The Fourth King Read online

  “Yes.”

  “Mind you, I haven’t admitted that I stole those securities. But if I signed that paper of yours — let us say — merely to let you feel you were protected from any welshing on my part on your fourteen-day job — would you guarantee to keep the whole matter secret between the two of us?”

  “Absolutely,” said the big man. His face suddenly looked tired and drawn.

  “And you would place it in writing or otherwise — so that if I carried out my end of the compact you would absolutely have to carry out yours?”

  “Exactly.”

  Folwell rose from his chair and went over to the window, where he stood for ten long minutes thinking, thinking, thinking, staring unseeingly down at LaSalle Street with its noonday flush of brokers and brokers’ clerks and stenographers clad in flashing finery and the colours of youth. At last he strode back to the desk he had just left.

  “I’ve decided to sign it,” he said firmly, “but as long as this is between you and me only, kindly remember that I haven’t admitted or stated that I’m guilty. As to why I’m doing it — oh, well, after all, why does it matter? It’s turned into a plain business proposition for you — and a blind proposition for me. That’s all I’ve got to say, I think.”

  He dipped the pen in the ink and placed his name across the line at the bottom.

  “Very well,” said Eaves coldly, blotting it and folding it up. “I’ll keep my end of the agreement. I’ll ‘phone detective headquarters and there’ll be no more police officers over here — and nothing mentioned either. Rest assured of that. Come back at one o’clock and I’ll give you the details of how you’re going to square yourself with me.” He rose and took his broad-brimmed Western felt hat from the coat hanger. “I’m glad you came clean with me, Jason.” And he held open the door for Folwell to leave.

  As for Folwell, he wondered dazedly, as he stepped back into the outer office, if he had done right in the signing of that paper almost under duress. Had he done wisely — or unwisely? And he marveled, too, as he took up his hat, what an odd thing love was. For he alone knew the secret of Avery Reardon, the pretty, slim, brown-eyed girl who typed J. Hamilton Eaves’s letters for him — and knew why Avery Reardon, straight, clean, honourable as she was, would nevertheless steal from her employer, were opportunity present, any amount up to nineteen thousand five hundred dollars with no compunction whatever. What strange passions both love and vengeance were, after all!

  CHAPTER III

  “WHY DID YOU DO IT?”

  WHEN Jason Folwell got out on busy LaSalle Street, he was bursting with several conflicting emotions. Crowding indignation, not to mention self-recrimination that he had ever come to such a country as this, struggled with satisfaction that he had successfully averted the arrest of Avery Reardon, for he knew full well what it would have meant should Avery Reardon have been grilled over at detective headquarters, and her relatives looked up and cross-questioned by the ever-watchful and motive-searching police. For police were police, the world over!

  Instead of getting a lunch — for appetite had quite left him after the interview which had just taken place — he took a car for the North Side, dismounting a half-hour later and making his way to a little green-painted cottage on Wisconsin Street, some blocks west of, Lincoln Park, covered with vines.

  When he rang the bell, a delicate and tired-looking woman, with bright, trustful, innocent-looking eyes, and white hair, answered it.

  “How do you do, Mrs. Hepburn,” Folwell greeted her. “Avery hasn’t left yet, I suppose?”

  “No, indeed, Mr. Folwell. She’s all packed, however, and expecting to leave the house this afternoon about five. She — ”

  But her words were broken by a girl’s silvery tones from behind her and she stepped aside.

  At the end of the tiny hall stood a slim-looking girl of about twenty-two, with great dark eyes that held in them the promise of wonderful wifehood. Her dark, jet hair fell in entrancing ringlets of carved ebony over her white smooth forehead. She was dressed in a blue serge suit, charming in its simplicity, and a single white lacy ruffle at her soft throat marked the artistic unity of her garb.

  “Jason!” she said in surprise, coming forward to meet him. “What are you doing ‘way up north to-day?”

