective scheme, he directed the bright-faced office
boy Einstein to report at his rooms on the ensuing evening.

There was a broad grin on the young rascal's face when he finally
left his master. He darted away with a ten-dollar bill in his purse,
the earnest of a secret monthly stipend. "Some strange fellows
are following  me, spying upon me, my boy," said the man who now
doubted all men but one, on earth, and who was fast falling under
the spell of his dreamy adoration of an utterly unknown siren.

"It matters not who they are or what they want.  I wish you to
follow me up, with a good deal of care, in my evening wanderings,
and shadow these spotters.

"There is a new hundred-dollar bill ready for you when you find
who they are, and where they come from, and who they report to.
You can keep hovering around at a safe distance, and never address
or notice me.  Spend what money you like in following my evening
rounds. I'll repay it all. I am going to lead them a merry dance.
Every day, before I leave the office, I will give you a different
rendezvous, up to midnight.  You are simply to hover around, ignore
me, and then skilfully shadow my pursuers."

The service of the Western Trading Company now galled Randall
Clayton like the galley slave's chain.  And yet Jack Witherspoon's
counsel had been most wise. For Clayton knew not who had replaced
the treacherous Ferris in that secret espionage, so necessary to
Worthington until the great "deal" had been  consummated.

"Lies, lies, all lies," muttered Clayton, as he read the friendly,
almost fatherly, letters of Hugh Worthington announcing his intended
tour around the world. "The old fox," sneered Clayton, as he read
the "rider" to the capitalist's letter.

"Ferris will have my power of attorney, and he alone will communicate
with me. If Alice's health demands it, I may vary my route and look
around in the Sierras, or take the summer run to Alaska. I fear
the heat of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. But all will depend
upon the doctors and their advice.

"Report only to Ferris as to any thing you wish to reach me. He
will have my private cipher. All the rest is mere routine."

But the words of the old money-grabber angered Clayton less than
Ferris' effusive friendly epistles from Detroit.

"I can excuse Worthington," growled Clayton, as he paced his private
room like a caged tiger. "He has his old crime to cover up, his
only daughter to shield, his vast plans to further. I am only a poor
pawn in his fevered game of life; but Ferris, 'mine own familiar
friend,' he is a traitor, a needless traitor, to his black heart's
core.

"For it is the sale of a soul, his dirty traffic in my heart's
secrets, a Benedict Arnold of the heart, for mere dirty gain. And
his cold ensnaring of this innocent  girl is an outrage; it is a
crime to make her the hostage of Senator Durham's corrupt friendship."

And yet, mindful of Jack Witherspoon's counsel, he took up the
trade of an honest Iago, and hid his raging hatred behind the mask
of an olden gratitude to the one, a loyal friendship to the other.

The searchlight of his mind was turned only on the Western conspirators,
and he feared no villainy in the world save the Detroit schemer who
had robbed him of his birthright. "By Heavens! I'll give up trade,
the service of this greedy octopus. I will go abroad and so escape
Worthington's vengeance, and Ferris' duplicity."

He began to secretly watch every one of the leading New York officials
of the company in order to detect Ferris' successor in the hidden
watch upon his movements.

It was with a secret longing for the coming Monday  of the breakfast
that Clayton passed Lilienthal's window, three days after Jack's
sailing, in company with the grave-featured Robert Wade. His runaway
heart was all unsuspicious now.

Thank Heaven! There was no longer the graceful woman lingering there
fascinated by the picture whose sunset glories lit up in gold and
purple the lonely man's rooms. But the suave dealer, waiting at
his door, salaamed with effusion as the manager passed. His salute
distantly included Clayton, and the action was not lost upon Robert
Wade.

"Do you know Lilienthal?" somewhat sharply asked Wade.

"Not at all," carelessly answered the younger man.  "I happened
to drop in and buy a bit of a landscape from him the other day. He
mentioned when I gave him my cheque that you occasionally patronized
him."

"He is a rare art connoisseur," musingly said Wade, "and I've picked
up a few pretty bits of etching now and then at his shop. You must
come up and see my collection some day."

Clayton, busied with his day dreams, did not notice the sudden
paleness of the pompous manager. In his own ignorance of the mysteries
of the "private room" and its secret "facilities for patrons," he
never dreamed that the man at his side was "light of foot, fierce
at heart" as the tiger when he stole to the  rendezvous arranged
by Lilienthal, who had indeed offered many "choice bits" to the
astute manager. Clayton had stumbled along in New York, blinded to
its dual existence, its gilded shams.

"I will never set foot in that place again," remarked Clayton, as
he strode alone down University Place to the bank. "Lilienthal must
never know of my further  acquaintance with the Fräulein."

And so, each keeping his own secret hugged closely to an anxious
heart, the two men went along on their different paths, each drawn
along by the invisible threads of life--the one dragged on by a
sudden romantic,  resistless passion, the other by the glowing links
of the iron chains of habit, the ruling appetite of a remorseless
lust. And yet both of them were only blinded fools of passion.

The dragging days until the trysting time for the breakfast were
filled up with business cares, but Randall  Clayton had roamed
the streets of New York at night, restlessly, since Witherspoon's
sailing. In a feverish unrest, he had visited concert halls,
theaters, and searched the now deserted club-rooms for a familiar
face.

A Sunday drive in the Park, and late excursions among the
kaleidoscopic crowds of midnight New York filled up his time until
he should again meet Irma Gluyas.

He had always turned away in disgust from the painted faces of the
leering sirens of the Tenderloin, and now he sat gloomily eying the
vacuous stare of the rabbit-faced stage beauties capering in their
mock diamonds. For a higher womanly ideal reigned in his lonely
bosom.

Back, back to the speaking silence of his lonely rooms he wandered,
to gaze through the smoke wreaths upon that picture which had so
strangely brought Irma Gluyas into his life. Gloomily recalling
the past, he went over all the brief memories of his boyhood, and
tried to recall his stern father's few confidences, or picture to
himself the mother whom he had never known. All was a gray blank
of toiling days and carking cares. And Worthington had robbed him
and made him eat the bread of dependence.

He lived now only to wreak a vengeance upon the man who had shared
his father's early speculations and deserted him in his time of need.
The ruin of Everett Clayton was now explained. And but one gracious
memory lingered with him to lighten the gloom of his dependent
boyhood.

Golden-haired Alice Worthington, the child-angel of the house,
the frank girlish little playmate, the slim, shy school girl, the
"Little Sister" of his striving  college days. And now she was
doomed to be the  deluded prey of a vulgar money conspiracy--sold,
body and soul.

He groaned as he thought of the deliberate sacrifice of the girl's
glorious young womanhood to the vicious ambitions of her father's
mad race for wealth and power.

"Shall I warn her?" he bitterly mused. And then all his manhood
rose up against discovering a father's shame. "Never!" he cried. "I
have eaten his bread and salt. My quarrel is with him alone! Ferris
is to be the coming bridegroom. He is like all the rest--greedy of
money and power. He will surely make her a "good husband" of the
plutocratic code. Her money, his uncle's influence, bartered off
for each other, will tie them firmly together. She shall never know
from me. But I will fight Hugh Worthington a silent battle to the
death. It will be a life and death struggle under the Black Flag."

It was this oath which made Clayton resolve to now hide his own
private life slyly from all his colleagues.  And it was a most
needful precaution. For one single imprudence would give to his
enemies the secret of his devotion to the dark-eyed woman whose
eyes seemed to shine through all the clouds around him.

And, strange to say, the watchful Einstein had as yet made
no report, though each night during the week Clayton had seen the
youth hovering afar, at varied times, and in strangely incongruous
changes of  external adornment.

It was while Clayton was hastily packing up his bank deposits,
upon the Monday morning, which had at last arrived, young Einstein
glided into the room and drew Clayton to the door, left slightly
ajar.

"There, quick," he whispered. "Those two fellows  at the elevator,
now. They have just come out from reporting to old Wade. I was in the
office,  waiting for Mr. Somers to give me the last mail deposits.

"Get out and follow them," whispered Clayton.  "Come to my rooms
at eight to-night. Your hundred dollars await you." The agile
lad nodded and stole out, springing down the stairs to await the
slowly-descending elevator.

"Now," growled Clayton, as he viciously snapped the lock of his
portmanteau. "I will hide my every movement from you, my marble-faced
old sleuth. You are the heir of Ferris' infamy."

And yet, as Clayton descended in the elevator, he realized  that
he had no claim whatever upon Robert Wade's friendship. "He has
not betrayed me," murmured the now defiant cashier. "He is only the
human 'transmitter' in Hugh Worthington's 'long-distance telephone'
of villainy."

But, deep down in his angered heart, Clayton swore an oath to
lead them all a merry dance. "No man among them shall ever have my
confidence, and I will find a way to hide my every movement."

He would have made a total change of residence at once but for Jack
Witherspoon's friendly caution. And so he sadly dismissed a plan
to follow Irma Gluyas, to find out her real residence, and to be
near her in the hours which she could make a paradise.

He smiled as he thought of the magnificent corbeille of flowers
which he had already sent over to the  Restaurant Bavaria to be
placed in the breakfast-room. He had stolen away for a quarter of
an hour to give his own directions to the grave-faced "Oberkellner,"
who was all discretion, as he pocketed Clayton's ten-dollar bill
and said, "I perfectly understand. Madame already ordered the
breakfast on Saturday. The same apartment. And you can trust to
me." The suave politeness of the well-greased palm.

There was a mild-eyed wonder in the eyes of the dashing attaches
of the Astor Place Bank as Randall Clayton entered on this fateful
Monday morning. For, with that unconscious desire to please of the
lover, Clayton's attire bespoke an unaccustomed elegance.

And yet a discreet silence was observed as the sixty thousand
dollars was transferred, and the flying fingers of the lynx-eyed
clerks filled up the dozen drafts which Clayton impatiently awaited.

In his haste Clayton hailed a passing coupe, dashed away to
the office, and quickly snapping his door after delivering over
his trust, glided down the stairs. "To the Irving Place Theater,"
ordered the impatient lover, and then the minutes seemed hours till
he had paid off his man, and then, by Fourteenth Street, hastily
entered the darkened hallway of the Restaurant Bavaria.

He was but vaguely aware of the presence of Madame Raffoni, as he
bowed low before his hostess. The incognito diva was a dream of
beauty in her ravishing Viennese morning dress. Randall Clayton
drew a new courage from Fräulein Irma's murmured remark, "Madame
Raffoni, unfortunately, speaks no English," and the young enthusiast
only noted that the ex-professional still possessed splendid eyes,
and showed the remains of a considerable personal beauty.

His whole cares fell away from him as Clayton joined in the merry
mood of his beautiful enchantress. The little dejeuner was a perfect
rapprochement, in the light-hearted happiness of the hour.

