AL 2984.3.25
Harvard College
Library
LES RI
By Exchange








THE CORRECTOR OF DESTINIES


707 -38


THE CORRECTOR
OF DESTINIES
Being tales of Randolph Mason as related
by his private secretary, Courtlandt Parks
BY
MELVILLE DAVISSON POST
AUTHOR OF “ THE STRANGE SCHEMES OF
RANDOLPH MASON"
New York
Edward J. Clode
Publisher
190%.


AL 298 4.3.25
COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1908, BY
PEARSON PUBLISHING CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY
EDWARD J. CLODE
-
ARVARD COLLE
DEC 201008
LIB
IBLARY,
ay exchange


CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
MY FRIEND AT BRIDGE
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
1
CHAPTER II
. ., .
MADAME VERSÄY
.
.
.
.
.
. 27
CHAPTER III
THE BURGOYNE-HAYES DINNER . .
.
.
.
.
. 45
CHAPTER IV
THE COPPER BONDS . . . . .
.
.
.
.
. 62
CHAPTER V
THE DISTRICT-ATTORNEY
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 80
CHAPTER VI
E INTERRUPTED EXILE
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 101
THE LAST CHECK
CHAPTER VII
. . . .
. .
.
.
.
.
. 135
CHAPTER VIII
THE LIFE TENANT . . . .
. .
.
.
.
.
. 151


Contents
PAGE
CHAPTER IX
THE PENNSYLVANIA PIRATE . . i
.
167
CHAPTER X
THE VIRGIN OF THE MOUNTAIN .
.
.
.
.
. 189
CHAPTER XI
AN ADVENTURE OF ST. VALENTINE'S NIGHT
.
.
.
. 228
CHAPTER XII
THE DANSEUSE
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 250
CHAPTER XIII
THE INTRIGUER
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 270


The Corrector of Destinies
CHAPTER I
MY FRIEND AT BRIDGE
N the evening of the 23d of December, I was
one of a party at bridge at the residence of
Baron Adolph von Hubert on Eighty-sixth Street.
The Baron was the American agent of the Berlin
banking-house of Weissell & Company. The charm-
ing Madame von Hubert was Sarah Lemarr, the
wealthiest debutante at Newport when the Baron
met her. A brilliant woman, who was vainly endeav-
oring to establish, in New York, a salon after those
of Paris under the Empire. Perhaps I should have
omitted the word vainly, because one met almost
everybody having any claim to distinction, in the
drawing-rooms of Madame von Hubert.
The little party on this evening consisted of Ma-
dame von Hubert, the Baron, Winfield Gerry and
myself. Young Gerry, who went everywhere among
people of leisure, was taken to be enormously rich.
His brother, Marcus Gerry, was certainly one of the
wealthiest men in New York. He was the largest
stockholder, and financial dictator, of the Fifty-
eighth National Bank. Winfield Gerry was under
.


The Corrector of Destinies
LS
thirty, a courtly young fellow, almost as handsome
as a girl. He was extravagant, daring, it was said,
and reckless. He had been brought up from boy-
hood on the Continent, I think, and was colored with
the Latin temperament.
I do not remember ever to have been so fortunate
at cards as on this evening. When we arose from
the table, I had won seven hundred dollars, of which
sum the Baron lost two hundred. The remainder
was the loss of Winfield Gerry. I was glad of this
distribution of the loss. Young Gerry was reputed
an idle young fellow with millions at his finger
tips.
The Baron, keeping his money, like a Teuton, in
gold, handed me ten double-eagles. Mr. Gerry said
that he would give me a check at the club, and asked
me to ride down-town with him in his carriage. We
were scarcely seated before he turned to me and said,
in a quiet, even voice, as though he were announcing
a score:
“I can't pay you, Mr. Parks."
I turned in astonishment to see if he was jesting.
The electric light in the carriage showed me a face
distressingly drawn and tired. There was no pleas-
antry behind that countenance. The solution came
to me instantly. This man, posing as a gentleman,
was in fact a cad; he was about to question the
regularity of the game, the regularity of a friendly
sitting at bridge in the house of such people as the
von Huberts. I bristled with indignation.


My Friend at Bridge
“ And may I inquire," I answered frigidly, “why
is it that you cannot pay me, Mr. Gerry ? "
The man did not at once reply. He took a cigar-
ette from his pocket, lighted it and leaned back on
the cushions of the carriage.
“For the best reason in the world, Mr. Parks,”
he answered; “I have at this moment, to be entirely
accurate, just two hundred and thirty-eight dollars
and seventy-five cents."
I was greatly relieved. “My dear sir," I laughed,
“I do not expect you to carry about a cash drawer.
I knew an Englishman once whose income was
something like a hundred thousand sterling, and
who did not have a shilling in his pocket from one
year's end to the other. I should be glad of your
check. I should be glad of any number of your
checks.”
“ You are alone there,” he said simply.
My annoyance returned. I detest passages at
banter. “I trust,” I said, “ that you will permit
me to understand you.”
Gerry took his cigarette from his mouth, ground
the lighted end against the panel of the carriage
and threw it on the floor.
“ It would be better, I have no doubt," he said,
looking me evenly in the face. “I have not intended
to be either obscure or facetious. The sum which I
have just mentioned represents all the money that
I have in the world. My reputation for wealth is a
mere shell. I owe ninety-five thousand dollars, ex-
ventioned reputation to collars, esa


The Corrector of Destinies
clusive of this little debt to you. Stable and tailor
bills, various club dues, run fifteen hundred more. I
owe twelve hundred in over-drafts. It is near a hun-
dred thousand, you see. Against this, I have perhaps
five thousand dollars of personal effects; horses
worth thirty-five hundred and a bundle of worthless
stocks. I am beastly poor, atrociously poor, you
see, Mr. Parks.”
I listened in astonishment.
“ You will doubtless put me down a cad,” he went
on, “ to join a game of bridge when I had not the
money to pay my losses. In fact, I did not intend
to play. I called, intending to make my excuses to
the Baroness and depart. I found this politely
impossible, and I sat down to the table hoping
that two hundred dollars would cover my propor-
tion of probable loss." He paused and made a dep-
recating gesture. “It was no idle fancy of the
ancients to picture Fortune a woman. I might have
known.”
Then he stopped, stripped off his gloves, took
out his purse, removed two rings, unhooked a jewel
from his tie, and, before I realized what he was
doing, handed them all to me. I put back his hand.
He thrust the articles into his waistcoat pocket and
dropped his hand on his knee.
“I thank you for the courtesy,” he said, “but
you would much better take them. They will pres-
ently be listed by the referee in bankruptcy. One
Brazilian diamond, two and a half carats, valued at


My Friend at Bridge
three hundred dollars. One imitation ruby, valued
at fifty dollars. One baroque pearl, valued at
twenty-five dollars. The very jewelry is mostly
sham. I am a rather complete pretense, Mr. Parks.”
I had been studying the man for the last five min-
utes. Nothing could be more impressive than the
calm with which a thoroughbred meets his ruin. I
have seen most sorts of men meet it.
There was little to say, and I said it with the best
grace I could gather — the usual platitudes. Some-
thing would turn up in the morning, wealthy friends
were in abundance. I mentioned his brother, Marcus
Gerry.
He said the name over slowly after me, “ Marcus
Gerry.” Then his lips set evenly along his fine,
sensitive mouth. But only for a moment. He gave
me a swift glance and began to laugh.
“My brother is all right, you know; but he is a
commercial factor. His financial sense is sound.
A rotten ship is a rotten ship. The captain of it
cannot matter a two-pence. Let him step down and
off, and the hull go to Davy Jones. Pension the
captain perhaps, but cut loose from the derelict.
That's Marcus Gerry. That's the sane view.”
We were down-town now. The carriage was turn-
ing into Fifth Avenue. The young man touched the
driver's button.
6 This is your club, Mr. Parks, I believe," he said.
“I am obliged by your kindness. Won't you let me
give you the gewgaws ?”
i


The Corrector of Destinies
“ By no means," I answered, getting out of the
cab.“ Please do me the courtesy to forget our game
of bridge.”
He laughed pleasantly. “Oh, I shall forget it,
thank you. Seafaring folk at Bremen say the cable
ought always to read, “ Der Kapitän ging mit seinem
Schiffe unter.'” Then he spoke to the driver and
closed the carriage door.
I went into the club and got a pony of brandy,
a cigar and a chair by the fire. I was greatly sorry
'or young Gerry. He was an exceedingly pleasant
fellow. Still, I could do nothing. I had thought
the matter over fully. I could, of course, bring him
to Randolph Mason, but of what use was that?
There was no balance of injustice to be squared up
here. A reckless young spendthrift, come to the
• end of his tether, was all. Mason would have that
fact out in a twinkle, and close the door in his face.
It was out of the question to fool him. He would
pick a man like a vulture at a bone till he got to the
marrow.' I threw the cigar into the fire. Anyway,
Marcus Gerry would doubtless pension the captain
of the rotten ship. At the worst, he would probably
be better off than the most of us. Then I recalled the
German sentence.
“ Heinrich," I said to the club steward, “ what is
* Der Kapitän ging mit seinem Schiffe unter "? "
“ Der Captain vent down mit his ship,” replied the
man.
A great light came to me. I went over to the


My Friend at Bridge
table and wrote on my card, “ Come to Ran-
dolph Mason to-morrow at eleven. The old Field
mansion off Broadway, below Wall Street.” Then
I sent it to his address by messenger. That
would at least gain time; and perhaps the boy
would give up the idea of suicide. Then I took
another pony of brandy and walked to my lodg-
ings.
Randolph Mason occupied the old Field mansion.
on the west side of Broadway below Wall Street. Ii
is an ancient brick house with a dilapidated garden,
surrounded by an iron fence. No effort seems to
have been made for years to keep this property in
repair; it remains almost as it was a century ago,
when it was considered a type of Colonial architec-
ture in America. The plaster has fallen from the
columns in irregular patches. The large red tiles
of the portico, which were brought over from Eng-
land, are mostly cracked. The flagstone walk to the
street remains, perhaps, the only one in New York.
Still, the house is a good one. It was built as our
fathers built — twenty-four-inch walls, heavy oak
timbers, solid mahogany doors, and all the exposed
metal brass and copper. The floors are hardwood,
worn smooth as bone. I think the door is considered
a model of Colonial excellence. I have seen it fre-
quently reproduced in architectural journals. The
fan-shaped panes above are thought to be of excep-
tional beauty. I believe the brass knocker used to


The Corrector of Destinies
grace a house in Bond Street, in the time of George
the Fourth.
This property is a hand out of the past clutching
Broadway. Around it are gigantic office buildings,
running to twenty stories. The roar of the greatest
commerce in the world beats along its rusted iron
fence. I am not entirely clear about the history of
this house. It seems to have descended by an entail,
as far as the law would permit, to Simon Field, who,
for some conspicuous service, gave Randolph Mason
a life lease of the property in his will. An Italian
servant, Pietro, and his wife, Francesca, kept the
place for Randolph Mason. They lived in the base-
ment. The woman was an Italian peasant of a type
to be found only in the country near Genoa, indus-
trious and economical almost past belief. She
prepared the meals for Randolph Mason, did the
marketing and so forth, but never came into the
upper part of the house, which he occupied.
This was the province of Pietro, who was the valet
and man-of-all-work. Mason would allow no other
servant near him. He seemed attached to Pietro.
The man was silent, efficient, and able, it seemed, to
anticipate his master's wishes. I picked up the pair
of them in a little village of the Italian Riviera when
I had Mason in the south of Europe. Pietro was a
deserter from the army and in hiding. We got them
safely to New York and they remained with Ran-
dolph Mason.
After a year in America, the two servants had


My Friend at Bridge
become so efficient that I put them in charge of the
house and took lodgings at an apartment club. I
had several reasons for this; one of them was that
I had come now to have enlarged social duties in
New York, and required proper bachelor quarters.
It also rid me of an exacting personal care of Ran-
dolph Mason. I went down each morning at ten
o'clock and returned at three. Sometimes, however,
I remained the night. But the house was without
comforts. It was one huge library of law books,
and Randolph Mason had no regular habits; the
silent Pietro might slip into your room at any hour
for a volume of reports. I came more and more to
bless Providence for Francesca and this jewel, Pietro.
I was a little late in arriving on Broadway the
morning after the game of bridge. As I stopped to
open the old iron gate to Randolph Mason's house,
Winfield Gerry came across from Wall Street and
joined me. He looked well-groomed and wholesome.
He was certainly a clean-limbed, clean-faced young
fellow, and there was nothing in his manner to recail
the evening before. He spoke to me cordially, joined
me at the gate, and walked up to the house. He
made some pleasantry about the dilapidated garden,
and then began to talk polo. I caught no tang of
misery in his talk.
We entered the house and crossed the wide hall to
the old-time drawing-room, now used for an office.
As I threw back the mahogany door, I observed
Randolph Mason leaning over the table in the mid-


The Corrector of Destinies
dle of the room. He straightened up, cast a steady,
searching glance at young Gerry that ran swiftly
over him to his feet, then turned abruptly and walked
into the adjoining room, closing the folding-doors
behind him.
We entered and young Gerry took a chair by the
window. “Was that Randolph Mason ? ” he said.
I answered that it was.
“ Until I saw his face," he continued, “I could ·
have sworn that it was Liebach, the greatest surgeon
in Europe. He has Liebach's hands, too. But the
resemblance vanished when he looked up. This man's
lean, sinewy, protruding jaw is almost a menace.
He is not as gray as Liebach, either; and, besides
that, Liebach has, once in a while, something gentle
in his face, if they do call him the Wolf,' in Mu-
nich. This man's face looks metallic, as though it
might ring if you struck it."
I laughed, tossed him the morning paper, and
begged him to excuse me while I ran over the morn-
ing mail. I was scarcely seated before Pietro
appeared, saying that Mr. Mason wished to see me.
I arose and went into the adjoining room.
Randolph Mason sat at his table, his elbow on
the writing-pad and his chin propped in the hollow
of his hand. Before him was a square sheet from
his memoranda files. He began to volley questions
in a voice that snapped like the click of a gun-barrel
into its block.
“Is Wilder acquitted ? ”
10


My Friend at Bridge
“ Yes," I answered; “a per curiam opinion yes-
terday. The mandate will come down from the
United States Circuit Court of Appeals, Monday.”
“ The Atlantic Canadian Securities ? ”
“Returned out of court, coupons paid up, costs
assumed by the Syndicate.”
“ André Dessausure?”
“ Dead," I replied.
At the word, Mason turned over the memorandum
sheet on the table, folded his arms and stared va-
cantly at the rows of bookcases lining the wall.
This was the enemy beyond him. The State De-
partment waited a day too long. The little French-
man had taken to his brazier of charcoal like an
impulsive son of the Quartier Latin, and Mason had
failed. I seized this opportune mood to get an
audience for young Gerry.
“Mr. Mason,” I said, “in the next room is an-
other man booked to the same shipping-point."
He turned sharply in his chair. “Bring him in,”
he said.
I opened the door and requested the young man to
come into this private office, although I had little
hope that Randolph Mason would even hear his his-
tory to the end. I had no hope of his assistance for
young Gerry; his case had none of the elements of
uncorrected injustice, bringing it within Mason's
zone of interest. I expected to see Mason search him
mercilessly for a moment, and then drop him as a
prospector would a spurious nugget.
11


The Corrector of Destinies
Young Gerry entered and remained standing by
one of the bookcases near the table. Mason looked
at him carefully for a moment; then he said, “ How
much do you owe?”
Winfield Gerry glanced quizzically at me. I re-
assured him with a nod and he answered, “In round
numbers, one hundred thousand dollars."
“For what ? ” said Mason.
“Borrowed money,” replied Gerry.
“For what? ” Mason repeated.
The young man hesitated; then he said, “I am
thought to be rather reckless where money matters
are concerned. Horses that are not fast enough,
women that are too fast; usually an explanation is
required to go no further.”
I could readily see that he was hoping to evade
this query.
“What is the truth about it?” said Mason.
Young Gerry shifted his feet uneasily: “Well,"
he began weakly, “ won't that do for an explanation ?
How can it matter, anyway? The money is gone."
Mason continued monotonously to repeat his ques-
tion. The young man seemed to go through that
period of uncertainty and hesitation common to the
court witness who finds himself forced by the exam-
iner either to make a clean breast of his story or
stubbornly refuse to answer anything at all. He
chewed his lips nervously, fumbled with the buttons
on his waistcoat and stroked gently the angle of his
jaw. Mason waited without apparent interest.
12


My Friend at Bridge
Finally, he arrived at his conclusion. He dropped
his hand as with a gesture of resignation.
“Very well,” he said; “ this is the whole truth:
My father and Egan Bedford were financial part-
ners. One day Bedford borrowed all the money he
could get in Wall Street on the firm's credit, and
apparently used it in an unsuccessful effort to hold
up a line of rotten securities, while in fact he se-
creted the money. A little later the firm failed.
Bedford cleared himself of the wreck in bankruptcy.
My father paid up the losses out of his private for-
tune as far as he could. When he died I assumed
the remainder of the loss, about two hundred thou-
sand dollars. I have paid half of it; but I can go
no further."
He dropped his hand limply on his knee, as he
had done the evening before in his carriage. Again
I was astonished at the contradiction which Winfield
Gerry presented. I studied his face. It was drawn
and tired, as it had been last night. I had been
wrong about him, wrong about his character, his
habits and the causes of his unfortunate situation.
This boy was breaking at the knees under the burden
of another's wrong. I understood him now. The
air of recklessness was assumed to explain these
debts. He was playing the loose spendthrift, while
he strove to clear his father's name and to return
what Bedford had stolen.
Young Gerry pulled himself together. “ I hardly
realize why I have laid this matter open,” he con-
13


The Corrector of Destinies
tinued; “I came here with no such plan. I came,
in fact, merely to put in the morning.”
There was something sinister in the way he spoke
of the morning — like a convicted prisoner, coming
up to be sentenced at the afternoon sitting of a
court.
“ Where is this man, Egan Bedford ? ” said Ran-
dolph Mason.
Winfield Gerry lifted his face in surprise. “ You
surely know Egan Bedford,” he said; “he is the
richest broker in Boston. Egan Bedford & Com-
pany is the firm name; but there is no firm and no
company, it's all Egan Bedford. He posed a few
years as a financial unfortunate, then he gradually
brought out the covered funds. To-day he is one
of the largest private bankers in Massachusetts.”
Then he added, wearily, “ The scheme of things
seems to require a hell. Matters must be adjusted
somewhere."
“ This one will be adjusted here,” said Mason.
Young Gerry smiled somewhat bitterly. “ Such
a thing is impossible,” he said; “ quite impossible.”
Randolph Mason ignored the words. His face
lost its gleaming vitality, as though a curtain were
lowered behind it shutting out the light. The effect
on Winfield Gerry was instantly noticeable. The
atmosphere of stress was lifted. He stretched out
his limbs, and looked curiously about him at the
rows of bookcases along the wall, the oriental rug
on the floor, the scattered volumes on the table, quite
14


My Friend at Bridge
as if Randolph Mason had walked out of the room.
Then he turned as if to go into the outer office. He
was half facing the door, when Mason's chin went
up. Instantly he fell into an attitude of attention.
“ Are you related to Marcus Gerry ? " said Mason.
The young man crossed the floor and sat down in
a chair. “ He is my brother,” he replied.
“ Then,” said Mason, “ this thing is child's play.”
The old listless cloud settled again over Winfield
Gerry's face. “Mr. Mason,” he said, “ there is no
hope in that quarter. My brother, Marcus Gerry,
is not a sentimentalist, as I am. He is a practical
person. When one gets a dollar from Marcus Gerry,
he leaves two in unquestioned securities until he comes
back with the loan. His instincts are those of a
banker, human until it comes to the money sacks.
Do not misunderstand me. My brother would
promptly knock down the man who assailed my name
in his presence. He would go up to the door of
state's prison to crush my enemy. He would grind
every moral precept into pulp to pull me out of a
hole; but he would not pay out a hundred thousand
dollars, nor a hundred dollars, nor one dollar, to
wipe out this debt which I have assumed. I have
gone over this matter more than once with him. He
is lying in wait for Egan Bedford. He has gone
to great pains to cultivate amicable relations with
him. Bedford & Company has become the Boston
correspondent of the Fifty-eighth National Bank,
which belongs to my brother. Marcus Gerry will
15


The Corrector of Destinies
repay Bedford in his own good time when the hour
finally comes.”
“ It has come,” said Mason. Then he leaned for-
ward in his chair and looked Winfield Gerry steadily
in the face, as one does with a child when he wishes
to impress upon him the importance of some direc-
tion.
“ Young man,” he said, “attend accurately to
what I am about to say. You will at once make a
careful and correct estimate of the amounts owed
by the estate of your father and yourself by reason
of Egan Bedford. This statement must be correct.
Not a cent more, not a cent less, than the exact sum.
You will at once dispose of any property you have
in New York, and on next Monday go to Boston and
open an office as a broker. Before the end of the
week you will receive a telegram from Marcus Gerry
authorizing you to follow my directions. On re-
ceipt of it, go at once to the banking-house of Egan
Bedford & Company, and say to Mr. Bedford that
you wish to establish a temporary line of credit with
his house; that you are about to draw a series of
checks on the Fifty-eighth National Bank of New
York, which you wish him to cash, and for which
you will pay him the usual commercial discount.
“ Also tell him that you have no deposit in the
Fifty-eighth National Bank subject to check, but
that this bank will arrange with him about meeting
the checks, and to take the matter up with it at once.
You will say nothing more, and leave the bank.
16


My Friend at Bridge
“ On the next day begin to present your checks,
payable to yourself and drawn on the Fifty-eighth
National Bank of New York. These checks will be
made out for the amounts, respectively, in your
statement of debts. With the money, as you receive
it from each check, you will at once pay that cred-
itor in full. This you will continue until all the
creditors are paid. It ought not to require longer
than a fortnight."
Mason arose as though to dismiss the audience
with young Gerry; then he added, “You will re-
member to do exactly as I say; do you understand
that ? "
“I understand,” replied the young man in amaze-
ment. “But the thing is impossible. The Fifty-
eighth National Bank will never shoulder such a
loss. These debts aggregate three hundred thousand
dollars."
“ The Fifty-eighth National Bank of New York,"
said Mason, “ will not lose a dollar.”
“ Then,” cried Gerry, now utterly incredulous, “I
do not know how under heaven Egan Bedford can
be got to cash the checks ! ”
" It is sufficient that I know,” said Mason. Then
he got up abruptly and walked out of the room.
I had a lot of trouble with Winfield Gerry after
Randolph Mason left the room. He was politely
incredulous. The thing was certainly impossible —
quite too absurdly impossible, he thought. Ran-
17


The Corrector of Destinies
dolph Mason was nodding. Egan Bedford was the
last man in the world to be taken for a fool. He
would not cash checks on the Fifty-eighth National
Bank of New York unless that bank guaranteed the
payment, especially when he was told that the drawer
of the checks had no account on deposit. Who would
indemnify the Fifty-eighth National Bank? Not
his brother, not Marcus Gerry. Mason was under a
violent illusion about any financial aid to be had
from him. No such authority as Mason intended
would ever arrive from him. It was out of the ques-
tion to tell Egan Bedford that the Fifty-eighth
National Bank would take care of the checks. What
use was there to lie, when in a few moments by tele-
phone Bedford could ascertain the statement was
not true. He did not wish me to misunderstand him,
he said. He had no mooning sentiment about pay-
ing Egan Bedford in his own coin. The devil ought
to be fought with fire. It was the only way to
get through the hide of such a beast as Bedford.
Neither did he wish to give me a false impression of
his brother. Marcus Gerry would do everything on
earth to carry such a matter through except pay
the money, and that was the very thing which he
must do under this plan. Egan Bedford would not
cash the checks until the Fifty-eighth National Bank
— that is, Marcus Gerry — guaranteed them; there
fore, Marcus Gerry must pay them. A loss could
not be left suspended in the air. It could not be
made to vanish like a magic carpet; neither could
18


The Corrector of Destinies
evening, when I was at the Cloverdale Hunt German.
By request from Mason, Coleman Stratton, Mr.
Gerry's counsel and that of the Fifty-eighth Na-
tional Bank, accompanied him. I have it from
Pietro that the conference ran up to midnight, and
that half of the books in the private office were on
the floor in the morning. At twelve o'clock Marcus
Gerry sent a telegram to his brother, saying to go
ahead as Mason had directed. Pietro took this tele-
gram to the Western Union office on Broadway.
When he returned, he passed Marcus Gerry's car-
riage leaving the house.
So the Gideon sign arrived in Boston before it :
was required. I know accurately what followed. On
Monday morning, Winfield Gerry went to the bank-
ing-house of Egan Bedford & Company and ex-
plained to Mr. Bedford what he wished to do, as
Randolph Mason had directed. Bedford requested
Gerry to return the next morning. He then called
up the Fifty-eighth National Bank by telephone and
inquired about the checks. The bank replied that
Winfield Gerry had no deposit there, but that it
would guarantee the payment of his checks up to
three hundred thousand dollars, and to send it all
the checks together by Adams Express at the close
of banking hours on Saturday. Bedford replied
that this arrangement was satisfactory; but he re-
quired it sent to him by cipher telegram and also by
letter, which was accordingly done. The next morn--
ing young Gerry presented his checks, which were
Tere
20


My Friend at Bridge
cashed. This he continued to do, until on Thursday
evening he had drawn out two hundred and ninety-
seven thousand dollars, and had paid all the cred-
itors of his father's old firm of Gerry & Bedford,
including the two hundred thousand of debts which
he had personally assumed. On Friday he closed
his office in Boston and came to New York, the most
puzzled man who ever entered the Borough of Man-
hattan.
Saturday evening, the banking-house of Egan
Bedford & Company sent the bundle of checks to
the Fifty-eighth National Bank of New York. This
bank refused to pay the checks, and returned them.
Mr. Bedford came at once to New York. He could
not understand this refusal of the bank to pay the
checks, but he was not alarmed; he held the guaranty
of the bank in writing; it was one of the wealthiest
financial institutions in America; it was as solvent
as the Government. Some misunderstanding of a
clerk was doubtless the explanation — at any rate,
he was safe.
Mr. Bedford went to the bank upon his arrival,
but got no explanation from any one of the clerical
force. An explicit direction to refuse payment on
the checks was all they knew about it. An effort to
secure an interview with the President, Marcus
Gerry, brought only an appointment for Mr. Bed-
ford with the general counsel of the bank at the
office of Coleman Stratton, on Broadway, at four
o'clock.
21


The Corrector of Destinies
I was present at this conference at the office of
Mr. Stratton at the invitation of Winfield Gerry,
who called for me at a quarter before four. We
walked over to the building. Young Gerry was
amazed at the incredible situation. It was unbeliev-
able all the way through. One dreamed of such
things on occasion. But this affair had gone on in
daylight. It belonged in Bagdad, yet here it was,
on a Monday in January, in New York! He was
under an almost breaking strain to see the close of it.
We were taken at once to Mr. Stratton's private
office. Egan Bedford and his counsel, Judge Hac-
ker, had already arrived, and were conversing in low
tones in a corner by the window. In a moment Mr.
Stratton joined us. He was a clean-cut, gray man,
radiating vitality. .
“ Gentlemen,” he said, “ can we not waive conven-
tions and get at once to this matter ? "
The two men at the window turned around in their
chairs. Egan Bedford arose, came over to the table
and put down a pack of checks. “I do not see why
the bank sends me to a law office," he said; “ I want
the money on these checks."
“I believe,” said Mr. Stratton, “ that the Fifty-
eighth National Bank held no deposit upon which
these checks could be drawn."
A light of cunning came into Egan Bedford's
face. “I know that,” he said; “but the bank is
better than any man's account. I made the bank
stand good for the checks.”
22


My Friend at Bridge
“ How ? ” said Stratton, and I thought there was
the faintest shadow of a smile flitting about the cor-
ners of his eyes.
Bedford's broad face lighted with victory. He
thrust his hand into the bosom of his coat, took out
a letter and a telegram and spread them on the table.
« There,” he said, “is the bank's guaranty in black
and white and yellow.” Then he added, with a sneer,
“I guess your bank's not broke; is it?”
The lawyer moved some papers until he found a
printed statement. “The bank,” he said, “has
assets valued at thirty-five millions of dollars; its
liabilities are some ten millions. That would be, I
believe, twenty-five millions above insolvency.”
“ Then,” said Bedford, “I want my money."
“ Doubtless,” replied Stratton
Bedford exploded with anger. “I am tired of
this damned nonsense !” he shouted. “If the bank
won't pay these checks, I will sue it.”
“ Then you will lose,” replied the lawyer quietly.
“Lose !” cried Bedford, “ like hell I'll lose! The
bank guaranteed these checks, I tell you. There is
the guaranty; don't you see it ? ” and he pushed the
papers across the table with his fat hand.
“I see it," said the lawyer; “but it is not worth
filing room.”
“ What ? " shouted Bedford.
“ This guaranty of the Fifty-eighth National
Bank,” continued Stratton, “is utterly void.”
Bedford plunged back on his heels like a man
23


The Corrector of Destinies
struck violently in the breast. He waived his fat
arm at his counsel, whom he had hitherto ignored.
“ Judge,” he gurgled, “ Judge, do you hear that ? ”
Judge Hacker, whose knowledge of the law is said
to equal that of any practitioner in New York, arose
and came over to the table. He nodded to us, then
he spoke quietly to his confrère in the law.
“ Stratton," he said, “ give me accurately your
position in this matter.”
Coleman Stratton touched an electric button,
scribbled a memorandum on a scrap of paper, and
handed it to the office boy who entered. Then he
turned to Judge Hacker.
“ This contract of the Fifty-eighth National Bank
with Egan Bedford & Company is one purely of
guaranty, and is ultra vires on the part of the bank.
The Revised Statutes of the United States give a
national bank no authority to guarantee the debts
of another. A national bank, as you are aware,
cannot exercise powers in excess of those conferred
upon it by statute. Egan Bedford & Company and,
for that, all persons equally with the bank are bound
to take notice of the statute. The guaranty is void
and the bank is not liable."
Judge Hacker listened attentively. “Have you
the Revised Statutes ? ” he said.
“ Yes," replied Stratton, handing him the volume.
“ Section 5136."
Judge Hacker opened the book on the table and
began to read it carefully. In a moment he looked
24


My Friend at Bridge
up. “Do you know of an authority construing this
statute ? " he said.
Mr. Stratton touched his bell, and the office boy
came in with a copy of the “ Federal Reporter."
Stratton handed the book to Judge Hacker. “Page
925," he said.
Judge Hacker took the volume to the window and
went carefully over the case. Egan Bedford followed
him, peeping now over and now under his arm, as
though the lawyer were examining some incompre-
hensible infernal machine. His face was tense.
The whole plan of Randolph Mason was now laid
open. Plain, even to young Winfield Gerry. He
slipped his hand into mine and wrung it.
Presently Judge Hacker closed the volume and
returned it to the table. Then he spoke to Stratton.
“ You seem to be right about this,” he said. “ This
decision of the United States Circuit Court of Ap-
peals appears conclusive. The Fifty-eighth National
Bank did not receive this money, and consequently
it cannot be taken to be in the position of obtaining
a benefit by its void act. This money was paid to
Winfield Gerry, and not to the bank.” Then he
turned to Egan Bedford, “ You will have to look to
Mr. Winfield Gerry for the payment of these checks."
Bedford raised his arms above his head and
dropped them with a hopeless gesture. “ Sue him,
sue that fellow !” he cried. “He is not worth a .
tinker's dam. He hasn't a dollar !”
Young Gerry took out his purse, stripped off his
25


CHAPTER II
MADAME VERSÄY
I was surprised on a morning in early February
to find Bishop Simonton's carriage before Randolph
Mason's house. I have known churchmen to appeal
to Mason in desperate straits, perhaps upon a theory
that one should try all temporal doors before knock-
ing on the gates of alabaster. But that the esthetic
and venerable Bishop of New York should require
profane assistance was quite beyond belief. I pulled
up short by my ancient friend, the crossing police-
man.
“ Scally,” I said, “I believe the ravages of age
are beginning to mark me. Can it be Bishop Simon-
ton's carriage I see yonder ? "
The great Celt rapped himself gently on the belt
plate with his club. “Sure,” he said, “it's not the
ravages of age that's doin' ye any harm this mornin',
Misther Parks. 'Tis his nib's wagon, all right.”
“ Some alderman must be squatting on the Church
lands," I said, “ to bring this good man out at a
quarter before ten on a winter morning.”
“ Wist !” replied the Irish king half covering his
mouth with his gloved hand; “ 'tis a woman.” Then
he crossed the street to stop a line of drays.
27


The Corrector of Destinies
The mystery was now beyond conjecture. I
walked on slowly to the gate and up the flag-path
to the house. Certain airy, nebulous conceptions
had, from the pleasantries of early Italian letters
and recent scandalous posters along the book stalls,
presented themselves with piquant explanations.
Within the house a second and greater surprise
awaited me. Pietro met me at the door saying that
Randolph Mason wished instantly to see me. I gave
Pietro my coat and hat and went at once to the
private office. My state of mental flippancy had
little prepared me for the type of woman who arose
as I entered. I have not seen her like in New York.
If the word elegant were not so thumbed, I should
write it here as descriptive of her — not in a tinseled
or bedizened sense, but as the panther is elegant,
as the red silken horses of a rajah are elegant.
High breeding, down an immemorial line, produces
such animals, time, through a hundred generations,
carving carefully, like a gem engraver. Tall, supple
and straight; the eye steady, calm, reserved, fear-
less; the nose straight and thin; the lips fine, delicate
and resolute; the chin up; the black, glossy hair
parted in the middle and brushed back. She was
gowned in well-fitting black. This woman was per-
haps fifty years old. I instantly fitted her into the
frame of a casement window along the Battery in
Charleston, or the white columns of an estate on the
James. I bowed as she turned toward me. I think
the statue of Nathan Hale, outside in the flurry of
28


Madame Versäy
snow, would also have bowed had it been standing
in my shoes. She did not speak to me at all, but
waited in dignified silence for Mason to say what
was necessary to be said.
Mason was standing by his table, tapping it im-
patiently with the tips of his long, sensitive fingers.
I thought the lines along his mouth were broken a
bit, his eyes a trifle warmer. But this was certainly
a fancy, for when he spoke it was in his usual cold,
even voice.
“ Parks,” he said, “ you must find a certain variety
actress, calling herself Madame Versäy. She has in
her possession a case of pearls belonging to Miss
Caroline Pickney. She will demand ten thousand
dollars in cash for the return of these jewels. You
will say to her that Miss Pickney has finally ar-
ranged to pay her this money. That on the tenth
day of February at ten o'clock, the vault officer of
the Jefferson Trust Company, in the city of Rich-
mond, in the presence of Miss Pickney here and you,
will deliver to her ten thousand dollars in currency.
She must bring with her the case of jewels and hand
it over to the vault officer, who, upon the payment of
the money, will give it to Miss Pickney. This Ma-
dame Versäy is said to be under the protection of
one Robert Henderson, a police detective of New
York. This person may also be present, if Madame
Versäy wishes him to be. You will arrange for this
purchase with Madame Versäy. You will then accom-
pany Miss Pickney to Richmond and be present with
29