  He looked hungrily at her as Mrs. Hepburn closed the door. “I venture you can spare an hour, Avery,” he said quietly, “as long as the boat doesn’t leave until six? I ran up to have a hasty talk about something very, very important that has just come up.”

  The older woman with a wan smile left for the rear of the house, and Avery Reardon led the way silently into the tiny parlour of the cottage. The room in which they stood was furnished simply, yet artistically, and as she dropped into a comfortable-looking rocker Jason Folwell drew up a spacious armchair close to her.

  “Honey girl,” he said at once, his face growing solemn, “something most unusual has come up at the office not a half-hour ago, and I’ve cut my lunch hour and everything else to catch you at once before you start on that long-delayed, vacation triangle-trip of yours.”

  Her face was the picture of curiosity. She said nothing, however, only watching his eyes.

  “Avery,” he began, “before I get on to the subject, I want to tell you that I think I know at last the reason you have refused to marry me, and yet have confessed that you really care for me. Avery, I stumbled upon something four days ago when I was running through the old records of the corporation that gave me a clue — not only to that but — well — to several other things also. The information was in the old book of stockholders — shareholders we call them where I come from — of the defunct American Airplane Stabilizer Company floated three years ago by J. Hamilton Eaves, whom we have both begun to see in his true guise as a trickster and a crooked promoter.” He stopped, watching her curiously.

  “So — so you finally found out, Jason?” she said simply. She nodded her head slowly. “Well — it’s not surprising that it happened — considering that you knew my mother’s name.”

  “I can say that I was more than surprised,” he declared with a grim laugh, “when I found that your mother had invested no less than nineteen thousand five hundred dollars in American Airplane Stabilizer stock. There was her name, though, in black and white — Mrs. Sarah Hepburn — on the books as the original purchaser of the stock.”

  For a few moments the girl looked out of the tiny front window, at the sky which was now beginning to be overcast with grey clouds. Finally she spoke.

  “Well, Jason, you found out all right, but after all it does not matter that you know the facts. Yes, dear, that was the reason. It was mother’s whole heritage from dad — at least Daddy Hepburn was the only father I ever knew — at the time he died: nineteen thousand five hundred dollars in first mortgage bonds. She was captured by one of Eaves’s glib-tongued salesmen just after her bonds fell due, and she had the actual cash in the bank. She was searching for a new investment. She was easily inveigled into putting the whole thing — every cent she had outside of this little home here — into that stock on the promise that it would pay twenty-five per cent. per year and be worth ten times its cost in a few years. It was Eaves himself who actually turned the sale — for it was he that talked with mother when she was in a doubtful frame of mind, and closed the transaction. You know now, as I know, Jason, what Eaves’s game is. In fact, mother and I talked it over long afterward with a broker we became acquainted with. He told us that American Airplane Stabilizer was one of Eaves’s most tricky stock flotations. His little model working on the toy airplane, the many testimonials from supposedly competent aviators, both professionals and ex-army fliers, bought and paid for beyond all doubt, the advance orders, most of them dummies, the photographs of the manufacturing plant with the ground broken and the spur tracks laid, and the final clever juggling on the market till the bottom fell out of what was even originally a worthless stock.” The girl shook her head sadly. “Mother is so gullible. Everything she had
went into that stock. And there it lies to-day, with a few gold and crimson certificates as a monument. There is even a mortgage of six hundred dollars on this little cottage here.”

  “And so,” commented Jason Folwell bitterly, “Eaves is the cause of your being unable to marry me — to make your mother a burden on me, as you put it.”

  She nodded quietly. “Mother is so proud — so proud, Jason. She would not accept a monthly stipend from, nor live with, nor upon, a son-in-law, particularly since she has thrown away her own patrimony that would have given her, when carefully invested, an income of close upon a hundred dollars a month for life. And why should I be angry at her stand? I am just as proud as she. I could not bear to think that I had brought to my husband, who has enough to do to make his own way in a strange land, an additional liability consisting of a mother too delicate to work her own way in the world. Hence I had to put away all — all thoughts of marrying you, Jason, even though — ”

  “Even though you do care?” he said, placing his strong hand over her smaller one.