Clayton had cast aside all suspicion when he left the doors of the
Western Trading Company, and over the Liebfrauenmilch and Tokayer
he found a new eloquence.  His Western stories, his European
experiences vastly interested the dark-eyed enchantress, and, led
on by the spell of those wistful eyes--Othello-like--he told her
the whole story of his life. For he stood before her, all unarmed
in his sudden love fever.

Two hours sped by in a lingering day dream, until, yielding to
his murmured entreaties, Irma Gluyas sat down at the piano, and
in thrilling half voice, sang him the songs of the far off Magyar
land.

As Merlin forgot his wisdom before the wily white-bosomed Vivien,
so did the stormy-hearted American yield to the charm of the woman
who sat there, with the choicest flowers of his offering clustered
over her sculptured breast. Love's old, old story of a total
surrender.

And then, as the last melody died away, the Hungarian witch softly
sighed, "The shadows are already stealing in! We have stolen a few
happy moments, mon ami. Ships that meet, and speak, and pass. I
will not say Adieu! I will only say that I hope to meet you again.
But your world and mine are so different.  I have my career to
make, and you must go on and be a money prince. There are no other
princes in your workaday America!" Madame Raffoni was nodding in
an alcove when the enraptured Randall Clayton caught the diva's
hand. For he could not bear to lose her now; his heart clamored
for her love.

His kisses warmed its veined marble as he whispered, "I must see
you again. We two are alone in the world.  I owe you a return of
your gallant hospitality."

Her bosom was heaving in a tumult of vague emotion as she whispered,
"I am fenced off from the whole world. My career depends upon my
fidelity to those who trust me. I am absolutely incognito. I live
apart from the world, and I dare not take you to my home.  There
is no way. The artist has no home life, no heart life. The world
claims us; all our youth, beauty, talent, even our last energies
are given up to the insatiate public.

"You must call me back when you look at our Danube picture, and,
when the ban is lifted, if I succeed, you will hear of me. If I
fail," she brokenly murmured, "then, forget me--think of me as only
one who, a stranger in a strange land, has shared Life's cup with
you, in a gleam of passing sunshine." There were bright tears
trembling upon her down-dropped lashes.

"And I shall have nothing of you! Not even a picture," hoarsely
murmured Clayton. "I will not be denied. I shall see you again. I
will follow you!"

He was startled by the ashen pallor of her face.

"You must not! You dare not!" she cried, in a sudden agitation. "It
would mean our eternal parting!  For I will not have my plighted
honor forfeit.  Promise me, if you ever hope to see me again, that
you will not follow me!"

There was the ring of truth in her words, and even the accent of
fear in her appeal.

Catching at a last straw, Clayton pleaded before the word of
dismissal should fall from her trembling lips.

"I must see you again," he begged. "I leave all to you, and I swear
to obey you in all things."

The beautiful woman bowed her head in her hands.

"See how I trust you," she brightly said, meeting his glance frankly
at last. "Be at the arch in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, next Sunday
at two.

"If you have a closed carriage we can drive an hour in the park.
If we must say farewell, we can say it then. For even when I met
you first, in that crowded street, I felt that in some strange
freemasonry of Life, we were to be friends."

A single frightened, warning gesture recalled him to his senses,
as Irma pointed to her nodding companion.  "You do not know how
jealous artists are.

"One single imprudence would be my professional ruin; my career
would be blasted. Trust to me! Obey me; swear that you will not
follow me, and we shall meet again, for I would not lose you from
my life." He took the roses from her bosom and kissed them.

"Go, now," she whispered, "but only that we may meet again! I have
your promise."

"Loyal to the death," swore Clayton, as he kissed her trembling
hands and then stole away, leaving her there alone with pallid lips
and a wildly beating heart.

Clayton had taken up the burden of his unfinished day's business
before the carriage left the "Bavaria," and swiftly traversing
Fourth Avenue, passed along to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry.

There was but one occupant, however, for Madame Raffoni had silently
disappeared before the diva, heavily veiled, entered the vehicle.

Clayton wondered at the protracted absence of his office boy,
ignorant that the young double spy was standing before the Restaurant
Bavaria watching Leah Einstein's furtive disappearance.

And neither the lad, astounded as his mother's unaccustomed finery,
nor the love-blinded Randall Clayton ever knew that "Madame Raffoni"
hastened to Magdal's Pharmacy to whisper to Mr. Fritz Braun tidings
which brought a surging swell of triumph into that arch plotter's
heart.

"Leah! You are a wonder, after all," was the comment of her old
lover. "Keep this whole matter quiet. Hoodwink them all! And that
pair of diamond ear-rings you dreamed of may fall your way at last!"
The poor cast-off woman swore a blind obedience to her lover once,
her tyrant still.

The adroit Timmins laughed in his heart when his employer, deliberately
closing his cabinet, left the shop an hour earlier than usual on
this particularly auspicious afternoon.

Fritz Braun's eyes gleamed viciously behind the blue glass screens
as he sedately boarded his car. "Things are coming my way at last,"
he said. "I must not hurry, I must make no mistake, and I must let
that Magyar devil fancy that she is playing this game herself, for
one false step would ruin all." And he vowed to deceive the daring
woman whom he feared to curb.  "She shall work my will and not know
the finale in the third act."

The office doors of the Western Trading Company closing, one by
one, with a resounding clang, awoke Randall Clayton from day dreams
which he dared not break off.

The office boy had not returned when Clayton, now on guard against
every one in the employ of the Western robber baron, went out into
the crowds pressing homewards.

He had given up, in a mad impulse, the whole faith of his unspent
life to the woman who had whispered, "Go now, that we may meet
again."

The thrilling accents of her voice, sweet and low, seemed to vibrate
in his soul, and so, hugging his darling secret to his heart, he
vowed to baffle Worthington's spies. "For her," he murmured, "I
will outwit them all."

No shade of suspicion rested upon the lovely image dwelling now on
the throne of his heart. For in the matchless beauty of her delicate
face he saw only the royal mint stamp of a noble soul. He had called
her to his side out of all New York's thronging thousands, by the
mute appeal of his lonely, longing eyes. It was Nature's mesmerism.

And as that grand hailing sign had been answered by Fate's decree,
he was blind to the pathway leading on. For, in his fond conceit,
he only knew Worthington and Ferris as enemies.

With a restless impatience, he awaited the coming of his office boy
after he had trifled the time away over his dinner at the Imperial.
Leaning back in his chair, he keenly watched the voluble lad, in a
growing wonder, as Einstein triumphantly recalled every detail of
his master's evening movements of the past week.

"I didn't get on to them well, sir," concluded Emil, "but the last
two nights one or the other of them has kept you in sight all the
while.

"Daly's, the Imperial, Hammerstein's, the Waldorf, up where you
bought your outing goods, down to Proctor's, up the Boulevard to
the Colonial Club, they piped you off. You see I only got familiar
with them after a few nights. But now I have them dead to rights."

"And where did they go from there?" growled Clayton. "After they
reported to the old man," irreverently answered Einstein, "they
went together down to the Fidelity Company. I followed them in and
brought away a card. That's all, sir!"

Randall Clayton paced the floor in silence a few moments.  Then,
taking out his pocketbook, he handed the eager youth a hundred-dollar
bill. "Keep this matter all to yourself, Emil," he gravely said.
"I will let you off now for a couple of weeks. Then I will take
you on again and will see if these 'spotters' are still on duty.
I will look out for you, and see you promoted."

When the boy had departed, Randall Clayton sank back in his chair.
"Whatever happens," he musingly decided, "I will never expose Irma
to the dangers of this espionage. They may have other agents by
day, who knows! And, if I wish to safely meet her, it must be over
there."

His thought were wandering far away across the black, flowing tide
of the East River, where the Brooklyn Bridge was now traced in line
of living light against the darkness of night.

Over there, beyond the gloomy river warehouses, with their forests
of masts, across the swiftly rushing tide seeking the unknown sea,
the graceful Queen of his awakened heart was hidden from him. "I
shall find her out; nothing shall part us; she shall hear me yet;
she shall learn to look for my coming, and she shall open the gates
of her home to me. Her heart shall beat against my own."

For, in all the sweep of a lover's imagination, he only saw her,
at the end of the veiled pathway, with love lighting her softly
shining eyes, and her beloved hand waving him on.

While he still wandered in a Fool's Paradise, the crafty office boy
was hastening across the great span which hangs its curving arch
from Manhattan to Long Island.

Einstein was driven on by his gnawing greed of money. "Fritz must
know this at once," he muttered.  These business detective fellows
are dangerous, and could easily break up his little game.

"For if Clayton gets into any trouble, out he goes!  There's no
money in him then, and he's no good to Fritz Braun, no more to me.
This news ought to fetch me a couple of twenties if well played."

It was ten o'clock when Emil Einstein sprang down the stairway of
the eastern terminus of the Brooklyn Bridge. The lad was blithe at
heart as he turned to the left and, passing through the seething
press of the crowds congested under the electric lights of Sands
and Fulton Streets, carefully reconnoitered a gorgeous saloon on
the corner of Layte and Dale Streets.

Einstein peered in through the two swinging doors of the front,
and then betook himself to the side entrance on Dale Street, where
the "Family Entrance," the private corridor, and one or two halls
admitted him to the restaurant, card rooms and private rooms of the
ground floor of the five-story corner brick building.  The youth
recoiled, after a peep through a ground glass door left ajar, at
the glories of the main hall of the famous "Valkyrie" saloon.

"What am I to do?" he mused, as he lit his cigarette in a dark
doorway outside, parrying the coarse advances of two fleeting Cyprians
with a retort which brought the blood to their cheeks, leaping up
under the plastered rouge. "I've been forbidden to call him out of
192; he and my mother are both now fooling the Duchess; I am playing
a double game with Clayton, and, by Hokey, old Wade's watchful men
may drop on to me. I may lose the best job in New York if these
people get all tangled up. What the devil is going on, anyway?"

He crossed the street and gazed up at the glaring red pressed-brick
walls of the Valkyrie corner. All the two score of windows on Dale
Street, and the score on Layte Street were closely guarded with
solid shutters of a green hue.

"God knows what deviltry is going on here," muttered the lad, a coward
at heart. There were fleeting figures of veiled women gliding past
him through the dim entrances, the refluent stream of the Devil's
daughters.

Down the gloomy side street the blue gleam of the pitiless river
showed light against the somber night, the yellow blinking lights
of the tugs flitting about like corpse candles.

In the dark shadows of the involved angular corners, thug and ghoul
lurked until midnight should bring them their prey, the careless
roysterer, or the belated prosperous citizen. Out on Layte Street
the flashy throng was still pouring toward the Fulton Ferry.