The Corrector of Destinies
her at the transfer of the money. Miss Pickney will
personally attend to the other details of the matter.”
When Randolph Mason had finished speaking, the
woman picked up a long coat from her chair and
began to put it on. I helped her with the collar of it.
She thrust her black-gloved hands in the deep
pockets, then she turned to Mason.
“ These jewels were brought from India by my
great-grandfather,” she said; “ they were worn by
my great-grandmother at her wedding; by my
grandmother; by my mother. Their value to me is
beyond estimate. Still I do not wish to violate either
the laws of Virginia or those of the United States in
order to recover them. I do not greatly fear the
laws of Virginia. It cannot be that my fathers have
made laws that would permit a creature like this
actress to retain my inheritance. But the laws of
the United States are of the North; they may per-
mit such things. I do not know. Federal judges in
the South, it is said, are king's governors, often con-
travening, I am told, our wisest laws, our oldest cus-
toms, our most cherished ideas of justice. I do not
wish to come into the presence of these overlords,
nor to be subject to the impertinence of their at-
tachés. I wish to be assured, Mr. Mason, of the
entire safety of this plan.”
Mason's face showed annoyance. “Madame," he
said, “ a rubber of whist could not be safer."
“ Then," said the woman, “ I bid you good-morn-
ing."
30


Madame Versäy
A little snow was falling, and I accompanied Miss
Caroline Pickney to Bishop Simonton's carriage,
tucked in the skirts of her great coat and closed the
door. I think she must have taken me for a sort of
upper servant, since she gave no evidence of my
presence, except a stately nod at the carriage win-
dow.
Here was a fine bundle of mysteries, coupled with
the direction of Mason to go out and find Madame
Versäy. Find an unknown variety actress, only the
devil's imps knew. where. Such birds had no marked
tree to roost in; besides, this person was probably
Madame Gladys by now, or Estelle something or
other. I could not go back to Mason for further
light. He would stare at me and walk away. My
directions were accurate: find Madame Versäy first
and then go to Richmond...
I turned up the collar of my greatcoat, and went
down for a conference with the omniscient Scally. I
found him directing commerce with the gestures of
a Roman prætor. I darted past the row of cabs to
his island of safety and seized his hand. A moment
later, when the tide had passed, he took my bill from
between the fingers of his glove and held it under his
broad thumb; then he smiled benignly.
“Misther Parks,” he said, “ 'tis the speed limit
you are after wishin' to exceed ? "
“No,” I said; “I am the King of the Golden
Mountain on the quest of a fairy.”
“ Go along; you're foolin',” he said.
31


The Corrector of Destinies
“By no means," I answered; “I want to find Ma-
dame Versäy."
He whistled softly. “Madame Versäy, is it! 'Tis
only the devil that knows where she is now, but
where she'll be at one to-night, 'tis Scally that knows
as well as the devil. In a dago café on the Bowery,
which is next door to Paddy Moran's dance hall, she
will be atin' and drinkin' and carryin' on. She's a
bad one, this Madame Versäy. 'Tis back to the tall
weeds your friend Scally would advise you to be
goin'."
At half-past twelve that night, I found Madame
Versäy, and the café called “ dago” by my friend
Scally. It was a fragment of Paris, transplanted
to the Bowery by Monsieur Popinot, an oily, obse-
quious little creature from the Montmartre. He
came running out to the curb to bow me in — the
coming of a hansom was an event. He enumerated
his wares with true Latin enthusiasm. His caviare
had arrived that very day. It was “magnifique,”
and his wines! ah, monsieur, he alone in all this raw
land had wines! His brother Anselem hunted France,
nosed it, fingered it, tasted it, that he, Popinot might
have champagne, fragrant like those little meadows
nestling at the foothills of the Pyrenees. Burgundy,
red like the poppies in the wheat fields of the
Oise; and absinthe — here language failed him. He
clasped his hands, “ Ravissante, monsieur !”
Madame Popinot, who presided over the cash
drawer by the door, beamed upon me as I entered.
32


Madame Versäy
She was a daughter of the little shops along the
Seine, fat and vigilant, knowing instantly if the new-
comer had the price of a glass of wine in his pocket.
A virtue of the highest order to her; doubtless the
only one remaining.
I selected a little table by the wall, and, not wish-
ing to be poisoned, ordered a bottle of Bass Ale and
a plate of dry biscuits, wiping out Popinot's disgust
with a generous tip.. The place was evidently a Bo-
hemian rendezvous of a low order. The atmosphere
was a stench of tobacco and sour wine, the floor was
freshly sprinkled with new sawdust. The chairs and
tables were of metal. Iron alone could resist large
primitive emotions when they got in action. The
crash of an elbow, the heave of a heavy boot-toe,
did not wreck a wire chair. It could be straightened
presently in the crack of a door. The place was fill-
ing up with jetsam from the under-currents of New
York. Gentlemen going swiftly down to the sill of
the world, beasts coming up from it, got somehow
into evening clothes, sat well together under Mon-
sieur Popinot's many-colored lights. It was the de-
pravity of Paris without a touch of its seductive
ésprit. The naïve, mischievous greeting of the Mou-
lin Rouge and the Folie Bergère, “ Je vous aime,
donnez-moi cinq francs," was not here. This place
was an oak for crows. I wondered on what limb of
it perched Madame Versäy.
I was about to summon the good Popinot to my
assistance, when a young man, very drunk, came in,
33


The Corrector of Destinies
accompanied by a woman in a superb opera coat.
They took the table opposite to mine. The young
man wore a soft slouch hat, which he promptly threw
on the floor. Then he began to hammer on the table
with the ferrule of his walking stick and shout,
“ Heah, heah, Popinot, you old dog, a bottle of Bur-
gundy for Madame Versäy. It's the wine of love
and laughter.”
My eyes went instantly to the woman. She was
a medium-size, conspicuous blonde, with a rather
trim figure, excellent arms and throat, made the
most of by a low gown of black velvet. Her com-
plexion was the usual sort to be had from boxes and
paint pots. Her mouth was a perfect Cupid's bow,
and exquisite. Her nose was bourgeois, but not
obtrusive and not bad. Her eyes, however, were
utterly bad. They reminded me of cold tallow. Her
bright yellow hair was coiled on the top of her head
to give an effect of height and to lengthen her face.
While her companion was unspeakably drunk, this
woman was coldly sober. She constantly refilled the
man's glass, but scarcely tasted her own. I was
evidently spectator at the epilogue of a quarrel which
Madame Versäy was striving to drown in the mix-
ture of alcohol and claret that Popinot sold for Bur-
gundy. She spoke almost in whispers, but now and
then the man broke out in a voice that I could hear.
“No, I won't wait no moah. I want them back.
You said you only wanted them to star in. That's
what you said; to star in.”
34


Madame Versäy
Madame Versäy patted him on the arm and cooed
over him, but her face was as cold as a wedge. The
man harped on the one idea. “No; I was drunk.
Didn't I tell you I was drunk when I did it? and
they've got to go back to her.”
Madame Versäy suddenly changed her tactics.
She leaned over, seized the young man by the collar
and shook him. What she said I could not hear, but
the effect on the drunken youth was marked. He
pleaded in blabbering slobbers: “ That's all right,
you keep them; they're yours. You dissolve them in
vin’ger and drink 'em like Cle-patra. You're good
, lil thing, you're a good, lil', sweet thing."
The man's drooling grew gradually inarticulate,
his head wobbled. Presently he made an ineffectual
effort to pat Madame Versäy's porcelain cheek, and
fell forward with his arms outstretched on the table.
Popinot's Burgundy was indeed distilled from the
poppies of the Oise!
The woman ordered a tumbler of whisky and drank
it like water. My hour had arrived. I arose and
threaded a way to her table.
“ Have I the honor,” I said, “ to address Madame
Versäy?”
A furtive light came into the cold, tallow eyes.
“Not so loud," she said. “ Are you a plain-clothes
Johnnie ? "
I assured her that I had attained to no such dig-
nity as that. I was merely one coming under a flag
of truce with a message from Miss Caroline Pickney.
35


The Corrector of Destinies
I said this over several times and in a variety of
ways before Madame's suspicions were soothed down.
Then I laid before her the offer to pay ten thousand
dollars cash for the jewels. A clean cut trade and
no questions. The money in her hands for the jewels
in ours. I did not go further into the place or de-
tails of payment, that would better follow a little
later on.
“ I'll stand for that,” said Madame Versäy, “if
it's straight goods; but you will have to show it to
Henderson. If he don't flag it, the old hen can have
her shiners.”
I wondered mildly if we might find Henderson
somewhere.
“ Sure,” said Madame Versäy. Then she sum-
moned Popinot. “Call up Henderson's Detective
Agency,” she directed," and tell Bobbie to chase in
here."
While we awaited the chasing-in of Bobbie, I drew
the celebrity out a little on the subject of the slum-
bering youth. He was an only nephew of Miss
Caroline Pickney and her half-brother, Bishop Si-
monton of New York. He was an orphan and a
very ebon sheep. Having fallen a victim to Madame
Versäy's charms, he had shouldered the onerous
duties of an“ angel," “burned his money," and
finally “swiped” the jewels from his relative and
bestowed them on this Dulcinea. These jewels Ma-
dame Versäy thought it advisable to retain, since
the law could not “ take a fall out of her” without
36


Madame Versäy
“ jugging” the youth. She appealed to me to affirm
the moral soundness of her attitude in this. A poor
girl must look out for herself.
I was spared the embarrassment of a decision on
so vexed a question by the arrival of Bobbie Hen-
derson. I was also glad of all the people in the Café
la Lune d'Or when he came bursting in it. He was
a person with a variegated waistcoat, many seals and
yellow diamonds, and a face that would have con-
victed him before any jury in America without a
word of evidence for the State. He sailed down
upon me with the bluster of the east wind.
“ Flash your star," he said, “ or jar loose from
the lady." His language was beyond me, but his
manner admitted of no doubt.
Madame Versäy sprang up and thrust her elbow
vigorously into the region of his diaphragm. “ Cut
it out, Bobbie,” she said, “ you ain't wise to the gent.
He's no plain-clothes Johnnie. This thing's busi-
ness.”
Mr. Robert Henderson was illumined. He drew
up a chair and expressed his desolation at the error.
Then the three of us got down to the details of Ma-
dame Versäy's “ business.” The offer to pay cash
was pleasing to Mr. Henderson. It “ sounded
good;” but he would take no chance on a “ double
cross” being “handed out.” The money must be
paid in his presence at a bank. No“ meet me under
the oak tree” for him. He was “onto" the iniqui-
ties of the human family.
37


The Corrector of Destinies
By gradual, indirect suggestions, I uncovered the
plan to pay at the Jefferson Trust Company in
Richmond under his eye. He took to that. It was
“ the old hen's nest ” to be sure, but doubtless the
only place where she could gather up so large a
“wad of dough.” And thus, after many glasses of
vile brandy, which, on my part, I managed to tip out
deftly into the sawdust, we got the “ business”
closed. Mr. Robert Henderson nearly crushed my
hand at parting. It was so rare a thing, he said, to
meet one of his “ kind of gentlemen” nowadays.
Madame Versäy beamed, and we parted in genial
fashion.
I had a word with Popinot at the door, after oil-
ing the itching in his palm with a silver dollar.
“ Poof!” he said, Madame Versäy was less French
than his café cat. She was born in Harlem under a
shamrock. She had heard him, Popinot, name the
divine Versailles in a flood of longing for his native
country. The name pleased her; she implored him
to say it again and yet again, until she got it and
so came “Madame Versäy.” “Mon Dieu! one's
sides split themselves with laughter. A grisette
named for a palace. Monsieur Villon never did so
excellent a naming. La demi-monde, l'édifice pu-
blique, one saw instantly the fitness of it.” He,
Popinot, was a genius of the first order.
And so I left him, shaking in the door, and calling
upon Olympus to send down his meed of bay-leaves.
Incomparable Popinot of the Golden Moon!
38


Madame Versäy
Shortly before ten o'clock on the tenth day of
February, I walked from my hotel over to the Jeffer-
son Trust Company in the city of Richmond. I was
taken at once into the vault of the safety deposit
boxes, where I found Miss Caroline Pickney and the
vault officer, Mr. Montague Thomas. This young
man greeted me courteously, but I had only another
stately nod from Miss Pickney. She would never
come to understand the social order of a commercial
civilization. One who took directions from another,
no matter in how exalted a sphere that other sat,
was a variety of servant. It was the theory of the
slave master bred in deep, and persisting after the
decadence of the civilization that produced it.
Promptly at ten, Mr. Robert Henderson arrived.
He wore a large checked ulster, a top hat and aston-
ishingly yellow gloves. He greeted me as a lost
neighbor discovered in a distant country, shook
vigorously the rather limp hand of Mr. Montague
Thomas, but went back on his heels before Miss
Caroline Pickney. She did not see him, she never saw
him.
I appreciated the need to get the matter speedily
over, and requested Mr. Henderson to allow Miss
Pickney to examine the jewels. He threw open his
ulster, revealing a small leather handbag, secured
to his waist by a chain, such as is used by bank mes-
sengers. He opened the bag and took out an ancient
black leather case, which he also opened and held in
his hand. In it, lying coiled up against the lining of
39


The Corrector of Destinies
old purple velvet was a pyramid pin, two drop ear-
rings and a strand of oriental pearls. Miss Pickney
expressed satisfaction to Mr. Montague Thomas and
directed him to open the safety deposit box. The
young man fitted the key into the lock of box number
320, and drew down the door, showing the little steel
vault packed with banknotes. He took out the money
in packages each enclosed by a printed slip, such as
are commonly used by banks, and marked “ Two
thousand dollars.”
Mr. Robert Henderson handed me one end of the
jewel-case to hold, and, with his free hand, he stowed
these five packs of bills into the little handbag.
When he had the last one safely in, he relaxed his
grip, on the jewel-case, locked his handbag and hur-
ried out of the bank. I handed the case to Miss
Caroline Pickney. She opened it and caressed the
jewels lovingly. But she said no word, and gave no
evidence of the great emotion tugging at her except
the trembling of her hands. Then she put the case
in her bosom and went down to her carriage in the
company of Mr. Montague Thomas.
I went out behind the pair of them. Not in all
my life had I been so thoroughly puzzled. What did
this woman need with Randolph Mason if she in-
tended to pay a painted actress the full value of the
jewels. Any police-sergeant could have done as well
as he. What need was there to send me scouting into
the Tenderloin and then here? The thing was idiotic.
I had been waiting to see the iron lid of some hidden
40


Madame Versäy
trap fall swiftly and crush Madame Versäy. In-
stead, I had carried out Mason's directions to the
final letter, only to see the money paid, the incident
closed, the thing ended. For Randolph Mason it
was not a defeat only, it was a capitulation, a rout.
His standard had been dragged off the field by a
variety actress and a red-light detective. I was un-
speakably bitter and depressed.
My train to New York left over the Southern at
twelve o'clock. I would go to the post-office for some
letters sent after me, get a little lunch and hurry
out of this unfortunate city. This capital of a phan-
tom empire was historic of disaster. Reputations
were always laid by the heels here. I went into the
post-office, got my letters, and was coming out when
a deputy marshal touched me on the elbow and asked
me to come up to the district-attorney's office. I .
knew then that Mason's trap had sprung, and I
hurried with the little man up the iron stairway.
Mr. Robert Henderson was boiling in picturesque
expletives when I entered the ante-room of the pros-
ecutor for the Government. His collar was wilted
down, his wonderful waistcoat crumpled, tiny threads
of perspiration lay along the fat folds of his chin.
He broke out louder when he saw me. " That's him.
That's one of the gang,” he shouted. “Now get the
other one. Get this Caroline Pickney woman, and
we'll land them in the penitentiary.”
At this moment, a tall, gracious man with a soft,
drawling accent that purred dangerously like a cat's,
41


The Corrector of Destinies
appeared in the doorway of the district-attorney's
office. “May I inquire,” he said, “who it is that is
about to send Miss Caroline Pickney to the peni-
tentiary?”
“ It's me,” said Henderson. “Her and this yeg-
ger have been shovin' the queer.”
“ Your language is unintelligible,” said the man.
“ Why, green goods,” growled Henderson. “ Pass-
in counterfeit money, that's what I mean.”
It was my turn to be astonished. So the packs
were counterfeit! Surely Mason could not have
made so dangerous a blunder. He knew the laws of
the United States. He could not have opened the
doors of the penitentiary wider to us. The mere
possession of counterfeit money was a crime. Per-
haps he did not believe that Madame Versäy would
dare come to the officers of the law with it. Perhaps
some other arm of his plan had broken down. I was
amazed and alarmed. The man in the door looked
inquiringly at me. I took out my card and handed
it to him. He bowed. “I am the district-attorney,"
he said. Then he spoke to the deputy marshal.
“ Go outside, close the door and see that I am not
interrupted.” He turned then to the detective.
“ Now, my man,” he continued, “what is all this
furore about ? ”
Henderson gave the matter swiftly in detail,
translating his Tenderloin terms as he proceeded.
When he had concluded the narrative, the district-
attorney asked to see the money. Henderson un-
42


Madame Versäy
locked his satchel, took out a pack, stripped off the
gum band at either end of it, and, holding the end of
the pack in his fingers, shook out the bills before the
district-attorney.
The lawyer had been listening with the closest
attention, his face clouded and distressed. Now, it
cleared like a summer morning. “Are the others
like this ? " he said.
“ The same," replied Henderson, “a good tenner
on the top and bottom and the rest queer."
“ Then,” said the district-attorney, “ the laws of
the United States have not been violated. These bills
are not counterfeit.”
Mr. Henderson mopped his wet face. “What!”
he ejaculated. “ It ain't good money; is it?"
“No,” replied the lawyer;" it is not money at all.”
Astonishment drove Mr. Henderson to his primal
tongue. “Hell, man!” he said. “ 'Taint good!
'Taint bad! You're stringin' me.”
The district-attorney was amused. He took the
pack of money and spread it out on the table.
“ These,” he said, “are bills of the Confederate
States of America. They are in no sense counterfeit.
The passing of these bills for money of the United
States is no crime against its laws. The Federal
Courts have time and again so decided, although
these bills closely resemble certain bank-note issues
of the Federal Government and have been more than
once complained of by the Treasury Department.”
Then he added, with a courtly bow to Henderson,
43


CHAPTER III
THE BURGOYNE-HAYES DINNER
The dinner given by Mrs. Burgoyne-Hayes to
Prince Edward of Hesse Mechel-Schweren will be
always remembered by New York. The proud old
dowager cut Society like a butcher. The list was a
streak of blood. No massacre of King Philip's war
ever left such savagery skulking in the bushes. The
terrible old woman openly declared that she intended
to give New York the bayonet, as her great relative
did in 1777.
I shall always remember this dinner for another
reason. It was the first appearance in America of
Beatrix Waldo after her marriage with Captain Gor-
don Smith of his majesty's lines in South Africa.
There were a lot of floating, disconnected rumors
about this marriage. Beatrix certainly posed as an
heiress before the Englishman went under the yoke,
and we got the impression, doubtless directly, that he
had a large estate somewhere on Loch Codan, five
thousand pounds, at any rate, over his pay. Then
we heard later on, through Jimmie Dale, I think —
he always knew the foreign gossip—that the Eng-
lishman did not have a brass farthing over his pay,
and was rather worse off than that by a fat budget
45


The Corrector of Destinies
of debts. We knew that Beatrix had no income to
speak of — her aunt kept the gown-makers going
for her. There were wild lands, back inland some-
where, that Beatrix used to turn in to oil, coal and
spruce lumber when she got to dreaming, but the
over-drained old aunt used to pay taxes on them,
and I think that was about the only reminder of the
fortune that ever came along to New York.
I had Sarah Lemarr on my right at this dinner,
and, fortunately, an impossible German person on
her right, who kept his nose well in his wines and
pâtés. I wanted to ask Sarah Lemarr about Beatrix,
and was glad of the Teuton's exclusive interest in
his stomach. I shared a rather general curiosity.
The Englishman was here with Beatrix, putting in
his leave of absence. If they mooned for vanished
Eldorados, one saw no tear-stains of it. I thought
the pair of them at the far end of the table looked
happy enough, pretty comfortable for disillusioned
fortune hunters. Presently I got Sarah Lemarr to
myself, and was about to inquire into the mystery
when she took the very subject from the tip of my
tongue.
“I have been hoping for a word with you, Court-
landt,” she said; “it's about Beatrix Smith. ; She
needs your assistance.”
“I am not a divorce lawyer,” I said.
“ Nonsense, Courtlandt,” she answered; "they
love each other. They are lovers. Can you gather
the significance of such an undreamed of ending to
46


The Burgoyne-Hayes Dinner
the effort each of them made to marry a fortune ?"
“ Then,” I said, “ Beatrix cannot need assistance.
Poets tell us that lovers do not dwell in this land of
trolley cars and spindles, but somewhere on blessed
islands they are happy.”
“But, my dear boy,” said Sarah Lemarr, “one
might take a stone bruise or a thorn in the thumb
even on a blessèd island.”
“Not so," I answered; “ the Well at the World's
End is there, and whosoever tasteth thereof shall be
perfect as his dreams are perfect, and around and
all about this land Lethe, the River of Oblivion, rolls
its watery labyrinth. Nay, do not interrupt me; the
human heart longs with a longing that cannot be
uttered for this enchanted country where, you tell
me, Beatrix walks with her Englishman.”
“Well!” said Sarah Lemarr. “Who is the girl,
Courtlandt ? "
“ There you go," I said, “ demonstrating the
greatest unwritten truth about a woman; namely,
that every reflection arises from a personal exper-
ience. If one deplores sin, he has robbed his employer
in his youth; if one apostrophizes love, he is about
to marry Miss Jones of Forty-eighth Street. The
girl in my case, dear Madame von Hubert, is that
mysterious fairy-woman, daughter of Abu Jaffer,
surnamed the Victorious, second Caliph of Bagdad
under the dynasty of the Abbassides, asleep on her
silk carpet in Arabia.”
Here the impossible German person interrupted to
47


The Corrector of Destinies
inquire if I thought the truffles were canned. I did
not think they were canned, and he was content; but
the moment gave Sarah Lemarr a lead and she seized
it with the practical directness of a New Bedford
skipper.
“Now, Courtlandt,” she said, “ be sensible. Bea-
trix needs forty thousand dollars.”
“How original of Beatrix," I replied. “Most of
us need only a couple of hundred.”
“ If you are going to be nasty about it, Court-
landt,” she said, “ I shall never speak to you again.
You must help Beatrix to find this forty thousand
dollars. The poor girl is dreadfully worried about
it. You see, Courtlandt, when the two of them awoke
after the honeymoon to find their estate all Castilian
haze, instead of a conventional separation they fell
in love with each other like a couple of Breton peas-
ants. Beatrix told me all about it; she is lovely. She
does not want the money for herself; she wants it to
pay Lieutenant Gordon Smith's debts. When his
debts are paid, he will be made a captain and trans-
ferred to his old regiment in India. Beatrix adores
India; she is quite content to go out there and live
quietly on a captain's pay, and love her big English-
man and be happy. But she wants his debts cleaned
off ; his honor untarnished,' she calls it. It seems
to mean a lot to her, and she is so absurdly in love
with the tall soldier that it is enough to break a
body's heart. Now, Courtlandt, where are we to get
this money for her ? "
48


The Burgoyne-Hayes Dinner
6 Unfortunately," I replied, “I do not at this
moment think of a convenient orphan to rob. How
would it do to rifle the poor box at St. Thomas's ? "
Sarah Lemarr ignored my second offence after the
manner of a woman, and, likewise, true to the same
manner, gave the remainder of the story after hav-
ing asked a decision in the midst of it.
“You remember Beatrix owned several thousand
acres of forest land, back somewhere in the Alle-
ghanies, in some county of the Virginias. Let —
me — see, she said the name had been a fortunate one
for the first Captain Smith in America and ought not
to fail the second one."
“ Pocahontas,” I suggested.
“How stupid!” she said. “ Of course, Pocahontas.
Well, some lumber company has managed to steal
half of Beatrix's land, and it, and some other rival
companies, now want to buy the remainder of her.
They will give twenty thousand dollars. They have
been dogging her footsteps ever since she landed in
New York. But this is only twenty thousand and
Beatrix needs forty. If she could get back the land
which has been stolen, it would bring the other
twenty thousand. I don't know how they managed
to get it. Beatrix has the whole story in detail, with
maps and so forth. I think she failed to pay the
taxes at some time and they stole it that way. Now,
Courtlandt, you must induce Mr. Mason to get Bea-
trix's land for her. She is stopping with me, you
know. Bring him to my house to-morrow for dinner.
49


The Corrector of Destinies:
Lieutenant Gordon Smith is going to Washington
to-morrow to call on the British Legation and will
not return until very late; but he knows nothing
about it. Beatrix is the business agent for the pair
of them.”
I smiled at the artlessness of Madame von Hubert.
“ Certainly,” I said; “ but why not bring the man
in the moon, too, and the Witch of Endor? Randolph
Mason is hardly the sort of person that goes out to
dinner.”
“Well, then,” said Sarah Lemarr, “bring him
after dinner. I will write him a little note.”
I could have laughed in the girl's face. “What
will you say in your little note?” I inquired.
“Oh, well, what any one would say,” she answered,
" that I wish to see him on an important business
matter."
“And do you know," I said, “ what would happen
to your little note ? "
“What would happen to it ? ” she said. Her chin
went up. She was a social overlord, this Madame
von Hubert. Her invitations were commands. The
social aspirant dreamed of their coming, as of that of
Abou ben Adhem's Angel.
“ This would happen," I answered. “Randolph
Mason would rip open the envelope with his long
finger, fold back the paper where you had creased it
across the middle, and drop it into the waste basket.”
A red flush sprang up along her dog collar of
diamonds. I hurried to explain. “I beg your par-
50


The Corrector of Destinies
that he ought to talk, and at once set about it with
the persistence and regularity of a man filing a saw.
We resisted as long as we could, and then gave it up
for another Sedan. We were rescued finally by Ma-
dame Castaigne, who gave some fragments from
Molière. I tried to get a further word with Beatrix
Smith, but Mrs. Burgoyne-Hayes descended on me.
“I must present you to the Prince, Courtlandt,"
she said. “Your great-grandfather on your moth-
er's side, I think, was a soldier of our King George."
“ Yes, madam," I said, “but the Grand Duke of
Hesse-Darmstadt drew his pay.”.
I did not see the note which Madame von Hubert
wrote to Randolph Mason; but it was effective. He
requested me to return after dinner and accompany
him to Eighty-sixth Street. The von Huberts have
a residence on Eighty-sixth Street. We arrived there
on the hour and were shown into the library. Ran-
dolph Mason at once sat down in a heavy black oak
chair before the fire. This chair was a massive and
curious piece. It was carved by the peasants of the
Black Forest for the Baron's grandfather. The tor-
tuous shapes forming its arms and legs are like the
gargoyles to be seen under the roofs of castles on the
Rhine, and now and then in Paris.
I was impressed by the picture of Mason in this
massive chair. His long, sinewy fingers gripping the
writhing features of the hideous oaken monsters, his
face thrown partly into shadow by the flaming logs
on the hearth. The masterful iron face, the lean,
52


The Burgoyne-Hayes Dinner
hard jaw with its projecting chin, the fearless, bony
nose appearing in the fantastic light flattened a little
at the end, like that of a beast of prey, and the
craggy forehead — all colored, browned, reddened
by the fire.
I heard the latch of the door click, and looked up
to see Beatrix Smith standing on the threshold, look-
ing at Mason with profound interest. Her lips were
parted and her eyes wide. She had not thought to
come on this curious picture of the middle ages taken
down from some Italian gallery and propped up here
in the library of the von Huberts. She bowed to me,
crossed the room and sat down by the library table a
little beyond Randolph Mason, at the corner of the
fire.
Presently Mason looked up at her. “Is this Ma-
dame von Hubert ? ” he said, without rising, without
an inflection of interest or courtesy, as he would have
said: “Is this the contract ? ” “ The bond in ques-
tion ? "
She flushed a little. “No," she answered; “I am
merely the interesting case that you came to examine
into.”
“ Give me the details of it,” said Mason.
She began at once without introduction or ver-
biage, and told her story with a brevity and direct-
ness that I could not associate with that rather silly
Beatrix Waldo who used to go up and down through
the drawing-rooms of Newport looking always for a
rich husband.
53


The Corrector of Destinies
She had inherited from her father two thousand
acres of wild forest land in the County of Pocahontas
in the State of West Virginia. She and her aunt
had watched it carefully and paid the taxes on it each
year; they had even taken the little local newspaper,
published at the county seat, in order that they might
know what lands were returned delinquent for taxes
and sold. They had been warned against the horde
of dangerous and unscrupulous land thieves said to
infest the mountain districts of the Virginias. But
her great care was not sufficient against the ingenu-
ity of these pirates. After one of the periodic assess-
ments of real estate, one thousand acres of her estate
were listed on the land books under the name of
Walden, returned delinquent, and sold for taxes.
The land was purchased by Gilbert Williams, pres-
ident of the Black Creek Lumber Company, for
$36.85. She had paid no attention to the sale, not
recognizing her land under this name until she came
to have the estate surveyed a few months ago, some
five or six years after its purchase at the tax sale by
Gilbert Williams. She also learned that the whole
thing was a well-planned and effective scheme of this
owner of the Black Creek Lumber Company to steal
her land. These wild lands had vastly increased in
value.
This company and a rival one, the Export Spruce
Company, were exceedingly anxious to purchase the
remaining tract. They would give, she thought,
twenty dollars an acre for it. The agents of the two
54


The Burgoyne-Hayes Dinner
companies had been at her heels ever since she arrived
in New York. Gilbert Williams was now at the Fifth
Avenue Hotel. He had endeavored to reach her by
telephone this very evening. He offered a little better
price than the Export Spruce Company, but he could
well afford to, since he it was that had stolen half the
land. The agent of the Export Spruce Company
was at the Holland. His note, on the table, requested
an interview with her at any hour she would name,
day or night. This indicated how very desirous they
were for the land. Such a sale would yield her
twenty thousand dollars. All the lands would have
given her the forty thousand which she needed. Her
name now was Beatrix Smith; she had married Lieu-
tenant Gordon Smith the year before. He was in
Washington to-day, but would return before eleven
o'clock this night.
That was the whole history, brief, accurate
and devoid of superfluous comment. She had there
on the table the original deed, maps and tax re-
ceipts.
Mason's face showed marked annoyance, as that
of an eminent surgeon would, who, having been sent
for in hot haste, arrives to find the patient with a
bumped nose.
“Why do you send for me?” he said; “ any law-
yer could adjust this problem.”
“ It is vital to me,” replied the woman, " it means
my happiness and my husband's career. I beg you
to help me.”
SS
55


The Corrector of Destinies
man
Her eyes began to fill up and her lips trembled
with distress.
Randolph Mason gave no attention to the woman's
emotions. He sat, beating the tips of his fingers on
the arms of the chair, with evident annoyance.
“Let us get the thing over, then," he said. “ Call
up this man Gilbert Williams. Say to him that Mrs.
Smith has determined to sell the lands; ask him to
come here at once with a notary."
“ What !” cried Beatrix Smith, “ sell the land to
Williams ? the man who robbed me! How can that
help ? "
“Madam,” said Randolph Mason, “ do not worry
me with petty bickering.”
I signaled Beatrix Smith to a conference with me
in the hall. “Do exactly as he says," I whispered
when we were outside the door, “ and hurry."
She promised and went swiftly up-stairs to the
telephone.
In a very few minutes Gilbert Williams arrived.
He was a red-haired old fellow with a face like a fox,
and beady eyes set obliquely in his head. Randolph
Mason arose when he came in, and explained that as
Mrs. Smith wished to leave America at once, she had
determined to sell her lands, provided cash was paid.
The lands were worth thirty thousand dollars, but
her husband was absent and could not convey his
curtesy in the deed. She would therefore take twenty
thousand cash and make a deed on the spot. Gilbert
Williams snapped up the offer. He did not care any-
56


The Burgoyne-Hayes Dinner
thing about the curtesy of the husband. The land
itself was worth nothing, the timber only was valu-
able. His mills would cut it off in a year, and he was
willing to take the chance of Mrs. Smith's living that
long. He produced a deed, which he had brought
with him to New York, and ran a pen through the
blank which it contained for the husband's name.
Beatrix signed the deed, and the notary who accom-
panied Williams filled in the acknowledgment and
affixed his seal in proper form.
Gilbert Williams wrote out a check on the Import-
ers Bank of Commerce for twenty thousand dollars.
We ascertained by telephone to the cashier at his
residence that the check was good. Williams then
folded his deed, put it in his pocket and departed
with the notary. The whole matter had taken less
than twenty minutes to bring to a close.
Randolph Mason inquired at what hour Lieuten-
ant Gordon Smith would arrive, and was told that he
would be at the house at half-past ten. “ Direct the
agent of the Export Spruce Company to be here at
that hour,” he said. Then he sat down in the oak
chair before the fire.
We were all greatly puzzled. We did not see why
this second purchaser should be invited to come.
Beatrix Smith had nothing more to sell. The trans-
action seemed to us to have arrived at its final act,
the curtain down and the lights out.
Sarah Lemarr came down to the hall and peeped
through the door at Mason, where he sat motionless,


The Corrector of Destinies
his right elbow on the twisted arm of the grotesquely
carved chair, his clenched fingers propping up his
jaw.
“O Courtlandt,” she whispered, “ he is splendid!
I think Lancelot must have looked like that when he
sat in Arthur's double-dragoned chair to umpire the
last tournament. Just fancy, with what freezing,
acid irony he would have said, “Hast thou won ? '
'Art thou the purest brother?' to such an uncon-
scionable rake as Tristan." Then she swore Beatrix
to obedience and slipped back up the great stairway.
A few minutes after ten o'clock, Lieutenant Gor-
don Smith arrived, and, a little later, the agent of
the Export Spruce Company. Mason arose when
this agent entered, and explained, as he had done to
Gilbert Williams, that Mrs. Smith was about to sail
for England, and had decided to sell her land. She
would take twenty thousand dollars in cash for it,
the deed to be executed and the money to be paid
down. The agent agreed at once, and produced his
deed. He was prepared as Williams was. Mason
directed Beatrix Smith and her husband to execute
the deed. I had no end of trouble with Beatrix in
the hall this time. She did not want to make another
deed; she had sold her land; she would not rob the
Export Spruce Company. It was not the company
that had stolen her land; Mr. Mason had clearly
gotten the two companies confused. He was making
an awful blunder. I must call him out and set him
right about it.
58


The Burgoyne-Hayes Dinner
Instead, I called Sarah Lemarr. She berated
Beatrix like a pirate. Disobey Randolph Mason?
the thing was unthinkable! Make a mistake? not
that big, fine, bronze god brooding by his sacred
fire. “Why, girl," she said, “I would shoot every
one of you in your tracks if that man told me to do
it. He is adorable. I could follow him around like
a dog and bite people if he whistled to me. Not
another word out of you, or I will come down with
the dog-whip.” And she shook her little clenched
hand over the banisters.
Finally we got the matter over. Beatrix and her
husband executed the deed. I got a notary from the
Plaza. The agent gave certified drafts on Dexter
& Company for the twenty thousand dollars, and,
like Gilbert Williams, folded his deed and departed.
Beatrix Smith bearded the lion with eyes swimming
in tears. “Mr. Mason,” she said, “ you have made a
terrible mistake. The Export Spruce Company is
not the one who stole my land. I cannot take its
money; it will not get the property." And she went
on with a torrent of lamentation.
“Madam,” said Mason, rising, “ all this is drivel.
I have made no mistake. The Export Spruce Com-
pany will get every acre that it has this night pur-
chased.” Then he directed Beatrix to cash the checks
at the earliest hour in the morning and sail at once
for England.
When we went down the steps to his carriage,
Sarah Lemarr slipped out from behind the door and
59