  Her eyes filled suddenly with blinding tears. “Yes — even though I do care,” she repeated slowly. “Oh, why, oh, why are men such as J. Hamilton Eaves allowed to trifle with the lives of others for the sake of money?”

  He said nothing for a second, till the tears stopped. His heart leaped with gladness at the sight of those tears, however; but suddenly thinking of the interview which had just taken place in Eaves’s office, his face grew serious again and his heart became heavy.

  “Now tell me one or two things, honey girl,” he requested. “First, we both knew that Eaves has no suspicion that the woman whose $19,500 he got on American Airplane Stabilizer — Mrs. Sarah Hepburn — is the mother of his employee, Avery Reardon, since the names are different and since you have concealed any mention of it and also asked me to do so, although at the time I confess I could not understand your odd request. Now, how did you happen to go to work for a man you must have hated in your heart — a man whom you could hardly refrain from hating?”

  She smiled through her tears. “My coming over was somewhat different from yours, Jason. I don’t think I shall ever forget how you came marching in there fresh from your Imperial College of Technology, with brilliant recommendations from your professors and knowledge of all sorts of mechanical devices, and of how Eaves hired you on the spot to be his draughtsman and ‘mechanical expert.’ You wanted a job — a chance to rise — and you wanted it quick, I suspect, for you were a wee bit shabby that day, Jason, weren’t you?” She placed her hand on his arm as though she feared she had hurt him.

  He nodded, as he recollected in particular Eaves’ shrewd bargain as to salary, and his glittering promises of a future.

  “As for me,” she continued, “I went in there after I learned the full details from mother of her terrible loss in American Airplane Stabilizer — to see Eaves — to talk with him about the chances of getting something, anything, out of it. He thought, however, that I was a girl he had telephoned for from a typists’ exchange, and at once began to explain the position he had open, and to talk salary. It seemed he wanted a girl who could not only take stenographic notes and typewrite, but she was to spend hours and hours of her time, both days and evenings, learning to operate that Shanks Dictatograph, so that it could be exhibited before visitors.”

  “Customers,” corrected Jason Folwell, grimly. “Customers, Avery.”

  “Yes, as I have learned,” she admitted. She paused a moment and then continued:

  “The upshot of this mistake on his part was that I suddenly perceived that here was an opportunity of getting right into the camp of the enemy — of learning at first hand the true and actual conditions concerning American Airplane Stabilizer — and incidentally of drawing a wage that was far more than I had hoped to get, considering that I was just out of business college when mother lost her money. So, as Avery Reardon, instead of the daughter of Mrs. Sarah Hepburn, I became part of the J. Hamilton Eaves business. That is all.”

  “I see,” he mused. He thought for a moment. He leaned forward. “Avery, dear, has it ever occurred to you that your services in operating the dictatograph in front of the different people he brings in are absolutely one of the strongest selling factors he has? Has it occurred to you that when customers see him dictating casually and freely to you — and you clicking away at the keys and taking his words all down in phonetic combinations that — according to his literature — any little ignorant $9 a week typist can transcribe later, he sells stock in it two times out of every three? Do you know what the State of Illinois — even with its so-called Blue Sky law — allows his firm out of all such stock sales? Twenty per cent. of the selling price of the stock, regardless of its par value. That means that one-fifth of all the money that trusting victims put into it remains in his hands. From that point — well, it’s only a question of time before he will juggle the limited market for it with washed sales, scarehead bulletins, false reports, depress the price of the shares, buy them in, boom them all over again, and resell them, making a hundred per cent. next time.”