"I wonder if I dare," mused the lad, as he walked around the corner
and paused before No. 192 Layte Street. The sober splendor of the
richly decorated old five-story brownstone told of the vanished
glories of the ante-bellum days.

A stately mansion in whose halls there had been royal cheer in the
departed days when Brooklyn had its proud burghers and New York its
simple citizens of worth. But the pressure of commerce, the havoc
of the bridge construction, the onrush of warehouse, shop, and the
pressure of the street railway octopus had left the sedate mansion
a relic of better days in an incongruous medley of little shops,
doubtful lodging-houses, vile man-traps, and clustering saloons.

Here the Juggernaut car of King Alcohol was rolling on remorselessly,
crushing out all life save the frenzied dream of the dipsomaniac.

But the lad paused and shook his head as he noted the windows of
the old English basement tightly barred. The parlor floor, bearing
the gilded sign, "Parisian Millinery Repository," was darkened, and,
above, the three upper floors presented only an array of undraped
windows solidly shut off by white-enamelled inside folding blinds.
The decorous-looking main entrance bore but one card, in script,
"Raffoni, Musical Director."

For years the neighborhood had forgotten its curiosity over the
foreign-looking men and women who passed the vigilant Cerberus at
the stately oaken door.  No daring book-agent, no pedlar of indurated
cheek, no outside barbarian had ever crossed that guarded portal,
for a brass chain of impregnable strength prevented any intrusion,
and only a glimpse of the old tesselated marble floor rewarded the
frightened interloper.

It was "No Thoroughfare" to the multitude, and the quaint visitors
were either personally conducted or used latch-keys.

The over-fed policeman sucking his club in front of 192 Layte only
smiled in answer to vague inquiry, "Private house, belongs to old
family estate, people in Europe," and then with a leer would drop
into the "Valkyrie" for a fistful of good cigars and a flask of
the very best.

The timid young scoundrel lingering before 192 on this fresh,
starry night was the only "outsider" who knew what deadly master
mind controlled the mysteries of the "Valkyrie" saloon and 192
Layte Street, its sedate neighbor.

The particular use of the "fake" millinery repository, the hidden
life of the upper floors of the old mansion, were only known to
the man whom Emil Einstein feared to meet in anger.

But in the Devil's auction of the corner building, man, woman and
child were knocked down to the highest bidder, for the hell-minted
price of human souls.

Gambler, crook and thief; wanton, decoy and badger; racing tout,
fugitive, smuggler, and counterfeiter; lottery sharp and green-goods
man, all welcomed the white, red and blue lights gleaming over the
"Valkyrie" saloon as the harbor-lights of their safe port in any
storm.

"I have it," muttered Einstein, as he boldly threw open the swinging
half door of the "Valkyrie." Shading his eyes in the flood of
garish light, he gazed around at the twenty round tables. Six alert
barkeepers lurked in front of the superb mirrors behind the rich
walnut counters gleaming with crystal and silver.

The music of the Orchestrion bore away on its flood of Strauss
waltzes the shrill chatter of women's laughter in the inside hell
of the private rooms.

Opening doors admitted fragments of poker gabble as the white-aproned
waiters rushed around with their trays of drinks.

With artful geography of arrangement, gaudy women from the side
street, at tables, were parading their too evident charms before
the crowd of clerks, men about town, warrant officers, railroad
employees, old roués, sporting men and belated "slummers" who leered
at every arrival of "fresh fish."

Young Einstein, scribbling the single word "Emil" on a card, approached
the parchment-faced German lad who sat in state, manipulating the
bewildering keys of the "Cash Register."

"Send this to the boss at once," said Einstein in a low voice.

"You can't see him," contemptuously announced the insolent
Jack-in-office, tossing back the card. He scented a possible
successor in this vulpine-looking young stranger. But Einstein
resolutely came back to the charge. "It's his business, and he'll
jerk you out of your job if you throw me down. I will not stir a
step till I see him. Send it up."

And Emil made a significant gesture with a defiant thumb.

Audacity carried the day! Young Einstein, coolly purchasing
a Regalia and seating himself at a table, grinned a last defiance
as a "Kellner" finally touched his arm and led him into a vacant
card-room.

Down a stairway came the sounding tread of a heavy man, and Einstein
was in the presence of Mr. Fritz Braun.

"It's about him, Clayton," faltered the boy, awed at his employer's
lowering face.

"Come with me," harshly said Braun, as he led the lad up to the
third floor. When they had entered a rear sleeping-room, Braun
locked the door. "Tell me all," he anxiously cried. "Out with it.
If you lie you'll never leave this house, remember!"

With chattering teeth, the lad delivered himself of his discovery.
It was only after half an hour of cross questioning that Braun was
satisfied with the details of Robert Wade's espionage of Randall
Clayton.  "You've done well, for yourself," said Braun, at last,
handing the boy a roll of bills. "But never come here again. I'll
give you an address to-morrow where you can call, telephone or
telegraph, and a name. Post me on all. Keep this from your mother.
I'll handle her myself. Now, by day you can slip over to the store,
by night use the new address. Get home now.  Go over the ferry."
He filled the boy's hand with loose silver. "I'll stay here. Speak
to no one. Get out quickly by the side door."

Emil Einstein was safely across the Fulton Ferry before he had
realized the startling change in Fritz Braun's appearance. The flowing
golden beard, the blue glasses, the padded clothes of middle-age
cut were gone. Fritz Braun, lithe, sharp-faced, with piercing eyes,
a dashing cavalry mustache, and dapper Wall Street tailoring, was
twenty years younger, and another man.

His diamond jewels, rakish air and "loose fish" manner bespoke the
flush book-maker or the flashy "boss."

"Here's for a night on the Bowery," gleefully cried Einstein,
counting his Judas gains, while he tried to forget Fritz Braun's
lightning change.

That dapper gentleman, stepping into a closet, passed swiftly
through the door from the Valkyrie into 192 Layte Street. His
hidden pool-room, gambling den and exchange for soul and body was
temporarily forgotten  by "Mr. August Meyer," owner of the peerless
"Valkyrie Saloon."

"I'll get a carriage and drive over to Irma," he growled. "She must
never cross the river again. We must lead him over here; but how?
Perhaps the pretty devil can help me. I must throw Wade off the
track.  Irma can fool this young greenhorn. The job must be done
over there. For a fortune, for his life or mine; and he must be
teased along till the July holidays."

Then Mr. August Meyer of Brooklyn proceeded to leisurely array
himself as a clubman of fashion.




CHAPTER V.

BREAKERS AHEAD! CHECKMATE! MR. ARTHUR FERRIS WORKS IN THE DARK.


Randall Clayton was an enigma in his altered personal  bearing
to his old confrères when he entered the manager's office at his
summons on a balmy afternoon of the dying days of June.

The two months since Jack Witherspoon's departure had changed the
frank young fellow into a taciturn man of feline secretiveness. The
discovery of Worthington's  treachery, the knowledge of the dogging
spies at his heels, had been a suddenly transforming influence.  He
now ardently burned for the return of his one confidant, for the
annual election was but a few days distant.

The ripening summer was coming on fast. On Fifth Avenue the delicate,
haughty-faced young Princesses of Mammon now bore the June blush
roses in their slender  pitiless hands. The annual hegira pleasureward
was beginning.

And as yet only Randall Clayton's burning eyes marked the conflict
raging in his soul. But he longed to leap into the open, and boldly
defy Worthington.  For a new purpose had stolen upon him in these
weeks--the sudden desire for wealth.

He craved money for but one object--to cast it at the feet of
Irma Gluyas and then to bear her away from a world of lies to the
storied Danube, where woman's rosy lip rests in clinging transports
upon lips speaking the wild love of the gallant Magyar land.  He
now knew the power of wealth. Clayton had become  as secretive as
the young Pawnee on his first warpath.  He was now watching the
enemy's camp and awaiting the moves of both the guilty employer
and false friend.

Through the still subsidized Einstein he knew that the bootless
espionage upon his leisure hours had been given up at last. He had
baffled his enemies.

It had not been done by fear of the clumsy artifices of Robert
Wade, but a desire born of his overmastering  love for Irma, to
guard her every footstep. His heart melted in its memories of that
crowning hour of the avowal of his love, when she had whispered,
"I dare not take you to my home! Wait, Randall, wait, and trust
all to me."

Two months past had seen him plunging deeper into the mad love,
more blindly, every day, sinking into the hungry passion, waxing
into a fond delirium, under the artful orders of a veiled Mokanna.
"You must lead him on, far as you can; make him forget everything
in the world but yourself; promise him all, and grant him nothing."

A thousand plans had been revolved by Clayton for the future, but
the delicious thralldom of his love drew him to Irma Gluyas as the
moon draws the sea.

It had been his own jealous lover heart which bade her meet him in
all distant places, but to always shun the city with Wade's baffled
spies still on the watch.

For once, the orders of the double traitor Einstein were identical,
as neither the artful Braun nor the anxious lover cared to risk
the dangers of Irma's face meeting the gaze of the watchful Wade.

In a guarded silence the young cashier awaited Mr.  Robert Wade's
official action on this June afternoon.  He was only vaguely
aware by rumor that Hugh Worthington and Miss Alice still lingered
somewhere on the Pacific Coast.

There had been no further word from Arthur Ferris, and the
all-important election was but a week distant now. Clayton keenly
watched the solemn-faced manager as he drew out some papers from
a bulky envelope.  There was but one phase in his now double life
of which Clayton naturally feared the exposure.

Warned by Witherspoon, Clayton had watched the steady rise of the
Western Trading Company's stock, week by week, during the absence
of the arbiter of its destinies. His veins were filled with the
tide of a new-born passion.

Clayton had boldly risked all his savings in the margining of
large blocks of the stock, dealing constantly through a Wall Street
friend.

Three times he had fortunately turned over his capital since
Witherspoon had unveiled the scheme to draw in a majority of the
shares, and he was now sixteen thousand dollars to the good. Even
after lavishing a goodly part of his gains upon the mysterious
diva, in every fantastic way possible, in their stealthy meetings,
Clayton still had pyramided his capital and now was sure of another
harvest. And he only wondered at the reluctance with which the
lovely Hungarian accepted the jewels thrust upon her.

"I will sell out the day before the election," mused Clayton, as
he awaited the manager's slow mental processes. "Then I can even
stand a discharge," he defiantly thought.

The young man's face paled suddenly as Wade handed him a telegram
addressed in the care of the manager. "When you have carefully read
this," said Wade, "I will give you Mr. Worthington's own ideas,
from his confidential instructions to me."

Conscious that he was now environed in the house of his enemies,
Randall Clayton sat for some time there, silently pondering the
suddenness of a proposal which affected his whole future career.

"You are wanted as general superintendent of all of our Western
ranches. Headquarters at Cheyenne.  Please telegraph acceptance,
and meet Ferris at Cheyenne in four days. He leaves to-day. Answer.
Wade has my full instructions."

