The Fourth King Read online

  He stopped. His face was a picture of despondency, fear, and indignation. Whereupon Folwell put in a question.

  “Well, I agree with you that if you notify the police you are going to get the choicest dose of notoriety that you ever will get.” He paused. “But what is puzzling me is what I have to do with the thing. What part of it all concerns me?”

  “Simply this,” said Eaves, with what appeared to be a trace of desperation in his words. “You want that confession and a receipt in full back — and I warn you, Jason, that unless you earn it back you can go into court and fight a criminal accusation of grand larceny. That’s final. I, on the contrary, want to circumvent this man or band of men — without risking my own life and without any of the confounded notoriety. I therefore make the following proposition — and you can take an hour to think it over.” He paused. “Jason, I stand willing to give you that confession back, together with a receipt, providing you take my place for fourteen days, going and coming from the office, living in my house, sleeping in my bed, riding to and from my house to my business, eating in my restaurants and clubs, and wearing my clothes.”

  Folwell leaned forward in his chair. “Wait — don’t you suppose if you’re marked for death your unknown assassin knows your face? Why, the only point of similarity between us is our steel-grey eyes! You’re one of the most striking figures on LaSalle Street here. You’re — ”

  “Of course,” interrupted J. Hamilton Eaves irritably. “But has it ever occurred to you that that striking figure consists of a rather large build, encased in certain clothing consisting of striped trousers and a Prince Albert coat, its head wearing a broad-brimmed Western felt hat, its hands chamois-skin gloves, and carrying a gold-headed blackthorn cane? Now assume that the face of that figure got supposedly badly burned in an explosion here in the office with some inflammable oil! Suppose that face was bandaged up, so far as the part beneath the eyes was concerned, with surgical gauze! In simple language, Jason, would anybody on LaSalle Street or in Chicago know, with your stocky, muscular build taking the place of my — er — tendency toward stoutness, your height the same as my own, and my striking clothes on your back, whether it was you or me passing back and forth daily from my house to this office? Think it over.”

  CHAPTER V

  THE GRIM CONTEST

  EAVES leaned back in his chair and regarded Folwell under narrowed, half-closed eyes. As for Folwell, he leaned back in his own chair, quite thunderstruck by the peculiar proposition placed before him. A short, speculative whistle escaped him. He sat thus for a long time. Then he spoke.

  “Your scheme is feasible, at any rate. As I take it, you want me to run the chance of death or injury for fourteen days — ”

  “In the hope and expectation that long before that time you’ll beat them out, that you’ll catch them in the attempt and shoot them dead on the spot, the cowardly dogs!” barked Eaves vehemently. “If you fail, he — they — it — Star of the Night or whatever it is — will get you. All right. But you will be armed. And you will be forewarned. Although I admit that the sender of the warning is impudently oblivious to the fact that forewarned is forearmed.”

  “Are you willing to show me that warning you received?”

  “Gladly,” said Eaves, “as soon as we have some more time. Say to-morrow if you like. I have sealed it and the deck of cards up, to use as evidence if we land this bird. But as a clue to the identity of the sender it’s nix. Rubber-stamped all through. And strictly to the point.”

  “I see,” Folwell pondered. “Just what, are you inclined to suspect, was the real cause of the death of each of those three men?”

  “Slugged or drugged,” retorted Eaves quickly. “Slugged or drugged — either one or the other. Which, I haven’t been able to come to a conclusion upon. They were asleep on the job and they were caught like flies in a trap. Slugged or drugged. That’s my theory and belief.”

  “I see.” Folwell thought for another second. “What had you intended to do to protect yourself, prior to the coming up of this chance of making the proposition to me to take your place?”

  “I have spent seven hard days thinking on the question,” Eaves admitted, “and was no nearer the solution late last night than I was at the beginning. And to-night my seven days are over. There you have the truth.”

  “I see.”