  She heard him through, wonderingly, wide-eyed. “I have had only the dim sense of these phases of his business without knowing of his exact methods. As for my operation of the dictatograph before visitors, these people do not know — he does not tell them, I have noticed — that I have had to put in hours and hours of practice far in excess of that required by a stenographer. Neither do they know that most of J. Hamilton Eaves’ demonstration letters consist of words and phrases that have been repeated so many times that it is second nature to me to know how to take them down. Why, Jason, many words of our English language are so intricate that it would take a dictatograph operator so long to find the correct phonetic key combination that her employer would be two sentences ahead of her before she extricated herself.”

  “Precisely,” he admitted. “Exactly. I have been trying for several weeks to land a new position, for I am one of the few people to-day who know that the Shanks Dictatograph is a fraud — a legal fraud — which through its stock sales will put dollars into the hands of Eaves only; a fraud which almost sells itself with its brilliant trimmings, its multi-coloured rubber keys, its silver-plated and nickelled parts, and last but not least its smooth operation by you, by me, and by Eaves himself. Like you, Avery, I have unconsciously been the means of selling a number of shares of the stock, for Eaves has thought nothing of calling me in to operate it when you were out to lunch. At still other times he has deigned to operate it himself, easily, casually, smilingly, his cigar in his mouth, having his customer read to him from a book of poems, every one of which he has meticulously memorized and practised. No, dear girl, now that you and I have come for the first time to a full understanding with each other about our mutual employer, I am going to tell you that the Shanks Dictatograph, which in Eaves’s most recent advertising booklet is designed to make any bright girl a stenographer in a couple of weeks’ practice, and to make notes consisting of group combinations of English letters and vowel symbols that cheap, ignorant typists can transcribe, will never be harboured either by employers or by stenographers. And I am glad we two have reached a perfect understanding upon this unpleasant point.”

  She leaned back in her chair. Nothing was said for a moment. He broke the silence.

  “You — you will be gone two weeks?” he queried. “Why did you elect to take the triangle trip so late in the year — October? This must be the last boat of the season to Sault Ste. Marie, isn’t it? And from there you go by rail to Toronto — thence to Buffalo, and back by the Lake Shore road to Chicago?”

  She looked away from him. “Jason, you have been frank with me, and I am going to be that way with you — at least partly so. I am going to take the triangle trip — yes — as a real vacation. But most of my time will be spent stopping off in Toronto, Canada. I wish I might tell you more — but my word of honour is involved, and I cannot. I am taking care of a peculiar errand in the big Canadian city. And so
me day I shall be able to tell you more about it. If it were really a matter of my own choice, I would rather keep the vacation money and work here in Chicago for two weeks and get the extra money — for mother and I have nothing but my wages. However — I leave for Sault Ste. Marie on the six o’clock boat to-night, and mother goes on a visit to her sister’s at Elgin at three o’clock to-day to remain with her the two weeks I am gone. And — well — that ends the story.” She smiled quizzically at him. “I can’t tell you more — just now!” She regarded him a moment. “But, Jason, it is you who are really the mysterious one. You come at a mysterious hour of the day, you say something vague about something that has happened at the office, and then you proceed to drop the whole thing. What — what has happened, Jason, that brings you clear out to Wisconsin Street on the eve of my departure?”

  He got up and paced a few steps back and forth across the room. Then he resumed his chair and spoke.

  “Avery, you recall the date when Eaves ripped out the ancient vault door in his office, and had that rather garish but modern two-door vault installed?”

  She nodded.

  “You remember Eaves’s talk to us at the time he entrusted us with the two combinations — the inner and the outer?”

  Again she nodded wonderingly.

  “For my own part,” said Folwell, “I can say that in opening the two doors, no one of the outer force has ever been in the room. And I have invariably thrown off both combinations when I have locked the safe. Have you done the same?”

  “Invariably, Jason,” was her quiet reply. She was looking peculiarly at him now.

  He leaned forward, fastening his steel-grey eyes on her brown ones. “Avery, did you by any chance whatever give the combinations, at any time, to any one not in the company?”