The blood surged back to Randall Clayton's heart in a defiant flood.
"They know nothing; but I'll hear him out."

It was twenty minutes before the manager had finished the explanation
of the measure proposed and had dilated upon the advance of salary,
the future prospects, and all the ultimate benefits of the parties
to this autocratically suggested change. "He has been secretly
coached up by Ferris," thought the suspicious Clayton. But he gave
no sign of his secret distrust.

"Of course," purringly remarked Robert Wade, "it is a little sudden;
but I am authorized to make you a half year's salary allowance for
first expenses and outfit, and so you can easily get away to-morrow
night. That will bring you out to Cheyenne in time to meet Ferris,
and then get your instructions. He is coming on to look at the annual
accounts and give Mr.  Worthington's views as to your successor."

Wade pushed over a telegraph blank. "Just write out your telegram,
and I will send it on at once. You will accept, of course."

Randall Clayton had schooled himself since Jack Witherspoon's
departure in every defensive measure against the secret plotters.
And so his voice was suave and measured as he simply said, "I think,
Mr.  Wade, that I shall have to regretfully decline this promotion.
I am perfectly well satisfied as I am. I know nothing of the details
of our great Western business.  I have forgotten the frontier now."

The lines in Wade's face hardened. "Is that your only reason? You
will soon pick up the technique!"

Clayton stood the fire of the vulpine gray eyes without a quiver.
Jack Witherspoon's warning injunctions returned to his mind. "Look
out, my boy, that they don't get you sidetracked in some lonely
place.  They would kill you like a rat if our design to uncover
the past was ever discovered."

Clayton but too well knew how easily a man could be lost forever out
in the Black Hills, or along the lonely Platte. "It is their grand
final move before bringing out Ferris as the new-made capitalist.
My life would not be worth a pin-head. And Witherspoon would be
far away out of reach. Irma lost to me forever!"

The jealous lover could almost see the crowded opera-house and
hear that now familiar witching voice.  He knew that men would
bow before her beauty; that flowers, jewels, flattery and fortune
would be showered upon her. The hungry "upper ten" pine for new
victims with unsatisfied maw. He had already dedicated his coming
fortune to her; she should be his heart-queen, and together they
would go back and buy the old family castle, whose legends had
fallen from her lips in the stolen hours of the long love trysts
of the last two months.

"I cannot accept this flattering offer, Mr. Wade," resolutely said
the young man, who now saw a steely anger in the manager's eyes.
"I have given the flower of my youth to Mr. Worthington's service;
but this is a total change, a sudden break-up of all my private
plans. I beg that you will at once telegraph him my respectful
declination."

Clayton rose with a look on his face which completed Wade's thorough
annoyance. "Stop, sir; stop! Think before you throw away all your
chances in life! You can have a whole day to think this over. Would
you forfeit Mr. Worthington's regard and so lose your place?"

There was a strident anger in the manager's harsh voice. But Clayton,
realizing that he had even till now not been able to gain Irma's
pictured face, looked forward to the heart-wreck of this enforced
absence.  "If I am to be cast out like a dog after my faithful
service, then you must do it, sir," gravely said Clayton, Witherspoon's
warnings returning to stiffen his resolution.  "Why not await Mr.
Ferris' arrival? I may be able to reach Mr. Worthington's second
thoughts through him." The agent of the two far off conspirators
lost his self-control at last.

"I'll await nothing," roared Robert Wade. "That will do, sir!" And
as the defiant Clayton retired, the manager rang for a telegraph
boy.

"I have given them checkmate," mused Clayton, as he snapped his
door behind him. "Their plans probably included making away with
me, out West, after Ferris has done his work and returns to openly
claim Alice's hand. It is a fight for my life now. I must reach
Irma at once. I must tell her all."

Suddenly he thought of the future. His heart sickened.  "Wade will
undoubtedly recommend my discharge.  If Jack fails me, I am then
to be cast out in the streets, and the influence of the Trust will
surely keep me from holding any other position longer than they
can find out where to reach me."

He absently broke the seals of a couple of letters dropped on his
desk in his brief absence.

He sprang up, a new man, as he read Jack Witherspoon's few words.
The missive was dated from Paris.  It bore in its light-hearted
chatter a few words which sealed his fate in life.

"Am coming home at once. Will be with you in ten days. Let nothing
prevent our meeting in New York. Will act instantly in your matter.
Have had private news. They were secretly married a month ago at
Tacoma. Be on your guard!"

Seizing his hat, Randall Clayton hurried away to the nearest
telegraph office, where he felt safe from Robert Wade's spies.

"Thank God for Irma's wit," he said, in his heart, as he sent the
veiled words which would bring her to that quiet hotel on Staten
Island, where, among Richmond's leafy bowers, they now defied all
possible detection.  It had been her own plan. The long weeks of
Clayton's complete self-surrender had brought about no forward step
in Irma Gluyas' intimacy.

The still silent Madame Raffoni was the careful guardian of the
veiled beauty, and Clayton, loyal to a frenzy of romantic faith,
had never broken his promise.

For he lived only now in Irma's whispered promise, "Wait, and trust
to me. You shall come to me as soon as I can break my bonds. It
shall be then you and I, for the rest of our days, if Love still
holds the helm."

It was long after midnight when the defiant lover returned to his
apartment. The Magyar witch had finally learned the last secret
of his honest heart, and with clinging arms had whispered through
her kisses, "If you leave me, Randall, it is the death of our love."
And, trusting blindly to his honest love, Clayton wagered his life
upon a woman's faith.

Under the door of his room lay a yellow envelope, and as the now
resolute man read it he smiled grimly.  "Victory!" he cried, for
Ferris' words assured him of a coming triumph, a crown of life and
love. It seemed that Irma's love had conquered after all.

"Await me in New York. I think that we can arrange all for your
remaining as you are." The signature was that of the artful Ferris.
"And I think that Jack and I can handle you, my false friend!"
sneered Clayton.

While the young lover read the words which gave him a new hope, far
across the Brooklyn Bridge, Mr.  Fritz Braun, in his own private
lair, was pondering over the words of Madame Raffoni, who had just
left the man who was the iron tyrant of her soiled life.

"I must give him a little more line! And I must either land the
fish now or lose him forever."

There was a steely gleam in the sleepless eyes of him who pondered
upon his clouded pathway. "It must be done! And she must help in
some way. She holds the winning cards now. Nothing else will draw
him!"

The masquerading criminal was almost desperate.  It had been his
by-play for years to play at hide and seek with humanity, using his
duplex characters at first to throw off any pursuit of the Vienna
police; and, later, to hide his nefarious operations on the New
York side.

Greedy for money, before Irma Gluyas had been driven to his arms by
adverse fortunes, Fritz Braun had at first made his refuge at the
"Valkyrie," then owned by Ludwig Sohmer, whose passion for "playing
the races" had at last dragged him down.

The Viennese fugitive diligently plied his erstwhile patron with
drink and smilingly enmeshed the brutish peasant-bred Sohmer in a
series of compounded loans.

It was not long until all the employees recognized in the alert
"August Meyer" the mainstay of the decaying fortunes of the half
bankrupt Sohmer.

Every evening, without fail, the sharp commands of Fritz Braun
were now conveyed to the responsible underlings! Sohmer, staggering
homeward with his greedy Aspasias from the Waterloo conflicts of
the race-track, sullenly assented at last to the chattel mortgages
and bills of sale which placed the "Valkyrie" and the whole building
under August Meyer's name.  Then, taking the downward road, Sohmer
tried to drown himself in drink, and succeeded.

When Sohmer was found dead in his bed, the millionaire brewer who
backed the "Valkyrie," and the owner of the ground on which the
building erected by Sohmer stood, gladly took on the active August
Meyer in loco the departed Sohmer.

The solidity of the new tenant's finances was vouched for by the
agents of the old estate from whom Fritz Braun had already leased
192 Layte Street, in his Brooklyn name of "August Meyer."

Strange to say, the keen-eyed officials of the German Consulate-General
had issued to the acute pharmacist a regular passport, upon the
military and family papers of Braun's poor soldier drudge at the
Magdal Pharmacy.

It had been an exchange acceptable to both parties: an ocean
of drink, a weekly pittance of food and raiment, for the valuable
attested documents which gave the disguised Viennese fugitive the
right to boldly claim the Kaiser's official protection as "August
Meyer." It was the very citadel of Braun's rising fortunes!

And so, with Sohmer soundly sleeping, whether well or illy, "after
life's fitful fever," the foxy Viennese rejoiced in his assigned
ground-lease, Sohmer's business, and the gold mine of the hidden
pool-room, gambling den and disguised harem of No. 192 Layte Street.

Fritz Braun had allowed a few months to pass before he secretly
opened the party walls between the two buildings to allow his
choicest patrons to enter No. 192 Layte Street all unobserved; but,
for reasons of his own, he had made one or two private alterations
in the two buildings which enabled him to enter the different floors
by his own judiciously veiled private entrances.

The cellar of No. 192 Layte Street had been piped for cold-storage
of the wines and beer of the "Valkyrie" under Fritz Braun's own
supervision when he gave up the basement of the "Valkyrie" to the
kitchens of the restaurant, which drew the attractive women of the
quarter into the safest possible association with their victims
crowding the "Valkyrie" saloon.

A vigilant business man, August Meyer came each evening to settle
the days' affairs and personally watch the money mill next door,
which ran noiselessly on golden wheels from nine o'clock till
midnight.

No one had Meyer's confidence; he left no tell-tale papers to connect
him with the gruff pharmacist of Sixth Avenue, and at midnight he
always vanished to his own private home, a diligently guarded terra
incognita to all men.

A sphinx-like "Oberkellner" received the orders of the proprietor
each evening; a steward of equal taciturnity "ran" the restaurant,
and August Meyer himself, with autocratic power, directed the
villainous operations of No. 192 Layte Street.

Popular with the police, exact in his monthly settlements with the
ground landlords and the despotic brewery king, Fritz Braun avoided
both the failings which had wrecked the golden fortunes of the dead
Sohmer.

But, alas! no man is equally strong against all temptations. Deaf
to woman's wail; brutal and heartless; too fearful of his past
record to give himself up to the bowl, Fritz Braun, blasé and tired
of every side of human life, had drifted easily into the desperate
craze of the insatiate gambler.

It was months after he had found No. 192 Layte Street to be
a never-failing mint, when Braun became fascinated with the whirr
of the roulette ball, the varying chances of the faro box, and, at
last, the fine peculiarities of "unlimited poker" swept away his
once callous prudence.

Night after night, in the grim quartette of a ruinously high game,
August Meyer "held his hand" recklessly, while a street railroad
magnate, a millionaire importer, and a reigning politician swept
away the revenues of the "Valkyrie." He was rolling the stone of
Sysiphus up hill now. He had forged his own ruin.