The Corrector of Destinies
caught my arm. “ I shall see to it,” she whispered.
“ They shall sail on the St. Paul at eleven o'clock.”
Then she gripped me until her nails hurt through
my sleeve. “Oh, Courtlandt,” she said, “I have at
last seen a man!" and she closed the big door behind
me.
The solution of the matter arrived a month later.
I was taking a hasty luncheon at a down-town café,
when Freddie Harland of the firm of Milton, Har-
land & Gaynor, came in and seated himself in the
chair beside me.
“ Hello, Parks," he said. “Old Williams tells me
you were present when he bought a gold brick the
other night."
“ You mean the Smith deed ? " I said.
“Well, rather,” he answered.“ Williams took it
down to West Virginia to have it recorded, and dis-
covered, to use his spectacular language, that it was
not worth three hurrahs in hell.""
“What was wrong with it ? " I said. “It did not
convey the husband's curtesy, I know; but Williams
knew that too. He did not care for that, he said;
he could cut the timber off in a year and he was
willing to take the chance of Mrs. Smith's living
until then.”
“ That,” replied Freddie Harland, “is a mere
bagatelle in the trouble. It seems that the Supreme
Court of West Virginia has decided that a deed made
by a wife, in which the husband does not join, con-
60


The Burgoyne-Hayes Dinner
veys no estate of any character whatever, is merely
a worthless piece of paper. The Export Spruce
Company has the land under a proper deed. Mrs.
Beatrix Smith has vanished into the fog beyond Fire
Island and the bob-cats have preëmpted old William's
mills.”
“Good,” I said, “ good! Gilbert Williams stole
half that land, so the chicken is home to roost.” "
“We reminded him of that,” replied Freddie Har-
land," when he began to jump around in the office.”
For the legal principle involved in this story see Austin et al,
v. Brown et al, 37 W. Va., 634.
Syllabus, Austin et al v. Brown et al, supra. “M. A. B., a
married woman, not living separate and apart, but with her
husband, undertook by deed ... to sell and convey a cer-
tain tract of land, part of her real estate ... Held, said
pretended deed was wholly ineffectual to divest M. A. B., the
grantor, of her ownership of such land, and did not pass any
interest therein, legal or equitable, to the said grantees.”
hi


CHAPTER IV
THE COPPER BONDS
I KNEW that Jean Balduc was from the far North
the moment Pietro brought him in from the door.
There is a close-sitting air of the provinces on all
those who come from there into New York. The
smartest tailors, the most Parisian modistes cannot
dislodge it. It is the atmosphere of his own land
minted into the man, lying deeper than the cut of
his coat. I put Jean Balduc up in British America
— his big, lank, hard body belonged in the open, a
rugged, roomy, primeval open. His light-blue eyes
were from remote spruce forests reflected on the glim-
mering snow-crust. His hair was that blue-black
which the French carried for violent contrast into the
white North. His manner and speech were abrupt
and direct.
He demanded an audience with Randolph Mason.
I tried first to get a little history out of the big fel-
low from which to determine the advisability of such
an audience. I got only a few craggy fragments.
He had come to New York to even up a score with
Barnsfield, the copper emperor on Broadway.
He wished to get at the man within the purlieus of
62


The Copper Bonds
the law, if such a thing was possible.'. If not, he
knew another way, very common in his country and
direct — and, if not productive of monetary results,
at least the balm of Gilead to one's injured sensi-
bilities. He had some other business to settle with
Barnsfield (not his own affair) which would require
dancing-steps and truce flags; but, when that was
cleaned up and ended, it would be the Indian cheek
on the stock of the Winchester and all white flags
down.
I took him to Randolph Mason, and he told his
story, walking up and down the length of the room
and driving, now and then, his clenched right hand
into the palm of his left for emphasis. He was from
Huron County on the south shore of Lake Superior.
Earlier he had come from the Jacques Cartier River
in the Dominion. He had been a factor in the affairs
of Huron County; he knew every man, woman and
child in it, every tract of land, every nook and corner
of it. Three years before he had made a house-to-
house, man-to-man canvass of the county for treas-
urer, and got it, with a majority to spare. He had
gained, too, the good-will of the people, their con-
fidence and their hospitable friendship. Then, like
the locusts of Biblical record, came the emissaries of
Barnsfield to purchase the mineral rights under all
the lands in the county.
It was not known that there was any copper in
Huron County. Indeed, eminent geologists and
practical prospectors had long agreed that the
63


The Corrector of Destinies
county was barren. These emissaries of Barnsfield
explained that he was not misled about the sterility
of the land. He knew that he was paying out good
money for worthless rock, clay and gravel; but his
plan was to corrupt the prospecting engineer of the
Great Lakes Railroad Company — have him secretly
report to the company the existence of copper in this
county. Then he, Barnsfield, would come generously
forward and offer to transfer to the railroad the
entire mineral rights of the county, provided the
company would build a line through it to his wharf
at Plymouth on the south shore of Lake Superior.
This would enable him to load ore from the known
copper regions directly on cars from the Lake boats
at Plymouth, and shorten the haul to his market by
two hundred miles.
This story was gladly swallowed by the natives.
They hoped for the coming of a railroad into the
county, as the advent of a sort of commercial Mes-
siah. Once or more they had voted large bond sub-
scriptions to lure in such an enterprise, but it was of
no avail. Lake Superior remained the only path of
commerce.
In a few months these agents had obtained the
mineral rights of almost the entire county. A few
land-owners along the Lake held out against them,
and finally, after exhausting their ingenuity, Barns-
field's men came to Jean Balduc for assistance.
They explained that these land-owners were blocking
the prosperity of the whole people. The only chance


The Copper Bonds
of an iron highway to the south was being elbowed
out.
Balduc said he would go to these men and induce
them to join in the sale, if he were assured from
headquarters that the railroad plan would be carried
through. They took him to Duluth, and to Barns-
field. He had the plan from Barnsfield's mouth. He
was shown maps and profiles of the proposed route,
elaborate plans and specifications of a great wharf
and warehouses which Barnsfield expected to build
at Plymouth when the railroad came, drawings for
an addition to the town - indeed, all the paper de-
tails for a city. Balduc was introduced to the
engineer of the Great Lakes Railroad Company and
read his report.
Barnsfield talked very frankly. His plan was not
philanthropic. He would get back his money in a
year from lessened shipping rates from the Lakes.
At present, his ore was at the mercy of one line; a
rival would mean competition and a fair tariff; it
would make his town of Plymouth a commercial cen-
ter on the Lake, and this would bring large profits
to him. He did not want Jean Balduc's assistance
for mere good-will. He was quite willing to pay a
thousand dollars for each land-owner whom Balduc
could induce to sell, the money to be paid when his
deeds were made to the railroad company. The
strength of the plan lay in having the entire county
in shape for direct transfer to the Great Lakes Rail-
road. So large a bait could not fail of success, nor
65


The Corrector of Destinies
was there any moral wrong in foisting these worth-
less mineral rights on the company. The directors of
it were notorious land thieves; a hair-shirt was due
them.
Jean Balduc was convinced and elated. He would
gladly have lent his aid to the scheme without com-
pensation, out of interest in the people of the coun-
ty; but here was Barnsfield about to reap enormous
sums from the venture, and he might as well have the
money which was offered. They agreed, then, that
Barnsfield should pay him one thousand dollars for
every land-owner who made a deed for the mineral
rights under his land, the money to be paid when the
transfer was made by Barnsfield to the Great Lakes
Railroad Company. There were thirty-four of these
men.
Balduc's popularity, the reputation he had estab-
lished with the people and his prestige as county
treasurer gave weight to his words. He went back
to his people, assured them that he had investigated
Barnsfield's plan and that it would certainly be car-
ried out. He had seen the very surveys for the road,
the estimates, the profiles. Finally he secured the
deeds of nineteen of these recalcitrant land-owners.
The others could not be induced to sell. Barnsfield
marked their names off his list, expressed himself
satisfied with the matter and put all his deeds to rec-
ord. The county, now at the gateway of its for-
tunes, rejoiced. A great mass meeting was held in
the court-house; a vote of thanks was awarded Jean
66


The Copper Bonds
Balduc; he was carried to his home on the shoulders
of his admiring fellows; tar-barrels were burned on
the hills; horses were paraded; the local papers ran
their election roosters and eagles.
Then came the gray morning, and the gradual
rising of the sun. The minions of Barnsfield van-
ished. Months passed, and no engineer of the Great
Lakes Railroad sighted his transit into Huron
County. No carts were trundled across her rivers,
no Italian came to make a footpath for the iron
beast; but, instead, a little man in spectacles arrived
from Marquette and staked out a shipping wharf at
Plymouth for the Lake Shore Steamship Company.
To inquiries he replied that Barnsfield wished to take
the copper out of Huron County, and the Steamship
Company must have a wharf from which to load it.
Copper! The county sat literally with its jaws
agape. But was this merely another subterfuge of
Barnsfield? It was not. A little later a well-known
superintendent from the regular mining region came
with workmen and uncovered the copper-bearing
strata. It was copper territory! The whole county
richer than the Indies!
Jean Balduc stopped here in his narrative, drew
down the muscles of his face until his eyes narrowed
to pale slits. He crushed and ground the flaps of his
coat pockets in his big hands. His mind was evi-
dently crammed with incidents—vivid, crowding in-
cidents: A flood of indignation poured over Jean
Balduc. He was cursed, waking and sleeping, as
67


The Corrector of Destinies
with a Roman anathema. Even Barnsfield, chuck-
ling in his den in New York, goaded him. He would
pay the nineteen thousand dollars when the deeds
were transferred to the Great Lakes Railroad Com-
pany — if he were living then.
Exile was the only solution. Jean Balduc deter-
mined to close up his affairs as treasurer of the
county, come to New York, collect from Barnsfield
the twenty-eight thousand dollars which he owed
Huron County for taxes on his mineral rights, trans-
fer it to the county, and then settle his own affair
with Barnsfield. After that, if he got away, he would
go back to the Jacques Cartier River; but he would
likely not get away.
“Have you seen Barnsfield ? ” said Randolph
Mason.
“Yes,” replied the man; “I went to him yester-
day to collect these taxes, and he tried to beat me
even on that. He was hard up, he said, he had no
ready money; but he would give me bonds of the
Empire Copper Company if I would take these bonds
at par and turn over the tax receipts to him. I re-
fused, and he asked me to come back to-day at one
o'clock.”
Randolph Mason turned to me. “What are these
bonds worth ? ” he said.
“ They are not listed on the Stock Exchange," I
answered; “ but there is a curb market for them at
seventy-five cents.”
Randolph Mason walked over to the window and
68


The Copper Bonds
stood looking out at the heavy snow-flakes driv-
ing against the glass. The big Northerner waited,
but Mason remained motionless, his hands be-
hind him. Finally, the man took up his hat and put
it on.
“ Well,” he said, " is there any trail out ? "
Mason turned abruptly. “Go back to Barnsfield,”
he said, “ and take his bonds at par for the taxes..
Mr. Parks will accompany you and write into the tax
receipts that these taxes are paid in full by the deliv-
ery to you of the bonds, setting out the number and
denomination, as you receive them. Give Barnsfield
the receipts, and come back to me.”
• The man was aghast. “ Why, sir,” he said, “ you
cannot mean that! I would be a damned fool to do
that. The county would be losing ten thousand
dollars to take the bonds at par.”
“ Obey me,” said Randolph Mason, and he turned
back to the window.
“ All right,” said the big fellow, “ you're the doc-
tor. What you say goes, but it certainly does sound
damn fool.”
I went with him to Barnsfield. We crossed the
snow-clad street, walked in under a gigantic granite
arch and took a steel cage to the twenty-fourth floor.
A limp youth led us to the copper magnate in a wing
of the building above Broadway. Barnsfield was in-
clined a little to display in his setting. There was a
silk Oriental rug on the floor, on the walls were rare
prints, with here and there a gross imitation of a
69


The Corrector of Destinies
master. Barnsfield evidently took his art as pre-
scribed by the foreign agents. The only table in
the room was a huge piece of shining mahogany
· heavy with carvings in atrocious taste, the sort of
thing which the full pocket gets when it leaves its
selection to the dealer. Behind it was Barnsfield.
I got the impression of something cold and pudgy,
when I looked at him. A like impression awaits the
spectator before the glass box at the end of the line
in the National Aquarium at Naples — a deep-sea
thing in a nest of weeds.
He was a tall man, fattened out of shape, fat
crowding his eyes back, distending his jowls, sagging
his chin. His hair was light and thin, brushed
smooth to his poll. His eyes were dull, the eyes which
Victor Hugo warned against, the cloudy eyes cover-
ing mines, rifle-pits, trenches manned with cannon
shotted to the muzzle and the fuse smoking. A fat
hand, illuminated by a great Kafir diamond, flopped
about on the mahogany table. He showed no ap-
parent interest at the arrival of Balduc, but he was
a bit uneasy over me. His fingers wandered to an
electric button, the nails scratching the rim of it.
“Mr. Barnsfield,” began Balduc, “I came back
about those taxes.”
Barnsfield looked inquiringly at me. “Yes," he
said. He wished to know who I was before his
answers became more than monosyllabic.
“ That's my lawyer's secretary,” said Balduc. “I
have concluded to take your chips and whetstones.


The Copper Bonds
They are better than nothing; but I want Mr. Parks
to look at them.”
The explanation cleared Barnsfield's face. If Bal-
duc was bringing Huron County up to be quietly
sheared of ten thousand dollars, a lawyer's secretary,
merely to examine the wording of the bonds, was a
detail to be pleased over. He dived down into the
drawers of his desk, fished out a package of bonds
and laid them on the table.
“ Good five per cents," he said, “ secured by a mort-
gage on all the copper properties in the county, in-
cluding plants, tram-rods and improvements to be
hereafter made. In six months they will be worth a
hundred and twenty."
I looked carefully at the bonds. They were in the
usual form of such securities, printed on bank-note
paper, with a picture on the back of a huge copper
pot, tipped over, pouring out a stream of gold pieces.
They were of a first issue of the Empire Copper
Company, limited to a million dollars, and in denom-
inations of one thousand. I smiled at the confidence
of Barnsfield. There were exactly twenty-eight of
these in the pack. He had pinned them up for Bal-
duc.
Barnsfield patted the bundle of securities with his
fat hand. “ There are the bonds,” he said; “ now
give me the tax receipts signed by you as treasurer.”
Balduc took a big leather pocketbook from his
coat and handed me the tax receipts. I wrote into
them, “ Paid this day by the delivery to the Treas-
11


The Corrector of Destinies
urer of Huron County of twenty-eight bonds of the
Empire Copper Company, numbered three hundred
and fifty to three hundred and seventy-seven inclu-
sive.” Then Balduc signed them and handed them
over to Barnsfield.
He placed the package in a pigeon-hole of his
desk, and came up from behind it transfigured. The
chill in the air was gone; the hidden ice-floes were
melted; the low-lying fogs were golden in the sun.
He had not imagined that the thing could be done so
easily. He had looked for long wrangling, delays,
a siege. It was like the answer to prayer put into
one's hands while they were still clasped. One ought
to go wreathed in smiles when events waited at one's
beck so courteously. I
He chortled softly in his throat when he was well
back into his chair, and beamed on us; then he talked.
He was glad to see Jean Balduc again, pleased to
meet me. He was athirst for news from the copper
land, aching with wonder about the inexplicable delay
of the Great Lakes Railroad in building its line. It
was his dearest, most closely cherished hope to see
the citizens of Huron County wax rich from the de-
velopment which he intended should be made on the
south shore of Lake Superior. He hinted vaguely
at large good fortune which the future held for
Balduc, a future of which he, Barnsfield, was in some
esoteric way the directing overlord. He wanted a
long, intimate, personal talk with Balduc. He must
come that night with him to dine, and I, too; he
172


The Copper Bonds
especially wished me to come. I had found favor in
his sight. There would be only the three of us — his
family was in Florida. It would be an informal,
friendly dinner, but a good one; he would see to that.
He would not be refused, his fat arms waved refusals
into distant limbo.
I looked to see the deep fires in Jean Balduc break
through; but he accepted the invitation on the spot
for the two of us at eight o'clock that evening.
Barnsfield lighted us to the door with smiles, and
there we left him, kneading his pudgy hands and
thanking Providence that the human game, like no
other, lacked instinct to protect it.
We went back to the office without a word. Ran-
dolph Mason looked at the bonds, and then directed
me to go out and sell them for what I could get. I
sold the bonds on the curb for seventy cents on the
dollar and got the cash in - large bills. Randolph
Mason handed this money to Jean Balduc and told
him to go back to the Jacques Cartier River. The
man was puzzled and angry. Was this all that Ma-
son could do — cause him to collect the taxes of
Huron County at a loss of some nine thousand dol-
lars, embezzle the money and hide out for the rest of
his life? He could do better than that. The open
way of the great North was a better one. He would
send the money to Huron County; then he would go
to Barnsfield's little informal dinner and square the
account with him.
I came forward then, and begged Mason to explain
73
.


The Corrector of Destinies
what he meant by his plan. As the matter stood,
Balduc could not do even as he himself suggested.
He could not send the money to Huron County, and
leave New York clear. The sum he had lacked nine
thousand dollars of paying the taxes. He had sur-
rendered and receipted for the taxes in full, twenty-
eight thousand dollars. If he sent back nineteen
thousand, he would be instantly charged with theft
of the other nine. Explanations would hardly avail
him. He would certainly be extradited and im-
prisoned.
Randolph Mason went over to a bookcase, got down
a volume of Reports of the State of Michigan, and sat
down with it between the two of us as a tutor might
do with puzzled little boys. He read the case, mark-
ing with his finger in the book, very carefully to us.
I saw instantly the intent of his plan, but he went
on, explaining in lucid detail the effect of it on Bal-
'duc, on Barnsfield, on Huron County, the equities
which it adjusted, the necessity of government
which it imposed, the penalties which it evaded,
and the ancient, correct, accurate doctrine of law
upon which this decision of the Michigan courts is
founded.
The tension in Jean Balduc's big body relaxed, the
pressure in his face ebbed. He understood the whole
scheme to the end now. I do not know of any emas-
culated language which could give the force and
directness of Balduc's own words. He got slowly to
his feet, stretched out his arms, filled his big lungs.
174


The Copper Bonds
“ By God,” he said, “ you have got the fat thief on
the cross!”
Then he turned to me. “Mr. Parks," he went on,
“I suppose you despised me down to the ground
when I agreed to eat with that puffy-throated viper;
but I only wanted to get a last chance at him, to tell
him what I thought of him, and then to jam his head
on the table among his pots. We will go up there to-
night, you and I. We will show him how he has
caught his own legs in his man-trap. I will tell him
some things which he needs to hear; but we will not
eat with him. If I were starving in the snow-drifts
of Hudson Bay, and he came to find me with a load
from the Company store, I would not eat with him.
I would eat; but I would kill him first.
Barnsfield, like every parvenu, wished to point
out for our admiration all the treasures in his hid-
eous, showy palace before we went in to dinner. The
place might have been the storehouse of Kidd in the
golden days of the Spanish Main. A carved wood
ceiling from some château in Normandy, a marble
vase from Sardinia, new Italian bronzes, old Dutch
chairs mingled with Chippendale, Heppelwhite, and
atrocious things in gilt, tables of the Empire beside
Colonial consoles, Moorish corners with old arms,
rugs, banners — all the indiscriminate loot of a bar-
barian with money-sacks.
I admired with discrete and evasive generalities.
Balduc said nothing and finally we went in to dinner.
75


The Copper Bonds
n.
teen tracts of land for you in Huron County, so you
owe me just nineteen thousand dollars. You paid
me to-day, nineteen thousand, six hundred, which was
six hundred too much.”
Barnsfield's face began to pale. “I don't under-
stand,” he said. “I paid the taxes to you. I gave
you twenty-eight bonds for them and got the receipt.
I did not pay you; I paid the taxes."
“Yes,” said Balduc, “ you thought you paid the
taxes; but you didn't. You paid me. The bonds
brought nineteen thousand, six hundred dollars. I
give you back the six hundred now, and our account
is square."
Barnsfield got up. “I paid the taxes,” he said.
“I got the tax receipts."
“ No,” said Balduc, “ taxes can only be paid in
money. That's the law. You can't pay taxes with
property. Your tax receipts are not worth hell-
room. They acknowledge the payment in bonds."
Barnsfield turned to me. “What's all this rot? "
he said.
I got up then, and walked around the table.
“What Mr. Balduc has said,” I answered, “is quite
true. Taxes can be paid only in money. If one
owing taxes delivers property to the tax-officer for
them, he does it at his own risk. He does not thereby
pay his taxes. If the tax-officer keeps the property,
the other must repay the taxes in money. The State
accepts only money for taxes.”
“ It's embezzlement of taxes," cried Barnsfield.
yre


The Corrector of Destinies
“If I have to repay them, he'll have to go to the
penitentiary!”
“No,” I said, “it is not embezzlement of taxes.
It is not any crime at all, for the reason that the tax-
officer is authorized to collect only money. He has
no authority to receive property. Property, if deliv-
ered to him, is at its owner's peril. He is not charge-
able with embezzlement if he appropriates this
property to his own use, nor are his bondsmen liable
for it, because they guarantee only a proper account-
ing of money which the officer receives as taxes."
Barnsfield jumped up and started toward a little
telephone at the corner of the sideboard. Balduc
darted across the room, smashed the telephone with
his knuckles and confronted Barnsfield.
“ Sit down, you puffy varmint,” he said. “Into
your chair with you!” And, seizing the man by the
shoulders, he whirled him around and forced him
down into his chair. Balduc stood over him a mo-
ment, his fingers working with restrained savagery.
His jaws clamped; his eyes narrowed to a thin line of
blue. Then he turned to me. “Let us go,” he said,
“ before I tramp the creature's face out of shape on
the floor."
We left Barnsfield, wheezing with excitement, his
breath gone and his fat hands wabbling about on the
arms of his chair.
In the street, Balduc took a deep breath and shook
himself like a dog coming out of a slime-vat. “I
had to get out of there,” he said, “or kill him.
78


The Copper Bonds
We
Good-by. If you ever need a slave with ten steel
fingers, send word of it to Jean Balduc on the
Jacques Cartier River," and he was gone.
I took a hansom to the Dresden for a little dinner.
For the legal principle involved in this story see People v.
Seeley, 117 Mich., 263; 75 N. W. R., 609.
A collector of taxes can receive nothing but money in pay-
ment of taxes. If he receive property in lieu thereof and ap-
propriate it to his own use, he is not guilty of embezzlement,
and his bondsmen are not liable. People v. Seeley, supra. A
collector of taxes can receive nothing but money in payment
of taxes.-Miller v. Wesener, 45 W. Va., 59.
my9


CHAPTER V
THE DISTRICT-ATTORNEY
One of the most disastrous bank failures in the
history of the middle West was that of the Patton
National Bank of St. Louis. It took down with it
almost every one of its correspondents — the Exeter
Trust Company especially, and Blackwell's Bank,
one of the oldest in the Mississippi Valley. Its New .
York correspondent, the Amsterhof National, sent
West a half-million dollars in gold that never returned
to its money vaults. The bank was closed by the
national bank examiner on a Saturday afternoon, a
few minutes before three o'clock.
I was in the Stock Exchange on Wall Street the
next Monday, following the fluctuations of some St.
Louis securities which the Patton National had been
instrumental in placing in New York. It was an
ugly morning for anything west of the Ohio. I came
out of the Stock Exchange at two o'clock disgusted
with securities. The Astors were the longest-headed
financiers after all. The earth alone was secure.
As I went down the steps into the street, an old
man came out from one of the exits of the gallery to
the Exchange and spoke to me.“ Is this Mr. Court-
80


The District-Attorney
landt Parks? ” he said. I replied that it was, and
hurried on up the crowded street. I was not in a very
pleasant mood, and he was evidently a provincial out
to see the horned and hoofed beasts of which he had
read in his weekly newspapers. He followed me,
however, and when I reached the crossing on Broad-
way he was at my elbow.
I spoke to him then, a bit impatiently. “May I
inquire,” I said, “ who it is that honors me with so
close an attendance? ”
The old man hesitated a little. “I am Jeremiah
Patton,” he replied, “ the president of the Patton
National Bank of St. Louis. I want to see Randolph
Mason.”
I turned squarely upon him, with no effort to con-
ceal my amazement. He was a tall old man with
close-cropped gray hair, mild brown eyes and a kindly
mouth. His face was wan and colorless, and one of
his legs dragged a little when he walked. I could
not stop there on that crowded corner to converse,
even with a Magus, although I should not have been
more disturbed had I met one of these fabled wise
men.
I took him with me to Randolph Mason's house.
I wished to hear his story, to learn the details of the
failure. The newspapers were not a little puzzled
over it; the bank had seemed prosperous, without a
shadow upon it, up to the very day it was closed by
order of the comptroller of the currency. Banks do
not commonly drop, some fine morning, suddenly
81


The Corrector of Destinies
into ruin; whisperings go, usually, before destruc-
tion.
I was a bit doubtful of the identity of the tall old
man until I saw him bare-headed, without his great-
coat, in a chair by the fire. Then I instantly recog-
nized him from the newspapers cuts, which repre-
sented him seated by a table; but he was more
impressive, stronger in this pose. His forehead was
broad, his head big and well-covered with thick gray
hair; but the face, as I have said, was gaunt, the eye-
pits and cheek-bones showing the first ravages of
disaster.
His story, told to Randolph Mason in a voice that
broke now and then and was pieced out with desolate
gestures, presented a situation, in my opinion, be-
yond human agencies to correct. The matter had
proceeded too far. Events, arising in orderly, in
infernal sequence, had entirely overwhelmed him. It
was a case of a patient brought, as a last resort, to
the specialist after the death rattle had started in his
throat.
Jeremiah Patton was seventy-five years old. He
had made a fortune as a wholesale merchant, and had
retired from active business late in life, with a repu-
tation established throughout the West for fair deal-
ing and highest integrity. He had no family, his
wife having been dead for twenty years. It had ap-
peared to him that by establishing a bank, he could
usefully employ his wealth, so he had erected a mod-
ern office building on a good corner, and founded the
82


The District-Attorney
Patton Savings Bank, of which he was president and
almost the exclusive owner. His object was to en-
courage a spirit of thrift among the middle class of
the city, and his method was to allow his depositors
every cent that their deposits earned, less the fixed
charges of the bank. His own capital yielded a
sufficient income for his needs.
The bank quickly sprang into prominence. Its
deposits were enormous. Its president found himself
under a heavy burden of care and responsibility in
the investment of these large sums so they would
yield a substantial profit.
About this time, Belmont Lane, the American pres-
ident of the Russian Oil Company, came to St. Louis
to acquire, if possible, the producing territory of
Missouri, and to establish banking relations. Lane
was a man of courtly address, imposing presence, and
charming personality. He very soon was on intimate
terms with Jeremiah Patton, and he suggested a con-
solidation of several smaller banks with that of Pat-
ton, and the founding of a national bank. This plan
was carried out, and the Patton National Bank of St.
Louis was the result, Patton advancing sufficient
money to acquire the major portion of the stock,
while Lane carried, through various employees of his
company, a nominal interest. He, therefore, did not
appear on the books as an owner of any stock, and
his name was in no way connected with the institution.
He explained that because of the wide financial rela-
tions of the oil company it would be unwise to con-
83


The Corrector of Destinies
nect his name with any one bank, since, should the
company want to borrow money, he would be asked
why he did not get it at his own bank.
Jeremiah Patton remained as the president of this
new institution and its nominal head, although its
active affairs and virtual control passed into the
hands of a board of directors selected from the
associates of Belmont Lane.
The old man halted a little in the march of his
narrative, searching if he could bring into more vivid
outline the figure of Belmont Lane. This man's real
character was still a mystery to him. The clue to his
charming, persuasive, dominant personality eluded
him when he tried to embody it in words. It always
so eluded him, he said, when Lane was not before him.
In the man's absence, his influence was naught; be-
fore one's face, it was irresistible. When Belmont
Lane urged a plan, it seemed at once practicable,
alluring, filled with promise. He made men gaze with
him from his own window, and out of it all things
looked good. So, when Belmont Lane suggested a
sub-company with an enormous paper capital to ac-
quire leases in Missouri for the Russian company, he
readily induced Jeremiah Patton to assume its pres-
idency and to hold in his name almost the entire
stock. Again, Lane was not of this company; a few
of his employees stood in the charter with Patton,
and made a board of directors which revolved around
Belmont Lane's finger, as the bank did.
One fine morning, while Mr. Patton was in Chi-
84


The District-Attorney
cago, the sub-company borrowed two millions of
dollars from the Patton National Bank on its note,
with its stock as collateral. Ten days later, the Na-
tional Bank Examiner condemned this loan and
declared the collateral worthless. A further exam-
ination of the bank's accounts showed extensive over-
drafts of the sub-company hidden under dummy
notes. The bank was insolvent, and the examiner
closed it at the direction of the Federal authorities
at Washington.
The assets of this sub-oil-company proved utterly
worthless. Belmont Lane could not be found. He
was thought to have returned to Russia. Jeremiah
Patton was utterly ruined. But this was not the
worst feature of the situation, the incensed public
demanded that some one be punished for so great a
swindle. The newspapers instantly erected a guil-
lotine, and found no head to place under it but that
of Jeremiah Patton.
At this point in his story the old man arose, took
several newspapers from his pocket and spread them
out on the table. Their headlines clamored like fish-
wives for Jeremiah Patton's arrest.
“You see,” he continued, “ I was president of the
company which wrecked the bank, and its greatest
stockholder. My coming to New York will be con-
sidered as a flight from justice. I can hardly hope
to reach St. Louis unaccompanied by a United States
marshal. I am certain to be indicted by the next
Federal grand jury, and certain to be convicted.”
85


The Corrector of Destinies
Randolph Mason was standing by the fire, his
shoulder leaning against the mantel, his arm extended
along it. He began to examine the old man with
sharp, searching queries — not as to the details of
the story he had just related, but with respect to the
personnel of the Federal court in his city.
The old man replied that both the judge and the
district-attorney were products of a recent political
upheaval in his state. The former United States
judge, a man in but middle life, had died suddenly
the previous September. The present judge, more
a politician than lawyer, had yielded an election to
the Senate in order to obtain this life appointment
to the bench. He was generally regarded as an
honorable man, but one not greatly learned in the
law.
The district-attorney was a man named Stet-
heimer, elevated to his position as a reward for con-
spicuous party service in the last national election.
He had organized a certain large element of the
city, and held it until a bargain was struck for this
position. The man was ambitious and hungry to be
rich. The position of United States district-attorney
carried with it a general practice of the best value in
the Federal courts. This practice Stetheimer was
anxious to secure. Jeremiah Patton had heard this
criticism of him. Some editors of opposite politics
had even accused him of seeking the civil business of
large corporations under a veiled suggestion of pro-
tection against the rigor of certain Acts of Congress.
86


The District-Attorney
Mr. Patton thought these corporations were prin-
cipally distillers, manufacturers 'of tobacco, and,
especially, beef and pork packers, who were said to
be constant violators of the interstate commerce laws.
Still, the district-attorney was reputed to have great
influence with the new judge. His advice was usually
followed with respect to the conduct of trials. The
common impression was that the judge, not yet fa-
miliar with the Federal procedure, assumed the advice
of the district-attorney to be correct. The district-
attorney was successfully posing as an able lawyer,
while, in fact, he was an obscure practitioner of in-
different learning. This was the gist of all that
Jeremiah Patton had heard about this court.
Randolph Mason took his arm from the mantel-
shelf and turned to the banker. “You will at once
return to St. Louis,” he said. “Employ the best
counsel you are able to obtain. When you are in-
dicted, insist upon an immediate trial; oppose every
delay, no matter how favorable it may seem to you.
Object to it, and put your objection on the record.
When you are acquitted — "
The old man interrupted Mason with an appealing
protest. “But I won't be acquitted, Mr. Mason,”
he said. “Stetheimer will arrange his jury for that,
if it is necessary. But he won't have to arrange it.
The people are mad for a sacrifice. A jury could not
be got that would acquit a bank president under
such circumstances. Belmont Lane has brought me
up to the door of the penitentiary. The United
87


The District-Attorney
in the West into one gigantic company with a hun-
dred million dollar capitalization, under the laws of
New Jersey; that the matter was still in an early,
formative state. The bankers who were to furnish
the large sums necessary to purchase such plants as
would not voluntarily come into the trust, feared that
some Populist district-attorney might attempt to
bring the matter into court, and thereby affect the
bonds of this syndicate, which they would hold as
their security. If, however, the principal office of
this great projected company could be placed in
some large city of the West, where the district-
attorney of the United States was a person of con-
servative ideas, they would furnish the money; other-
wise they would not. Solmeyer represented these
bankers, and this was the problem they had pre-
sented to him for solution. He had gone carefully
over the entire field, and finally settled upon the dis-
trict-attorney of St. Louis as filling every require-
ment of his clients. If he could act, Solmeyer would
pay him five thousand dollars as a retainer; then,
when the bankers held their meeting in New York, he
could come before them and arrange about his annual
retainer. The size of this annual retainer Solmeyer
hesitated to suggest, but intimated something in the
neighborhood of twenty thousand dollars.
The district-attorney glowed with joy and in-
creased importance, put the five thousand dollars in
his pocket, and Jacob Solmeyer returned to his office
in New York.
89


The Corrector of Destinies
The trial of Jeremiah Patton continued. All the
affairs of the bank were gone into. Masses of doc-
umentary evidence were introduced. The district-
attorney was determined to make his reputation on
this case. He burned with dramatic pose every piece
of red fire that he could lay his hands on. The
court-room swarmed with reporters. The evidence
was printed in detail in all the great dailies. Pat-
ton was depicted as an intolerable scoundrel who
had wrecked the bank of which he was president,
and looted his depositors by borrowing on worth-
less securities great sums for a company which he
owned.
On a Saturday afternoon, the district-attorney
closed for the Government and rested his case. On
the following Sunday, Jacob Solmeyer telegraphed
the district-attorney that there would be a meeting
of the bankers on Tuesday evening, and to come at
once to New York. Stetheimer called Solmeyer by
long-distance telephone, explained his situation in
regard to the Patton trial, and asked if the meeting
could not be postponed. Solmeyer answered that a
postponement was impossible, that some members of
the syndicate were the heads of great banking houses
in Europe and could not await any man's conve-
nience; that the district-attorney must attend the
meeting, or return the retainer paid to him and
abandon the scheme.
Uncertain what course to follow, the district-
attorney took counsel with his wife. She advised him
90


The District-Attorney
to get rich while he could, while the winged hand of
opportunity was reached out to him. Money was the
only actual power that could be stored away against
the time of need. Everything else was like fairy
gold — yellow oak leaves on the morning after.
Still, Stetheimer feared to abandon the case to sub-
ordinates and go out of St. Louis. He would be
open to the charge of having been purchased by the
defendant; besides that, the assistant district-attor-
ney would step up into his place before the public
eye. He must find some other way.
In his extremity, he determined to apply to the
judge for a postponement of the trial until the next
term of court. This would give him an opportunity
to meet the bankers in New York, and still conduct the
case. He went at once to the judge and explained
that he had just discovered a possible connection of
several other prominent persons with the wrecking
of the Patton National Bank, and that, before he
cross-examined Jeremiah Patton, he wished thor-
oughly to investigate this evidence and fortify him-
self with all the details. This would take consider-
able time. Stetheimer strengthened his suggestion
with excellent arguments — it was a matter of the
greatest public importance; thousands of helpless
depositors relied wholly on the courts to insure the
fidelity of their bankers; swift, complete, ruthless
punishment of every person involved, high or low,
was their only safeguard. He wished to ferret out
every one of the criminals concerned, to run them
91