  Folwell got up and went over to the window, where he again thought over the affair from first detail to last. It seemed not a difficult task to do — this thing of impersonating another man of similar physical build for fourteen days. Perhaps the warning really was nothing but an empty threat; perhaps Paddon, Rothblume, and Lee had died from natural causes arising from their mode of living. But no, he shook his head. The doctrine of chances was against such a hypothesis. All three, according to Eaves, had been named in the Riswold exposé. All three had received summonses of similar nature. All three had died suddenly — in different ways, to be sure, yet neither by shot nor wound. But the remembrance of the confession he had signed to protect Avery Reardon — uselessly, perhaps not — and the thought of his own youth and strength, courage and quickness, together with a contempt for a sneaking, skulking blackguard, or paranoiac, as it might be, who struck in the dark, brought him around to a decision.

  He came back to his chair. “A few questions I want to ask,” he said quietly. “First, how soon would you want me to start in?”

  “To-night,” replied Eaves. “To-night marks the expiration of the week so kindly granted me.” He paused. “We can send you out and get the gauze for the bandaging camouflage. I have an extra coat, tailored exactly as is this one I have on, hanging in the closet there; one I had made for cool days. I have two crackerjack guns in this desk drawer — one for you and one for me — although if this scheme of ours is to work out mine won’t be needed.”

  “Yes. What would be your procedure during the fourteen days?”

  “As follows: In the first place these windows, you’ll notice, are equipped with the Brown patented lightless shades. Yes, he’s the guy that made a real fortune by inventing something that Chicago speakeasies, gambling-houses and houses of prostitution had to have. I had these installed here originally for exhibition purposes, for at the time I thought I could promote Brown’s invention; but he decided to go ahead by his lonesome, and he cleaned up very nicely. So be it. But here we are all nicely equipped with a set of the lightless shades. They don’t let a single light wave out; that’s how efficient they are. Now for four or five dollars we can buy a folding camp cot which can be put in the closet there during daytimes. Another five will buy two A. No. I army blankets. And there’s the procedure in a nutshell. I would simply sleep in the office here during the dangerous days and nights, remaining in it during the day transacting my business by ‘phone only, and sending out for my meals. You would be myself, walking in my actual footsteps — so far as my unknown would-be assassin could know.”

  “Your stepson, Lionel Pettibone, would be informed, of course, that you and I were doing this to shift a dangerous situation from your shoulders to mine?”

  “Lionel knows of the threat. I told him the facts this morning at breakfast, after a long discussion about the business. Lionel owns twenty-five per cent. of the stock of the National Industrial Securities Company, which he inherited from his mother when she died. I would simply leave it to you to tell him the details of the actual plan agreed upon. I would not want any telephonic conversation to be held anent the plan.”

  “Would old man Fisher, the book-keeper, or Hal, the office boy, know about matters? Or Beebe or Meier, the salesmen?”

  “No. I am here the first thing in the morning — usually about a quarter to eight — and the last to go at night — generally seven. I would wear, while in the office, a mask of gauze to give the impression, even to a spy sent in from the outside, that I have been burned about the face. I can arrange that little fake explosion very nicely — never fear. You would arrive at my time in the morning, which would be thr
ee-quarters of an hour before the rest get here. Then you would resume your own clothing — and identity — during the day. You would leave at my time at night, a full hour and a half after they have started for home. Simple enough, isn’t it?”

  “What guarantee would I have that that confession — the identical paper I signed — would be returned to me after fulfilling the contract?”

  Eaves thought for a moment. “This is the only way, I think, but it will protect you. I am willing to call in old Fisher and young Hal. I will have him sign his name across it with the date, thus witnessing it, without reading a word of it. I will personally tell him before you and before the kid, that an agreement has been entered into by which this paper which he witnesses shall become your property, at the expiration of fourteen days’ special work for me. Should I attempt to use it in court, after such a definite statement, you would be able to subpœna not only Hal and Fisher, but even Lionel, to prove the agreement and the actual filling of it on your part.”

  “Yes,” agreed Folwell curtly, “with unfortunate publicity to myself.”