Alone in the world, a desperate Ishmael, Fritz Braun needed the
secret protection of these powerful plutocrats.  Silently he had
suffered his huge losses, waiting for the luck to turn, and now, on
the eve of his great coup of criminal sagacity, he awoke at last
to his own imperiled fortunes, and yet he feared to own that he
dared not cease gambling, that he could not "throw up his hand."

And, by one of the fantastic turns of luck which haunt even
the safest "dealing" games, he had seen the tide of Fortune turn
viciously against his banking dealers several times. The "bank"
had been broken at several of his tables until he had hypothecated
all his reserve securities. Ruin stared him in the face, for it
had come at last.

Possessed of his regular passport, safe now in any voyage in Germany,
the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, in Russia, Fritz Braun
had long desired to break off his slavery to the "painted ladies"
of the cards.

He had always kept some jewels of great value with him as a final
reserve, and a nest-egg of a few thousands deposited in a Frankfort
banking-house, with whose New York agents he had effected many
clearings of considerable size.

Fate was now swiftly sweeping him along, he knew not whither, and
on this night of discontent he bitterly calculated the chances of
a stormy future.

"Ten thousand dollars only left, and whatever more my jewels will
bring," he growled. "I am safe enough, though. Timmins can run the
pharmacy, and the brewery will put an agent in here if I say that
I need a few months' rest abroad."

"But there's Irma to be got rid of! If she does not help me to
this one crowning stroke of luck, then I've either got to put her
out of the way or take her with me. She knows my one dangerous
secret."

A busy devil in his heart whispered an excellent suggestion. He
grinned in self-satisfied malignity.  "Yes! That's the trick! If I
win we'll take a Hoboken steamer together. Any one of our smuggling
stewards and agents over there will take care of us on the way
over.

"If I lose, she must go with me; and there are a few lonely lakes
in Norway, a few deep fiords with leaping waterfalls. I might lose
her there, and only that coward Lilienthal would perhaps suspect.
He would have to keep his mouth shut, for he has his own tracks
to cover, and he would easily believe that the pretty jade has run
off and left me. And he fears publicity.

"As for Leah, she loves me blindly, with a dog's fidelity; her boy
will be true to his dam and drift on in silence--a sharp scoundrel!
The world is an easy oyster for him to open.

"If--if I lose Irma, I'll have Leah over there with me. My passport
as August Meyer makes me invincible."

And the scheming villain threw himself down to dream of a stroke of
luck which should make him safe in Northern Europe, in the assumed
character of "August Meyer," a second self which fitted him like a
Guardsman's uniform. "I can easily play off a long sickness, turn
over the leases, and the brewer will run the 'Valkyrie.' My one
hope and fear is Irma. If she pulls this off I'll fix her; yes,
I'll fix her!"

He drifted away into a land of dreams, a far-off land, where,
under the black shadows of the Norway firs, he could see the gleam
of white hands thrown up despairingly in the icy waters. It was a
fiend's prophecy of a nameless horror to come.

When Randall Clayton noticed the returning suavity of Manager Robert
Wade's demeanor on the days ensuing the abortive attempt to lure
the young cashier out West, he vowed to redouble his own crafty
policy of secret resistance. It all seemed so clear to him now.
"Wade and Ferris wish to conceal the marriage until the election
is over. I would be exposed, perhaps even here, to their deadly
resentment if I openly rebelled.

"But once that Jack Witherspoon is back, and Ferris anchored here,
Jack can go on and face old Worthington.  I will affect ignorance,
and then a brief campaign of victory will put Irma in my arms."

Startled by Einstein's revelations, Randall Clayton had carefully
removed every scrap of his private papers from his apartments, and
his little fortune, his stocks and personal archives, were all safe
in a down-town Safe Deposit.

The address and all the details of the Trust were lying in a sealed
envelope in the safe of Jack Witherspoon's club, in Detroit, awaiting
that legal champion's return.

And so, his heart thrilled with the fear of losing the Hungarian
singer, Randall Clayton made friends with all in the office until
his friend and enemy should pass each other in New York City.

The business and social atmosphere had visibly cleared before the
day of the annual election came on.

Clayton's eyes were now fixed only on his friend Witherspoon,
whose steamer was now picking him up at Boulogne. The approach of
the Fourth of July, with a triple holiday--Saturday, Sunday and
Monday--caused Clayton to toil, early and late, in the vast annual
settlements of the end of the fiscal year. It was upon the basis
of the settlement of June 30th that the reports of July 1st, the
annual election, were to be made.

But one thought now filled Clayton's agitated heart.

It was Irma Gluyas' future. Her resolute policy of holding him off
had inflamed Clayton's lover ardor to an overmastering passion.

Gallant and loyal, he had taken her at her own word.  The unconventional
artist life, her romantic early history, her foreign birth, her
carefully veiled coming début, all this conspired to cover the
singular reticence of the diva as to her home life.

He never had demanded her whole heart confidence, for he had been
forced to veil from her his hopes of winning a fortune by one fell
swoop upon the astounded Worthington.

"And then," murmured the passionate, heated lover, "I can tell her
all. I can give her a home, the power of wealth to set my jewel
off, and there shall be nothing hidden between us."

From first to last he had concealed nothing from her, save the
mechanism of the short, sharp struggle which was to make him almost
a millionaire, if Jack Witherspoon's bold plan succeeded.

It had been for her sake as well as his own that the veiled star,
Irma Gluyas, had laughingly searched the map of New York and vicinity
to find places of safe meeting.

To avoid Robert Wade's spies, to preserve Irma's incognito, they
had exhausted the "lions" of every Long Island, Staten Island,
and New Jersey village.  They had canvassed every place of resort
within fifty miles of New York City.

With a dumb fidelity Madame Raffoni had accompanied her beautiful
charge. There was a wholesome innocence in these strangely arranged
stolen interviews.

Clayton often searched that lovely face to read what malign influence
kept her from opening her whole life to him.

But it all seemed so clear. Her wild artist nature yearned for the
honors of a world's applause; it was agreed between them that, be
it opera season or concert tour, that, once success was achieved,
the eclipse of Love should hide her from the eager moths who flutter
around the risen star.

"She trusts me; I have not told her all. When I can give her
my whole life and a fortune," thought Clayton, "then I shall say,
'Irma, open the sealed books. There must be nothing hidden between
us.'"

With a serene confidence in Madame Raffoni, Randall Clayton always
came home alone and by circuitous routes, artfully varied, from
these strange trysts.

This stolen time seemed all too short to speak of their future,
gilded by a love which thrived strangely in the difficulties
besetting the strangely-met couple.

Clayton's mind was unclouded by suspicion. He had given his whole
destiny over to the keeping of the small blue-veined hands, which
lingered so lovingly on his heated brow. His watchfulness was only
turned upon Robert Wade's disgruntled spies.

From the heavily subsidized Einstein, Clayton gleefully learned that
the weekly "report" of one or the other of the Fidelity Company's
men consisted of a morose shake of the head and the single word,
"Nothing!"

The cashier laughed at Emil's report of Wade's accidentally overheard
angry growl, "Where the devil does he keep himself, any way?"

For Love had taught Clayton a strange, new craft, and he easily
outwitted the two brutes who always came to "report" during his
bank absences, and had vainly rifled his deserted rooms during his
long Sunday and evening absences.

There was no tell-tale clue in the lonely apartment, where the dust
of many long weeks had gathered in Arthur Ferris' vacant rooms.

Unable to absent himself on the near approach of the great annual
settlement, driven at last to extremity, Randall Clayton arranged
his last meeting with Irma, before the return of Ferris and
Witherspoon, at Manhattan Beach.

For the summer boats were already running, and, on the broad piazzas
of the Oriental they could safely meet.

It was so easy for Madame Raffoni to pilot the incognito diva by
the railway to the Manhattan Hotel.  A double veil and a judiciously
fringed sunshade would make Irma Gluyas impregnable to the flaneur.

"Alas! The days of Aranjuez are over," sighed Clayton, for this
tryst of Thursday was to be followed by the election on Friday.

As yet Arthur Ferris had given no sign of his  impending arrival.
Some gloomy foreboding weighed down Randall Clayton's soul with a
fear of coming  disaster. He felt how powerless he was in the hands
of  the cruel conspirators who had robbed him of his fortune.

He never doubted that Senator Durham and the treacherous Ferris
both possessed Hugh Worthington's dastardly secret, and that they
all stood ready to  crush him.

The innocent four-line advertisement of the annual election had
been duly inserted in the obscure corners of certain fourth-class
journals, "as required by law."

There was an oily grin upon Robert Wade's self-satisfied face,
and, with no single word from Worthington or Ferris, Clayton felt
the toils closing around him. He was left out of the game--a mere
poor pawn.

It was on the night before his five-o'clock tryst at the Manhattan,
when Clayton suddenly sprang from his chair. "By God! I have it!" he
cried. "Old Wade has failed to trap me. Ferris, the smug scoundrel,
will glide back here and try to steal into my intimacy.  He can post
his slyly posted spies. I cannot then keep him off. And he will
reiterate Worthington's plans, cling to me, and run me to earth. He
will take up his Judas trade, and either trap me or else, baffled,
will telegraph Worthington and have me discharged.  Why has
he concealed this secret marriage?  And, damnation! I cannot ever
meet Jack Witherspoon in private without giving myself away. I must
have some one meet Witherspoon at the steamer and arrange for one
meeting out of town. He must go over to Philadelphia and await me.
I can take an evening train over, and be back here, even if Ferris
hangs on my track. I will go out alone, as if to the theater, and
then turn up belated. Ferris must not know. It is for my life, for
Irma, and for my fortune that I  struggle now. My God! Whom can I
trust now, and they have poisoned Alice's mind against me. I see
their damned villainy. Poor Little Sister! Another man's wife now.
She will never know."

In his lover's second sight Randall Clayton had really stumbled
on the artful measure by which the old Croesus  had deliberately
shifted Alice Worthington's love for her old-time playmate.

Over his gold-bowed spectacles, Hugh Worthington,  the "surviving
partner," had sadly read aloud the details of Randall Clayton's
"New York career." "Forget him, Alice," the old man sternly said.
"He has fallen on evil ways." "And yet you still keep him in your
employ, father?" answered the clear-eyed girl, her wondering glances
gleaming out under a brow of truth.

"Yes, yes!" harshly said the startled old miser.  "But it must soon
come to an end. I have delayed the inevitable. But he must go. You
are right; he must go."

And with this colloquy by the far Pacific, the old man dropped
Randall Clayton's soiled memory, while the despoiled heir had turned
at bay to fight for his own.