The Corrector of Destinies
down, brand them as thieves, and hand them over to
the warden of the penitentiary, and the judge must
give him ample time in which to do this. In fact, it
was a duty owed to the whole people of Missouri.
The judge decided finally that, if these were the facts,
he would direct a continuance upon the motion of the
district-attorney.
Stetheimer went then to the attorneys for Jeremiah
Patton. He said to them that his wife was ill, threat-
ened with appendicitis, it was thought'; that he
wished to take her at once to Philadelphia ; that he
would probably be required to remain there during the
operation and the convalescence of the patient, and
requested them to consent to a postponement of the
case until the following term. The attorneys court-
eously expressed their regret, but replied that this
was a criminal trial, and that they could not consent
to any order, no matter what. Still, they could not
see how their client would be prejudiced by such a
continuance, and if the judge wished to enter such an
order, they would make no vigorous oral argument
against it.
When the court convened on Monday morning, the
judge made the continuance upon the motion of the
district-attorney. This motion was not strenuously
resisted by the counsel for Jeremiah Patton. They
offered a formal objection for the prisoner, which
was overruled, and the exception was entered on the
record. The judge discharged the jury, ordered a
new panel and took up the trial of some petty revenue
92


The District-Attorney
cases, the assistant district-attorney appearing for
the Government.
Stetheimer explained the meaning of this con-
tinuance to the newspapers by covertly suggesting
the story told to the judge. The public was appeased
with the promise of more and prominent victims, and
the district-attorney stood justified in the conduct of
his case. Moreover, his reputation for shrewdness
was established, and his figure as a far-sighted, in-
corruptible public servant on the trail of higher
thieves lengthened, widened, loomed larger. He left
immediately for New York accompanied by his wife,
who was taken to the station in an ambulance.
Jacob Solmeyer arranged a meeting of some of
the more prosperous looking of his clients and took
the district-attorney before them. They discussed
the problems of the great combine, questioned the
lawyer at length upon the status of their rights under
the Interstate Commerce Act, the possibility of a
Federal investigation, the effect of such a move on
the bonds of the trust as a security, and the scope of
the act in its criminal features.
The district-attorney slurred over the difficulties
in the Federal statute, pointing out that the section
providing individual punishment for violation of the
act was already a dead letter, that the act itself was
largely a bugaboo to appease the agrarian. He
urged the combine and promised immunity in Mis-
souri. Solmeyer's “ bankers ” adjourned without
finally determining upon the loan to the packers.
mbine, They cand toom
93


The Corrector of Destinies
However, they agreed to employ the district-attor-
ney, in case the loan was made, and to pay him
twenty-five thousand dollars a year. Solmeyer gave
the man an additional one thousand dollars, and he
returned to St. Louis.
On Thursday morning Jacob Solmeyer reported
to Randolph Mason, and told of the transaction in
detail. He was puzzled to the finger tips and curious
to know Mason's object. But he was a man of dis-
cretion, aware of the value of silence and the folly of
any query put to Randolph Mason. His theory was
that Mason wished to make a case against the dis-
trict-attorney looking to his removal, and in test of
this theory he ventured to present his report care-
fully in writing, attaching to it a sworn stenographic
report of the district-attorney's speech to the “ bank-
ers,” including his offer of protection against the
Interstate Commerce Act.
Randolph Mason tossed the papers into the grate
when Solmeyer had finished, concluded the conference,
and dismissed him.
In the hall the old German blinked behind his thick
glasses. “Mein Gott! Mr. Parks,” he said, “vat
does Randolph Mason mean? He pay tix thousand
dollars to get der district-attorney on record, den he
burns der record.”
“ Solmeyer," I replied, “I do not know who was
the man in the iron mask. I do not know what
melody it was the sirens sang, neither do I know
what Randolph Mason means.”
94


The District-Attorney
The old man shrugged his shoulders, spread out
his hands as though before an impenetrable enigma,
and went down the steps to his hansom.
And yet I was not in the least puzzled. I thought
I saw clearly into the solution of it all. Mason's
ruse had failed — that was the reading of the riddle.
He had planned to lure the district-attorney out of
St. Louis and thereby cripple the prosecution; but
the shrewdness of the man had forstalled him. Ma-
son had warned Patton to oppose a continuance; he
evidently counted upon his counsel to resist with such
vigor that the court would go on with the trial; he
had not dreamed of a mere objection on the record.
The plan had gone to pieces. At the next term,
Patton would be tried and convicted. A weakling out
of Israel had overthrown Goliath of Gath in his
brazen helmet.
I had just pieced out and rounded up my theory
as the correct solution of this otherwise inexplicable
side-play, when Randolph Mason came out of his
room, walked past me in the hall and started up the
stairway. He stopped on the third step and looked
down at me.
“ Parks,” he said, “ go out to St. Louis at the next
term of the court, and move it to discharge Jeremiah
Patton. On your table is a citation to the only case
you will require.” Then he went on up the stairway,
his hand sliding along the mahogany rail.
Thus my theory, like that of Jacob Solmeyer, was
snuffed out. . . .
95


The Corrector of Destinies
My train to St. Louis was eight hours late because
of floods in the Ohio valley. The case of Jeremiah
Patton had been called for retrial when I finally
reached the United States court-room. The building
was packed with spectators. The district-attorney
was inside the rail with a bright new rosebud pinned
to the lapel of his coat. The prisoner looked tired
out and very old, a wretched, pitiable figure, seated
by the table with his attorneys; the clerk was calling
a jury. I spoke to the elder of the defendant's coun-
sel, giving him Randolph Mason's directions and the
reference. He immediately sent a page into the
library for a volume, ran his eyes over the syllabus
of the case, and at once arose.
“ If it please your honor,” he said, “I move the
court to dismiss the prisoner.”
The judge looked up from his calendar. “Is this
a dilatory motion, Mr. Scott? ” he said. “If so, it
may be overruled.”
“ This is a motion in the nature of a plea in bar,"
replied the lawyer.
The judge was not interested. He was becoming
familiar with the ceaseless clutching of criminal law-
yers at every straw. He turned to the representative
of the Government. “Mr. District-Attorney," he
said, “ do you wish to argue this motion?”
“No,” said Stetheimer, “let us get on with the
trial.”
“ Then,” said the judge, “I presume that it may
be overruled.”
96 :


The District-Attorney
The counsel for Jeremiah Patton was posing a
little for dramatic effect. He held up his hand.
“ Just a moment, your honor," he said; “ this
question has already been decided in Missouri.”
He walked over and laid the open volume on the
bench.
The judge glanced at the statement of the case,
then he turned to the opinion. Apathy faded from
his face; the muscles of his jaw grew compact; he
settled down in his chair to read the case carefully
to the end. Finally he rose and looked a moment
over the court-room; then he said,
“I sustain your motion, Mr. Scott."
The great audience stirred with profound, univer-
sal surprise. The district-attorney was on his feet.
“ Your honor,” he cried, “ this prisoner cannot be
discharged. He is under indictment. He has not
been tried. The case has been merely continued.
There must be an acquittal by a jury. A judge
cannot turn a criminal loose on society by a royal
edict."
The lines along the judge's mouth curled. “Have
you read this decision?” he said.
“No!” shouted the district-attorney, now angry
and alarmed; "but it cannot annul trial by jury;
it cannot unhinge the gates of our penal institutions ;
it cannot transform a presiding judge into Cæsar,
holding the issues of life and death in the turn of his
thumb. What court would pronounce a decision
holding that a continuance of the cause should have
97


The Corrector of Destinies
reply the
ri. It holds ourt for the war
the effect of a trial by jury, a verdict of not guilty
and a discharge of the prisoner ! ”
“Sir," replied the judge, “ you inquire what court
would pronounce such a decree, and I reply the
United States District Court for the Western District
of Missouri. It holds in the case before me precisely
what you say it could not hold, namely, that a post-
ponement of a case and the discharge of a jury, after
the introduction of the Government's evidence and
over the objection of the prisoner, without proper
reasons therefor, is, in effect, an acquittal, preclud-
ing a retrial and working the discharge of the pris-
oner. Jeremiah Patton has been put to trial, the
evidence against him was introduced; then, upon the
motion of the district-attorney, without any reason
given on the record, and over the prisoner's protest,
the case was continued and the jury discharged.
These facts here are in accordance with those in the
case cited. The decision of the associate court is
not to be disregarded, and the prisoner must be set
at liberty.”
The judge paused a moment, took up the volume
of reports in his hand and looked down at the packed
sea of faces. “It would be folly,” he said, “ for me
to do other than sustain this motion. The United
States Circuit Court of Appeals would immediately
reverse me. The Government would be put to the
expense of a useless appeal, and I would be subject
to censure as an arbitrary public servant, disregard-
ing the doctrine of law established by an associate
. 98


The District-Attorney
court. By curious accident, this prisoner steps out-
side the power of the law through one of the numer-
ous safeguards which our judicial system throws
around a citizen charged with a crime. We do not
know whether or not Jeremiah Patton is guilty as
charged in this indictment, no jury has decided that;
we know only that the law directs that he be dis-
charged from custody, and I so order it.”
On Monday morning after the acquittal of Jere-
miah Patton, Pietro handed me a cablegram for
Randolph Mason. I tore it open and went into
Mason's office with it. He looked up from the
table as I entered. “Parks,” he said, “I am
ready to adjust the remaining feature of this bank
problem.”
“Mr. Mason," I answered, “ do you know
where Jeremiah Patton and Belmont Lane are to-
day?"
“Yes," he said, “ Patton arrived in New York last
Friday night and Belmont Lane is now in the custody
of the United States consul at Berlin.”
“Mr. Mason," I replied, “ for once in your life
you are mistaken.”
“ Mistaken !” he said, “I mistaken ? "
“ Yes," I said; “ you are mistaken. Jeremiah Pat-
ton is dead at the Dresden of pneumonia ; I came this
moment from his bedside. Belmont Lane shot him-
self in the entresol of the hotel Gross Herzog von
Wildenheim in Berlin at seven o'clock Sunday morn-
99


The Corrector of Destinies
ing, when confronted with your writ of extradition,”
and I handed him the cablegram.
For the legal principle involved in this story see Ex parte
Ulrich, 42 Fed., 587. This case was afterward reversed by the
United States Circuit Court of Appeals, but not upon the
proposition of law here dealt with.
The law as laid down in the case of Ex parte Ulrich, supra,
follows the best courts in this country. See Highlands v. Com-
monwealth, 111 Penn. St., 1; 56 Amer. Rep., 236; State v. Calen-
dine, 8 Iowa; Wight v. State, 5 Ind., 292; Mitchell v. State, 42
Ohio St., 383.
100


CHAPTER VI
THE INTERRUPTED EXILE
WHEN the invitations to Emily Cruger's wedding
at her father's country place on the Hudson arrived,
every one knew what was going to happen — and it
did happen. Horses were unharnessed, motor cars
were ordered back into their garages, and we went
up in the day coaches of a railroad special with a
flurry of snow driving against the windows.
We were met at the little station shed by a row of
closed carriages, jolted off to a village church and
packed into tight little pews. There, if one were
really an old and dear friend of the family and had
known the bride since she was a tow-headed little girl
in fluffy frocks, he berated old General Cruger as
though he were a pickpocket, vilified Emily and
damned the institution of marriage. Then we were
whisked away in the snow-covered carriages to Cliff-
court and luncheon. But, first, we piled our rubbers
in an anteroom by the porte-cochère, passed in re-
view before the old general, kissed the tips of Emily's
gloved fingers, quoted to the groom the appropriate
remark of Solomon, and then girded our loins to
fight for a place by the General's fleshpots.
101


The Corrector of Destinies
Now it may be said that a well-ordered country
wedding proceeds upon the lines of an English cro-
quet party — you talk to your neighbor, if you like;
eat whatever you can find to eat — and the devil take
you. The host's social honor is a hostage for you.
You may clap the man before you on the back and
say how vile the punch is, or ogle the foreign brides-
maid until, with a delicious little shrug, she inquires
of the fat dowager at her elbow, “ Qui est cet homme-
là?” and probably is told that you are the person
sent up by the caterer to look after the plate. You
have the freedom of the roof.
The east wind had desolated the general's garden
as the mercenaries did those of Hamilcar, the hedges
were aslant, the bushes broken, the early spring blos-
soms shattered. So much for those who sat a-plan-
ning in Phoebus's golden cart.
Fortune sat me down at luncheon opposite a man
at whom I was very glad to have a look. Vague
whisperings had linked his name with Emily Cruger's
for many a long day. He had proceeded with his
plans to win her with the deliberation of a Japanese
field marshal. He had burrowed the land around
her, probed it with trenches, planted it with mines,
and then had sat down to wait with a sort of fatal
patience. He was not attractive as men go, and his
youth had been required of him, but he had the in-
stinct of conquest. He believed that every door
opened in the end, if one never ceased to knock on it.
He had acquired a fortune by that theory, a great
102


The Interrupted Exile
fortune. He would hammer his opponent year in,
year out, always in the same weak place until he
finally went down.
But women are not to be taken with a chain of
forts. Love has had his magic carpet, his rope lad-
der, his fairy godmother, since time was. Any wise
old poet could have told him that, and saved him,
probably, these conspicuous mouthfuls of bitter
bread.
The man was carrying on his face a courteous un-
concern, but the enamel of it was set over savage
lines. When, now and then, the genial lights went
out of his face, one could see smoldering war-fires ·
heaped up with red ashes. Under a black flag this
man would have been relentless; he would have
hanged his prisoners, burned the town and pistoled
the women and children, if he found a war-ship pen-
ning him inside the bay.
Gossip had it that his plans for the housing of this
wife were already carried out; the land for a mile
farther up the Hudson had become the splendid,
formal gardens of a French estate, the rising walls
of the château loomed, a line of gray, on the bluff
above the river. The great Oriental was making
ready while he waited.
I had no opportunity to speak with him. Mrs.
Chenley Gaynor, with a niece on the block, had him
at her right. The practical old dowager was in
every slave-market. She wanted a country estate, a
town house and perhaps a yacht for her ware. Hu-
103


The Corrector of Destinies .
man emotions had no value, the little maid in white
went to the highest bidder. There she was. Step a
little closer, gentlemen; not twenty yet, lifted but
yesterday out of the gardens of a convent, sweet,
innocent, fresh as a rosebud. How many sequins
for her?
Any mother would have feared so dangerous a
man, but not so Mrs. Chenley Gaynor. This free-
booter was the richest on the seas, he had sacks of
doubloons packed to the gunwale of his brig. What
mattered it if the dearest illusion of a maid walked
the plank with two gold pieces bound tight over
its eyelids, provided one got a country estate, a town
house and perhaps a yacht? Mammon was the only
god who was never sleeping or on a journey. The
man hovered a bit about the debutante, praising her
charms, but he did not want her, that was clear. He
nursed a hurt with his hand on his cutlass.
I was glad that the old general was independent
and the man Emily Cruger had chosen well enough
to do. This brown wolf would be a fearful beast,
prowling at one's door.
The luncheon passed after the fashion of its kind.
Mrs. Campbell Grant, roped in pearls, thought that,
if she had been giving a luncheon early in May, she
would have had something hot. An old Russian ad-
miral in citizen's dress feared that the champagne
was of a Pacific vintage, and sipped it uneasily until
he caught the foreign label on the bottle. He always
had trouble in picking up stores in American waters
104


The Interrupted Exile . .
he said, no end of trouble. Alas! if he had served his
Czar with one-half the zeal that he had served his
stomach, his ship would not have been shot into
scrap-iron on the coast of Asia!
We depleted the larder to its last pâté, got into
our rubbers and proceeded to embark in our cov-
ered carriages. We trod upon one another's toes,
jammed our elbows into our neighbors, and apolo-
gized sweetly for it; but underneath, I fear, we were
ravening wolves. The tragedy of a country wed-
ding in a May blizzard, twenty miles from New
York!
The women all had been carted away, and I was
entering a carriage after the last man when a ser-
vant ran out and said the general greatly wished
me to remain. Would I return to the house? I was
marooned, and no help for it. General Cruger had
honored me with a long and kindly friendship, a sort
of paternal overcare about the club, attentions to an
adopted youngling. He was, doubtless, lonely in his
big house with no daughter by the hearth.
The servant took me to a guest chamber where I
found a glass of whisky, a hot bath and a dinner-
jacket. Meanwhile night descended and I joined the
old general below stairs. We dined in rather desolate
splendor under the lamps; after that we smoked by a
little smoldering twig fire in the library overlooking
the river. Then it was that I discovered why he
wished me to remain.
“ Courtlandt,” he began, “ you sat opposite a cur-
105


The Corrector of Destinies
ious person to-day at luncheon. What do you think
of him? ”
“Well,” I said, “if one were lacking names, I
think he might be safely called a wolf.”
He took my answer with a slow nodding of
the head; then he walked over to the window and
stood looking out at the snow driving up the dim
river.
“ Emily loves this place,” he said; “I am glad I
saved it to her; but it was like the story in the Rus-
sian fairy-book, I tossed the wolf everything else for
it.”
Then he came back to the fire and sat down in his
leather chair with his feet stretched out to the fender.
These were premonitions of a confidence, and I
waited, watching the blue rings of my cigar smoke
rise to the beamed ceiling. Finally he went on.
“I will keep your name 'wolf, Courtlandt,” he
said; “ I like it better than the one his father gave
him. I am glad Emily is well out of his way, God
bless her. I used to shudder when I saw the beast at
her heels. It does not matter so much when a man is
devoured, he takes that chance in the forest; but the
nursery tale of little Red Riding Hood is full of
heartaches. I used to see in fancy this wolf in my
smoking-jacket by the fire in this chair here. I have
barred him out from my little Red Riding Hood;
but I await the destiny of the helpless old grand-
mother.”
He reached out his arm, moved some papers on
106


The Interrupted Exile
onner.
the library table, uncovering a legal document in its
blue, stiff wrapper.
“I have got to sign this for him," he went on,
“ and then blow on my fingers to warm them I sup-
pose. The place here is deeded to Emily, and this
property is all I have left."
He took up the paper and handed it over to me.
I read it carefully through. It was a first mortgage
on certain coal lands and mines of the Pittsburg
vein in what is known as the Fairmont region, secur-
ing a two-hundred-thousand-dollar issue of bonds.
It was made by the Cruger Coal Company to the
Exington Trust Company as trustee. A rather
bulky document, completed in every detail by a scriv-
ener down to the blank form of acknowledgment.
“You see, Courtlandt,” the old gentleman went on
by way of explanation, “ I am the Cruger Coal Com-
pany — president and all, with a few friendly dum-
mies to make the corporation valid. I owe this wolf
two hundred thousand dollars. He agrees to take
the bond issue for the debt. He might as well take
a deed for the property. It is worth perhaps forty
thousand dollars more than that; but he will get it
in the end for the debt. A deed direct to him would
be a little bold just now, a bit like exacting smart
money, punitive damages for the loss of Emily.”
He leaned over, got a little flaming twig from the
fire, and relighted his burned-out cigar with it. Then
he went on.
“ There is a fragment of unbelievable history
107


The Interrupted Exile
hands of a receiver, was sold, brought merely the
value of the receiver's certificates, which the court
had issued to cover its operating expenses, and the
bonds were, of course, worthless.
“Senator Lapman came to me, and I went at once
to the wolf. I told him that the Granite Mountain
officials had relied on his word and mine, that he had
guaranteed the security in person before the board,
and it must now be made good. He replied that I
was quite right, he would make it wholly good, but
that he would have to borrow the money, as he had
not so much to his credit. He asked me to wait while
he went across the street to his bank. In a few mo-
ments he returned, said the bank would loan him the
money on his personal note, but that, to keep within
its rules, the note would require two names on it. He
could put his office boy on, he said, but if I would
indorse it, the transaction would appear rather bet-
ter.
“I knew that he was perfectly good for that sum,
as good as the sub-treasury, and I at once said that
I would comply with his request.
“We went together to the bank, an officer made
out a note, he signed it and passed it to me. I no-
ticed that it was in the form of a joint note; but I
remembered that banks often preferred obligations
in that form and I did not hesitate to sign it. Then,
at his request, the bank delivered the money to me
and I went at once to Montpelier and adjusted the
matter with the insurance company. I forgot the
109


The Corrector of Destinies
incident then, but remembered how honorable the wolf
was."
The old general's jaw tightened on the bitter word.
He broke the cigar in his fingers and threw the pieces
into the fire.
“ One morning, after Emily's cards were out, I
got a letter from the bank, calling my attention to
this note and saying it must be paid. I was dumb-
founded. I had supposed that the wolf had paid it
long before. I went instantly to his office in New
York. He met me with a face as cold as a stone,
said that he had paid individually the interest on our
note for several years, that he had used his good
offices with the bank to get all the time for me that
he could, that the bank refused to carry the paper
any longer and we must arrange to pay it. In the
greatest surprise I recalled the occurrence to his
memory in minute detail. He replied composedly
that I was quite mistaken, he was no more responsible
to the insurance company than I; neither of us had
been legally bound, but both had felt morally obliged
to make good the loss, and so a joint note had been
executed and the money paid to me. I surely re-
membered that.
“I turned around without another word and went
to my solicitor. He examined the note at the bank,
questioned the cashier, and advised me that the bank
would certainly sue on the note and that I should
have to pay my half of it. I was horribly disturbed.
I did not know where to get two hundred thousand
110


The Interrupted Exile
dollars. Everything I possessed would hardly bring
that sum under the hammer, besides I wanted to give
this place to Emily. In this dilemma the bank again
notified me that the note would be reduced to judg-
ment if not paid within thirty days, but added that
if I would execute a mortgage on my coal property,
of which it seems to have had an exact statement, it
could place the bonds for my share of the note, and,
as the wolf stood ready to pay his share in cash, the
matter could be settled. I agreed to this plan because
it left me free to convey this place to Emily for her
marriage portion. I have since learned that this
wolf, Myron Gates, takes these bonds.”
The old man paused a moment, removed his eye-
glasses and laid them on the table; then he went on,
“I have also learned that the whole thing, from its
inception, was a plan of Gates to get me into his
power. He, in fact, owned the worthless securities
which were transferred to the Granite Mountain In-
surance Company. He it was who got the four hun-
dred thousand dollars; he it was who directed the
bank to make out a joint note while I waited for him
in his office; the delivery of the cash to me was a part
of the scheme, that the officers of the bank could
testify that the loan was for me. He got the two
hundred thousand dollars which I must pay back to
the bank.”
He arose and began to walk up and down the
library. “There was a time,” he continued, “ when
one could call out such a creature and make him
111


The Corrector of Destinies
stand up before a pistol for an act like this. The
custom had its value, which we forget now. When
blood-letting was the penalty, sneaking cads kept
their tongues tucked back of their teeth and their
fingers out of other men's pockets. The law has
disarmed the gentleman, but left the viper his fangs.
You are wondering now, Courtlandt, why this man
was here at the wedding luncheon; but Emily knows
nothing of all this.”
He stopped by the table and rang for a servant.
“ Martin,” he said, when the man appeared, “ bring
a bottle of Long John Scotch and some soda. I
want you to try this whisky, Courtlandt; it is made
at Fort William, one of the oldest stills in the world."
He went back to his chair with his glass and sat
slowly sipping it.
“Now, my dear wedding guest,” he said, smiling
over the whisky, “I am up to the point where the
ship went down like lead, and am come to the ex-
planation of your marooning. I have no source of
income now but an inadequate little pension. I can-
not live on it anywhere in America without my pov-
erty being patent to Emily and her friends. I must
get out of the country. I have thought about some
little village in Southern France where one could
have, at slight cost, the necessities of life, a servant
and sunshine. I remembered that you had been over
there for some time with Randolph Mason, and would
know about it. Now, to be quite sordid, what would
it cost to hide in some forgotten nook of the Medi-
112


The Interrupted Exile
terranean off the track of tourists? Remember, I
am counting pennies — all told not more than two
thousand francs a year with five hundred for
clothes.” Then he added with a deeper smile, “ I like
to say it that way, it sounds more like a comfortable
living."
I had kept my place by the fire without a word
while General Cruger was telling his story. He had
my sympathy when he began it, now he had also my
indignation. In every respect he was a gentleman,
who expected to find in other men his own honorable
instincts. Such men sweeten the world, and the
triumph of evil persons over them is a blow to all, a
shoulder set against that power working everywhere
for righteousness. I determined to take the matter
before Randolph Mason on my own initiative.
“General Cruger,” I said, “ before we discuss exile,
let us see if Myron Gates cannot be got at in some
way. The wolf might be forced to disgorge this
money; perhaps we could find a way to scorch him
somewhere with a firebrand. It seems to me a duty
of a rather superior sort to pour a pot of pitch on
the head of such a devil's imp."
He shook his head somewhat hopelessly at that.
“Do not get a wrong impression of me, Courtlandt,"
he said, “I should like to pack coals under the beast
if I could, I do not fear him. I have no refinements
of false conscience against meeting his treachery with
steel-traps set in the leaves of his den, but even the
discussion of such a thing is idle. I have gone over
113


The Corrector of Destinies
it more than once with the best attorneys in the city,
and they saw no hope in a suit. It would be my word
against his; but to support his word would be my
letter of introduction, the joint note, the evidence of
the bank officers that the money was paid to me per-
sonally — these things would convince a jury of can-
dlestick-makers and the like. One firm of lawyers on
upper Nassau thought I was lying even to them
about it.”
“ But, General,” I said, “ Randolph Mason is not
the usual practitioner of New York. Permit me to
talk the matter over with him. Something may come
of it.”
His manner did not conceal how lacking he thought
the result would be, but he was courteously obliged.
“ Certainly, Courtlandt," he replied, “I shall be
greatly in your debt for thinking of the matter, but
I fear we shall come back in the end to a counting of
centimes, and the problem of a cheap little inn, with
a roast fowl now and then and wine of the country.”
Then he rang for Martin, gave me a nightcap of
Long John Scotch, and sent me off to bed with the
mortgage in my pocket. I could not at once go to
sleep, for the melted snow trickled on the shingles of
the roof, the branches of the trees swept now and
then against the cornice and the thought of the old
man's exile kept me cruelly unhappy. He was firm-
lipped and cheery about it, but I knew there was to
him death in it. He could not live with the peasants
of Southern France, eat meager dinners, with only
114


The Interrupted Exile
the blank wall on the other side of him for company,
hear no word of his own language day in and day
out, sit in the sun and build New York over again in
the rising smoke of a black cigar brought down from
Marseilles by the postcart. Some morning a pistol
would end it; or the Southern fever, pausing for a
moment in his village, would lend him a hand into the
boat of the last ferryman.
I got somehow to sleep finally, and dreamed a
great, thrilling dream in which Randolph Mason
drove the wolf howling into the very house where I
slept, seized him and, with his long, powerful fingers,
choked broad gold-pieces out of his dripping throat,
which fell clinking on the hard oak floor.
I had no opportunity to consult with Randolph
Mason until the evening of the following day. He
was engaged all the morning with the English consul
over some government matters, to be discussed only
behind closed doors, and, when the consul finally went
out, he tramped the length of the house and up and
down the stairway, as he always did when the prob-
lem before him was unusually difficult, his chin
up, his jaws locked like the close-fitting bars of a
trap, his eyes wide open, but the eyeballs dull, his
body erect, rigid almost, in its gray tweeds, and
the long, nervous fingers gripped behind his back.
His step was firm, the stride regular, even and me-
chanical.
I do not know how to give any adequate idea of
115


The Corrector of Destinies
Randolph Mason at such a time, unless I should say
that his attitude was that of menace. I do not mean
a mere physical threatening. It was rather as
though by tremendous effort he drove his intelligence
steadily against some well-nigh impassable barrier.
At such a time it was impossible to interrupt him. If
one spoke to him, he did not reply; if a hand were
laid on his arm, he paid no attention to it. When he
finally solved the problem, he would call for Pietro.
So the patient Italian had learned to adjust his house-
hold duties to the uncertain movements of the master
- dinner on a tray at any hour, or a bath, or the
bedroom darkened for a night's rest beginning with
the sun over Trinity's steeple.
I kept sharp watch on his regular, monotonous
tramping, because I wished to present to him the
matter of the night before as early as it might be.
I hoped to go quickly back to General Cruger with
some clean-cut, brilliant plan that would turn the
pockets of Myron Gates inside out. I had thrown
the figure of Randolph Mason a bit large before the
incredulous old gentleman. I wished to make my rep-
resentations splendidly good.
At three o'clock the sound of his regular, even
step ceased abruptly in the adjoining room. I got
up and looked through the half-open door. He stood
in the center of the room with his back toward me
for full a minute, then the pressure in his figure
vanished, his shoulders dropped, he crossed the room
quickly to a bookcase, got down a volume of the
116


The Interrupted Exile
reports of the King's Bench, marked it with a slip of
paper and laid it on the table. Then he sat down in
his chair, rang for Pietro and ordered him to bring
a little luncheon.
Pietro brought a tray with a chop, a shirred egg
and a cup of black coffee. He drank the coffee
slowly, resting his elbows on the table in the attitude
of one who is very tired. All the muscles in his face
were relaxed, even a bit flabby, as though they had
been much overstrained. The tremendous nervous
energy of the man had withdrawn into its subtlest
retreat. He looked about him with the half-interest
of one who has been absent.
I went into the room and sitting down in the chair
before the table, made my excuses for interrupting
his coffee and told General Cruger's story. I had
hardly stated the opening points of the matter be-
fore I saw how great an error it was to go to him at
such a time. He seemed not to follow what I said,
his brain was tired, it would not be disturbed, it
declined another problem until it had rested. The
very sound of my words seemed to annoy him, as the
chatter of a child disturbs one who is tired. When
I handed him the mortgage, he looked indolently at
the first and last pages of it, whipped through the
sheets and thrust it over among the papers of his
table. Then he arose and called Pietro, directed him
to prepare a hot bath at once, and started to walk
out of the room. I rose to make a final effort to get
his opinion.
117


The Corrector of Destinies
“Mr. Mason,” I said, “this is a great injury to a
very helpless man. How is this mortgage to be
avoided? "
He answered me with a listless unconcern, still
looking after the departing Pietro, “ It is not to be
avoided,” he said. “Let the man sign it and pay
his debt to the bank.”
I caught helplessly at the last straw floating out
from my disastrous shipwreck; “What then?” I said.
“ What then? ” he repeated, with the same indolent
indifference. “Why, then, there will be another day
to-morrow.”
And he went out of the room and up to his bed-
chamber, where the silent Pietro made ready for his
eccentric master.
I was crushed under the pressure of this striking
failure. I saw instantly that I had not made Ran-
dolph Mason understand the injustice of General
Cruger's situation. To him, General Cruger stood
in the shoes of one who, with his eyes open, had put
his name to a note, knowing well what obligation
such an act entailed, and who now sought to avoid
the consequences. That was all he had caught in my
recital. He saw in my hasty story only a penned
debtor seeking for a hole in the wall. He was not
concerned with such; his talents were not at the ser-
vice of those who, finding burdens by the way, lifted
them to their shoulders and then prayed to be re-
118


The Interrupted Exile
lieved of them, or of those who, having danced,
wished to cheat the fiddler. .
I damned myself for a miserable bungler, arose
and went out into the city. I could not take up any
work just then. My comforting vision of Myron
Gates the wolf, flayed, howling in his den, now ap-
peared such stuff as dreams are made of. Not that
the problem was beyond solution, there lay the very
bitterness of it; I knew that Randolph Mason could
adjust it if he wished. His fingers could reach the
wolf's throat over his money-bags, if he would but
put out his hands. But, like a fool, I had forced an
opinion on a case that he had not considered. I had
taken his final decree with the evidence unread. I
must return to General Cruger with the word. I
must help him build his illusion of a rather pleasant
exile, with its quaint inn peopled like an opera bouffe,
where strange travelers met to pledge flagons, to
whisper plots of Don Carlos and the Pretender of
Orleans, a life of the footlights.
I had a long talk that night with Pietro. He had
a cousin in Polianno, a village about a league from
Genoa, where the Mediterranean makes a little sunny
pocket. The place, he thought, ran with General
Cruger's dream of the Riviera, the bay was paved
with topaz, the far-off back of the sea wine-red, as
in the days of Homer, the air soft as down,— only
the natives were not to be desired. They were pic-
turesque enough for a theatric eye, but they were
very dirty, very stout liars, and all sons of the forty
119


The Corrector of Destinies
thieves. His cousin, Guido, was no better than the
worst of them, but he kept a very comfortable inn, if
the fleas in it were only dead. His wife, Gabriella,
had once been in the service of the old Marquis Fer-
retti at Genoa and knew how to serve a gentleman.
Pietro would write to this cousin and drive a bar-
gain for every detail of General Cruger's needs. It
would not do to leave an item out of it. Guido would
charge for the sunlight at so much a meter, if he
could. Then General Cruger should take this bar-
gain to a notary in Genoa, whom Pietro knew for
somewhat honest, who, for a dozen lire, would bind
Guido with a contract covering every vagary of the
Italian laws of tenantry. Then, if it were not for
the fleas, one could live at Polianno, quite as well as
the old Marquis Ferretti did at Genoa, for a matter
of some fifteen hundred lire paid out in a year. Also,
if one cursed like an Englishman, and kicked Guido
soundly at least once in every fortnight, he would
come to be regarded as a person of importance and
have every cap in the place off to him when he took
the air. Still, and Pietro wrung his hands over it
and wagged his head sadly, an American would be
unutterably dreary there. He would rot to death
finally, like a bad olive drying slowly in the sun.
There was no comfort to be had from waiting, so
I packed up a map, a Baedecker, some current fiction
on Italy, and, taking the evil-fated mortgage in my
pocket, went to Cliff court the next evening. As I
walked down from the little station, the sun was lin-
120


The Interrupted Exile
gering along the paths of the general's garden, try-
ing, like a wilful sweetheart, to make up in delicate
little tendernesses for the sorry conduct of that other
day. New blossoms were coaxed out, the hedges
were on their feet again, the river purred under the
stroking of golden fingers. One ought to come in all
this sunshine with happy Fortune at his elbow. Per-
haps she was on the inside of the house, smiling
behind the door. But she was not there, nor any
foot-track of her. I almost cried out when I saw
General Cruger, his face was so greatly troubled.
He looked white and feeble, an old man in two days
and nights.
He tried to make a little genial talk at dinner, and
get back into his old cheery self. But it was an
effort he gave up presently with a rather bitter smile.
The dinner ended in silence, with a roast of mutton
scarcely cut and wine in the glasses. I had no more
heart to eat than this miserable old man. I came
with no illusion of hope for him, only directions for
the exile, a word about the land he was going into,
some poor suggestions for his comfort — the com-
mon amenities of a death-watch.
“Mr. Parks," he said, when we were again in the
library, “ Victor Hugo once said that bad fortune
always grew worse, and pretended it a quotation
from the Sybilline books. He believed that Destiny,
when it seized a man, always hurried him from one
disaster to another until it flung him, finally, into
the grave. The first blow was not always the one to
121


The Corrector of Destinies
be wept over. It was the second, the third, that he
feared. Well, here is the second.”
He took up a letter from the mantel and drew out
the sheets as though he would read it to me; then he
sat down in his chair still holding the sheets in his
fingers.
“I got this letter yesterday from Emily. It was
written from the St. Louis as she went out to sea, and
brought in by the pilot.”
He stopped a moment and sat staring into the fire,
as if caught by some vagrant memory. Then he
read the letter.
It was a happy letter, charmingly put, full of
tendernesses for the old father in his lonely house,
carrying little directions to him, little messages which
he should deliver, little duties he must perform. Mar-
tin should drive him to the train-shed when it rained.
He must live at his club all he could, and write to her
every day, sending the letters to the Hotel Vesuve
in Naples for the first week, then to the Dardanelle
in Venice, the Continental in Paris and the Victoria
in London. She was unutterably happy, as those are
who look out at the gray world through the window
of another's heart. Then the bit of crushing news,
sent as a happy promise. In a month or so they
would return to live with him at Cliffcourt. They
had thought it all over. He would be too lonely by
himself, his little girl would come back with the son
she had found for him, the old house should be full
of laughter again. How happy they would be ever
122