  “And publicity neither you nor I want,” returned Eaves imperturbably. “That in itself is protection enough.” He paused. “Well, what’s the answer?”

  “I’ll take your place,” said Folwell grimly, “for fourteen days. I’ll take my chance — but I’ll shoot to kill! If this should be any underhanded business in which you yourself are actively concerned, Eaves, watch out. That’s my warning to you. I’ll reload the gun you give me with good cartridges, and whoever — either you or any one hired by you — tries anything on me had better watch out.”

  “God forbid,” said Eaves. “Don’t have a brainstorm, Jason. This is as much a mystery to me as it is to you.” He pushed a button at the side of his desk. The door opened. Fisher, the rheumatic old book-keeper, with his white hair, his watery blue eyes and his faded alpaca office coat, responded.

  “You wished to see me, Mr. Eaves?” he whined.

  “Yes. Get Hal and return with him.” Fisher limped back to the outer office, and Eaves, standing in front of the vault door, twirled it carefully, following this with a second combination inside. Then, from a pigeon-hole, he withdrew what appeared by the texture of the paper and the purple ink to be the confession that Folwell had signed that morning. He closed the outer door, and twirled the combination off. By this time Fisher was back, with a bright-faced young boy of about fifteen clad in a blue uniform. Eaves stepped to the desk and beckoned to Fisher. Folwell, from where he stood, could see that Eaves held the paper purposely upside down. “Fisher, I want you to put your name and the date down here as a witness. No — never mind getting your glasses. Don’t need to read it. It’s simply a private paper between Jason and myself. Hal, pay attention to this. Mr. Folwell and I have just entered into a verbal agreement in which he is to remain in my employ for fourteen days on some special work, and is to receive this paper in return for the work. Understand, both of you, that we are furthermore agreeing that neither he nor I — either one of us — will owe the other anything after the return of the paper. Get that, old man? And you, Hal?”

  “I understand, Mr. Eaves,” said the boy politely.

  “I get it all, Mr. Eaves,” wheezed the old book-keeper. “I’ll remember it — don’t fear, sir.”

  In a firm hand, he signed the paper still upside down. Then he bowed himself servilely out. The door closed behind the two of them — youth and age.

  “Now, Jason, that’s settled.” Eaves locked the paper back in the safety-vault again. The operation took but a minute. He resumed his chair. “Now you can go out and you can get a generous supply of surgical gauze. Here’s twenty dollars.” He peeled off two tens from a bulky roll in his pocket. “While you’re out, ‘phone your landlady that you’ll not be home to-night. After that, go to a sporting goods dealer and buy a folding canvas camp cot, single width. Have it well wrapped, with no identification marks. From there to a department store, and get two extra heavy blankets. Then return here. When you get back I’ll be ready to stage a little tabloid drama. After which you’ll bandage up my face neatly, using some of that experience you told me about your getting when you tried being an orderly in that big hospital on the banks of the Thames. You’ll spend — or pretend to spend — the rest of the afternoon over your drawing-board on those ground plans of the proposed new factory. After all the rest are gone to-night, we’ll very politely transfer the gauze from my face into the waste-basket, and some of my clothes over to your back, and some of the gauze to your face, and you’ll go out of here as J. Hamilton Eaves. And you can order Andrew, the lunch-room man downstairs, to send up a bottle of milk, a ham sandwich and a half pie for Jason Folwell, room 216, at six o’clock. But I’ll do the eating of it.” He rose. “All set?” He leaned over and from the drawer of his desk took out two gleaming revolvers, a .32 and a .38, the workings of which he inspected closely. “One of these will be yours to-night — and one mine. I’ll give you the .38.” He slid it across the blotter on his desk. “But you’re the man that’s going to need the firearms — not me.”