While Randall Clayton paced his lonely rooms in Manhattan, gazing
sadly on the glowing Danube scene, there was a woman seated in
a shaded corner of the old library of the lonely mansion on Layte
Street. The second drawing-room and library on the ground floor
were a dream of luxury. It had once pleased Mr. Fritz Braun to make
them worthy of a Sultana.

And he stood there now, regarding the graceful  figure of one whose
head was hidden in her hands.

The diamonds on the adventurer's bosom flashed fitfully  in the
yellow gaslight, as he slowly said, "And now you know all your
part. Will you play it?"

Irma Gluyas sprang to her feet and clutched his   arms with a
despairing clasp. "Swear to me that no harm shall come to him!"

Fritz Braun growled an assent. "Not a hand shall be laid on him. I
swear it!" And then, through falling  tears, the Magyar witch gave
her word to do her master's bidding. She had glided from the room
before  the man started, as the street door clashed and the roll
of wheels was heard. He poured out a draught of brandy and threw
himself into a chair. "One week more and I would be too late. I
must hoodwink her!"




BOOK II.

AN INSIDE RING.




CHAPTER VI.

DREAMING BY THE SEA.


Five o'clock on Thursday afternoon found Mr. Randall  Clayton
hovering around the grounds of the more democratic Hotel Manhattan,
while the early birds of fashion sought the more pretentious splendor
of the Oriental.

There was an anxious look upon the young man's face, and deep hollows
under his eyes told of unaccustomed  vigils. A couple of wandering
peris gazed wishfully  at the hand bundle carefully enveloped in
silvery tissue paper. It was true that dark blue Russian violets,
the starry forget-me-not, and the peerless lilies of the valley were
therein hidden, but a keener emotion than expectant love shone in
the young man's haggard eyes.

He was anxiously gazing around for the now well known form of Madame
Raffoni. Clayton dared not exhibit himself before the couple of
hundred staring eyes upon the pavilion and broad porticos.

An unknown fear of being entrapped drove him restlessly about.

"Would to God that Jack Witherspoon had arrived!" muttered the
lover. "I may have the trap sprung on me at any moment. Another
week; a long, long week!  And God knows what may not happen in that
time." Some burning fever gnawed at his unquiet heart, some veiled
danger weighed him down.

Clayton was waiting for the approach of the wife of  that mysterious
musical director whom he had never seen.

A fortunate sort of lingua Franca had been patched up between the
unsuspicious Clayton and the dark-eyed  duenna. A few words of
German, a little scattered  French, and a bit of gibberish English
enabled the two to hold occasional brief and amiable intercourse.

"What language does she really speak?" often cried the baffled
Clayton to the mocking Irma.

"Only pure Czech, my comrade," laughed the diva.  "And I will teach
you the softest language of Love myself when we wander back into
the blue Bohemian mountains to proud old Georgsburg. My father was
a Magyar, my mother," she softly said, "a Czech princess."

While Clayton moved around, cautiously exhibiting himself as agreed
upon, his mind was agitated with a hundred unknown fears. He knew
not the designs of his panther-footed enemies.

To his astonishment, Robert Wade was absent the whole last business
day of the year from the Western Trading Company's offices, and
this, too, when every pen was busied up to five o'clock.

And, the momentous election was to occur in  the morning!

He had lingered with his own annual summary until three o'clock,
when the dejected face of Somers, the head accountant, had appeared
at his office door. "I have a telegram that Mr. Wade is sick in
his bed. I am to take the consolidated accounts up to him to-night."

And so Randall Clayton handed over his papers without  a word. "It
will probably be the last account I will ever render here," he
savagely mused, as he clashed his roll-top desk. "I wish that I had
broken it all off when Wade brought on the half quarrel. I should
have taken a friend with me, drawn out my   little hoard, gone West
and faced Worthington before he successfully works this infamous
deal.

"Now I am powerless. He may tell us both to go to the devil."

And then Clayton sadly remembered that he depended  only on Jack
Witherspoon's mere hearsay for any proofs of wrong-doing. "Yes!
I've only Jack's eagerness to marry that dainty Francine Delacroix
to thank for my fortune--if I ever get it. A woman whom I never
have seen decides my whole destiny, while I would give my life up,
my last drop of blood, for Irma!"

Ah! All unknown to him, a dozen busy minds were weaving snares for
his wandering feet. While Clayton,  at last, saw Madame Raffoni
cautiously approaching,  in his superb Fifth Avenue residence, the
sick man, Robert Wade, was closeted with the wolfish-eyed Arthur
Ferris, the parchment-faced Somers, and four of the seven directors
of the Trading Company.

On guard, lingering around Clayton's apartment, two mercantile
agent's spies were waiting to pipe him off and report his every
movement secretly to the  returned Ferris, now breathless with
anxiety for the greatest financial coup of the season.

Mr. Fritz Braun was artfully busied at Magdal's Pharmacy with giving
Timmins a few last directions, and with the quiet destruction of
a few necessary  professional memoranda which he did not care to
leave behind as dangerous weapons in the hands of the law or any
thieving clerk.

In the pocket of Mr. Fritz Braun's well-known brown overcoat
now reposed a bulky envelope, with a  passport for Mr. and Mrs.
August Meyer, his Frankfort bank exchange, and several letters of
introduction to responsible merchants in Upper Germany. He was, at
least, armed for flight, and fortified beyond all attack.

Ben Timmins looked forward, with delight, to a six-months' suzerainty
of his master's drug business. "I have given Mr. Lilienthal my power
of attorney," said Braun soberly, "and I figure that you should
turn him in at least two hundred dollars a week profit, and also
keep the stock up. He will look in once or twice a week. If you
need help, he will get you a man. If you don't do your duty, he
will promptly kick you out."

"Thank you, sir," submissively remarked Timmins, who felt sure of
declaring himself an equal cash  dividend every week.

"Now remember," said Braun, "I am going over to see Lilienthal. If
any one asks for me, I have gone over the water, that's all.

"For how long, is nobody's business, and you can refer all inquiries
to Lilienthal direct. All that you have to do is to mind your
business and mine. Lilienthal  will let you know when I am coming
back, and advise you."

The two lovers had met, far away at Manhattan Beach, after Madame
Raffoni had discreetly piloted Clayton over to a sandy hollow where
a half-burned spar gave a convenient resting-place, before Fritz
Braun and Lilienthal had finished an acrimonious settlement  of
some private money matters.

"I'm not a wolf," growled Braun. "You square up as if you were
never going to see me again. You need me more than I need you."

They were in the safe seclusion of the "Private Room" of the Newport
Art Gallery, judiciously vacated  for the occasion, when a strange
fear took possession  of the sly pleasure pander, Mr. Adolph
Lilienthal.

"See here, Braun," he huskily said, a mean suspicion  seizing upon
him, "You're not cutting stick for good! You're not going to 'blow
on me' and 'give me away!' By God! I believe it," he said in fright,
as he noted Braun's pale face.

"It's two months since I've seen Irma Gluyas.  Damn you! You've sent
her over to the other side, and got all your papers safe! You've
turned revenue spy! I see your game!"

Before the words were out of his mouth, Braun had dragged the
venal scoundrel down in a strangler's grip.  Planting his knee on
his chest, he hissed, "One more word and I'll throttle you here!
I can go out by the side entrance! You dare not scream! You fool!
Don't you know Irma, the pretty baggage, cleared out six weeks ago
with a New York millionaire whom she picked up?"

"Swear to me that you'll keep your mouth shut or I'll go out and
denounce you now. I have nothing to lose. You have. You have robbed
me in our past dealings. You are rich and I am poor. I am going to
follow that woman over the world till I find her, for I loved her.
That's all! Swear that you'll keep my secrets or I'll kill you now.
I've burned every paper I have in the world."

When Braun's desperate mood had passed, he allowed  the pleading
man to rise, and then listened morosely  as Lilienthal, the veriest
coward at heart, begged for a reconciliation. "I didn't know of
your trouble," gasped Lilienthal. "See here, if you'll go on to
Hamburg  and Bremen and fix up that 'phenacetine' business  for me,
I'll advance you five thousand dollars now.  I didn't know you were
so hard up." He whispered an address in the victorious druggist's
ear.

The half-crazed gamester felt that he had gone too far, and in half
an hour he departed richer by a cheque for five thousand dollars.

But his mind was far away on Manhattan Beach, with the wandering
lovers, as he told Lilienthal that he should not call again. "I'll
jump on the first steamer I can catch! Timmins knows all. Just
watch him, and don't put yourself in his power, till I return. He
can run the shop to a good profit in 'dope' and drinks till I am
with you again. I'm damned near crazy at losing that woman." And
the cowardly Lilienthal believed  his rugged master.

When he had stalked away through the snaplock-guarded private entrance,
there came over Lilienthal's face a spasm of deadly hatred. "The
dirty dog!" he growled, as he unlocked a cabinet and drank heavily.
"It must be true. This young fellow Clayton is here on duty every
day; he looks wolfish, too. I wonder if he really loved the girl.
Well, I shall soon have my day. If Braun ever presents that letter
in Hamburg the friends there will have received my secret message
by our No. II, who goes over this trip. A walk around the docks,
and a knife stab in the back will settle Braun. He knows too much
to be allowed to run loose in Europe. He would like to spoil our
game; he shall spoil his own." And the traitor hastened away to
entrap Braun, little dreaming that the acute druggist  would never
trust himself to the hands of the "gang" at Hamburg.

Randall Clayton had been startled by Madame Raffoni's  eager
disclosure as he approached the place of rendezvous. He had studied
the still handsome face of the disguised Leah Einstein when she told
him that the Fräulein was really ill and most unhappy. He managed
to pick out from her dialect that the diva had been plunged in some
secret sorrow.

Quietly restraining himself, he watched the voluptuous  form of
the Jewess mingle with the crowd of guests on the hotel terrace.
"That poor woman, a worn-out theater beauty, is without guile. What
can this mean?"

He had rightly judged the good-hearted Leah's concern,  and he never
knew of the long hours of the discarded  mistress' ministrations
to the "reigning beauty."

Timorous at heart, Leah Einstein's evil career had been only one
of petty wheedling craft, and an easy self-surrender.

Violence she both feared and abhorred, and now, in the wane of her
beauty, she was easily content with such crumbs of money profit as
could be picked up by an easy code of a plastic surface morality
which covered only her petty intrigues.

Loyal to Irma Gulyas, Randall Clayton dared not question the poor
mock duenna; in fact, her jargon vocabulary would have failed her,
but there had been no deceit in the sympathetic tears which clung
to Madame  Raffoni's eyelids.

Seated on a half-burned spar, there where the roar of the restless
waves reached their ears, with her face veiled, the Magyar witch
awaited her all unsuspicious lover. The golden sunset faded now
far in the west, the piled up purple clouds were turning blacker,
and around them

   "The mists arose, the waters swelled,"
   "Gulls screamed, their flight recalling."