The Interrupted Exile
after, as the fairy stories say. The new son's in-
heritance was in the hands of trustees; he could not
get a penny of it until he was twenty-five — that
was three years. Three years “ to live in daddy's
pocket” as she put it. They had enough to make
the trip and a little income over — enough for fur-
belows and a top hat now and then. She must be
economical. Then the letter laughed for half a page
— the good daddy had observed her try that in other
days. It was always tremendously expensive; but
he would not care for that, would he? He had always
said that the only adequate return which he had ever
got for his money was when she spent it on her
pretty self. Just wait then, until she kissed him and
ruined a Paris frock from hugging him so tightly.
He folded the letter and laid it on the table. Then
he spoke with the distinctness of one going firmly to
his ruin. Italy was now out of the question; he must
remain and get employment somewhere. But, first,
this business with the bank must be concluded. He
would go up to the city with me in the morning,
execute the mortgage and take up the note. He did
not ask me about my conference with Randolph Ma-
son, and so I was spared the recital of that failure.
When the candles burned down, I slept again in the
guest-chamber above the library, but no aid came
through the gate of dreams. Hope had abandoned
this derelict to the seas.
We went into the wolf's bank at ten o'clock the
next morning. General Cruger executed the mort-
123


The Corrector of Destinies
gage, and a notary of the bank filled in the prepared.
acknowledgment below his signature. The bonds
were delivered to the secretary of Myron Gates, the
money paid by him to General Cruger, who delivered
the cash to the bank and got the note stamped
“ Paid.” Then, when the transaction was concluded,
we had luncheon at a club and I returned to lower
Broadway after having promised General Cruger to
meet him for dinner at the Holland.
When I entered the house, Randolph Mason was
coming down the stairway. He inquired what busi-
ness had taken up the morning, and I told him, as
bitterly as I could, the sequel to my other story.
General Cruger was now penniless, Myron Gates had
boarded his galleon and sailed away with its cargo
without a shot at his black flag or the hack of a cut-
lass on his gunwales. He was over the horizon with
his loot, the thing was ended.
“ Nothing is ended," said Mason, “ until it arrives
at its adjustment."
“ Then,” I said, “ this is a case for the Court of
Final Equity, if it ever sits."
“ It is a case for me,” he said.
I looked at him in wonder.
“A case for you? ” I echoed. “You said “Ex-
ecute the mortgage and let the man pay the bank.'”
“I did,” he replied. “You have followed that
direction, I believe.”
I did not understand.
“ We followed the inevitable,” I answered him.
124


The Interrupted Exile
“ It was the only thing to do. You recognized that
yourself.”
“ It was the right thing to 'do,” he said; “but not
the only thing.”
Again I was astonished.
“ Why, Mr. Mason,” I said, " I asked you. What
then?' and you said there would be another day to-
morrow."
“It is here now," he answered. “Each day to its
own events. The fool confuses his assistant with a
multitude of directions. This is to be done now:
You will at once hold a meeting of the Cruger Coal
Company under a call signed by all the members of
the company, and as provided by law. Prepare the
record of the company in proper form, authorize a
mortgage on all the property of the company to the
London Trust Company of this city as trustee to
secure a loan of two hundred and twenty thousand
dollars. These mines, I discover, are easily worth
that sum, including the earnings for one year. Some
foreign clients of the banking house of Hurst & Sol-
meyer will pay in cash two hundred thousand dol-
lars for these bonds upon the execution of the mort-
gage. Let General Cruger take that sum and hide
it somewhere in Europe under his daughter's apron.
Bring me the mortgage when it is ready to be
signed.”
In the face of all my experience of Randolph Ma-
son, I hazarded an objection.
“ But," I said, “ the first mortgage is executed.
125


The Corrector of Destinies
Do you mean that this property is worth enough to
secure another mortgage?”
“No," he answered, “I have just said that these
mines are worth two hundred and twenty thousand
dollars."
“ Then,” I said, “ you mean this loss to fall on
Hurst & Solmeyer?”
“No,” he said, “ Hurst & Solmeyer will make
twenty thousand dollars.”
“ Surely," I said, “ you do not mean to date this
mortgage before the other one, do you? No notary
could be got to certify an incorrect date.”
He looked at me a moment.
“Parks,” he said, “I fear that you are beginning
to be a fool.” Then he came down the steps and
went into his private office.
This light breaking suddenly on a supposedly
hopeless darkness, confused me, or else I had not put
useless questions to Randolph Mason. I should have
known better. Mason's words were never idle, nor
were his plans visionary and barren, whether he bid
one do a little or a great thing. The story of Naa-
man and the Prophet was convincing precedent. I
did not understand these new instructions and could
not point out their intent to General Cruger, but I
knew that a pit was being digged for Myron Gates,
and that was light enough.
I explained all this frankly to the old man that
evening after dinner at the Holland. I urged him
with the logic of the Syrian's servants. If Randolph
126


The Interrupted Exile
Mason had bid us build a great, looming trap for the
wolf, we should have done it. How much rather then
this easy thing which he suggested! I did not com-
prehend, any more than he, how it could result as
Mason said it would. It would take, in my opinion,
words and passes, charmed amulets and the laying
on of hands to induce any bankers to advance money
on a second mortgage when the property involved
was worth scarcely the value of the first. Still, Ran-
dolph Mason said the bankers would pay over the
money, and he knew. I would pledge my life on that.
I was aware, too, that Solmeyer believed in Mason as
the Maid of Israel did in Elisha, and that the firm
had made a fortune of six figures through that faith.
Let us dip ourselves, then, seven times in Jordan,
and leave the cure to the Prophet!
I had my way about it in the end. The meeting of
the Cruger Coal Company was held, the record cor-
rectly made, the bonds authorized, and the mortgage
prepared in every detail as the law required it. I
took it to Randolph Mason when the scrivener had
finished. He examined it carefully, called in a
notary, dictated the certificate, had the signatures
properly affixed, and sent me with it to the bankers.
They took it with the bonds and handed General
Cruger a draft on the Rothschilds in Paris for two
hundred thousand dollars. I walked up-town with
the bewildered old man to his club. He was silent
for a block of the way, dazed by this incredible for-
tune. Finally, he put his hand on my arm.
127


The Corrector of Destinies
“My dear friend,” he said, “I seem to be
quite awake, and yet this event is after the man-
ner of dreams or the illusion of some Oriental
drug.”
To reassure himself he stopped on the curb and
looked up, like a provincial, at the tall buildings.
Then he took his wallet from his pocket and scru-
tinized the draft, read aloud the signatures on it,
and counted the figures slowly, “ Two hundred thou-
sand,” folded it with a long sigh of satisfaction and
returned the wallet to his pocket.
“ Yes," he said, “I am quite awake, and I have
somehow got two hundred thousand dollars. I do
not know how; I have met no fairy godmother; I
have seen no genius rising in a wreath of gray smoke,
and yet I have two hundred thousand dollars, and
I am wide awake on the principal street in New
York.”
He went on slowly a little farther up Broadway.
Then he stopped as though taken with a sudden
resolution.
“ Mr. Parks," he said, “Randolph Mason directed
me to go to Europe and hide this money in my
daughter's apron. I will go to-morrow on the Celtic.
Come down to the ship at eleven and explain this
miracle to me. I will run up home now for the
luggage.”
Then he took a car to his train and I returned to
the banking house of Hurst & Solmeyer. I, also,
wished an explanation. I walked straight through
128


The Interrupted Exile
the building to the private office of the elder banker,
and sat down before him at his table.
“ Solmeyer," I said, “ are you sure that the brick
which you have just bought is gold?”
The old man smiled and stroked his long, patri-
archal beard.
“ Yes, Mr. Parks," he said, “ this one is gold,
Gates got the brass one.”
“ Impossible," I replied. “Myron Gates got a
mortgage prepared by his own scrivener for the full
value of this property. His security is prior to
yours. How could his brick be brass?"
The old man's black eyes twinkled in their deep
sockets.
“Mr. Parks,” he said, “ you do not know the
Prophets. Is it not written, “Whoso causeth the
righteous to go astray in an evil way shall fall him-
self into his own pit’?”
“ The quotation is hopeful,” I said, “but into
what pit did Myron Gates fall?”
. The old banker looked me searchingly in the face.
“Randolph Mason said that we were not to tell
this thing to any one, but you are his secretary,
and I take it that he has sent you to see if we, our-
selves, understand it.”
Then he pulled out the drawer of the table and
laid before me the mortgage, a copy of the one ex-
ecuted for Myron Gates, a report of the Supreme
most
* To avoid a charge of notice under the case cited.
129


The Corrector of Destinies
Court of Appeals of West Virginia, and a copy of
the Acts of its Legislature. Each volume was
marked with a slip of paper. The banker opened
first the volume of Acts.
“ You will observe,” he said, “ that the old form
of acknowledgment for corporations was changed by
this Act, and a new form given, in which the presi-
dent of the corporation must certify under oath that
he is such officer, and authorized to execute such a .
paper. Now, the scrivener who drew the Gates mort-
gage used the old form of acknowledgment as he
found it in the form books, while our mortgage, you
will notice, is executed under the new form of
acknowledgment.
“Well,” I said, “what important effect can that
have? The Gates mortgage is in proper form, there
is only a mistake in the certificate of acknowledg-
ment. That does not invalidate the mortgage, nor
affect the validity of the bonds."
For answer the banker opened the volume of Re-
ports, and passed it across the table to me, his finger
marking the page.
It was a decision of the Court of Last Resort in
? It may be suggested that a scrivener would not likely make
such an error in the acknowledgment as that made here in the
Gates mortgage. The best answer is that such a mistake was
made in a mortgage upon coal properties in West Virginia,
and can be seen in the office of the clerk of the County Court
of Taylor County. This mortgage was prepared by one of the
best firms of attorneys in New York, and involved a sum in
excess of the sum involved here.
130


The Interrupted Exile
the state where the mortgaged property was situated,
holding that such a mortgage, certified under the old
form of acknowledgment, could not be admitted to
record so as to create a lien on the property, that
such an acknowledgment was void, and that spread-
ing such a mortgage, so acknowledged, on the county
records did not make it a recorded lien.
The matter was now clear. The Gates mortgage
was not a lien. Gates was only a general creditor.
The first and only lien on these coal properties was
this last mortgage, which was properly acknowledged,
and could be admitted to record. The estate pledged
was worth merely the amount of the last mortgage.
When it was foreclosed, as it doubtless would be,
Hurst & Solmeyer's clients, the innocent foreign
holders of the really secured bonds, would be paid
in full. Myron Gates would come in after them as a
general creditor, but there would be no assets with
which to pay his debt. His bonds were, therefore,
worthless, his debt worthless. The bank had been
paid in cash, the note liquidated; thus the bank was
not affected. Hurst & Solmeyer would make twenty
thousand dollars. Myron Gates was the only one
upon whom the loss would fall. He would be out two
hundred thousand dollars.
I understood now why Randolph Mason had mere-
ly said, “Let the man execute this mortgage and
pay the bank.” When he had looked at the legal
paper he had instantly seen the old form of acknowl-
edgment and knew that it was void. Myron Gates's
131


The Interrupted Exile
“ Mr. Parks,” he chuckled, “ I regret that you do
not know the Prophets. There is so apt a comment
in the Book of Jeremiah.”
I found General Cruger waiting for me on the deck
of the Celtic when I arrived. Good fortune had re-
stored his middle age, his step was springy, the mus-
cles of his face firm again, the old light rekindled in
his eyes. He put his arm around my shoulder, and
we walked to the bow of the steamer. The old man
was thrilling like a boy over his anticipated plan.
He would join Emily in Paris, they would spin
through the great wheat fields of France in a motor
car, cross the Alps to the Italian lakes and return
along the Riviera to Marseilles; but they should live
a week, not a day less than a whole week, with Guido
at Polianno in the teeth of the fleas, and he would
make no bargain with Guido, the Italian should rob
him like a brigand of the first order. In three years
they would return.
He put his hand gently over my mouth when I
started to explain to him the mystery of his resur-
rected fortune. He had thought it over, he said, and
he did not care to know. He preferred to think of the
money as a bounty of God, and let the matter rest
there. Randolph Mason may have got it out of the
gutters of Broadway by an Arabian enchantment, or
the bankers brought it from the lost land of Helevah.
It did not matter.
I made one of the cheering crowd on the pier as the
. 133


The Corrector of Destinies
ship went out to sea with the tugs barking at her
heels.
Sec. 3 syllabus, Abney et al v. Ohio Lumber and Mining
Company, 45 W. Va., 446. “A certificate of acknowledgment
of a deed conveying real estate by a corporation, which fails
to show that the officer or agent executing it was sworn and
deposed to the facts contained in the certificate, as required
by section 5, chapter 73, Code, is fatally defective, and does
not entitle such deed to be recorded.”
134


CHAPTER VII
THE LAST CHECK
I BELIEVE it was a theory of Robert Louis Steven-
son that one could have no sense of completer phys-
ical comfort in this life than to escape from the
“ Bastille of Civilization” and dine on tinned bologna
and a cake of chocolate under the pines of Gevaudan,
“Where God keeps an open house." The average
dweller in New York, who could hardly locate Ge-
vaudan with an atlas, will, I think, be found skepti-
cally dissenting. He will cite, rather, the comfortable
state of one who takes his steaming dinner at a good
hostelry. Let the table be set snugly by a window,
let the night be dark and rainy, let one warm and
hungry look out at the splashing street, the bedrab-
bled passers, the huddled cabmen turning their
glistening backs to the wind. It is like sitting com-
fortably in Abraham's bosom with a good view of
Dives!
On such a night of April, I had the corner table
at a window in the Dresden looking out on the drip-
ping avenue, a good dinner set over a white cloth, a
bottle cooling in a tub of ice, a cigar awaiting me
on the servant's tray, a hunger like a wood-chopper's
135


The Last Check
must be helped back to his freedom, or else it was
a woman.
In the meantime the carriage continued uptown.
Randolph Mason was silently smoking a cigar, lying
back in his corner of the seat, and I followed his
example. It thus happened I took no notice of our
route. However, after perhaps an hour, the carriage
stopped and I observed that we were under the porte-
cochère of one of the new palaces on Riverside
Drive.
The door was thrown open and we stepped down
into the presence of a liveried footman, who led us
into the house and removed our coats, left us waiting
for a moment in a dimly-lighted hall, and then took
us up a flight of great stairs. On the first landing
we passed two nurses in their white caps and aprons.
A moment later we were ushered into a sitting-room
off a bedchamber. Beside a table a man sat propped
up in an invalid chair. He was a huge bulk of a man,
rather over six feet, I should think, with a tremen-
dous, muscular chest, thin gray hair and a heavy,
puffy face. Nature had built him for gigantic labors.
Energy, strength, decisive action sat in his big
muscles; but they were dying now, like the man. A
mere loose, devitalized, pudgy hulk remained of what
was once a splendid animal. The eye alone seemed
living. A brilliant, determined brown eye, burning
steady and clear like a ship's light. The last, unfail-
ing servant of an indomitable spirit making ready
to abandon its worthless house.
137


The Last Check
invitation to proceed to other matters more important.
The invalid continued:
“ Within the last day or two, I have been going
carefully over my affairs under a sense of impending
death. In one matter I conceived myself to have
made a mistake, and I wish to correct it, if possible.
You are aware of the recent vicious public assault on
the insurance companies, a wave of hostile, rabid,
universal sentiment. There seems to be no particular
reason for it. The movement is a phenomenon re-
curring constantly in the history of our civilization.
I believe these periodic storms of public opinion to
be organic and inevitable. All established institu-
tions, no matter how excellent, are subject to such
assaults. I pointed this out ten years ago to the
bank officials of New York when a wave of sentiment
threatened the established monetary standard."
He pulled his baggy form together in his chair.
As he spoke, his voice became somewhat clearer.
“Now, in all this investigation what wrongs have
been exposed? Indeed none, outside of a few com-
panies, except that those in control of these insurance
companies had the use of large sums of money and,
not being infallible, made sometimes questionable in-
vestments; and the further fact that considerable
sums were used in politics. Why, gentlemen, every-
body knows that the average Assembly of the State
is composed largely of men who scheme to extort
money from commercial industries by threatening
them with destructive legislation. The commerce of
139


The Corrector of Destinies
to-day is no better off than the commerce of the
Middle Ages. It must still purchase immunity from
the banditti. Sometimes these highwaymen can be
fought, but usually most industries have found it
less expensive to pay the toll. Consequently, no
higher injustice can be imagined than to hold
officials of an insurance company responsible for such
expenditures. It is like shooting a captain for hand-
ing over his ship's money to pirates in order to save
his cargo. Why, there is not an insurance company
in America that could hold itself together for a year
as a money-making concern if it neglected to keep
a representative at Albany.".
“Sir,” said Randolph Mason, “ this statement is
neither entertaining nor instructive. Please come to
the point.”
“I beg your pardon,” replied the invalid; “ I am
coming to the point. Five years ago I foresaw the
arrival of this outbreak, there were certain signs
which I shall not stop here to discuss; and I began to
prepare my company for this era of exposure. The
result of that labor is to-day evident. My company
stands almost alone with a clean bill of health. But
the cost to me as an individual would stagger America
if it knew. I have done the labor of fifty years in
five, and I have expended every dollar that I or my
family possessed to accomplish this result.
“ You are not to imagine that during this time
the political banditti were any the less threatening
or avid. I fed them as usual, but, unlike the other
140


The Last Check
there any way to correct this injustice? Can any-
thing be done?”
“ Nothing could be more simple,” replied Randolph
Mason. “You are president of this insurance com-
pany; are you not?”
“ Why, yes, I am still its president,” replied Curtis.
" And you doubtless have funds of the company
subject to your check," continued Mason.
“I am trustee," answered the invalid, “ for the
entire surplus fund of the company deposited in the
Regent National Bank of America.”
“ Then,” said Mason, “ there is the remedy in your
very hands."
An expression of despair returned to the man's
face, so briefly lighted with hope.
“I have thought carefully of that,” he said, “ and
there is no remedy in that direction. If I gave my
wife a check for any portion of this trust fund, she
would doubtless be criminally involved after my death
for receiving embezzled moneys. If I lifted this
mortgage from her property with the money, the
directors of the insurance company would, when such
facts were discovered after my death, instantly seize
the property and sell it to make good the funds so
used. Do not misunderstand me. I would no longer
hesitate on any moral ground. I believe that my
services to the company are worth a living to my
family. At any rate, now, in the face of death, I
would so use the money and take my chance on the
right of it before the Judge over the frontier. I
143


The Corrector of Destinies
would not, to save my own life, take these trust
moneys of the company; but to save my family from
poverty I would take them if there were any way to
do it.”
“ There is a way to do it,” said Randolph Mason.
“How much money will it take to satisfy this mort-
gage?"
The invalid opened a tin dispatch box on the table
before him, took out some papers and looked over
them a moment.
“ Two hundred and four thousand and seventy-
five dollars," he replied, “including interest until
to-morrow.”
“ Very well,” said Mason, “write out a check to
the holder of this mortgage for that sum.”
The sick man spread out a check-book before him
on the table, carefully and laboriously made out a
check and handed it to Randolph Mason, who looked
at it sharply for a moment, then laid it down on the
other papers.
“ That will do,” he said. " Take up your note
to-morrow with this check, have the mortgage can-
celled and released, direct your wife to sell this house
instantly for what she can get on the market in cash,
take the money so received and go immediately to her
relatives in England, and there conceal the money
under their names beyond a court's writ.”
He paused a moment; then he looked thoughtfully
at the invalid.
“A suitable reason for this immediate exodus will
144


The Last Check
be the taking of your body for burial among your
ancestors in Sussex.”
“ All shall be done exactly as you direct,” replied
Curtis, leaning heavily on the arm of his chair. “And,
now, if only I could return the money to the insur-
ance company; if only I could even matters with that
cold, cruel, cunning political intriguer, I should die
happy.”
“ Then,” said Mason, “ you will die like the saints.
The Assurance Company of North America will not
lose a dollar, and matters will be squared once for all
with this politician.”
The invalid pulled his baggy frame together.
“ Human pity,” he said, “has always promised
the impossible to the dying; but it is no kindness."
“Sir," said Mason, “I promise nothing; I merely
point out the inevitable."
“ The inevitable," echoed the man. “Why, only
the hand of God could perform the thing you speak
of.”
“ Pardon me," said Mason, “ your own hand has
already done it."
The invalid looked down at his hand, swollen tight
in the skin, trembling, purple.
“I am too tired,” he said, “ to guess what pleas-
antry you mean. I am like Nicodemus, accustomed
to look upon things as they occur in nature. I wish
to lift a mortgage from this property; in order to
do that I pay the holder of the mortgage a certain
sum. That sum is taken from the moneys of another.
145


The Last Check
velope, addressed it and handed it to me. Then he
spoke to Mason.
“I consider this thing,” he said, “ to be a provi-
dence of God.”
“ On the contrary,” replied Mason; “it is a mere
principle of law.”
Then we went out of the room and down through
the silent house to our carriage, waiting in the rain.
I followed the sequence of events with the keenest
scrutiny. The newspapers contained no notice of the
sale of the house on Riverside Drive by Richard R.
Curtis; but I found a deed of sale on record showing
a cash consideration of two hundred and twenty thou-
sand dollars. Five days later Mr. Curtis died of
Bright's disease. His life and business career were
elaborately reviewed in the public prints. ' I observed
the significant item as to his birth in Sussex, and that
his body would be taken there for burial. Evidently
the directions of Randolph Mason were being followed
with scrupulous exactness. All this whetted still
keener my curiosity as to the sealed letter in my
possession.
Finally, on the first Wednesday of the succeeding
month the Board of Directors of the Life Assurance
Company of North America met at the company's
building on Broadway. I appeared before it and pre-
sented the letter. In attendance upon the meeting were
some of the great financiers of New York and, among
them, the company attorney, Mr. Eustace Ruling,
147


The Corrector of Destinies
whose reputation as a counselor is established beyond
any man's comment. The chairman of the board took
the letter, ripped off the envelope and read it. Imme-
diately he ordered a clerk to lay before him the last
checks of President Curtis. Then laboring under
apparent surprise, he addressed the other members.
“ Gentlemen,” he said, “ here is a most astonishing
discovery. I find that our late president has used
$204,075 of the company's money with which to pay
a private debt of his own. Here is the check and some
sort of explanatory note.”
Instantly there was a hubbub. In the midst of it
Mr. Ruling came forward and took up the letter
and the check. He read them carefully, then he
laughed.
“ Well," he said, “ Mr. Curtis seems to have landed
on our old friend, the State Boss, with a nice upper
cut, from his coffin."
“ He seems, on the contrary,” replied one of the
directors, “ to have landed on us. His last official act
was to hand over the company's money to this poli-
tician.”
“ Yes,” said the lawyer, “but this payment has a
quite sufficient string to it. It is explained fully in his
letter. Mr. Curtis advises us that, in order to wipe
out a personal debt, a debt legally but not morally
just, he has given the man a check on the funds of the
company. He begs us to observe that this check
directs payment to be made by the bank out of the
funds of the Life Assurance Company of North
148


The Corrector of Destinies
State Boss, good for it? Why, the thief has a million
dollars in one building on Twenty-third Street!”
In their consuming interest in the matter my pres-
ence was apparently overlooked, and I stepped softly
through the door. These men did not realize its full
significance; to them it was merely vengeance visited
by a dead man on his enemy, a payment to a rogue
in his own pocket-pieces; but to one who knew all
the facts, Randolph Mason's plan had worked a larger
justice. Mason had seen instantly that, if this
mortgage could be lifted, Mrs. Curtis could sell the
house, the purchaser's title would be clear, and she
could take the money out of the country and conceal
it. The only problem was to get the cancellation of
the mortgage on the records. This check on the trust
funds did that and yet left the taker of it liable to
the assurance company, which owned the funds.
Suppose it were technically a crime in Richard R.
Curtis thus temporarily to appropriate the moneys
held in trust. He was dead and no injury would
come to any one innocent of wrong. A dependent
woman had her property returned to her; a skulking
rogue had his own knife in his ribs, and the Assurance
Company of North America would receive its money
with usury. I saw now why the dying man looked
upon Randolph Mason as a providence of God.
For the legal principle involved in this story see Brown v.
Ford, L. R. A. New Series 97. In New York see Cohnfeld
v. Tannenbaum, 176 N. Y., 126, 98 Am. St. Rep. 653, 68 N.
E. 141.
150


CHAPTER VIII
THE LIFE TENANT
I HAD remained the night at Randolph Mason's
house. It was very warm, and at daybreak Pietro
opened all the doors and windows to invite in what
little breeze there was. I was disturbed by this, and
presently arose and took a cold shower bath, after
which Pietro brought me a Continental breakfast
served on a tray.
It was early, then, doubtless not later than six
o'clock, when I left my bedchamber. As I turned the
landing of the stair, I noticed a man standing in the
street door. He was a tall, slender young man,
rather well-dressed; the lower part of his face was
hidden by a handkerchief, which he held pressed
against his mouth; there were blood spots, widening
on the handkerchief, and an unmistakable expression
of fear was in the eyes. It was evident that he had
met with some injury.
I led him at once into the office and rang for Pietro.
In a moment the latter was at the door, and I directed
him to bring a bowl of water as quickly as possible.
So far, the injured man had not spoken. I doubted
if he could speak, the wound being evidently in the
mouth or throat. The moment he got into the room
151


The Corrector of Destinies
he lay down at full length on the floor, perfectly
motionless, his head back, his eyes closed, still press-
ing the bloody handkerchief to his lips. When Pietro
set the bowl of water on the floor beside him, he dipped
the handkerchief into it, squeezed out the blood and
returned the damp cloth to his mouth. I saw the
blood coming slowly from between his lips; it was
very bright-arterial blood, a little frothy.
I turned to Pietro and directed him to call a sur-
geon. At the word the bleeding man shook his head
and opened his eyes with an expression of protest.
This refusal of medical attendance in one so desper-
ately hurt was to me highly significant; it subjected
him instantly to suspicion. I determined to see if
he could speak.
“ Do you want a physician?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“ Are you badly hurt? "
Again he replied with the same negative sign.
“What is the matter with you then?” I purposely
phrased the question so that a nodding would not
answer it.
“A ruby," he said thickly behind the handkerchief.
The reply was unintelligible to me. It was doubtless
some term current among criminals. I was now con-
vinced that the man belonged to the criminal classes.
He was certainly injured and he refused a surgeon-
yet I could not leave him to die on the floor. In this
quandary, I turned to find Randolph Mason standing
behind me.
152


The Life Tenant
“ Pietro," he said, “ this man is having a hemor-
rhage. Leave him alone.”
Then he went back into the next room.
Instantly the mystery cleared. The poor fellow
was merely a consumptive, doing the only thing
possible for a slight bleeding—to lie stretched out
motionless. The hemorrhage had doubtless come
on him in the street, and he had noticed our open door
and come in. The flow of blood had now about
ceased, and I went to my table to examine the morn-
ing's mail.
Presently the man got up and sat down in a chair
by my table.
“ Was that Randolph Mason?” he said.
“ Yes," I replied.
“I thought so,” said the man. “I came to New
York to see two great specialists, Dr. Ashby Clark
and Randolph Mason.”
He tapped his breast with his finger.
“ Clark says no good. I wonder what Mason will
say."
“ You were looking for this house, then ? "
“Yes; I was coming up the steps to it when I got
the ruby'" Then he explained: “ That's what we
call the hemorrhage, the blood is so bright, you know
-a technical term of the lunger !!!
"I thought you were a wounded burglar," I said.
“ If you wish to talk with Mr. Mason, you would
better go in now while there is an opportunity.”
The man arose and went into the private office.
153


The Corrector of Destinies
I heard Mason direct him to be seated and order Pietro
to give him a glass of whisky.
“I came over to see you and Dr. Clark,” began
the visitor; “ Clark, because I have consumption ;
you, because no man ever has simple consumption.
He always has another trouble with it—a bad heart
that won't stand high altitudes, a wife who won't
leave the home folks, or no funds. My fix is the
latter. Clark says I will last six months in an Ameri-
can climate; but if I will go at once to the Marquesas
Islands, my lung will probably heal and I will hang
on until some native pinks me with a fish spear.
"I guess the place isn't so bad; it's under the
French and quite a garden of Eden, Clark says. But
it is away off in the South Seas. It would take a
thousand dollars to get there and a check arriving
regularly every pay day to keep me going. I have
read about the beach-combers on these Pacific Islands
-there's no hobo worse off. And no way to make
a cent there. Copra is the only trade stuff, and the
natives have that. Everything fit for a white man to
eat is tinned. You've got to buy it when the ship
lands. You've got to be a government Johnny, a
missionary or a native, otherwise you live on money
from home or the French deport you for a convict.
That's Clark's garden of Eden. I got the facts at
a tourist's joint uptown. So, there I am! I can't
live if I don't go; I can't go; I can't live if I could
go! Nice, comfortable bunch of alternatives that!
I had a little money, but a court down in West Vir-
154


The Life Tenant
ginia skinned me out of it. Now I haven't enough to
pay a doctor. That's why I shook my head on the
floor awhile ago.”
“ You mean,” said Randolph Mason, “a legal
decision rendered against you in a suit at law?”
“ Not a bit of it,” replied the man; “I mean what
I say—skinned out of it. I had no law-suit. I was
standing in a crowd of rubes before a court house
when the blindfold lady stepped out with a little shell
game and lifted my wad.”
“ This,” said Mason, “is the jargon of a cab
driver. What do you mean?”
“ I'll cut it out,” replied the man, “I will begin
over. When my father died he left me ten thousand
dollars in bank stocks. It paid a dividend of about
four per cent., and no taxes. Being naturally smarter
than my father, I at once determined to take that
money and get rich. I sold the stock, pocketed a
check-book and got busy. One bright morning, in
a little town on the Monongahela River, a commis-
sioner was selling a tract of land before the court
house. In my hunt for good things I happened by
accident to know about that land. It is a rough
mountain tract, not worth ten dollars an acre; but
it is underlaid with the Pittsburg vein of coal, stand-
ing up eight feet thick, clean and solid like a ledge of
sandstone. A corner of the land comes down to the
railroad and there is a little mine, opened and oper-
ated by the old farmer who lived on the place. He
had a pole-tipple, wheeled the coal out by hand, and
155


The Corrector of Destinies
got off about a car a day. The tract contains some
two hundred acres.
“I stepped up to the commissioner and inquired
about the sale. He told me that the owner was broke
and the court was selling the land. I inquired if the
coal was included and he said, 'Yes; from the sky
to the center of the earth. Then I asked the bid.
When he answered fifteen dollars, I nearly threw a
fit! Fifteen dollars! The coal was worth two hun-
dred an acre. Now, I had been knocking about the
coal country for a good bit and I was no greenhorn.
I knew that this was the Pittsburg vein and I knew
what it was worth. The court was selling the land,
so there could be no doubt about the title. I would
not have trusted any dealer about a land title if it
had been a private sale; but here was the court-
the old blind lady herself-selling the land, so the
game was bound to be straight. I bid twenty. The
commissioner called it a moment, and a big man, out
a little way in the crowd, with a nose like your elbow,
bid twenty-five. I let the thing hang to see if there
was another bidder; then, just before the 'going,'
I bid thirty. Nosy looked me over, snorted and finally
bid thirty-five, and “five more,' I said. He stamped
around awhile and finally lifted it to forty-five.
“ All right, Nosy,' I said to myself, “I'll just
throw a good, stiff bluff into you and end it.' 'An'
five', I said, “an' five more every time you raise it.'
He looked at me for a good minute.
66. You're a damned fool!' he said, and then he
156


The Corrector of Destinies
ently sipping his glass of whisky and flippantly
spinning out his story like a tipsy sailor. This san-
guine temperament goes surely with this disease; no
other dying men whistle thus cheerily in the face of
death.
“ So there I was,” the man continued, “ no money,
no land. I had bought only the right to use
this ground as long as the old farmer lived. A
goat with creepers on his feet would have starved on
the top of it. I tried to sell out to Nosy. I dis-
covered then that he was a capper for the Union Fuel
Company, a little branch of one of the two soft coal
trusts of America.
“Nothin' doing', he said. Our company put up
that little job to catch just such suckers as you are.
We bought the fee simple title to that land; then we
picked up the debts of the old farmer, who was sup-
posed to own it but had only a life estate, as we knew.
We got the debts for ten cents on the dollar, when
we showed the creditors that the rube had no title.
Then we brought a creditor's suit to sell the land. I
expected to buy it in for the face amount of our
debts, but when you butted in and bid it over our
debts, I side-stepped. We made about nine thousand
dollars on your cut-in. No, we will not pay out any
good money for your little old life estate. Not us;
our heading won't get up to this land for the next
ten years. I guess we'll just set back on our hunkers
and wait till the old man dies. So long! I may not
see you again. You're a lunger; ain't you?
158


The Life Tenant
“ That was two years ago. The bugs haven't
knocked off any time, Clark says, and, unless I can
get to the South Seas, I'm all in.”
Randolph Mason leaned over and made a little
calculation with his pencil on the corner of the
writing-pad.
“ In your condition of health,” he said, “ ten thou-
sand dollars should easily buy a six per cent. annuity.
Could you live in the Marquesas on six hundred a
year?”
The consumptive's eyes snapped.
“ With all the comforts of home, and money to
invest in the funds, as the French say. Outside the
grub, you only need a sleeping mat and a pair of
pajamas. Fifty plunks a month? I should say yes.”
“ Very well,” said Mason; “ you shall have twelve
hundred dollars down for expenses, and six hundred
payable semi-annually as long as you live.”
The facetious youth made a wide, ludicrous gesture
with both arms as though gathering up a great heap
of bundles.
: “ An' a motor, an'a private car, an' an insurance
directorship, an' the young princess, my daughter,
for a wife, an' twelve she asses laden with gold-
where from?”
Randolph Mason looked down at him as one does
at a pert, gibing bootblack.
“ From the Union Fuel Company,” he answered.
The cheerful consumptive snapped his fingers.
“ Stuff's off," he said. “ You might get it from
159


The Corrector of Destinies
me."
the Fresh Air Fund or Uncle Abdul of Turkey, but
not the coal trust.”
“ We shall get it from the Union Fuel Company,"
said Mason. “Mr. Parks, have Pietro call a car-
riage, and come with us."
The young man arose, waved his right arm in a
great gesture of assent.
“ All right, Governor," he said; “ have it your
own way; but when you wake up, don't take it out
on me.”
Then he cocked his hat on one side of his head
and followed out to the carriage behind Randolph
Mason.
The offices of the Union Fuel Company are at the
foot of Broadway, an entire floor, reached by a great
semicircle of elevators, banging, rattling, clicking,
in their amphitheater of cages. The business carried
on here is of necessity stupendous. It has to do
with modifying the temperature of the whole country.
The forces, too, that labor everywhere under a man's
fingers, are sold here, stored in a block of carbon.
The companies housed under this roof, and the rival
ones occupying as great a building across Broadway,
practically own the available coal beds of America,
the virgin sources of all the energy used commonly
by man, from the fire cooking his egg to the fire
driving his steamship. That there should be two
well-defined groups of such companies thus in rivalry,
standing like duelists with the street between them,
arises from the fact that there are two great railroad
160


The Life Tenant
riod than the farmer at whose death the estate ter-
minates."
The president of the Union Fuel Company
laughed, his voice cackling like a spinning cog-wheel.
“ Really,” he said, “ you amuse me.”
An ugly sneer gathered in the corners of Mason's
mouth.
“ You do not amuse me,” he said; “you annoy
me."
Mr. Andrew Flint flushed and turned sharply in
his chair.
“I believe this conference is ended,” he said.
“Not quite ended,” replied Randolph Mason.
“ Listen a moment, if you please. It is the law of the
State of West Virginia that a life tenant—that is, one
owning a life estate in lands—cannot open mines and
remove coal or minerals from such lands during his
life, but must get his living from the surface and
pass over all the wealth beneath his feet to his suc-
cessor. He may be sick, weighted with debt, starving,
the wealth of the Indies may lie beneath the sod of
his lands like a buried treasure, yet it is held in certain
decisions that he cannot touch it. Does such a rule
of law seem to you to be justice?”
It was now Andrew Flint's turn to sneer.
“I am not interested,” he replied, “in the justice
of it.”
“Perhaps,” continued Mason, “ you may be inter-
ested in a further provision of that doctrine, quite
as curious. It is also the law of the State of West
163


The Corrector of Destinies
Virginia that, if at the time the life tenant comes
into his estate there is a mine opened on the land and
in operation, then this person with the life estate
can not only continue the operation of the mine," but
he can also work it to exhaustion. He can gut the
land of every ounce of value. If a way be but cut
to the door of the storehouse, he can rifle it to the
last penny. He can disembowel the land and leave
his successor only a worthless shell. Does this seem
to you to be any sounder justice?"
The president of the Union Fuel Company fell
back into his attitude of business interest, as by the
snapping of a lever.
“ What! what!” he said. “Let me understand
you?"
“ You shall understand me exactly,” replied Mason.
“ There is a little mine in operation on this land.
If you do not choose to make this contract with Mr.
Hopkins, I shall take him to the coal company across
the street, which also operates in this region. I shall
lease the land to it for any royalty it suggests, even
a cent a ton. This Pittsburg vein is eight feet thick.
It will yield ten thousand tons to the acre. At one
cent a ton that would net Mr. Hopkins a royalty of
one hundred dollars per acre. Ordinarily any com-
pany would take out ten acres every year. Under
the existing conditions, this company will take out
twenty. This will yield Mr. Hopkins some twenty
thousand dollars in the end, and the company a profit
of a hundred thousand; and you at the farmer's death
164


The Corrector of Destinies
Flint. The one, no less than the other, expected an
advantage to be pressed home; it was the first law
of commerce, as they knew it; all else was a theory
of churches.
I think the sick man would have broken into protest,
but the manner of Randolph Mason was not to be
misread, and, too, in the consumptive's eye he was
something of the magician in the fairy book, and not
to be set in anger lest the gold in sight vanish.
A deed was swiftly written, executed, and a check
for twelve hundred dollars passed over to Mr. Hop-
kins.
I shall always remember the comment of that erratic
but cheerful person as we left the building. He
walked along through the corridor beside me, his eye
traveling in sort of childish wonder over Randolph
Mason, who strode before him, doubtless like a Provi-
dence. Finally, as we were coming to the door, he
plucked my sleeve and spoke his comment, which,
phrased differently, was, indeed, the comment of us
all.
“ The old boy's hell! ain't he?"
For the legal principle involved in this story see The Law
of Mines and Mining in the United States (Barringer &
Adams, page 15), also the following cases: Koen v. Bartlett,
41 W. Va., 559; especially 567; Williamson v. Jones, 39 W. Va.,
231; Wilson v. Yost, 43 W. Va., 834.
“The rule is well settled that a tenant for life, when not
precluded by restraining words, may not only work open mines,
but may work them to exhaustion,” p. 567, Koen v. Bartlett,
supra. Opinion.
166


CHAPTER IX
THE PENNSYLVANIA PIRATE
REFORMS, it would seem, only cause the devil to
change his clothes. The advance of civilization is
a progress in disguises; the agents by which the
Emperor of the Hoof carries on his gentle arts are
always costumed appropriately to the times, but the
agents themselves remain the same. For example,
would you find again the free-booters, hanged so
long ago at the yard-arm, you have but to look closely
at the financial advertising in certain great dailies of
New York.
Kidd, Morgan, and Stede Bonnet of the Barbadoes
are not dead. In any city of America, they are living
—although the scenery about them has been rese!.
The sloop of eight guns has been traded for a north
office in a Trust building, and the cutlass has gone
in pledge to the printer. It is a trick cf costuming,
but the business of the play is quite the same; the
doubloons, the pieces of eight are still to be had from
the hold of the merchantman.
The wonder of these financial ventures, so glaringly
advertised, is that the public is deceived by them.
The impossible profits offered ought to be a sufficient
warning, but it is not. It is, in fact, the brightest
167 .