  • • •

  The next two hours found Folwell, jaw set, firmly engaged in buying at several stores a number of articles, consisting of a folding canvas camp cot, a roll of cotton and a roll of surgical gauze, two blankets and — unknown to Eaves — a box of perfectly good A No. I size .38 calibre metallic cartridges. At times he wondered if the whole affair were some sort of a mad dream — his taking the part of another man who was scheduled for quick and speedy death; but each time he fell into such a reverie he was quickly brought back to earth again by the belligerency that was engendered in him when he thought of the cowardly Star of the Night who struck impudently, invisibly. Strangely, he had no fear, at least at this stage of matters. Perhaps it was due to the unreality of the whole thing. And perhaps it was due to his reflection that, even though Paddon, Rothblume and Lee had been forewarned, they had disregarded their warnings as jokes, and hence, not being on the alert for lurking danger, had not been forearmed as he, Folwell, now was.

  He returned to the office at four o’clock with the purchased articles, and thereupon proceeded to closet himself with J. Hamilton Eaves in the private office. The latter was sitting at his desk, a tiny folding paper resembling a headache powder leaning against his inkwell. He nodded his head toward it as Folwell deposited the purchased articles in the small closet near by.

  “Magnesium powder,” he said in a low voice. “Camera flashlight I happened to have in the desk. Just lock the door now, please, and draw down all the shades.”

  Folwell, puzzled, clicked the latch of the private door, and drew down each of the patent light-proof shades. Indeed, with the slow drizzle outside, there was little light coming in from the cloud-covered skies.

  “Now,” directed Eaves, “this is a bit of gunpowder — stage gunpowder! As soon as the flash takes place there may be some rapping on the door to see if any-thing’s wrong. Want you to go to it, if there is, and tell them that Mr. Eaves says go back to work — that there’s nothing wrong. Get that, Jason?”

  Folwell nodded. “Perfectly.”

  Whereupon Eaves, without a further word, opened the paper of sparkling grey powder, held it off at arm’s length on a japanned smoking tray, and touched a lighted match to the paper itself. It burned slowly for a second, and then with a sharp “sput” exploded in a brilliantly bright glare that made both men start involuntarily, blinking their eyes. A cloud of black, acrid smoke wafted over the half-open transom into the outer office. A profound silence. And then a rapid excited knocking on the door.

  “Anything wrong, Mr. Eaves?” came old Fisher’s quavering voice. The high-pitched, sharp voice of Meier, one of the two stock salesmen, was audible at his elbow. Eaves, with a peculiar fixed look hovering over his lips, motioned his head towards the door. “Go ahead,” he whispered.

  Whereupon Folwell stepped to the door, Eaves withdrawing entirely from the line of view. “Nothing wrong, gentlem
en,” Folwell said reassuringly, peeping through a one-inch opening he had made in the doorway. “Just go ahead to your work, Mr. Eaves says.”

  He closed the door in the face of a rather startled office, and, locking it, returned to Eaves’s side.

  “Now for the gauze, Jason,” directed that individual.

  It was but the task of a few seconds to lay out the gauze on the desk, and one of several minutes to do a neat, workmanlike job of bandaging, using the approved methods he had learned in his summer’s work, two years before, in St. Thomas’s Hospital far across the seas. When he was finished, only Eaves’s eyes were visible, together with the slit for his mouth, his nostrils and his ears.

  “Now,” said the older man, at the conclusion of the operation, “just throw open the door, and I’ll stroll nervously out into the office as though I’m in some pain. And for the rest of the afternoon we’ll just leave the door of this private room open, so that anybody who enters, from a book peddler to a spy, can get an eyeful.”

  Folwell, rather admiring in spite of himself the other’s adroit little drama staged to precede his appearance bandaged up, threw open the door and tramped back to his drawing-board, where he tried to resume work on some sketches which he had been drawing up for several days: sketches of the ground plan of a manufacturing plant which he had profound doubts would ever get beyond the foundations or incorporation into one of Eaves’s stock-selling “booklets.” As for Eaves, he strolled forth, hands in his pockets, his face and head neatly bound in the bluish-white surgical gauze, into the office, the cynosure of the staring eyes of old Fisher, Hal, and Beebe and Meier from the extra adjoining room containing the “sucker” telephones. The latter two were soon flocking about him to learn about the accident.