The woman's heart was racked with the deceit which had entrapped
a man she now madly loved.

The freshening wind was driving the black smoke of the steamers,
far out at sea, in long funereal wreaths, athwart the foaming wake,
and the silver-sailed schooners  began to reef, in anticipation of
the coming storm.

An infinite tenderness seized upon Randall Clayton as he motioned
to Madame Raffoni to leave them, and then took that beloved head
to its shelter upon his breast.

His heart panted for the day when they could be all in all to
each other. He felt the clouding spell of some mysterious enmity
descending upon them, and clouding their love as he kissed the
white and trembling hands which had so nervously clasped his own.
For Irma Gluyas feared for her own life. She dared not betray the
tiger-like Fritz Braun, whose veiled scheme of plunder or blackmail
she could not fathom.

Hitherto all had gone well with them, in their merry will-o'-the-wisp
game with Irma's jealous unknown guardians, with his concealed
enemies.

But Clayton well knew that no mere pretense would baffle Arthur
Ferris' thorough knowledge of all of his past social habits.

He dared not openly quarrel with Ferris until Jack Witherspoon's
return. He only lived now to see the Detroit lawyer speeding west,
far on ahead of the deceitful  Ferris, who would be detained in
New York by the quiet consummation of the big deal.

Clayton was but too well aware that his only weapon was his knowledge
of Ferris' secret marriage--an outrage  upon Alice Worthington's
unguarded girlhood.

And yet he dared not openly use that weapon; how easy for the old
capitalist to frame a suave excuse for the "maimed rites" of that
Western bridal.

One longing burned now in Clayton's heart, the honest  wish to find
some dignified and safe place of meeting  with the woman upon whom
he would shower the gold soon to be his own.

"If anything should happen," he thought.

Of course, his own face was too well known to adopt any mere hiding
tactics. Irma was ever fearful  of her jealous artist guardians,
and in this lovely evening hour the lover's heart rose up in all
its stormy tenderness to beg her to lift the veil from her incognito.

Even while they murmured again their vows and drifted away into
dreams of the unclouded future, the heavens were blackening around
them.

Irma seemed strangely frightened as she cowered in her lover's
arms, while he begged her to lift the veil of her privacy.

"I must be with you--near you," he cried. "Listen!  I have even
now grave matters hanging over me which may summon me suddenly
away from you. You know not my abode. You cannot write or telegraph
safely to my office.

"There are veiled spies, jealous rivals, there, who would rob me
of place, power, and the money which will yet be ours, in the dear
far-off Danube land.

"You have been ill, distressed," he fondly said.  "Nay, do not deny
it! Madame Raffoni has told me all."

"My God!" whispered Irma. "She has told you"--

"Only that you have suffered, my darling," said Clayton, folding
her to his breast.

"Ah! I must make an end of it!" the loyal lover cried, as Irma lay
sobbing on his breast. "If I could only come to you; how shall I
know? Can you trust no one? There is Madame Raffoni," said Clayton.

"She knows where my office is. I have bribed her, with flattery
and a few little kindnesses, to come and tell me of you, several
times, when we have been separated  in these long weeks. We have
not even gone to the 'Bavaria'; I have shown her my office. I care
not to force myself upon your loyal secrecy. I respect the promise
upon which your artistic future depends; but think of me. If you
were ill, and we were separated by Fate, I should go mad! I could
not live! Can you not trust her to bring me to you?" Fear and love
were striving now in the singer's throbbing heart.

The Magyar witch clasped her arms around her gallant  lover in
a mad access of tenderness. "And you do love me so, Randall," she
cried, in a storm of tears.

"More than my life," said the man who now felt her heart beating
wildly against his own.

"Ah! God!" sobbed Irma. "If we had only met in other days, in
another land, in my own dear country!"

"Listen, Irma," pleaded Clayton. "I will soon take you away, far
over the seas."

"In a few weeks I shall be free, and you shall be my own, my very
own! For I will then come to you, free to give you all that life
and love can give.

"But promise me now that Madame Raffoni shall lead me to you if
you need me. You can trust her.  I will come to her home. I cannot
bear this agony, and I am watched, also!"

Even as he spoke, the heavens blackened and a stormy drift of rain
swept athwart the sky. There was a muttering roll of thunder. The
white-crested waves dashed menacingly upon the shore!

Irma Gluyas clung to her lover as the affrighted Madame Raffoni came
rushing toward them for shelter  in the storm. The red lightning
flashed, and the fury of the storm was upon them. It was a wild
tempest  which raged around them. The women were helpless with
fear.

In despair, Randall Clayton gazed at the distant hotels;  there was
shelter and safety. But now a new fear beset him. His well-known
identity, Irma's marked beauty, the strange attendant duenna, there
would be certain discovery and scandal. And he would be Ferris'
easy victim if discovered.

Irma Gluyas shrieked as she clung to her lover and bade him save
her as the wild lightning bolts rent the darkness. It was a horrid
elemental tumult!

A few hundred yards away a heavy closed carriage was slowly creeping
along the drive between the hotels.  "Run for your life!" shouted
Clayton to the eager Madame Raffoni. "Stop that carriage. Offer
him anything, everything! I will carry her. I must save her."

Bending himself to the task, Clayton raised the  fainting form of
Irma Gluyas. Her long hair lowered, swept around her in the storm;
her sculptured arms clung to him, and her warm heart thrilled him
as he sped on through the driving torrent. He was possessed with
Love's last delirium.

In the violence of the storm, Clayton could only motion  "forward"
as he closed the door of the carriage and the frightened horses
set off at a mad gallop. The inmates of the carriage never saw the
bridge as the vehicle swayed from side to side in the blue-flamed
lightning flashes.

They were nearing Brooklyn when, in the still driving  storm,
Clayton descended and procured some restoratives  at a pharmacy.

He poured a draught of strong wine between the affrighted woman's
pallid lips, and then whispered, "You must tell me where to take
you. It is life or death now."

And then Irma Gluyas, her head resting on Madame Raffoni's bosom,
feebly whispered, "To my home, 192 Layte Street."

There was not a word spoken as, in the midnight darkness of the
storm, the horses struggled along until,  under the shelter of the
high houses, the carriage stopped before the desolate-looking old
mansion.

There was a look of terror on Madame Raffoni's face which was not
lost upon Clayton. "Get the door open," he hoarsely cried. "I will
carry her in. Then, I swear to you, I will leave her at once."

The strong man sprang from his place, and in a few moments he stood
within the veiled splendors of the old drawing-room.

Kneeling by the bed, wherein he had deposited the senseless woman,
Clayton chafed her marble hands in an agony of despair.

But, even in his lover's exaltation, he listened to Madame Raffoni,
who knelt before him in passionate adjuration. "Go, go!" she cried
in broken pathos.  "I will come to you to-morrow."

And she dragged him to the door. "I will all do; everything! I
swear! Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!"

With one last despairing look, raining passionate kisses upon the
marble lips of the woman he loved, Randall Clayton left the dusky
magnificence of the superb apartment, and only halted at the door
long enough to whisper to the Raffoni, "Bring me to her  to-morrow,
and I will make you rich!"

And the poor woman dumbly covered his hands with obedient kisses.
"Go, go!" she cried. "I will come!"

And, touched with the woman's frantic fears, Randall  Clayton sprang
into the carriage. Through the blinding storm he had reached the
New York side before he thought of his own movements, of the morrow,
of his coming friend, and of his wary enemies.

Then he resolutely made up his mind to fight the warring Fates to
a finish.

He drove to the Astor House, dismissed his driver with a ransom
fee, and there hid himself in an  upper room.

When he presented himself at the half-deserted office of the Western
Trading Company, upon the next morning,  he was clad in unfamiliar
garb.

His blood-shot eyes told of a vigil of mental suffering,  and he
dared say nothing as he gruffly bowed when Mr. Somers told him of
Robert Wade's continued illness.

"I am going down to the election," said the old accountant.  "And
so you will be in charge, as Mr. Ferris has not been heard from.
There is no one here but you to represent the management."

"Trapped," muttered Clayton, who listened every moment for some
tidings of the woman whose silken hair had wound its delicate meshes
around him in the storm. "Dying; dead, perhaps," he groaned, in an
agony of excitement, and then and there he swore that, upon the
arrival of Witherspoon he would leave the cave of his enemies, await
his fate, and bear Irma Gluyas away to farther and fairer lands.

The long morning dragged on in a semi-stupor as he sat there
listening to the hollow footfall of the casual passers-by.

And yet there was no word from Madame Raffoni, the only holder of
the secret of Irma Gluyas' life. His foot was on the threshhold to
leave at last, when Arthur Ferris calmly entered.

Randall Clayton mastered himself with a mighty effort, as Ferris
glibly murmured, "I am only here for a few moments! Come into the
private office."

The few minutes before they were at their ease in Robert Wade's
impregnable sanctum enabled Clayton to steel himself against the
secret bridegroom's duplicity.  Clayton's quick eye noted Ferris'
satchel, his top-coat and umbrella carelessly thrown down on Wade's
reading-table.

"Have you been at the rooms?" carelessly remarked Clayton, tossing
Ferris' private keys upon the table.  "No," curtly replied Ferris.
"I came here directly from the train. I wished to stop and see my
mother and sister; but Wade's illness has upset all my plans.

"I have to go on to Philadelphia at once on some private business
for the Chief. You know he is a very heavy stockholder in the Cramp
Shipbuilding Company. I will not be back for several days."

"And what about the election?" deliberately replied Clayton, now
anxious to draw his enemy out. "I have nothing to do with that,"
said Ferris, dropping his eyes to veil a slight agitation. "Wade
has all that in charge, and he has given Somers his proxy."

"I thought that you held Worthington's private power of attorney,"
stoutly said Randall Clayton.

"Only for his outside matters, Clayton," coaxingly said Ferris.
"The fact is, we may expect many changes. Hugh has several plans
of great importance in his mind.

"Yes; I have lived in an atmosphere of change for some time, Ferris,"
said Clayton, bluntly. "I have only been waiting for your return
to consult with you about giving up our joint apartment.

"I reserved that privilege on May 1st, and you can either keep the
rooms or sublet them. I have paid the rental for the last three
months in your absence."

"See here, Clayton," sharply said Ferris, throwing off the mask.
"I am not a man for any mysteries.  I don't know why I should be
forced to tell you things that I do not know myself.

"Now, I will be several days busy with these outside matters at
Philadelphia. You had the one opportunity of your life the other
day.

"I expect that you will have reconsidered your refusal  to Wade,
to obey Hugh Worthington's orders by my return."

"So you know all about it, do you?" fiercely retorted Randall Clayton.
"I fancied that Wade was dealing directly with Hugh, himself, by the
tone of the Chief's letters and the telegrams which I have received."