The Pennsylvania Pirate
I was held and puzzled by this striking proposition.
It seemed to be drafted with an eye only to the pro-
tection of the investor. If it had failed to name the
bank in which the funds were to be deposited, or had
named one of a lower standard, I should instantly
have doubted its good faith; but the Driller's Bank
of Pittsburg was well rated; it had a capital of five
millions; its stockholders were, for the most part,
men who had made fortunes in the oil fields of western
Pennsylvania. It was naturally the bank which such
a company would select. Where then was the flaw?
What advantage did such a plan offer to this com-
pany? The money was not paid to it, but to a
responsible bank on deposit to the investor's credit;
the company could not get it. The money would be
returned by the bank, unless an equal sum were paid
by the company to the stockholders. It would, indeed,
be difficult to devise a safer scheme. Almost any one
would speculate under such conditions; it was remov-
ing the element of chance from the game, and yet
here evidently were large sums expended in adver-
tising. Surely a deception was hidden somewhere
there, so the advertisement fascinated me like a page
of puzzles. It lay under my eye for a week; then I
dropped it into a pigeonhole of the desk.
Two years later Captain Roger Shelton called to
see Randolph Mason. I have rarely met a man so
aptly cast for his part as this Captain Shelton. He
was tall, somewhat unevenly fattened, clothed in light
169


The Corrector of Destinies
worsted, with a style of coat provincially called
“ cutaway,” always kept buttoned, a top hat and
very shiny patent leathers. His eyes were alert and
his speech rapid and persuasive. His mouth, how-
ever, was loose in the under lip—the real Captain
Shelton flying there his signal. His manner tended
quickly to establish relations of amiable fellowship;
he strove for that with a certain breezy frankness.
Some one on lower Broadway had sent him to
Randolph Mason. He required a little assistance, he
explained, of a business rather than of a legal nature.
He had struck a hard place in a trade. If he could
get over it, his fortune was established.
The captain seemed an ideal promoter. He strove,
with no slight cunning, to inform himself through me
about Randolph Mason. He led to his queries always
by two roads, like a commander of infantry; when
one was found guarded, he crossed quickly to the other.
I think, too, that his knowledge of men was fairly
accurate, for, when he came, presently, before Ran-
dolph Mason himself, his manner perceptibly
changed, the “ hail fellow” vanished, he stated his
business with a certain approach to dignity, and it
was only when the “murder," so to speak, was out,
that the real man came visibly to the surface..
Randolph Mason gave the Pennsylvanian close
attention. He led him almost persuasively into detail.
He unearthed here and there a covered portion of his
story until the nature of the affair came wholly into
daylight. The art of subtle inquiry, in the use of
170


The Pennsylvania Pirate
which Shelton had a certain skill, was turned master-
fully against him, and so unobtrusively that each
elicited feature seemed to follow .some voluntary
statement like an inevitable sequel.
Captain Shelton had intended to give such elements
of his story as he deemed necessary to his end; but
under his handling by Randolph Mason he was
unable to stop at his own marked points. When he
laid his hands on a protruding limb of his story he
somehow astonishingly drew up with it the whole
hidden body. The point upon which he wished aid,
baldly put (as he had intended), was commonplace
enough. He held ten thousand acres of land under
oil leases, lying solidly in a parallelogram with the
exception of two tracts of nine hundred and twelve
hundred acres respectively. These two tracts were
owned by two directors of a certain savings bank
in New England. The larger tract he did not want,
but the nine-hundred-acre fract he greatly wished;
it was the only territory of the whole block lying, in
his opinion, above oil-bearing strata. He exhibited
a map showing in red this strip of land running across
the parallelogram, and explained that the oil-bearing
rocks in this region sloped on either side, forming a
synclinal, and that this synclinal lay almost wholly
within the tract colored red on the map. It was,
therefore, the storehouse of the whole region. Now
the difficulty was that these two men had an agree-
ment that one would not sell without the other. Each
demanded the same price for his property, one hun-
171


The Corrector of Destinies
dred thousand dollars in cash. The tract lying over
the synclinal was worth half a million dollars, the
other was worthless. Captain Shelton could, of
course, purchase both, but he did not have the
amount. He had in available cash on deposit about
eighty thousand dollars. He could not get another
dollar. He had labored for years, he said, to locate
this eldorado. He had found it at last, like a pot
of gold at the end of the rainbow. By right of dis-
covery it belonged to him; he had earned it with his
wits; he wished now to possess it.
Such were the well-pruned facts that Captain
Shelton had selected for presentation to Randolph
Mason; but the narrative, under Mason's touches,
would not stop with two directors of a conservative
savings bank in New England holding tracts of oil
land in a distant state remaining unexplained; it
would not stop with a mysterious pact binding them
to a common sale at a common price; it would not
stop at eighty thousand dollars clean cash in Shelton's
hand unaccompanied by any avenues of credit. The
parts of the story could not be separated without
disclosing glaring discrepancies. Wherever the nar-
rative was cut, it bled. In his effort to avoid this
obvious result, the man said more than he intended
and in the end told everything that he had meant
to conceal. If the naked facts first given by Captain
Shelton were commonplace, this pirate's log from
which they were taken was not. Cast into proper
sequence this was the whole story.
172


The Pennsylvania Pirate
Captain Shelton was a financial buccaneer. Some
two years earlier, in a gust of fortune, his brig had
sunk and he had come, with five hundred dollars,
perilously ashore. Faced with a desperate need for
a new sloop, he hit finally upon this delectable plan.
The country at large was in a hysteria of industrial
consolidation, the markets gorged with securities, and
the banks necessarily short of ready money. He
went to the president of the Driller's Bank of Pitts-
burg and offered to secure for it a million of dollars
in non-interest-bearing deposits, guaranteed to re-
main undisturbed in the possession of the bank for
at least one year, provided the bank would pay him
three per cent. per annum for the deposit. This was
one per cent. less than banks generally were paying
for time deposits running no longer than four or
six months.
The president at once agreed, and, presuming that
it was Shelton's intention to canvass for deposits,
loaded him with literature of the bank. The excellent
captain dropped these pamphlets into the waste
basket and walked over to a cheap lodging on Fourth
Avenue. There, from a drunken roustabout, for a
hundred dollars, he bought a bagful of oil leases on
worthless territory lying along the east side of the
Ohio River above St. Mary's. Then he got a charter
from the secretary of state of West Virginia, and
organized the Union Consolidated Oil Company with
a capital of five millions. For two dollars and fifty
cents he bought a seal, and for five more a book of
173


The Corrector of Destinies
stock certificates excellently printed on bank-note
paper.
Then the captain sat down at a hotel desk in the
city of Pittsburg and wrote the advertisement which
I had cut out of the New York evening paper. This
he put in the hands of an advertising agency of New
England with a deposit on account of two hundred
dollars. With the remaining money he rented three
furnished rooms on the nineteenth floor of the Iron
Building, and sat down to await the arrival of his
fortune.
The president of the Driller's Bank sent for Cap-
tain Shelton and demanded an explanation of his
remarkable plan. The captain instantly invited an
inspection of the company. He exhibited recorded
leases, legally valid, covering some ten thousand
acres of land, and a corporation properly organized,
the leaseholds transferred in payment of the stock-
every detail entirely within the law. He pointed out
that under his plan no man could lose a dollar of his
money. It would remain on deposit with the bank
to the depositor's credit while he, Shelton, tested the
territory. If these lands proved oil-producing, as
he thought they would, then his stockholders would
make enormous profits. If they proved worthless, no
man would lose a cent, the company would be dis-
solved, the certificates cancelled and every stockholder
permitted to withdraw his deposit. Then he spoke
thus pointedly:
174


The Pennsylvania Pirate
“ Your bank's good, isn't it? You will pay the
people's money back to them, won't you? I can't
rob them, and I suppose you won't."
The president of the Driller's Bank determined to
lay the matter before his directors. In the meantime,
a tide of small deposits began to arrive. When the
directors met on the second Tuesday of the month,
there were a hundred thousand dollars in these depos-
its, increasing with every mail. The bank needed the
money, it was loaded with industrial securities. The
directors hesitated, and finally continued the matter
until the next meeting. The tide swelled into a flood,
the matter never came up again before the board, and
Captain Shelton secured not one million, as he had
promised, but in all nearly two million dollars in
deposits.
The entrance of the two bank directors from
Massachusetts followed a little later on. Shelton had
sent his advertisement broadly scattered into New
England, reaching for persons there with small
annuities and little savings in banks. His plan
touched the very king-bolt in the nature of these
people, a possibility of wealth without risk. The in-
come from their deposits in savings banks was slight.
This speculation involved only the transfer of depos-
its to a different bank with a try at an eldorado for a
rider. Having determined that the Driller's Bank of
Pittsburg was solvent, deposits went flooding west-
ward. So great were the withdrawals that two
175


The Pennsylvania Pirate
these tracts were not included, and he replied that at
the time the company leases were taken they could
not be had, and now he could not secure them without
the consent of the stockholders, a thing impracticable.
He would take these two tracts in his own name, but
such an act might subject him to criticism. This was,
of course, a lie. The roustabout from whom Shelton
had secured his leases omitted these tracts because
the owners demanded twenty-five cents an acre bonus.
Around these two tracts Shelton masked his arts of
suggestion. He wished these men's fingers dipped
with his in the dish, a little of their gold on the table,
a wager left here behind them on the spin of the wheel.
When the two bank directors returned to New
England, they took with them the fee simple titles
of these two tracts. They took with them also the
impression, but not the certainty, that Captain Shel-
ton was merely an adventurer. Able to judge
accurately any situation in New England, they were
at sea here. The bank in Pittsburg was certainly
solvent. The territory advertised by Shelton was
certainly covered by his leases. It was a land where
Fortunatus drunk was swinging his purse by the
strings. Who could say upon what passer the gold
would fall!
Eighteen months later, the Union Consolidated
Oil Company was dissolved and its stock cancelled.
The bank returned the deposits and paid Roger
Shelton eighty thousand dollars in interest. He
feared to place this money in bank lest someone suing
177


The Pennsylvania Pirate
“ My plan,” said Mason, “ will conform to your
way of doing business. Have these men here at
two o'clock. Let them know nothing of the object
of this conference. But you, on your part, take every
precaution. Come a half-hour earlier with your
attorney. Bring the deeds and the cash with you.
Bring also a notary. I would have you take no
chance. I would have you omit no safeguard which
your instincts suggest.”
Captain Shelton was greatly reassured; but a doubt
remained.
“If I come, they won't sell," he said. “That's
the very trouble I'm trying to get around.”
“I will get around that,” replied Randolph Mason.
“ Then,” said Captain Shelton, “ you will have to
pretend to represent some one else, and leave me to
my lawyer.”
“ Your foresight is amazing,” replied Mason.
“I shall leave you entirely to your lawyer. I shall
pretend to represent, let us say, the stockholders of
the Union Consolidated Oil Company."
“Good!” cried the captain, “ that lie will do the
work!"
Randolph Mason arose, and waited for his visitor
to depart.
“I think,” he remarked, “ that it will do the work
excellently.”
The men who met in Randolph Mason's private
office were of most incongruous types. My visual
179


The Pennsylvania Pirate
Captain Shelton was now ready to return. He
wished to do so through these directors, leaving them
to distribute it in detail to the stockholders. However,
in the manner of this restitution, Captain Shelton
wished to avoid the appearance of compounding a
fraud. Mason had, therefore, called this meeting
to propose that these two directors sell their tracts
of worthless oil territory to Captain Shelton in
consideration of this money and, after deducting their
individual expenditures, refund the balance of it to
the various stockholders of the Union Consolidated
Oil Company.
The two bank directors, who had been until now
greatly mystified, agreed instantly to this proposi-
tion, the elder speaking for the other. They
considered their investment in this oil territory some-
what in the nature of a trust, and had determined
to hold the tracts indefinitely, in the hope that at some
future time they would yield enough money to repay
what the stockholders of the company had lost. They
had gone to Pittsburg as envoys, in a way, for the
stockholders, and any gain arising from that journey
was equitably the property of all. They had con-
sequently asked one hundred thousand dollars in
cash for each of these tracts, and had agreed to
pool the two properties, so that if oil were ever
discovered on either tract, it would pay in full the
losses of the stockholders. This price they knew to
be prohibitive, but the tracts were either to adjust
the matter or remain unsold until the end of time.
181


The Corrector of Destinies
The Pennsylvanian, sitting with a calf-skin satchel
on his knees, observed the difficulty in the way of his
fortune thus easily overcome with a sudden mounting
joy he could not wholly conceal. His face fell into
the sanctimonious expression of one who, at the cost
of abnegations, would be perfect. Even the hands
of the inscrutable attorney opened wide their fingers
as in admiration of a master. The next statement
of Mason won still further their amazed approval.
He said that the two sales must be understood to
be complete and separate transactions, concluded
absolutely in every detail upon the signing of the
deed, and, in order that no claim could be afterward
set up that in this sale Captain Shelton took
advantage of any secret knowledge of the value of
either of the two tracts, he suggested that Shelton
be permitted to select the tract which at this time he
considered the more valuable, in order that his opinion
might be known before the deeds were signed, pay
for it seventy-nine thousand dollars, and take the
other tract at a nominal sum, say one thousand
dollars. Then if either tract should prove in the
future to be oil-producing, Captain Shelton could
enjoy that good fortune free from any imputation
of deception in its purchase.
The attorney's nimble fingers danced on the rungs
of his chair—this piece of strategy was excellent.
Shelton, too, instantly saw its wisdom. If he took,
now, the worthless tract at the large price, the very
fact of this selection would conclusively prove that
182


The Pennsylvania Pirate
when this worthless tract was purchased he knew
nothing of the fabulous value of the other. His
good faith, his innocence of secret knowledge, would
be here and now irrevocably established for all time
to come. Those who sold estates for pottage usually
came crying to the courts, and if the deeds showed
on their faces that the purchaser was himself mis-
taken in the value of these estates, that cry would fail.
Separate, the two sales ought also to be, that no one
other than the signer of the deed could afterward
claim an attaching equity.
The two New Englanders assented to this, and
Captain Shelton instantly selected the worthless tract.
The attorney took two deeds from his pocket and
laid them before him on the table. He then stated
in detail the terms of the purchase; seventy-nine
thousand dollars in cash for the tract of twelve
hundred acres, one thousand dollars in cash for the
tract of nine hundred acres; the two sales distinct,
separate transactions directly between the parties
named in the deed. He wished this agreement clearly
understood. The sentimental reason moving Roger
Shelton to this purchase, as given by Randolph
Mason, was an observation beside the point. He
alone represented Roger Shelton. The purchase of
these tracts was now a clean-cut matter of business,
showing wholly on the face of the deed. Then he
took up one of the deeds, wrote into it the considera-
tion, seventy-nine thousand dollars, and handed it to
the younger man, who, it happened was the owner
183


The Pennsylvania Pirate
in his possession at any cost, gripped the handle of
the satchel with his right hand and, rising a little,
struck the Pennsylvanian with the clenched fingers
of his left. The long body of Captain Shelton slid
back, across the table, crashing into his chair. The
little bald attorney was immediately on his feet, his
fingers twitching like live electric wires, but his face
still as expressionless as wood. He saw instantly
that his client had been outwitted, trapped and,
perhaps, ruined; that the attempt to recover the
money by force had failed; that further deception
and intrigue would likewise equally fail. This athletic
young man, muscled like a blacksmith, his hands
clenched, his shoulders thrown loosely forward, it
were folly to assail with blows. It were equally
folly to assail with wiles that other there, calmly
tearing the deed to ribbons, running the strips of
paper backward and forward through his fingers.
. The plan had crashed without a tremor of warning,
and yet the attorney's presence of mind was not a
whit shaken. His face held its set like plaster, not
a nerve quivered, not a muscle sprung—he had been
schooled to meet the unforeseen. He had gone
through a thousand staggering crises where the life,
the reputation, the fortune of his client were in a
flash periled. He understood instantly, judged the
situation, and acted at once. He thrust the pack of
one thousand dollars, left lying on the table, into his
pocket and helped his dazed client to his feet and to
the door. Then he turned back to Randolph Mason.
185


The Corrector of Destinies
“ Your destruction of this deed will not do any
good,” he said. . “ The contract for the sale of this
tract of land was definitely made and concluded, here,
in the presence of this notary as a witness; the
signing of the deed is a mere physical act in no way
affecting this sale. I shall at once institute a suit
for the specific performance of this contract of sale
and have a court commissioner make the deed, if this
man refuses. The testimony of the notary, as the
only disinterested person present, will insure the
success of that suit.”
Mason did not at once answer. He stood looking
closely at the man as one might at some unusual
phenomenon in nature. Finally he spoke, as though
seeking to induce a comment.
“ You will hardly institute such a suit, I
think.”
“Why will I not institute it? ” replied the attor-
ney, his voice rising to a stronger volume.
Mason advanced slowly with his verbal prodding.
“Well,” he said, “ let us say that such a suit would
be founded on a moral wrong. This tract of land
is thought by your client to be fabulously rich. It
lies, I believe, above a synclinal in the oil-bearing
strata. That is, it contains the oil reservoir of
the whole region around it. It is worth, your client
tells me, a half-million dollars. To take it from the
owner for a mere thousand would be a striking
injustice. If the law permitted this wrong, would
your conscience permit it?"
186


The Pennsylvania Pirate
The attorney standing at the door laughed without
disturbing the muscles of his face.
“We will take exactly what the law gives us,”
he said.
“I thought that,” replied Randolph Mason, his
prodding ended, his voice now lashing like a whip,
" and, therefore, I have taken care to see that the
law does not permit this wrong to become effective.
If you look at chapter ninety-eight of the Code of
the state in which this oil territory lies, you will
discover that no contract for the sale of real estate
can be enforced in its courts unless that contract,
or some agreement or memorandum of it, be in
writing and signed by the party to be charged
thereby or his agents. A contract for the sale of
land in that state may be made in the presence of a
hundred witnesses, every detail agreed to, the bargain
struck, assented to, ended, and yet it cannot be
enforced in its courts without some signed writing.
This act is called the Statute of Frauds. I com-
mend it, likewise, to you for the value of its name.”
The hope rising in Roger Shelton's eyes, called
up by the words of his counsel, died there. His
mouth, bleeding from the impact of his enemy's
knuckles on the bone, fell into a baggy gaping. He
turned painfully through the door. The attorney
remained a moment, looking at Randolph Mason.
He had been outwitted, balked, juggled with, then
grilled on the fire, and yet he came forth unmoved,
a Narraganset from the stake. He followed his
187


CHAPTER X
THE VIRGIN OF THE MOUNTAIN
On any Sunday evening of last year one could have
seen the Marquis Mazaccra dining at the Dresden, on
Fifth Avenue. The observer may not have known
this remarkable man nor anything of his history, but
he would instantly have noticed his fine, sinewy figure,
and his features, clean-cut and regular like those of
an Italian bronze. The marquis wore an evening coat
fitting snugly to the waist and squared a little on the
shoulders, after the fashion of the tailors of Vienna.
It is well to remember that every foreign country
maintains a kingdom lying within the boundaries of
this Republic. I do not mean that fiction of sover-
eignty attaching to the legations at Washington,
but a phantom state rather, keeping the customs, the
traditions, even the very laws, of the mother country.
No numbered boundary posts mark the limits of these
foreign kingdoms; our police walk unwittingly
through them as one does through a shadow; the grip
of our courts on them is but a hand closing on a
shadow. After the shouts, the blows, the musketry,
there is still the shadow on the wall. The authority
of a government can be enforced only over that which
189


The Corrector of Destinies
one can
may be felled with a bullet-one cannot pistol a
ghost.
It was only in this kingdom of Italy that Signore
Mazaccra was a marquis. Uptown in New York, he
was merely a star of heavy opera, one Ricardo Robini,
with a voice like that of many sirens. He could be
heard of a winter night, a fluting pipe in Herr
Wagner's mammoth organ, for not more than half
an eagle, and later, for no fee at all, over a mid-
night dinner in counsel with some dreamy-eyed dis-
ciple of Duse, if one came luckily to the same inn
with him.
To that generation which sets Paradise behind a
stage curtain, Signore Mazaccra was a happy half-
mortal, knowing neither good nor evil, a faun of
Praxiteles, full of laughter; one born from a mys-
terious union of some sun-god with a woman of
Tuscany under olive trees on a summer afternoon.
There were no cares, no obligations, no deeps of feel-
ing in that beautiful face, only the first lights of the
morning with the promise of everlasting youthfulness.
And yet the man, plying this emasculated trade, was
in fact a ruthless, calculating, steel-nerved senti-
nel, presenting himself, thus singing, in the world's
most public places, and reporting each night to
that phantom kingdom of Italy, set down like a
well-fitting shadow over the streets and buildings of
New York.
The Marquis Mazaccra lived openly, lodged in a
suite at the Dresden, maintaining a private hansom
190


The Corrector of Destinies
of emotion before crime. He is a hard-headed,
practical lawyer. Why, then, this immunity to the
Marquis Mazaccra, as of one heaven-born, amenable
to no law? Why was he not sent promptly to the
electric chair, and, afterward, to dimmer audiences?
To know this it is necessary to know first a chapter
of Italian history.
If, when one is dropping his copper tribute into
the dish of the collector at Sorrento, he will look to
his left-hand along the Bay of Naples, he will observe
a villa built of ancient Sicilian marble clinging like
a bit of flung-up sea-foam to a little promontory of
the shore, having for background a lemon grove, the
thick branches supported by a lath trellis, like that
commonly built for vines. Below is the sea with its
ever-changing patches of color, reached by a wide
stone stairway ending in the water. In the month of
May and, again, in the month of October, this frag-
ment of the world is not in point of beauty second to
that first fragment by the Euphrates.
When the singing marquis came into his inherit-
ance, there remained only this villa, the half-acre of
lemon grove and the steps to the sea, out of what was
once the finest estate in Salerno. Even the treasures
of the villa had, for the most part, gone elsewhere
in exchange for lira, that the dissolute father of the
marquis might maintain to the last day his midnight
court of revels for the ballet of the Neapolitan opera,
coming up the stone stairway, laughing, shouting,
singing bits of dissolute songs, as though escaped by
192


The Virgin of the Mountain
some enchantment from the halls of Morgana the
Fay, under the sea.
The old marquis could not give up his place at the
head of this Saturnalian stairway, host to these
abandoned daughters of Thespis. He gave up,
rather, the orange groves, the olive presses, the vases,
the bronzes, the rare coral, the nymphs of Della Rob-
bia, rather than these live nymphs. One night,
crowned with a wreath of wilted roses, brought by the
first arrivals from their dancing floor, the old mar-
quis, running forward to welcome Lauretta Matteo
the white devil of Naples—stumbled, and was himself
welcomed by the master of all devils.
The young marquis, arriving swiftly from a mili-
tary school at Milan, found himself to have inherited
a corpse, and little else. Every item of his inheritance
had gone down the stone stairway, except this patch
of garden, this house, this dead body of the marquis,
and an ancient painting of the Virgin hanging in its
heavy frame in the hall. This painting the old mar-
quis had not dared to sell, having a care for the wel-
fare of his soul. Perhaps, also, a care for the welfare
of his body into the bargain. It was painted from
some round-faced Tuscan model of middle age and
was wholly without beauty except its coloring, which
was wonderfully fresh and bright. Nevertheless, it
was the most adored Virgin in the south of Europe,
with a miracle to its credit beyond that of any Virgin
of the cathedrals—not a mere straightening of legs
or a healing of afflicted infants, but the saving of the
193


The Corrector of Destinies
whole village of Torre del Greco, its meadows, its
crops, its villas, its churches, its gardens, as well, also,
as its cripples and its babies.
The manner of it was that on a certain good Tues-
day, with scarce a rumble of warning, Vesuvius began
to pour forth ashes, sulphurous fumes and lava. The
alarmed but pious people of Torre del Greco began
at once to carry in procession every holy relic to be
found in any of the churches, but without effect. The
sulphurous cloud remained, the ashes continued to
fall, the black, viscous streams of lava drew always
a little nearer, scarifying the meadows like hell-vomit.
When the list of these holy objects had been ex-
hausted, a certain padre of Sorrento remembered the
Virgin of the Marquis Mazaccra, and went instantly
in a boat to borrow it. It was carried through the
streets of Torre del Greco behind lighted candles.
That night the eruption of Vesuvius ceased, and the
marquis's Virgin was on the instant famous. She
was called now the Virgin of the Mountain. There
was an immediate clamor for the painting to be
set up in a cathedral, but the old marquis met
this with a choice selection of Neapolitan oaths.
She was his Virgin, for all this fine stopping of the
lava!
There might have been a stiletto in the marquis
then, but for the suave padre who had first thought
so luckily of the Virgin. He came forward, suggest-
ing that, after all, would it not be wiser to leave her
where they had found her? Seeing so much evil there,
194


• The Virgin of the Mountain
would she not be more desirous to do a little good
when the need was pressing? There was sense in
that, and human nature as well. So the Virgin went
back into the villa of the Marquis Mazaccra, a thing
no other Virgin ever did.
There is this virtue in a miracle, that one does not
have to repeat it, like a clown's trick, to keep one's
reputation shining. The Virgin of the Mountain
continued the patron of Torre del Greco. Twice a
year, in May and again in October, the painting was
borrowed of the marquis and carried in procession
through Torre del Greco, with a thousand wax
candles, a great chanting of hymns, a festival of the
harvest, a mighty drinking of white wine, and with
the village lighted that night by a myriad of little
glass pots, each holding a red candle burning in the
bottom of it. It was little enough honor to so ex-
cellent a patron, because if one looked at the matter
rightly was not that first miracle continuously ef-
fective? There was Torre del Greco unconsumed!
One could whistle at Vesuvius with such a Virgin at
his back.
It was May and but seven days before the festival
of Torre del Greco, when the old voluptuary of Sor-
rento fared forth so swiftly with a guest he had not
invited. The new marquis was scarcely warm in his
bare house and the old one cold in his before the pro-
cession of boats, each with its comfortable priest,
came to the stone steps and bore away the Virgin of
the Mountain to her semi-annual worshipping. It
ca
195


The Corrector of Destinies
was the common blue-skied, sunny-aired day of fes-
tival, with every detail of the usual ceremony, and,
unhappily, a further detail added by the Fates, or,
more likely, the mountain, hitting back. An Amer-
ican tourist chose that morning to ascend Vesuvius.
Passing through Torre del Greco, he was met by the
procession of the Virgin, and his driver was ordered
by the priests to pull up by the roadside until the
holy ceremony be ended. The tourist, standing up on
his carriage seat, observed that the procession was
not likely to pass within any reasonable time, and as
the ceremony was in no wise holy to him, a fact which
he stated clearly enough in his own language, he
ordered his driver to go on. The driver declined,
having, like the old marquis, an eye to the welfare of
his soul, whereupon the tourist, not caring a whit for
his soul, caught up the lines and drove into the pro-
cession.
A crowd of women with their hair streaming down
their backs were passing at that moment. These
promptly seized the horses, cut the traces of the
harness, pulled the linch-pins out of the axles, and
trundled the carriage into the gutter. They then, in
a variety of ways, explained to the tourist the esteem
in which they held him. He, likewise, gave his views
no less picturesquely, finally declaring that he would
buy the confounded Virgin as soon as he got down
from Vesuvius, and hang her up in a Carnegie library
-a threat at that moment lost on the un-Englished
peasants of Torre del Greco, but otherwise an expres-
196


The Corrector of Destinies
tain vanished; the canvas had been cut out of the
frame.
The man, overwhelmed with this tremendous disas-
ter, sat down on a bench in his hall, covered his face
with his hands and abandoned himself to despair,
forgetful of the open door and the sun now shining
through it. He was aroused by a voice offering him
the salutation of the morning and the benediction of
God. He looked up to see the padre of Sorrento
standing in the door. The old man had come early,
tramping down the mountain through the wet lemon
groves, to warn the young marquis against that
devil's threat of the American and to bring peace to
his house.
The young marquis took one of his hands from
over his face and pointed to the empty frame hanging
on the wall. The padre, following his finger, groaned
like one struck with a mortal agony and backed
slowly out of the door. Then, livid, quivering, his
teeth rattling like castanets, he cursed the new Mar-
quis Mazaccra with hideous, excoriating curses.
“ Thou who hast sold, like Judas, not Christ, but
the Mother of Christ!”
The boy leaped up like one prodded with a hot
spit.
“No, no, padre!” he cried, “I have not sold it.
It was stolen. See, it was cut from the frame. I
have not sold it!”
The old man pointed a long, shaking finger over
the threshold.
198


The Virgin of the Mountain
“ Thou art a liar," he said, “ like thy master, who
is the father of liars."
Then he gathered his skirts closely about his legs,
shook the dust from his feet and went swiftly down
the steps.
The boy instantly saw the hell-storm that would
descend on him when the padre got back to his people
with the news. The whole village of Torre del Greco
would empty itself up his stone stairway, he would
be bound, weighted with a mill-stone and dropped
into the Mediterranean. No denials would avail him
against the anathema of this terrible old man, fired
with revenge for an insult heaped on the Mother of
God.
He gathered quickly what he could carry tied up
in a cloth and fled to Naples. A steamer was just
going out of the harbor for America. He went
aboard, took his place in the steerage with the emi-
grants and came to New York. Here he repaired
directly to those in authority over the phantom king-
dom of Italy and laid the entire matter before
them. In this new kingdom, as in the old one, he
was the Marquis Mazaccra and a person of peculiar
distinction. Moreover, here his story was believed.
There was precedent enough. More than one time-
honored painting of the saints, treasure of the
mother-land, had been spirited into America after
catching the eye of some fabulously rich barbarian
tourist. There were men in Naples who could be got
to do anything for a handful of lira, even the work
199


The Corrector of Destinies
of Iscariot. Besides, the boy came in the steerage,
with scarcely clothes to his back. If he had sold
the picture, he would have gold. Twenty thousand
lira was something of a fortune.
The new kingdom of Italy decided for the marquis
and went into secret counsel on his case. The young
man had a plan of his own. He knew the face of the
American who had come to buy the Virgin of the
Mountain, and he had, also, the finest voice in the
military school at Milan. Why not, then, get a
place in Grand Opera, if it could be managed. There
could be no better station for a sentinel posted to
find a millionaire than that. Sooner or later the man
would come in with such audiences if he were living.
The matter was easily managed through Filippo
Marchesi, himself an Italian born in Amalfi, a son
of those fishermen to be seen sleeping at noon on the
white sand, by an 'arm of the Mediterranean under
the king's road running to Pagani. Thus the Mar-
quis Mazaccra became one Ricardo Robini, a paid
singer in a theater, but also a sentinel watching
while he sang, and reporting constant failure to
those in authority sitting on the East Side of New
York. But if he failed to find the man he was seek-
ing, he failed not to find the fame he was not seeking.
In the Marquis Mazaccra's throat was a voice de-
scended from the stars. He gained swiftly every-
thing to be had over a footlight. Within five years
he was richer than any other marquis born in the
villa at Sorrento. That shade of Thespis, a specter
200