"The matter has been referred to me," hotly answered Ferris, who
dared not openly use his new power.  "But I will not wait here to
discuss this matter. I may miss my train."

Arthur Ferris sharply rang a bell, and then, with a nod of recognition,
directed the young Einstein to take his traps down stairs and call
him a carriage.

The door clanged and the two secret enemies were left facing each
other.

"I had fancied," said Clayton, bitterly, "that a  lifetime spent
in Hugh Worthington's service would at least win me a dismissal at
first hands.

"Wade has tried to force me to throw up a position for which I was
previously named by Worthington.  I imagined that the Chief was
really going abroad. He seems to have changed his plans. I have no
means of reaching him direct.

"And now, sir, you will find the keys of our rooms with the janitor
on your return. All that I wish to know is whether I shall deal
with you or Wade in giving my final answer to the suspended orders
for me to go West."

"You stand ready to throw up a life position?" harshly cried Ferris,
white with secret rage pausing with his hand on the door.

"I shall certainly wait until I hear from Mr.  Worthington,"
gravely answered Clayton. "It matters little about me. Your own
life position is secure!"

"What do you mean by that?" cried Ferris, springing  forward in a
sudden anger which made him forget all his plans of crafty concealment.

But the tall Westerner, with one wave of his arm, swept Ferris'
delicate form away from the door and passed out of the presence of
the budding capitalist.

Arthur Ferris cast stealthy glances to right and left as he sought
the elevator. He breathed freer when he reached the sidewalk.

Fortunately, no one had overheard the unseemly quarrel.

His hand was on the carriage door when his glances fell upon the
questioning face of Emil Einstein.

"Anything further, sir?" demanded the eager office boy. "Yes! Jump
in with me and ride down to the Pennsylvania Ferry. I may need
you."

Ferris' brain was in a whirl. He had intended to double around
and reach Wade's house, where he was a secret guest, during the
excitable ordeal of  the election.

Too well he knew the dangers of setting his own foot in Wall Street.
Keen brokers, great operators, lynx-eyed newspaper reporters would
soon corner him.

His slightest word would be misconstrued, and there was still time
for some unforeseen plot before the polls of the stockholders'
election closed at three o'clock.

Clayton's defiant manner had aroused his jealousy to a keen rage.
"Does the fool know anything of my marriage?" he mused. "How could
he?" Ferris smiled, for his girl wife was still in Tacoma, by her
father's side, and the marriage had been a secret one.

The crafty lawyer hated Clayton, at heart, for too well he knew that
no word clouding Clayton's character could be uttered unchallenged
in Alice  Worthington's presence.

Once he had tried, to probe her opinions, with faint sneers, but
his voice had died away under the indignant  protest of the heiress.

"I do not know who has poisoned my father's mind," resolutely said
the Little Sister, "but Randall Clayton has been the brother of my
heart, and always will be.  If he had never left us we would all
be happier to-day."

The clear-browed woman did not know how truly this arrow had sped
to its mark. It silenced forever Arthur Ferris, and lent a new
caution to the scheming plans of the old money grabber.

"If I only had my cipher book," was the first thought of the excited
Ferris, "I must telegraph to Hugh and put him on his guard. What
the devil can Clayton  have picked up?"

There was yet two weeks before the final arrangement  of the "great
deal," and the repayment of the two millions could be substantially
arranged.

As the carriage dashed along to the Christopher Street Ferry, Ferris
rapidly made up his plan of action.  "I can go over to Taylor's
Hotel at Jersey City. Old Somers will cast the majority vote at a
quarter of three.

"I can call him up at the down-town office by telephone,  and then
telegraph direct to old Hugh at Tacoma.

"And Wade must come over to me at Philadelphia and spend a day or
so, for appearance's sake. But a light rein is needed for this wild
ass of the West, Clayton. Oh! to have him out there in Cheyenne
for one month.

"Yes! By Jove, I have it! Hugh must invite him to meet him there.
I will telegraph him, and the old man can smooth Clayton down."

A sudden desire to know of Randall Clayton's private  life seized
upon Ferris, who already contemplated a sweet revenge. "Damn
him! I must keep him and Alice apart. She would side with him, on
sentimental grounds. But, as soon as I get back, I can cipher Hugh
that he must settle this fellow, in some way, on that Western visit.
The old fox can find a way, and both Alice and I will be out of
it."

Deliberately selecting two one hundred dollar bills from his wallet,
Arthur Ferris held them up to the astonished gaze of Einstein.
"Mr. Clayton has been a little strange in his behavior lately," he
said. "In some tiff he has thrown up his old rooms, and is going
to move. I will be away three or four days.  When I come back, I
want to know just where he is located, and--all about him; who his
friends are, and so on. There is more where this came from."

"I understand," smoothly answered Emil, pocketing  the bills with
a grin.

In the meantime Ferris had scribbled a few words on a card. He stopped
the carriage. "Jump out and take a coupe, and get instantly down to
Wall and Broad. You'll find Mr. Somers waiting in the  election-room.
Tell him not to leave there till I get him on the 'phone from
Jersey City. And my address you can give him as Lafayette House,
Philadelphia. I'll be there three days." The lie was deliberate,
and even the triple spy believed him.

The long hours crawled away while Randall Clayton  resolutely paced
his lonely office. Only the busy under-accountants came in now and
then for a word of directions, and the ticking of the office clock
sounded like the hollow tapping of hammers upon coffin-lids to the
solitary man who was crazed with his loving anxiety to hear from
the woman who now ruled his every thought.

He forgot the absence of Einstein in his eager  waiting for some
intelligence of the woman whom he had shielded from the storm. Poor
Madame Raffoni had mumbled some obscure words about "die herz-kranke."

"Heartsick, my God! I am heartsick," cried Randall  Clayton. "And,
she may be alone; there may be no one to send."

Clayton tried to recall the last directions which he had given
to the disguised Leah Einstein. All that he could recall was the
murmured pledge, "I will come, I will come!"

The lover's heart told him that Ferris' spies would now follow in
his every movement. He lingered, in a trance of agony, until long
after the parchment-faced Somers had returned from Wall and Broad
Street.

"It was a very quiet election," murmured Somers, who started at the
appearance of the young man's  haggard face. He was astonished to
see Clayton lingering there to the confines of darkness.

The faithful old tool of Mammon had crawled back to turn all his
combination knobs and cast a last glance over the rooms into which
his life had grown as the silkworm into its cocoon.

"You must go away, my boy," kindly said old Somers, "you need a
long rest."

"Yes, yes," mournfully replied Clayton, thinking of the five days
of agony before Jack Witherspoon would arrive to run the gauntlet
of the treacherous Ferris. "I must go away--go away--and, have a
long, long rest!"

The old accountant watched his listless steps as he departed. "Head
or heart--which?" he murmured.  "That man is in a bad way."




CHAPTER VII.

"THIS MAY BE MY LAST BANK DEPOSIT."


There was an air of supreme content upon the usually impassive face
of Arthur Ferris when he hung the receiver of the public telephone
up upon its hook, at precisely fifteen minutes past three o'clock,
in the office of Taylor's Hotel.

The astonished girl gazed admiringly after the young lawyer, when
he dropped a two-dollar bill into her hand, saying, "Never mind
the change."

"It's my lucky day," murmured Ferris, as he sought the telegraph
office. The measured words of Accountant  Somers were still ringing
in his ears:

"A very quiet election; no opposition to our ticket.  Directors'
meeting pro forma. Vice-President Selden cast majority vote
for new officers. Reports endorsed.  Selden, president; yourself,
vice-president; Hugh Worthington, managing director. New officers
published to-morrow. Too late for afternoon press. Will go and
report to Mr. Wade."

The first official act of Vice-President Arthur Ferris had been
to order Accountant Somers to send a cheque for one month's extra
salary to each of the office force, and then to add, "I shall
be in Philadelphia for some days, remember; Lafayette House. Use
telegraph business cipher only. I will be too busy to come to the
telephone. Shall be at Cramp's yards taking a look with a view to
further investments there."

No flush of triumph colored Arthur Ferris' pale face as he pondered
over his dispatch to Hugh Worthington.  He suddenly paused, with
his pencil in the air.

"By God! I have it! We will soft-soap this fellow.  Violence in
quarrel is always a clumsy mistake. I need to keep in touch with
Clayton; at least, until old Hugh gets his claws upon him. What if
the fool resigns  and throws all up in a huff? There is no way to
lure him out West then. It would not do to have anything happen to
him here. And I'll ring in the Auld Lang Syne a bit, also."

He smiled artfully as he read over his two telegrams before handing
them to the waiting operator. The anaemic girl was sadly disappointed
in their tenor. She had scented an intrigue in the presence of the
dapper young lawyer with his distinctly clubman air.

"Pshaw! only business," she murmured, as she dashed her hand into
the cash till for the change of a five-dollar bill.

But Arthur Ferris' resolute eyes recalled her to duty, as he
impatiently said, "Repeat them both back to me, at Lafayette House,
Philadelphia. Take out the extra charge, and please give me a press
copy of each."

"I'll run over to Philadelphia, drop in at the clubs, have a good
time, and then disappear via Pittsburgh 'for New York,'" he said.
"It will give time for Randall Clayton to cool off. And, after
all, the smooth way is the best way. I can hold him over till Hugh
works him 'on the easy pulley.'"

He was proud of these two telegrams, as he sat at his carefully-chosen
early dinner. He read them over with a secret glee.

"He is ours. No one can snatch him from our clutches. The old man
can cajole him with Alice's wish that he should join the family
party. That'll fetch him. Fool! that he did not make the running
while she was at his side. The 'Sister' business is always a rank
failure. But he has made me a  millionaire for life."

Arthur Ferris had no pity for the man whose life secrets he
had sapped in those four long years of  treason to friendship. He
recalled with a secret complacence the steps which had led him,
bit by bit, into Hugh Worthington's confidence, through the frank
disclosures of Clayton.

And so, fortified by the single-hearted man's intimate relations
with the Detroit household, Arthur Ferris had taken up every thread
as it slipped through  Clayton's busy fingers.

The knowledge that he would enjoy Randall Clayton's  real patrimony;
that he had stolen a charming wife from the man who was bound by
an unearned gratitude to Worthington, made this hour of triumph a
most delicious one.

"Old Hugh needed me; he needed a man who would be a safe intermediary
with Durham; one who was a Safe Deposit for both senator and
millionaire.

"Now I hold every trump in life, and Clayton, the dolt, has thrown
away his fortune and made mine."

Then the thin-lipped lawyer recalled Balzac's remark,  "One, in
order to succeed, must either cut one's way through life like a
sword, or glide through the world quietly like a pestilence."

"I'll let Hugh use the sword," he laughed, as he  enjoyed hi

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