The Virgin of the Mountain
of ruin to the elder Mazaccra, was now a beneficent
genius bringing endless gifts to the younger. With
the American gold, through an agent in Naples, he
brought back up the stone stairway, the orange
groves, the olive presses, the vases, the bronzes, the
rare corals, even the nymphs of Della Robbia that
his father had sent down it.
More Northern and colder blood would doubtless,
after these years, have given up the Virgin of the
Mountain, and gone about an enjoyment of its
much goods, like that certain rich man. But not so
this blood, brewed in its sun-vat by the Mediter-
ranean. The quest of the Marquis Mazaccra was
charged with a passion for revenge; a motive, it is
said, holding the Italian to a labor and denial pos-
sible to a Saxon only when he wishes to acquire the
lands of another. So the sentinel remained in the
house of Orpheus.
All this was related in minutest detail by the ser-
vant Pietro to Randolph Mason. The occasion for
it was the finding of the Virgin of the Mountain.
Not by the Marquis Mazaccra nor the host of Ital-
ian servants in New York, all commissioned by the
authority on the East Side to search, but by acci-
dent. An Italian paper-hanger, sent to help with
the interior decoration of a house on East Forty-
eighth Street, had discovered the painting rolled up
in a closet of a room on the second floor whose door
he had opened to find a place for his paste-pots.
The house belonged to Tolman Perkins, a retired
201


The Corrector of Destinies
iron manufacturer of Pittsburg. This man, like all
those who, having got a fortune by middle life and
having come to New York to enjoy it, had found in-
activity unbearable, and had gone wandering over
the earth. He was about to return from a three-
years' sauntering through the Japanese East, and the
care-takers were getting the house in order for him.
The fame of Randolph Mason had been carried by
Pietro into the kingdom of New Italy. The authority
there wished to know how the picture might be re-
covered and adequate vengeance visited on Tolman
Perkins. Pietro laid the matter before Randolph
Mason one night after dinner. He crossed himself
devoutly as he spoke of the great sacrilege the
Marquis Mazaccra, a noble, driven into exile; the
poor peasants of Torre del Greco, so long without
protection against the smoky mountain of devils; and
such an insult to God's Mother! This thieving Per-
kins would certainly be himself framed in brass and
hung up in the hottest bowl of Vesuvius for all eter-
nity when at last God judged him!
But, meanwhile, the canvas must be returned to its
place on the walls of the villa at Sorrento, and the
marquis also returned, a resurrected noble, to his
estates; the accursed Perkins made to pay blood-
money. After that, he could be abandoned to the
vengeances of God. The authority of New Italy
was of this sensible opinion.
Randolph Mason bade Pietro sit down in a chair
before him, and he explained with the greatest pa-
202


The Virgin of the Mountain
tience the avenues of redress. A suit could be insti-
tuted in the circuit court of the United States by
this Mazaccra, a subject of King Victor Emanuel
the Third, of Italy, against Tolman Perkins, to se-
cure the painting and adequate damages. The pic-
ture could be taken, meanwhile, into the custody of
the court by a proper writ. This was the direct legal
plan available in such a case, and to be advised. If
this authority on the East Side preferred not to go
with such a matter into the courts, then he would
give it a plan by which the matter could be adjusted
without the running of any writ. But first, Pietro
should go back to New Italy, state exactly what
Randolph Mason had said, and learn which of the
two plans the authority there preferred to follow.
But, in the meantime, the Marquis Mazaccra had
elected to follow his own plan. Taking the place of
the Italian paper-hanger who had found the picture
of the Virgin of the Mountain, and disguised as that
workman, he went on the day following the discovery
to the house on Forty-eighth Street and brought the
painting away with him enclosed in a roll of burlap.
Pietro reported to Randolph Mason that the stolen
picture had been thus recovered and that the author-
ity of New Italy now considered the matter ended.
The Marquis Mazaccra, however, did not consider
it thus ended. The score with Tolman Perkins re-
mained yet to be settled. The Latin mind was not
accustomed to the idea of punitive damages at law
for an injury. The Saxon and the Teuton might
203


The Corrector of Destinies
hale his enemy before a court and make him pay
down money, but such a plan was repugnant to an
Italian. Early peoples, long anterior to courts, have
held revenge to be a certain principle of justice: the
Mosaic law stood squarely on that human conception.
Such an adjustment of wrongs appears in nature to
be ethically correct. A return in exact measure of
the injury received seems, somehow, among men to
be the only adequate conception of equity. The lit-
erature of all nations shows this to be true. The
final act of any melodrama to-day constructed to
meet the popular conception of justice shows it, like-
wise, to be true.
Northern peoples have accustomed themselves,
after long effort, to the turning of these matters
of revenge over to a third party for adjustment in
tribunals created for that purpose. But not easily
so those peoples with the sun in their blood.
. This is a right of man which the Latin will hardly
delegate to another. The resolute marquis again
took the situation in his own hands.
On a certain Sunday morning, a few days after
the recovery of the picture of the Virgin of the
Mountain, New York was astonished by a homicide
belonging, in its deliberate, cruel and theatric details,
to some inquisitorial era. Mr. Tolman Perkins, a
bachelor, was found by his valet at seven o'clock on
this Sunday morning, in the library of his house on
204


The Corrector of Destinies
and he was asked to write the name of the person
who had attacked him. Finally, after repeated ef-
forts, he wrote the following words:
“ It was that Italian, the Marquis Mazaccra, who
did it. When I get well I will kill him.”
He died at three o'clock.
I happened to be with Randolph Mason at about
five o'clock on this day when, through the window,
I noticed Pietro enter the back gate of the house
with an Italian fruit-vender. The man was carry-
ing a basket and the two were talking earnestly to-
gether. I was surprised a few moments later when
both came into the library. Randolph Mason was
standing with me by the window. He turned when
the door opened. Pietro came swiftly forward to
the table in the middle of the room.
“ Oh, Mr. Mason,” he said, “ a terrible thing has
happened! The Marquis Mazaccra is lost!”
Then, hurriedly, gesticulating with his hands and
shoulders, he poured forth the whole story: How a
wax impression of the lock on the Forty-eighth
Street house had been taken for the Marquis Ma-
zaccra after the picture of the Virgin had been
brought away, and a key made; how with this key
the marquis had admitted himself to the presence of
Tolman Perkins in his library, seized him from be-
hind as he sat reading by his table, and visited upon
him this ghastly ordeal of retributive justice; how
Tolman Perkins, contrary to every human possibil-
ity, by reason of a blood-clot forming in the wound,
206


The Virgin of the Mountain
had lived long enough to tell who had killed him.
The Italian janitor at the hospital had made a copy
of his dying statement; the Marquis Mazaccra was
instantly notified, and by the direction of that au-
thority on the East Side, of whom I have spoken,
had come instantly, disguised thus, to Randolph
Mason. He was there by the door.
I looked at Pietro's companion with astonishment.
He was a tall, powerful, but sullen and dirty Italian,
the typical Neapolitan vender of stale oranges.
“Let me see this statement,” said Mason.
Pietro handed him a piece of wrapping paper con-
taining these lines in pencil:
“It was that Italian, the Marquis Mazaccra, who
did it. When I get well I will kill him."
Over Mason's arm I read the fatal words of the
dying man. This Italian had need to be the most
typical vender of stale oranges in all New York.
The Marquis Mazaccrá was, indeed, lost. He had
need to be lost, to be blotted out, from this Sunday
afternoon thenceforth. This voice, calling back
through the door of death, hailed the Marquis Ma-
zaccra to follow by the electric chair, pointed him
out to the State, spoke his name so all men could
hear it. It was one of those unforeseen, mysterious,
sinister tricks of destiny whereby all safeguards of
human ingenuity are sometimes made of no avail.
The only possible hope for the man now lay in the
loss of his identity. Happy, indeed, to be a vender
of stale oranges! He had come too late to Randolph
207


The Corrector of Destinies
Mason. There was no escape now, if the law of New
York ever identified the Marquis Mazaccra.
I waited to hear Randolph Mason coldly point out
to Pietro that, as this man had elected to take the
matter into his own hands, he must now abide the re-
sult and begone. Instead, he quietly asked the Mar-
quis Mazaccra upon what theory of the adjustment
of injuries he had deemed it necessary to kill Tol-
man Perkins.
The vender of stale oranges came forward then,
his head up, his face resolute, his voice when he
spoke, vibrant.
“ You have doubtless," he said in excellent Eng-
lish, “ heard from Pietro here the story of the Virgin
of the Mountain ? "
“ Yes,” said Mason, “but that injury in itself-
does not seem to justify the counter-injury of death.
What I wish particularly to know is how you arrive
at the death penalty as an equitable adjustment of
Tolman Perkins's wrongful act.”
“ You mean," said the Italian, “what man has
Tolman Perkins killed that I should kill him ? "
“ Not quite that,” replied Mason; " but have you
not returned a larger measure of injury than that
received? It is upon this point that I wish to be en-
lightened.”
“A less measure,” said the Italian. “ Three per-
sons have gone out of God's sunlight because of this
dead beast. The Neapolitan bravo who stole the
painting for him, struck with terror at his hideous
208


The Virgin of the Mountain
sacrilege, shot himself before the altar in the Ca-
thedral at Sorrento; Giovanni Battuchi, the little
farmer whose meadows lie nearest to the mountain,
fell down dead when he learned that he had no longer
the protection of the Virgin; and within the last
twelve months, the padre of Torre del Greco, ad-
vancing to the foot of Vesuvius with a fragment of
the forearm of St. Peter, relying upon the virtue in
that holy relic to check a threatening flow of lava,
was himself surrounded by the lava and perished hor-
ribly within sight of the whole village.
“I conceive," continued the marquis, “ that Tol-
man Perkins was as directly responsible for the
death of this poor farmer and this sincere, though
perhaps misguided priest, as if he had shot them
through the forehead with a pistol. The bravo de-
served what he got; but the other two were murdered
by Perkins.”
“Ah!” said Mason, as though the only difficulty
presented in the whole desperate business were now
removed. “ There remains, then, only the detail of
putting you beyond punishment by the State of New
York for what the law will consider to be a murder."
I have never grown accustomed to the indifference
with which Randolph Mason regarded those stu-
pendous legal problems held usually by men to be
impossible of solution. The detail of putting this
man beyond punishment by the State of New York!
There is, on this earth, no authority so far-reach-
ing, efficient, tireless as that of a government in pur-
209


The Virgin of the Mountain
talking earnestly, gesticulating with his hands. I
thought him pleading for a confidence in Randolph
Mason, for a trust in the wisdom of his counsel
which the Marquis Mazaccra could hardly have
entertained. I began to wonder vaguely if Ran-
dolph Mason really intended this man to escape the
electric chair. If it were not rather his plan that
the Marquis Mazaccra should be executed for the
killing of Tolman Perkins. Might it not be that
such a result was necessary in Randolph Mason's
view of the equity of the matter, under his curious
mania for adjustment? Among so many improb-
able things this was not wholly improbable.
From the great newspapers of America nothing
can be hidden; neither a flight on the wings of the
morning nor a dwelling in the uttermost parts of
the sea provides adequate cover. On Monday morn-
ing the whole story of Tolman Perkins's killing was
laid in detail before the world under gigantic head-
lines inquiring who the Marquis Mazaccra was. On
Tuesday morning, these newspapers, with equally
imposing headlines, not only answered this query of
the day before, but pointed out where the Marquis
Mazaccra was to be found, gave innumerable pic-
tures of him, listed the articles of his wardrobe, de-
scribed in microscopic detail his lodgings at the
Dresden, identified him with the singer Robini, and
put then the third query—What motive induced the
Italian to kill Tolman Perkins? On Wednesday, this
211


The Corrector of Destinies
great press, fitting in omniscience to the imagery of
the Psalmist, likewise answered this query with a
fairly accurate story of the stealing of the Virgin
of the Mountain and the expatriation of the Mar-
quis Mazaccra. The theory of motive then was
that Tolman Perkins had caused this painting to be
stolen, had carried it to America, and had been
hunted down and killed in order to recover the pic-
ture and avenge the injury.
Having thus assiduously cleared the matter of
mystery, it awoke on Thursday to a realization of
the fact that the Marquis Mazaccra was still at lib-
erty, and called upon the District-Attorney to cause
his immediate arrest. There he was, living in a pala-
tial suite at the Dresden, going up and down the
city as he listed in a private hansom, smiling cour-
teously but answering not at all to the questions of
any man. Were the police of the city on a journey,
like that god twitted by the Tishbite!
Having thus thrust its elbow into the ribs of the
apparently dozing body of the law, it waited with
inked presses for the instalment of the story having
to do with an examination before a magistrate, and
the Tombs.
Friday, Saturday, a week passed, and the Mar-
quis Mazaccra was not yet taken into custody. To
the stormy interrogation of public opinion, the Chief
of Police replied that he was acting under orders
from the District-Attorney. That latter personage,
when approached upon the same query, replied with-
212


The Virgin of the Mountain
Court Building. We were brought almost immedi-
ately into the presence of the District-Attorney.
“ Sir,” said Randolph Mason,“ permit me to pre-
sent to you the Marquis Mazaccra.”
For a moment there was an expression of the
keenest inquiry in the steady eyes of the lawyer, then
he arose and bowed courteously.
“May I inquire," he said, “ why I am thus strik-
ingly honored ? "
I saw instantly that no fears cudgelled this un-
usual man.
“ You have caused an innocent man to be arrested
for the killing of Tolman Perkins," said Mason;
6 we came to say that.”
“How do you know that he is innocent?" said the
lawyer.
“I know it,” replied Mason, “in precisely the
same manner that you, yourself, know it, and with
the same conviction."
“I would prefer," said the District-Attorney, “ to
hear the Marquis Mazaccra upon that point.”
“With pleasure,” replied the Italian. “ The valet
did not kill Tolman Perkins."
“Who did kill him?” said the lawyer instantly.
“ Pardon me,” replied the marquis; “ is not that
query a trifle beside the point?”
“ Suppose," said the District-Attorney, slowly,
“ I should cause you to be detained as a witness in
this matter!"
“ Sir,” said Mason, “it would be an act of the
215


The Corrector of Destinies
purest idiocy. He would decline to answer, on the
ground that such an answer would tend to incrimi-
nate him, and so be immediately discharged. You
must, my dear sir, be content with the word of the
marquis as a gentleman."
“Why not, rather," said the District Attorney,
speaking even more slowly, “arrest the Marquis
Mazaccra for this murder?”
“ Indeed, why not?” replied Mason. “You are
quite convinced that he is guilty of it."
“Do you admit it, then ? " said the lawyer.
“ Pardon me," said Mason, “ I am his counsel and
shall always formally deny it.”
“ Gentlemen,” said the District-Attorney, “ this
interview is preposterous.”
“At any rate,” replied Mason, “it is ended.
Good-morning."
Then he turned abruptly and walked out of
the room. The marquis bowed to the District-At-
torney and followed Mason, while I came at their
heels.
It was beyond any purlieus of the probable that
the District Attorney would now permit this prac-
tically confessed killer of Tolman Perkins to leave
the building a free man. This interview, for sheer,
incredible folly, seemed to me without even an imag-
inary parallel. It smacked of insane, strutting brag-
gadocio. I saw no common-sense result that such
flaunting of a red flag before the law could secure.
Mason seemed to be helping the singer Robini into
216


The Virgin of the Mountain
ave
the death cell. It must be, then, that Mason wished
the man strikingly punished. The language of the
District-Attorney was indeed exactly descriptive of
this interview, it was preposterous! I looked every
moment to see an officer touch the Marquis Mazaccra
on the shoulder, and the spell of this artificial situa-
tion snap. And yet he walked before me leisurely to
the carriage and entered it. We drove to the Dres-
den and there the marquis descended and mounted
the steps to his apartments.
I turned then to the human enigma in the seat
beside me.
“Mr. Mason," I said, “ this morning's work will
surely cause the arrest of the Marquis Mazaccra.”
“I fear not,” replied Randolph Mason. This
District Attorney is no ordinary person.”
On the following morning the storm of public con-
demnation doubled around the head of the District-
Attorney of New York. The story of the mysterious
visit of the Marquis Mazaccra and his counsel to the
Criminal Court Building was elaborately published,
rounded with the statement that the Italian had there
confessed to the homicide and invited the District-
Attorney to arrest him in place of the innocent valet
of Tolman Perkins. Why was the singer Robini
above the law?
The organ of the party opposed in politics to the
District-Attorney denounced him with savage edi-
torial comment. If he was afraid to prosecute the
Italian Robini, it would find an attorney who was
**
217


The Virgin of the Mountain
of masters, a hydra-authority, safe only while its
tongues kept chorus.
. Within a week of the date of the arrest, the Mar-
quis Mazaccra, alias Ricardo Robini, was indicted
for the murder of Tolman Perkins. His case was
advanced on the docket, a jury was impaneled, and
the man placed on trial for his life. The valet, re-
leased and sitting in the court room, was the chief
witness for the people. Randolph Mason appeared
as counsel for the prisoner, but his conduct of the
defense was so acquiescent that Fagan's organ face-
tiously named him the co-counsel for the people. He
offered no objection to the special grand jury, no
objection to the advancing of the case; he put no
question in the voir dire examination to the talesmen,
and, in fact, assisted the new prosecutor to get the
trial as quickly as possible under way.
This strange method of defense was not unmarked
or without public comment. The jurymen were
searchingly investigated by Mr. Fagan's journal to
determine if they were reached by any subterranean
influences; but they were shown to be men of ordi-
nary affairs, wholly without any foreign relations.
The Governor was interviewed, the personnel of the
Supreme Court scrutinized. To be sure, no hope lay
there for this mysterious prisoner. So far afield did
this labor of suspicion carry that the very officials
of the prison were turned around in the public light
of inquiry.
In the meantime no more impressive or engagingly
219


The Corrector of Destinies
“Your honor,” said Mason, “ we admit the identity
of the Marquis Mazaccra.”
The joy of Mr. Fagan could not be concealed;
it sat glowing on his face as he got once more
to his feet. The only gap in his evidence had been
bridged for him. The road to the conviction of
his prisoner lay now unbroken before him in the
sun.
“ If your honor please,” he said, “I have proved
the incidents of the murder, the death of the victim,
and the circumstances attendant on the dying decla-
ration of the deceased. I wish now to introduce that
declaration, to connect the prisoner with this killing.
The identity of this prisoner with the Marquis Ma-
zaccra having been now admitted, I take it that the
people have made their case.”
Then, posing on one foot, and raising his voice
until it carried to the bailiffs at the door, he read the
original statement of Tolman Perkins:
“It was that Italian, the Marquis Mazaccra, who
did it. When I get well, I will kill him."
If any one had been at that moment observing
closely the face of the presiding judge, he would have
noticed a curious transition there, as of lights swiftly
changed behind the immobile features. The judge
was an able and conservative trier of causes, and
made it a point never to read any newspaper notices
of a crime, nor to be advised in any manner of public
opinion, nor of any comment antedating the trial of
the prisoner. He thus got his knowledge of the case
222


The Virgin of the Mountain
solely from the evidence produced before him on the
trial.
“May I inquire, Mr. Fagan,” he said, “ if you
have any evidence further than this declaration to
offer for the people?”
“No, your honor,” replied the lawyer. “ This
seems quite enough to establish the guilt of the pris-
oner. The people rest with it.”
The judge looked down at Randolph Mason.
“Has the counsel for the prisoner anything to
say on the admissibility of this evidence?"
“No," replied Mason, rising; “I object merely
to its introduction, and move the court to direct a
verdict of not guilty. We have no evidence to offer."
Mr. Theodore Fagan arose then, buttoned his
frock coat, thrust his right hand into its breast, and
delivered an oration on the homicide. From the tail
of a cart, before a street mob, Mr. Fagan was an
effective speaker. In the cruces of turbulent conven-
tions, he was almost a genius, of a certain order. He
fitted the prisoner to the stage-setting of a fiend, he
conjured forth the horrors of a man bound in a chair,
set before a mirror to watch himself bleed to death.
He called upon justice, beating his breast like the
priests of Baal, to send down fire from heaven and
consume this Italian smiling ironically in the dock.
It was a lurid thing, not without effect on the jury
and those who sat listening in the court-room. Had
the law been absent, such a speech would have swept
the marquis to the lamp-post. But to the dispas-
223


The Corrector of Destinies
sionate judge, the words were as sounding brass.
When Mr. Fagan returned finally, steaming, to his
chair, the judge arose and addressed the jury.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “ there is no more difficult
duty than that of passing upon the guilt or inno-
cence of one charged with a crime; therefore the law,
out of an interminable experience, has laid down cer-
tain definite rules by which courts are to be governed
in the exercise of that duty. These rules are said to
be the very refinement of reason. They at least in-
sure a certain order and a certain uniformity of re-
sult not otherwise attainable. They are rigid, ac-
curately determined and binding alike on all courts
of justice. It is certain that now and then the ob-
servance of these rules permits a guilty man to escape
punishment. But, in the meantime, they are the
safeguards of persons injustly accused and preserve
the innocent from passion, prejudice or a public pre-
conception of guilt.
“In the case before you, evidence has established
the violent death of a citizen, and the circumstances
attendant on it; in fact, the perpetration of the
highest crime under that of treason. If, in addition
thereto, proper evidence should be presented tending
to connect the prisoner with that killing, you would
have the right, under the law, to say whether he is
guilty or not guilty of the crime. The assistant
district-attorney offered the statement of the de
ceased, naming the Marquis Mazaccra. The identity
of that person with the accused is admitted. This is
224


The Corrector of Destinies
ment itself established the contrary beyond a doubt.
When I get well I will kill him.' Here is more than
a hope of life. Here is a threat of retribution, based
on a conviction of recovery. This statement of the
decedent is, therefore, not an admissible dying decla-
ration. It cannot be introduced as evidence. It is a
worthless recital, before the law.
“Now, gentlemen of the jury, there is no evidence
whatever, other than this inadmissible statement,
tending to connect the accused with this homicide. I
shall, therefore, sustain the motion made by counsel
for the accused. You are directed to find a verdict of
'not guilty. And the Marquis Mazaccra, alias
Ricardo Robini, is discharged.”
The following morning the District-Attorney of
New York had his triumph. His statement to the
electorate of the city marked the greatness of the
man; it was dignified, concise and without exultation.
Being aware that the statement of Tolman Perkins
was not admissible as evidence, and that the Italian
would be acquitted if seized and tried, his plan was to
set the police machinery at work on the case in the
hope of finding some evidence connecting the accused
with the crime. Finally, when the great wave of
public opinion descended on him, he determined to
yield to its wishes and thereby give the people an
object lesson, an example of the danger of public
clamor when directed against the administration of
the law. He looked upon the result as a thing not
to be deplored, rather as a public good, tending to
226


The Virgin of the Mountain
strengthen the confidence of the people in the in-
tegrity of its public servants.
It was now clear to me why Randolph Mason had
tried to goad the District-Attorney into a trial.
There was danger in delay, something might be dis-
covered; but a trial upon the evidence in the posses-
sion of the people must result in acquittal, and, if the
man was once acquitted, he could not again be tried,
no matter what after-evidence was discovered.
The Marquis Mazaccra saw it all, too; but he
made no fulsome offer of thanks to Randolph Mason
in the court-room. He maintained there his bearing
of an aristocrat, the air of a man lightly indifferent
to sun or shadow. Later, on his way to an Italian
· steamer, he came in for a moment.
“Mr. Mason,” he said, “I wish to thank you for
my life.”
“ Sir,” said Mason, “I had no interest in your
life. The adjustment of your problem was the only
thing of interest to me.”
I have not been lately in Italy, but I am told that
if one will double the copper coins dropped into the
dish of the collector at Sorrento, he will be rowed
along the Bay to the villa of the Marquis Mazaccra,
and, if he increase this wage to a lira, he will be
shown the Virgin of the Mountain..
For the legal principle involved in this story see Greenleaf,
or any text-book on evidence.
227


CHAPTER XI
AN ADVENTURE OF ST. VALENTINE'S NIGHT
On the night of the fourteenth of February, I
came to New York from Philadelphia. The fast
train from the South was late and did not arrive until
nine o'clock. It was very cold, the windows of the
cars were incrusted with ice, there were miniature
snow drifts across the vestibules, and the steam pipes
smoked. I was exceedingly hungry. The dining-car
had been cut off at Philadelphia and my hope of
dinner was beyond me, in New York. When the boat
which carried us across from Jersey City to the
Twenty-third Street ferry touched the dock, I jumped
off and ran into the checking room to give directions
about the transfer of my luggage. I was delayed by
the oriental leisure of the man in charge. When I
got out, finally, into the street not a cab was to be
seen. The wind was driving past every moment with
increasing fury, the frozen snow flakes cut one's face.
I started to cross the street to a waiting street-car.
I had hardly stepped out from the ferry house when
a hansom pulled up and I hailed it.
As I put my foot on the cab step, I heard behind
me a little smothered cry of disappointment. I took
228


An Adventure of St. Valentine's Night
my foot down from the step and turned around. A
little way behind me, under the eaves of the building,
stood a woman wearing a long fur coat to her feet,
and carrying in her hand a traveling bag. Her face
above the fur collar of her coat was wrapped in a
black veil. I went at once to her.
“ Madam,” I said, “ did you call this cab?"
“No," she replied, in a voice low, musical, but
greatly troubled; “ I did not call it, but I hoped to
get it.”
Then she added with a flutter in her voice,
“I am alone. I cannot possibly walk in this storm,
and I must get quickly to the Dresden.”
“ Madam,” I said, “ this hansom is at your service;
pray take it."
“ But you? ” she answered.
“I shall get up-town some way,” I said; “the
elevated station is only a few blocks away."
I helped her into the hansom, then another tre-
mendous gust came roaring down by the ferry house.
I banged the doors and ducked my head to escape the
fierce onslaught of the wind. When the gust passed
I looked up to find the cab standing beside me. A
little hand threw open the hansom door, the soft,
musical voice said,
“I cannot leave you here in this terrible storm,
get in.”
I got in, howled to the driver to get over town to
the Dresden and sat down by the unknown. As the
hansom wheeled into the street, the woman leaned
229


An Adventure of St. Valentine's Night
“ Just arrived, sir, in the first hansom, sir.”
I glanced at the elevator, the door clicked; the
escape was by a hair's thickness. I turned to follow
the man. He was advancing to the clerk's desk, his
back toward me. I observed that he was rather tall
and wore a dark ulster with a strap across the back.
The incident required no reflection. Here was the
hurrying stranger of the ferry-shed, certainly one of
several kinds of dragons to be found at the heels of
escaping beauties. I should presently see to which
type of dangerous beast he belonged. I strolled over
to the big leather settle opposite the clerk's desk,
planted myself in it and lighted a cigarette. The
new-comer wrote his name in the register, took off his
coat, and turned. I saw then that he was not an irate
father, obviously. He was either the brother, or alas,
the husband of this charming unknown. He was a
tall young man, evidently from the South or West.
His eyes were gray, he wore gold-rimmed spectacles,
his nose was aquiline, his mouth and chin firm and well
cut. He was evidently a person of determination and
courage.
“ Aha!” I said behind my cigarette; “ there is here
certainly snuffings of battle, but not afar off. How-
ever, before the shouting of the captains begin to
arise, it might simplify matters if I knew whether the
Nemesis is brother or husband.”
I should arrive at the solution from his bearing;
Monsieur Le Coque or Dupin would read it, instantly,
like a weather report. I looked up at the man's face.
233


An Adventure of St. Valentine's Night
away the cigarette, went into the dining-room and
ordered a somewhat elaborate dinner. Events were
marching over me, the good St. Valentine slept. I
must dine alone, while the unhappy truant trembled
and went hungry, and, while, perhaps, tragedy
knotted the tie strings of her mask.
I was leaning over a cup of bouillon when a low,
merry voice said,
“ You are not very thoughtful of a guest."
I sprang up to confront a dainty figure in a gray
traveling dress, two merry dark eyes, a trace of smil-
ing scarlet above a defiant chin, and a mass of brown
hair wound in loose coils.
“I beg you, madam," I said, “ to lay this dis-
courtesy to my meager knowledge of fairies. I
thought you vanished.”
“What!” she quoted, “ and lose the loin of beef,
the Burgundy, the salad?”
My tone was reproduced adorably. Then she sat
down opposite me at the table, as bewitching a
madcap as ever danced out of the kingdom of Queen
Mab.
So, then, I had been mistaken. She had not seen
the Nemesis after all. Or better, perhaps, the person
who had arrived was not he, or there was no Nemesis
except in my disordered fancy. I looked over the
room for the man. If he were spying, he would be in
some corner of the café with his eye on us, and so he
was. I found him presently, a little behind a palm in
a nook by the door, and such eyes! They burned like
235


The Corrector of Destinies
dull green lamps. The smile was faded out to its last
vestige, the face was sallow, its tense lines could not
be read incorrectly. Some huge, skulking emotion sat
watching with this man. The woman had not seen
him—that was the whole solution in a word.
I could not eat much for all my boastings of
hunger—no one could under those ugly eyes. They
seemed now to glitter when the leaves of the palm
threw little shadows on spectacle glass. That glass
added a certain terror, the eyes became like one
moving behind a screen, and there was something
sinister in the smiles and laughter of this charming
woman under an espionage she did not dream of. I
held my place as carelessly as I could, under this
menace like a cocked pistol. I fished a little for a
clue.
“Madam," I said, tipping a little of my wine into
the plate, “ the king, your father, doubtless sends an
invisible escort with you. I pour out a libation to it.”
She put aside the bait.
“I am an orphan,” she said, “not even a brother
on the throne.”
That lopped off one limb of the problem, if it were
the truth.
“But, madam,” I began.
She held up her ungloved hand, as bare of rings as
my own good nose. That dismissed the husband—if
the ring were not in her pocket.
“I beg your pardon,” I continued. “How could
one hope that you had escaped bondage for so long?
236


An Adventure of St. Valentine's Night
The men of your land must resemble that foolish peo-
ple railed at by the Prophet."
She lifted her little chin with a quaint challenge.
“ Am I so old, then? ” she said.
“ Yes, Mademoiselle Inconnue," I answered,“ quite
eighty years old, I think. The letters to you have
been published thirty years.”
“ Excellent, Monsieur Mérimée,” she said. “We
are now supplied with names, we shall get on better.”
I could have taken this promise with a greater joy
had it not been for the sentinel behind the palm. I
have rarely seen a more bewitching woman than this
Mademoiselle Inconnue. She was evidently of Latin
stock. French, I thought. The outlines of her face
were Continental, the vivacity of it Parisian. Her
words had now and then a noticeable accent. She was
perhaps born in the Faubourg St. Germain, and ex-
patriated in her short skirts. I thought of her as
descended from those women of the Empire who,
Halevy says, Legan their memoirs with so subtle and
piquant a listing of their charms that no man, after
the first page, ever lais, down the volume until he had
the last word.
If it had been any other than St. Valentine's night,
I should have set a doubt against this sudden geniali-
ty of my companion. She had not been so sunny
in the hansom, but here she laughed like a brook. We
might have been runaway lovers with no horses gal-
loping behind us. I would have given kingdoms for
a red-hot spit in those eyes under the palm; but there
237


An Adventure of St. Valentine's Night
when he entered with the porter. She knew that he
sat behind that palm when she came in to dinner, and
yet she came, and played with me a comedy of sweet-
hearts crowded with suggestive incident, and over-
played it. No woman would so goad a man who had
any rights over her. Her subtle knowledge of the
savage always somewhere in him would warn her
against bearing on the sore spot too hard. If noth-
ing else, she would fear the danger of a scene in a
public dining-room. But she defied the man. Ob-
viously then, he was one who watched without any
authority to control her. To what class did such per-
sons belong? Plainly, to the sleuths of the law. The
man in the spectacles was a paid spy. He could re-
port what he saw, but he could not interrupt it. The
explanation had arrived.
I had barely settled the matter to my satisfaction,
when the man arose and came through the dining-
room past our table to the door. He doubtless saw
that the woman had discovered him and so deemed it
wise to leave the café like an ordinary guest. I ob-
served again that his face was strong, determined and
very pale. Such a type of person did not become a
detective in New York; but all manner of men came
from the great West, and why not a spy with an open,
honorable face? The next moment my last theory
went to pieces.
The young woman looked up from her coffee,
smiled and spoke to him in as pleasant a voice as I
have ever heard.
239


The Corrector of Destinies
“Good-evening, Henry,” she said.
The man bowed courteously and passed on through
the door, a show of color mounting slowly to his
cheeks.
I withdrew then from the field of Le Coque and
Dupin. The mystery was beyond me. One did not
speak thus cordially to a hired trailer, and where in
Christendom was there a spy who blushed? The man
went out into the lobby of the hotel, got a cigar some-
where and sat down in a leather chair by the wall
where he could have a view of the dining-room. Still
he watched, and my Lady Unknown knew that he
watched. She returned to me with a play of still
more bewitching coquetry. It was exquisitely done
for an audience that could not hear the lines.
There was now an air of deep, trusting confidence,
now a gush of banter, now a moment of affection,
restraining with difficulty a caress. I have not seen
the thing done better behind any footlights in the
world.
When the dinner was ended, I went with her to the
elevator, wondering if she would play it out with her
fingers to kiss at the parting. But she only smiled
álluringly and I stepped into the steel cage with her.
Even the Hebrew Scriptures scorned the weakling
who turned back.
“ The parlors are on the next floor,” she said.
Then the door clicked and the elevator began to
rise. Instantly she changed as under some hideous
sorcery. Her hands trembled, her face grew as white
240


An Adventure of St. Valentine's Night
as a grave-cloth. When she spoke her voice clicked
like a steel rail under an express.
“Get out here,” she said, when the car touched at
the next landing, “ and manage to leave the hotel un-
observed. You have done me a great favor. I thank
you."
I got out. The car vanished. I started to go
down the steps, when I saw over the rail the mys-
terious stranger coming up. I turned back and
stepped quickly behind the elevator shaft. The man
came slowly up the stairway and went into the public
drawing-room. I got into the next car that came
down. As it descended, I looked back through the
wire net over the roof of the car. The man was
coming out of the drawing-room door into the hall.
His face was purple.
It was late when I got down-town the next morn-
ing. Pietro let me in and I went at once to my table
in the front office. I was scarcely seated when I be-
came aware of some one talking in the adjoining
room. There was a familiar tone in the low voice that
took my attention from the pile of letters before me.
The door was not quite closed. I arose softly and
looked through the crack. Randolph Mason sat in
his chair, his fingers plucking impatiently at the
heavy mahogany arms, his head held a little to one
side, his eyes wandering aimlessly over the room.
Opposite him, with her two elbows on the table, her
face pressed together in her hands, and a long seal
241


An Adventure of St. Valentine's Night
Passe. She was the only friend I ever had, this old,
crooked, evil-featured Madame Duroque. She could
more easily have sold me to him at the door of her
lodge for a hundred louis. After this, I was, at least,
not hungry. My husband was little more than a boy.
We lived over the Seine by the Luxembourg. I did
not dance any more at the Théâtre Français, but I
went every Monday morning to see Madame Duroque
to tell her everything and to divide with her my hand-
ful of francs. My husband studied art under the
usual masters, but it was every morning thrown away.
He was indolent, utterly worthless, wholly given over
to a life of pleasure.
“ One noon in May, his father arrived, handed me
twenty-five napoleons and told me to go down into
the street. I went with the money in my hand to
Madame Duroque. She put her shawl over her head
and hurried out. I did not see her again for five
days. Then she came with the great American and
took me to the Hotel Continental and to my husband.
Madame Duroque kissed me at the door, put my cer-
tificate of marriage and the wedding ring in a silk
bag and fastened it around my neck with a little gold
chain. Then she took me to one side, and bade me
remain with my husband and demand a hundred thou-
sand francs before I would set foot out of Paris, after
which she went back to her lodge.
“ The father prepared then to return with us to
America. I refused to go, and my husband, who was
now aroused, refused also to go unless I accompanied
243


The Corrector of Destinies
him. I got finally the one hundred thousand francs
and we arrived in New York. My father-in-law, who
owned railroads in a Western state, took us there and
installed my husband as the clerk of a court in a little
town built along the side of a mountain above the
fork of a river where three railroads joined. He was
trying to make a man out of my husband, he said.
At his urging, I invested the money which I had re-
ceived in the bonds of a railroad which he was building
through the county.
“We lived there five years in the smoke, the mud,
the unutterable dreariness of this frontier village.
One day my husband fell and broke his wrist. He
went to a hospital in a neighboring town to have the
bone set, and died under the influence of ether on the
operating table. I found in his pocket this letter,
which he had written to me before the operation.”
She took one of her hands down from her face, un-
hooked. the bosom of her dress, took out a letter and
read it. It was a meager note, a sort of memorandum
to her, in the event of any serious consequence attend-
ing the operation. It told her briefly that the money
which she had invested was lost, that his father had
wrecked the railroad, reorganized it and absorbed its
assets; but that there were twenty-five thousand dol-
lars in a tin box in the bottom of his trunk in her
room. She should say nothing to any one and keep
that money for her own. It was all the provision he
could make for her.
She laid the paper before Randolph Mason, then
244


An Adventure of St. Valentine's Night
she took a newspaper clipping out of her purse and
held it in her hand.
“I found the money packed in big bills in the tin
box. In a few days I knew where my husband had got
this money."
Then she read the clipping. It was an ordinary
newspaper notice, reciting the death of the clerk of
the court, and the fact that a sum of twenty-five
thousand dollars which had been paid into his hands
could not be discovered anywhere on deposit in any of
the banks. This money he had received under the fol-
lowing conditions: The main line of the railroad be-
longing to the clerk's father had condemned and
taken the bottom lands of the town for a freight yard,
and, the land owners refusing to take the money al-
lowed in the condemnation proceedings and the circuit
court not being in session, the railroad had paid it
into the hands of the clerk of this court.
The woman crumpled up the piece of paper and
threw it on the floor, set her elbow on the table,
pressed her open hand once more against her face and
hurried on with her story.
“ My husband's office accounts were gone over and
this money could not be found. He was presumed to
have spent it. I said nothing. It was merely my
one hundred thousand francs with its interest re-
turned to me, and from the very one who, in his
own fashion, had taken it. I was glad, glad of this
settlement by the good God, glad to the very bot-
tom of my heart. I made ready to return to Paris,
one hund me, and to it I was
245


The Corrector of Destinies
too, that the door of the house stood half open. He
had come in unnoticed by Pietro.
The woman got her voice painfully in hand again.
“Here,” she said, “ here is the money.” And she
took up her traveling bag from the floor and threw it
down on the table among the books.
“ Send it back to him. You are a lawyer, you can
do that somehow. I have kept only a thousand dol-
lars for Madame Duroque. Let him arrest me for
stealing that, if he likes. I should be glad of a cell.”
The woman's face was set now in a distressing
tension.
“ Madame,” said Randolph Mason, “ you might
have spared yourself this nonsense. You are guilty
of no crime in taking this money; neither was your
husband guilty of any crime in keeping it, nor yet is
the bondsman of your husband liable for this money.
This money was paid to your husband as clerk of the
circuit court of his county, during the vacation of
that court. It was not, then, money paid into court,
to the clerk, as contemplated by the statute of the
state in which he lived. It, therefore, did not come
into his possession by virtue of his office, and his
bondsmen are not liable for its misappropriation.
Such bonds require only that the clerk shall account
for and pay over, as required by law, all money which
may come to his hands by virtue of his said office. It
is no crime for you to keep the money since it was
neither stolen nor embezzled, but merely entrusted to
your husband under an incorrect idea of the law. The
248


An Adventure of St. Valentine's Night
loss, madam, will fall on the railroad which paid this
money into court—that is, your father-in-law, the one
who should properly lose it."
I looked to see the woman grow suddenly radiant;
but, instead, she buried her face in her hands and be-
gan to cry. The tears trickled through her fingers.
She rocked, sobbing, in her chair. I caught the
handle to the folding-doors between the two rooms
and flung them open. The woman sprang up, stam-
mering incoherently. The man took her in his arms.
Randolph Mason spoke then in his cold, even voice,
but there was almost a smile on his lips.
““ Parks,” he said, “ go out and engage a state-
room on the Kaiser Wilhelm for Cherbourg."
For the legal principle involved in this story see the case of
State to Use of Blake v. Enslow et al. 41 W. Va.; 744.
249


CHAPTER XII
THE DANSEUSE
' By far the most interesting client that ever called
upon Randolph Mason was St. George Fairfield
Porter. I do not put this superiority upon any one
predominating feature; in point of dignified manner,
in point of physical impressiveness, in point of court-
ly presentation of his case, he was easily first. He
came attended by a retinue, like a maharaja. He
gave no personal attention to Randolph Mason be-
yond a certain stolid observation cast in entering
equally upon the rows of leather book-backs, upon
Pietro, upon the glittering ink-stand on the table.
Like a maharaja, he conducted his relations with
others through skillful attendants waiting constantly
on his person. One spoke for him—a sort of regent.
One in white, a servant of an upper order, saw con-
stantly that no profaning hand touched him, and
another, of a lower caste, waited at the door with
various articles of portable luggage.
He held, above all persons of my knowledge, de-
cided contempt for custom. I remember that he
lunched during the interview, that he expressed with-
out restraint his annoyance at a beam of light which
250


The Da seuse
struck him through an open shutter, and once he
sang monotonously the fore words of a ditty with end-
less repetition, like one comfortably at leisure dwell-
ing on a thought that pleased him. Something of his
dress ought, doubtless, to be described. He wore a
sort of yellow sandal, disclosing white hose ending
four inches above on his fat leg, a plaited frock, a
coat hand-embroidered in white silk, a hat buttoned
together, having a baggy crown, a drooping rim—all
of French piqué. In his right hand he carried a dog-
whip, although there was nowhere in his retinue a
dog, and, tucked under his left elbow, a man in minute,
effigy named—as I presently observed—most curious-
ly, “How de-do,” and more curiously, I thought, re-
ferred to by his master as a “ baby.”
Now I admit here upon this record the superiority
of St. George Fairfield Porter in all qualities deemed
excellent among men; but in the matter of sight I am
as good as any of God's creatures, and my gorge rises
at the word baby applied to such a beast as this
How-de-do. There was never on this earth a more
debauched, evil-featured thug of middle age. The
worst strains in three alien races were hideously mixed
in him. The negro kink in his hair spoke of " long
pig” eaten half-raw by camp fires on the Congo; his
puffy, cruel, Turkish face, of ghastly-writhing sacks
cast out of palace windows into the Bosphorus; his
..slim Mexican body, deformed at the extremities, of
good priests buried alive to the chin in the slime of the
Verde, their faces smeared with honey that the flies.
251


The Correce or of Destinies
might devour them. If at the last door-post, by
reason of my sins, I am to meet the devil, I pray that
he may not come upon me in the mortal habiliments of
this How-de-do. I saw now the larger uses for the
dog-whip.
St. George Fairfield Porter was perhaps two years
old. He came accompanied by his mother, a nurse
and a lesser servant. This mother was a woman
whose face impressed me; it bore record of disaster
without attendant hardening of lines, rather the face
seemed cleansed by misfortunes, as a plate passed
through acid. She spoke directly, without coloring
her words, without restraint and without apology, as
one speaks to the surgeon before he strips for the
knife. She did not desire sympathy or verbal con-
solation. She wished merely that Randolph Mason
should have the object of her visit laid clearly before
him. She had consulted with an eminent attorney in
New York, who had sent her to him, as the practicing
physician sends the difficult case to the expert.
She was born in New York City, and had been mar-
ried three years before to Charles Porter, an iron-
broker of that city. This man was a progressive,
brilliant fellow. He had risen swiftly from a subordi-
nate position, partly by reason of his excellent ad-
dress, but chiefly because he was the most practical
authority in America on the manufacture of pig-iron.
The era of industrial consolidation arrived about
the time of this marriage, and Charles Porter was the
first in the East to step into the open door. He swift-
252


The Danseuse
ly got optional control of the iron mill whose product
he was accustomed to sell, and materially assisted to
bring the larger business into one gigantic combine
under a New York charter. This tremendous, giddy
rise was the man's ruin. Shot upward almost in a
night from the status of a middleman to a position of
authority in one of the greatest consolidated indus-
tries of the world, he was wrenched violently loose
from every moral safeguard. He adopted, as an
essential element of this new station, the glittering
vices with which he was now surrounded.
A certain oriental Jew, speaking from rare knowl-
edge of human nature, feared that with riches one
would forget God. Had he been a monogamist, he
would equally have feared the forgetting of one's
wife and God. So long as a man can with difficulty
carry out but one plan of life he is apt to conduct
himself as an honorable citizen. Set on an instant
where many paths are open, he is equally apt to
plunge recklessly into every possible experience. The
American lacked the foresight of King David; within
a year he had startled a continent by his gambling at
Monte Carlo; he had been fined in every city of Italy
for the reckless driving of motor cars; he had been
publicly ejected from the Moulin Rouge for excesses
passing even the elastic standard of Paris.
On his way of riot he came under the eye of a
Viennese danseuse, Suzanne Kinsky, a creature with
the alluring person of a dryad and the hard, practical
mind of an inn-keeper. She attached herself in-
253


The Corrector of Destinies
order permitting their withdrawal only upon the
written direction of a syndicate committee of which
Charles Porter was a member, and encumbered by a
further agreement requiring them to be first offered
to the members of the syndicate before being exhibited
otherwise for sale. This estate was valued at, per-
haps, seven millions of dollars.
· The far-sighted, practical second wife was not
greatly alarmed over the status of these seven millions.
Every other scrap of the estate was in her possession
-cash and negotiable assets aggregating, perhaps,
a million dollars. One-half of these remaining six
millions the law would give her at the husband's death.
Porter had made no will and he was now forever in-
capable of executing one. These iron and steel stocks
were personal property, and one-half would go to the
wife should the husband die, as he was doing, without
issue by the second marriage, the child of the first
marriage having been provided for in the decree of
divorce by a meager annuity in lieu of future prop-
erty rights. Then, when every detail was snugly
arranged, she carried Charles Porter to the medical
experts. They pronounced him utterly incurable,
with perhaps six months to live.
The danseuse now saw the last gate barring her
wildest fancies swing inward on its hinges—a great
chateau in the Bavarian mountains, a palace in
Vienna, a glittering court flitting through continental
capitals like a fairy pageant, all rising from that six
feet of earth into which this slobbering creature, who
256


The Danseuse
had eaten of Circe's flowers, was presently to be
hidden.
Then, on the instant, as under God's finger, that
spoke in the wheel of Fortune, arriving at the summit,
snapped. Suzanne Kinsky, looking over a New York
paper at dinner one evening, read that the Supreme
Court of the United States had on that day pro-
nounced an opinion declaring invalid divorces granted
upon an order of publication.
In another quarter events now began to move. The
catastrophe befalling Charles Porter startled the first
wife into activity. She had not cared particularly for
herself, and she had all along believed that finally
Porter would secure the bulk of his estate to his son.
Now, stricken into senility, he could not. The scarlet
woman must be met with fire. There is no courage,
no endurance, no tenacity comparable to that of the
just, rising, at last, to action. This deserted woman
went at once to an attorney and laid the matter before
him. He brought forth the decision of the Supreme
Court of the United States which had struck such
terror to Suzanne Kinsky, and assured her that the
Courts of New York would refuse to treat Porter's
divorce as valid or of any effect. She would stand
under the law as Porter's wife. The estate in New
York would descend at his death to her and the boy.
But the million dollars which the danseuse had got
into her hands was certainly gone, the woman was
shrewd enough for that. But the Covenanter, the
Puritan, was in the field now. No inch of ground
257


The Danseuse
Thus I met St. George Fairfield Porter, seeking to
regain a lost million of his inheritance under the con-
duct of his regent, a woman driven by that mystic,
fearless, untiring instinct shared alike by the mothers
of the forest.
When the story was ended, Mrs. Porter took from
the bosom of her dress three folded papers and laid
them on the table before Randolph Mason.
“ That,” she said, “is my marriage certificate.
This, a file of the divorce proceedings, and here,” her
fingers pressed the document against the writing-pad
as though to crush it, “is the contract which that
woman had the effrontery to send with her offer of
compromise."
Mason looked casually through the court file; then
he opened the contract and carefully read it, and I,
standing by the table, read it also. It was a rigid
agreement by which this first Mrs. Porter, in con-
sideration of one million dollars, received from
Charles Porter, agreed and bound herself not to con-
test or disturb the decree of divorce; and in order that
the signature might not ever be questioned, it was to
be acknowledged before a notary and witnessed before
the clerk of a court of record under his official seal.
“You will observe,” said the woman, “ that this
paper is an iron-clad contract. My attorney says its
terms could not be more bindingly put.”
“ That is true,” replied Randolph Mason.
“ And,” continued the woman, “by its terms I
would, in point of fact, be agreeing to surrender an
259


The Corrector of Destinies
estate of six millions coming to my son here and to me
at Mr. Porter's death for this one million delivered to
me now. Is not that true?”
“ That also is true,” replied Randolph Mason.
“ Then," said the woman, “ this adventuress is a
fool if she thinks I would sign it."
“Madame,” said Randolph Mason, “you must sign
it.”
Mrs. Porter looked at Randolph Mason a moment
in complete, utter astonishment. Then an explana-
tion suggested itself and she smiled.
“I see,” she said, “ you will use this paper in order
to get the money delivered into your possession or
where it can be held by law, but you will not give it
to that woman."
Then her voice became almost masculinely resolute.
“I know this to be a piece of difficult strategy. I
wish to put it wholly into your hands. I wish in no
way to interfere with you. I want to do exactly as
you direct. But I do not intend to give away six
millions for one. I will sign this paper if you assure
me that it will under no circumstances pass out of
your possession to the loss of my boy's inheritance.
Do you promise me that?"
“I promise you that,” replied Randolph Mason.
Then I conducted St. George Fairfield Porter and
his retinue to a notary public and the clerk of a court
of record, had Mrs. Porter properly identified and the
paper signed and executed as its terms required. The
young gentleman labored for my entertainment on the
260


The Danseuse
way. He pointed out the various colored “ gups”
drawing carriages, the “ meows ” sunning in the door-
ways, the “ giggles” singing in the green trees of the
Park, and once, for the better safety of us all, lashed
How-de-do soundly with the dog-whip.
We parted at Twenty-first Street, friends, one
looking on there would have sworn, till death.
I pressed his hand lovingly, but he would not per-
mit the acquaintance to end so coldly. He gave How-
de-do into the keeping of his mother, then ordered me
to “up-go” him, and planted a wet kiss somewhere
in the region of my ear. After that I would have
done murder for him.
When I returned with the executed paper Randolph
Mason seemed already to have forgotten the inter-
view. He was writing at his table, stopping now and
then to consult a digest, open among other books be-
fore him. I waited for a few moments, then I laid the
paper between the open pages of the digest. When
he came again to examine the reference, he picked up
the paper and held it out to me. I saw that his at-
tention had departed from Mrs. Porter's affair. I
took the paper back and explained carefully what
it was.
“ Yes,” he replied, without looking up.
“But, Mr. Mason,” I urged, “what shall I do
with it?"
He wrote on.
“ Take it to the woman and get the money," he
said.
261


The Corrector of Destinies
I thought he could not understand he would hard-
ly direct me to deliver the paper to the adventuress on
Long Island, after his deliberate promise. I went
again over the case, calling his attention directly to
his word. He looked up then, his eyes wavering.
“Parks,” he said, “ you disturb me.”
I should have gone out but for the memory of St.
George Fairfield Porter-I felt his little fat hand
clinging to my fingers, his fortune in my keeping. I
braved Mason before the table. I explained, urged,
denounced such an act of infidelity as the surrender
of this paper. I spread the contract open above
the sheet that he was writing. He sprang up then,
his eyes blazing, his clenched hand hammering the
table.
“ You vex me,” he said, “ you harass me. What
do you want? ”
“I want to know what to do with this paper,” I
responded.
“ What to do with it?" he cried. “I told you!
Go out now.”
Then he dropped back into his chair, oblivious
again to his surroundings.
I felt that I had done all that it was possible for
me to do. If he were determined to violate his word,
why, then, doubtless he had a sufficient reason for it.
Perhaps the divorce was not invalid after all. At any
rate, he was the person in authority, the one responsi-
ble. But had his mind returned to this matter? Did
he understand what I was asking? Was he not, in
262


The Danseuse
fact, merely annoyed by a supposedly meaningless in-
terruption? I feared it.
Nevertheless, I obeyed him. I took a motor-car and
went down to the residence of Charles Porter on Long
Island. The house, enclosed by enormous hedges, sat
on the border of the Sound, a few ancient trees con-
trasting their green with its silver gray. A yacht
hung out beyond in the water. I left the chauffeur
with the car before the door, and knocked. By a mis-
take of the maid I was taken at once into the presence
of Suzanne Kinsky. As a highly-colored incident,
this scene remains strikingly vivid, it seems yet out of
proportion to other events of life, although it con-
tinued perhaps not twenty minutes.
The room into which I was shown was littered with
the light articles of ocean travel, with heavy coats,
rugs, portmanteaus. In the center of the room an
open steamer trunk was packed with stocks, bonds
and bulky packages of currency. A little, dark,
glossy-haired woman, robed in a Japanese wrapper,
was writing at a desk. A man, whom I instantly
recognized as a notorious attorney of New York, one
Levin Howell, the famous counsel of actors, adventu-
rers, criminals with filled pockets, was standing at the
window, his back to me, his fingers drumming on the
pane. He turned around and regarded me with an
expression of profound astonishment. For a moment
he was too overcome to speak, then he began to stam-
mer.
“Good heavens!” he said, “ this is not my partner.
263


The Corrector of Destinies
This is Mr. Parks, the secretary of Randolph
Mason.”
The woman writing at the desk flashed to her feet
like cotton touched with fire. For a step or two she
advanced on me as a weasel might upon some larger
creature. Then she turned viciously on the maid, and
cursed her in French, German and Italian, until, in
the Lorraine peasant's figure of speech, a fly passing
would not have lighted on her.
I gleaned an explanation from this lurid damning.
The attorney was expecting his associate to come for
him in a motor, the maid had been directed to admit
him at once on his arrival and, naturally, she had
taken me for the man.
The infuriated woman slapped the maid's face,
pushed her out of the room, locked the door and
turned to me, her eyes again shimmering beadily, like
a weasel's.
“What do you want? ” she said in English, biting
at each word as it came out.
I had no wish to be scratched to pieces, so I took
the paper out of my pocket and swiftly explained my
errand. The pistol, the scalping-knife, the acid bot-
tle, instantly vanished. A moment's calm fell and
then the sun flooded that theater of savagery. Thus
a convict escaping from the death-cell would have
acted, if, as he climbed the wall, a guard had touched
him, and, turning about desperately to meet a bullet,
he should be handed a reprieve. The woman and her
attorney carried the contract to the desk, spread it
264


The Danseuse
out, read it and re-read it absorbingly, surely as that
convict would have done his pardon. Then they
talked whisperingly together while I waited. Finally,
the attorney spoke to me, holding the contract in his
hand.
“ If you will pardon me a moment, Mr. Parks,” he
said, “ until I verify these signatures, we will conclude
this matter."
He went out into the hall to a telephone. I heard
him call up the clerk and the notary. While he talked
I had a little leisure to examine Suzanne Kinsky. Her
complexion was of that deep, beautiful olive to be
found only in the south of Austria. Her hair was
heavy with the purple-black gloss of dye, although it
was certainly not dyed. Her figure, fallen now into
repose, was sensuous and dainty; her hands were es-
pecially tapering and beautiful, but her ankles were
thick-the ankles of a ballet dancer.
In a few minutes the attorney returned.
“Mr. Parks,” he said, “ this contract seems to have
been properly executed. My client will accept it. I
think you will find the full consideration packed in
that steamer trunk in money and securities.”
I went with him to the open trunk and, in ten min-
utes, had verified its contents. The bulk of the fund
was in securities and the remainder in banknotes of
large denominations. These securities were difficult
to value accurately. I thought the trunk contained
some twenty-eight thousand dollars more than the re-
quired sum. Howell thought it contained forty thou-
265


The Corrector of Destinies
sand more. We compromised finally at thirty-five, and
he took out that sum in currency. I closed the trunk
and carried it myself to the motor-car.
Then I returned up Long Island to New York, the
first man since Kidd to travel there with a chest of
treasure, albeit to the passer I appeared to be merely
one returning to his town apartment with a rather
knocked-up steamer trunk, held together by a broad
leather strap. I wondered, as I went, into what pleas-
ing scene this changed situation fell at my departure.
I had come evidently, by the maid's blunder, upon a
flight. I had entered, to the danseuse an instrument.
of the law with some detaining writ, and was changed
into a friendly herald of surrender. I had brought,
against all hoping, peace, the end of harrowing un-
certainty—a signed instrument of settlement. Three
millions to the adventuress for one!
That hour was highly colored, and yet the hour ar-
riving passed, I think, beyond it. At three o'clock I
had set the trunk down in the office of Mrs. Porter's
lawyer, and explained its contents. He called her in-
stantly by telephone, and once more St. George Fair-
field Porter came before me with his retinue, the only
one of us on this dramatic day a gentleman unmoved,
and yet the one whose fortune was in peril.
Again I saw a woman cast from one emotion vio-
lently to another—a woman of a higher order, and
yet the situation was no less one of desperate drama.
Mrs. Porter had taken the message to her for some
clean recovery of the money, and came elated as to a
266


The Danseuse
victory. When she had the story, when she knew that
the contract of settlement had been delivered for it,
she fell upon that instant to the very grave-floor of
despair. By this folly of Randolph Mason she had
lost the major portion of her boy's inheritance. He
had surrendered the paper against his promise, he
had broken his word immediately, he had given up for
one million dollars their claim to the estate! The
thing in the acuteness of its injuries was criminal, and
yet there was here no violence, no bitter word, no
ravings of hysteria. The woman was terrifyingly
quiet, her face fallen into a painful stiffness. In that
hour I admired her lawyer. He made no comment
upon this verification of his own advice, upon this
blunder of Randolph Mason, upon failure following
where he said it certainly would follow. He set the
trunk on end in his office vault and took his client to
Randolph Mason.
I carried St. George Fairfield Porter from the car-
riage to Randolph Mason's house. I was still his
loving friend, although by my act I had lost him and
his mother on this day six million dollars. He patted
me softly on the shoulder and, by infant magic,
changed me to an Arab charger, urged gently with
the dog-whip. Then he placed the murderous How-
de-do astride my collar with various equestrian direc-
tions. So little a thing was six million dollars against
a friendship. Since I was set wailing in this world,
I have not gone two hundred feet with a keener
misery
267


The Corrector of Destinies
We found Randolph Mason writing at his table,
where I had left him. In his presence the distressing
dumbness which had fallen on Mrs. Porter for a mo-
ment lifted. She went forward resolutely to his table.
“Mr. Mason,” she said, “why did you break your
promise to me?"
Randolph Mason arose and, seeing me, ignored her
query.
“ Parks," he said, “ did you get that money?"
“ Yes," I answered, “I did exactly what you di-
rected me to do. I took the contract to Suzanne
Kinsky and got the money for it.”
“Good!” he said. Then he turned to the woman
standing by the table.
“Madame,” he said, “ I have kept my word rigidly.
I said that this paper should not pass out of my pos-
session to the loss of your child's inheritance. I have
kept that promise. You have now in your possession
the one million of dollars which you wished me to
secure, and, under the laws of New York, you and
your son will inherit the remainder of the estate of
Mr. Porter at his death.”
“But, my dear sir,” interrupted the attorney, “ you
have delivered an agreement by which Mrs. Porter
binds herself not to disturb the decree of divorce
granted in Connecticut. That paper will be filed in
bar of any proceeding now taken to establish her
right to the fortune as the true legal wife of Charles
Porter. You seem strangely to have overlooked the
effect of this agreement.”
268


The Danseuse
“I have overlooked nothing,” replied Randolph
Mason.
Then he took up a book from the table, opened it
at a certain page, and handed it to the attorney.
“ There,” he said, “is the leading decision in this
country, holding that where a decree of divorce has
been wrongfully obtained, a subsequent agreement
among the parties that it shall not be disturbed is an
illegal contract, void, as against public policy."
For the legal principle involved in this story see Comstock
v. Adams, 23 Kansas, 513, 33 Am. R. 191; Black v. Nohl, 102
Mo., 159; Haddock v. Haddock, Supreme Court of the United
States, 201 U. S., 562.
The courts of New York have invariably refused to treat a .
divorce rendered in another state under the circumstances
stated, as entitled to be enforced in New York by virtue of
the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution of the
United States; and, indeed, have refused generally to give
effect to such decrees even by state comity. Haddock v. Had-
dock, supra, citing Lynde v. Lynde, 162 N. Y., 405; 48 L. R. A.,
679, 76 Am. St. Rep. 332, 56 N. E. 979; Winston v. Winston,
165 N. Y., 553, 59 N. E., 273.
269


CHAPTER XIII
THE INTRIGUER
I was one of that fortunate audience before which
Gafki played the “ Bronze Helmet” at the Broad
Street Theater in Philadelphia. It was a notable
event in America. Gafki came directly from Berlin,
and staged the drama in its every detail, as he had
done it for the Emperor at the National Theater on
Unter den Linden. Philadelphia society possessed the
Broad Street Theater that night. A prohibitive tar-
iff, wisely set by Gafki, barred out the rabble.
I can recall but few details of the “Bronze Helmet"
after the first act. When the curtain came down I
went over to the box of the aged Mrs. Van Couver-
Benson to talk a little with Margaret Garnett. She
and her father, the president of the Consolidated Fuel
Railroads of Pennsylvania, were about to sail for a
winter's visit with our Ambassador at London, and
this was my only opportunity to present personal
adieus. Mrs. Van Couver-Benson is a mere wisp of a
woman, one at the road's end, painfully clinging a
moment longer to life. She sat in a corner of the box,
a bit of breathing wax covered with costly laces,
isolated by deafness. Margaret Garnett was alone,
270


The Intriguer
leader of the people; and then, when he stood an
authority to be reckoned with in the placing of
federal patronage, he chose strangely and with a
small spirit, we thought, the position of a United
States marshal. The men who usually got this office
were aspiring sheriffs. Why, then, did this man,
reared in kings' houses, thus strangely wish it?
I forgot on the instant Gafki and his “ Bronze
Helmet.” Here was indeed news. The engagement
of Margaret Garnett! The big Englishmen would
not haunt now our Ambassador's house in Park Lane.
The tall girl's destiny had arrived.
I made the usual conventional speeches, a bit highly
colored, I fear-rather eulogistic, over-appreciative,
laden with tropical platitudes.
She heard me, like a sphinx, calmly to the end, then
she dropped a guillotine knife on the dainty speeches.
“ Very pretty, Courtlandt,” she said, “ but you are
giving tongue on the wrong trail. Mr. Wood is not
at present intending to marry me. He is absorbingly
engaged in an effort to advance his own fortunes,
somewhat at the cost of my father's.”
I stammered my way back, and she went on, cov-
ering thus unconsciously my confusion.
“I fear that father is not coming off as he would
wish in this contest with Mr. Wood. He laughed a
little at the opening skirmish, somewhat like Gafki's
Cæsar, sitting in his tent; but within the last month
he has advanced his standards, as Cæsar always did
when he was being cut to pieces. You see how much
273


The Corrector of Destinies
I am influenced by this thing of Gafki. Father has
abandoned our winter in London. He must be here,
happy if by being here he can prevail against Mr.
Wood. It is in this manner, Courtlandt, that the man
at the end of the fifth row is standing in the way.”
I was still deeply puzzled. How could one of but
moderate fortunes, a mere United States marshal, in-
terrupt thus seriously the plans of an industrial em-
peror like John A. Garnett. I waited for further ex-
planation. It did not immediately come. The tall
young woman looked down for a moment at the big
military figure in that first seat of the fifth row. Her
eyelids gathered in little quivering lines at their cor-
ners, the dainty muscles of her mouth lifted, thrusting
out its band of scarlet, the delicate nostrils distended
visibly. It was a deep, scrutinizing glance, searching,
charged with interest, reservedly emotional. Then
she came back to me almost with a sigh, and I made
ready for the details of the fight against the great
· president of the Consolidated Fuel Railroads of Penn-
sylvania. It must be a driving, brutal, savage war-
fare so to force John A. Garnett into a corner and his
daughter to such incredible interest. When she spoke
her words seemed irrelevant.
“ Courtlandt,” she said, “ tell me about Randolph
Mason.”
“Randolph Mason," I echoed. “What interest can
you have in Randolph Mason?”
“ You will learn that a little further on,” she said.
Then the dominant quality in her, in her father, in
274


The Corrector of Destinies
Randolph Mason would refuse to assist my father in
the fight with Mr. Wood. It seems to be making the
game unfair, like the Rhine helping the Germans
there against Cæsar. This drama of Gafki, like all
Homeric echoes, outrages my sense of fair play.
There was not, as I remember, a clean fight in the
whole Iliad, some god was always lending a hand.”
She sat a moment silently watching Cæsar's pon-
toon bridges sucked under by mysterious currents.
“No sooner is one fairly beaten,” she continued,
“ than he posts off hot-foot for the big outsider to
assist him. There go the Germans tossing the Bronze
Helmet into the Rhine to buy aid of the devils—and
my father's counsel at his wit's end is turning to Ran-
dolph Mason."
She laughed, a bit affectedly I thought.
“I ought, as a dutiful daughter, to hold a keener
interest in my father's side of it, I suppose,” she said.
“If Mr. Wood is not checkmated, father's railroads
will go into receivership; and if my father crushes
him, he will go, in every sense, under the ax. So I
ought to be fired with a certain barbaric eagerness
for victory, and so, in a way, I am. But somehow,
at the bottom of me, I wish to see the fight fair. No
handicaps, no Olympic legging, the winning to the
best man.”
The fingers of her hands clenched, the pale blue of
her eyes became the harder blue of metal.
“ Straining muscle against straining muscle, wits
fiercely hand to hand, with the cross for the con-
276


The Corrector of Destinies
Margaret Garnett's point of view, it involved a con-
ception of fair play too purely academic; it returned
to a heroic note; it was too ideal for this commercial
decade. Such an attitude was well enough in a Greek
tragedy, or in that German princess conjured up by
Gafki, but not in Margaret Garnett. Still her feel-
ing was doubtless a passing mood created by this
drama, women were notoriously subject to such in-
fluences; it would vanish with eight hours of sleep.
I turned to call a hansom, when one of the theater
attendants touched me on the arm.
“I beg your pardon,” he said; “ can you tell me
if this article belongs to Miss Garnett? It was picked:
up by an usher in her box.” He held in his hand a
flat gold locket attached to a chain linking alternately
a topaz and an opal. I carried the locket to the light
and examined it. The case was without a mark. I
pulled it open to see if there was any inside, and I
found there such a one as left no doubt remaining.
The locket contained the picture of her father, and
opposite it, of all persons on this earth, the face of
Thomas B. Wood.
So the girl's heroic mood antedated Gafki! This
struggle was the one big, thrilling incident of her
prosaic life. Like a woman, she had deified the actors
in it. The nice balance of the struggle was not to be
disturbed even at the price of victory. The fight had
taken on the fine lines of a Latin tragedy. The girl's
mood was the pure joy in combat sung of by the lyric
poets—a thing anachronistic.
278


The Intriguer
E
Randolph Mason's face took on an expression of
unwilling assent, such an expression as one observes
frequently on the face of an examiner in the court-
room, who, failing to bring his witness clearly to the
issue, abandons him to his own manner of recital. He
sat down in his chair, placed his hands idly before him
on the table and then dropped his body leisurely back,
like one hopelessly fated to a long story. These sug-
gestive actions were not lost on the attorney; he knew
exactly by what mental conceptions they were in-
spired. A faint shade of color came for an instant
into his face and vanished, but his voice deliberately
continued:
“ The Consolidated Fuel Railroads Company, of
which John A. Garnett is president and chief owner,
is made up of the principal lines running into the
Pennsylvania coal fields. They reach some five thou-
sand workings, employing several hundred thousand
men. They are the avenues by which this product is
conveyed to the seaboard. This railroad company de-
pends for its tonnage, and therefore for its existence,
exclusively upon the production of these mines. If
these mines are idle the railroad is idle, but with the
distinction that a mine can shut down and lie so with-
out expense, while a railroad must continue as an
active concern, no matter at what a loss. Now, as
you are doubtless aware, an effort is being made to
organize these miners into a union. The result is that
an epic life struggle is about to open between the
railroad and its mines on one side and the representa-
... POPE
musta
und ich
281


The Intriguer
“A word must be spoken about this remarkable
man to make that charge clear: He is thirty-eight
years old; he intends to be a United States senator,
and, what is more important for the future, he in-
tends to remain one. To remain a United States
senator is infinitely more difficult than to become one.
To enter, one need have behind him only the people;
to remain, he must have behind him that which is more
constant than the people wealth.
“ Bear in mind that Wood's intention was to be-
come a senator. He began, then, with the people.
He attached himself to all movements in behalf of
labor. He observed the clamor of the man with the
pick, the man with the apron, the man with the ham-
mer. He appeared to listen, to consider, presently to
be convinced, and, finally, to advocate what they said.
Then, under that law which I do not understand but
by virtue of which Mirabeau, a noble, became the idol
of the French Revolution, this man, an aristocrat,
became a leader of the people. So when his party
came presently to national power, the great heads
of it found him there to be dealt with. What did he
want? They said it with a certain deference. He
might have demanded his seat in the upper Con-
gress then, but he could not hope to remain there,
he had no pedestal of gold under him; he was stand-
ing on the sands. He chose the position of United
States marshal. The leaders gave it with a cer-
tain wondering contempt, and dismissed him from
their catalogue of fears. He was, then, a person
283


The Intriguer
voting control of the Consolidated Fuel Railroads, the
position of first vice-president, a political dictatorship
above and behind Garnett. Then he will resign.
With Wood stepping down from the position of
United States marshal, the strike will crash through
like a rotten bridge, Garnett's commercial plans will
go smoothly on to the piling up of millions; but Gar-
nett will have a master, and Pennsylvania a senator
with a life tenure in office.”
The attorney leaned forward in his chair, his eyes
rested steadily on Mason, the index finger of his right
hand arose in a direct and a significant gesture.
“ The problem, then," he said, “ is to remove Wood
without the payment of his price-a thing no man
can do."
“A thing any man can do,” replied Randolph
Mason.
“How?” said the attorney, his finger still lifted,
his voice still impressively deliberate.
“Leave that to me,” said Mason.
The attorney drew in a deep breath, as though for
a moment he had forgotten to supply his lungs, and
leaned back in his chair. He put up his open hand
and lingeringly stroked his face, running the tips of
his fingers from the forehead downward over the
cheek-bones to the chin. This situation, in which he
took directions from another, was staggering and un-
familiar.
“ Very well,” he said. “What am I to do? ”
“What have you intended to do? ” replied Mason.
285


The Corrector of Destinies
“I see nothing to do,” continued the attorney,
“ other than to accept the conditions of Thomas B.
Wood—to surrender, to give him what he demands.”
“Do it then,” said Mason.
The voice of the attorney arose again lingeringly
on his words.
“You give it up then, you bid me ruin Gar-
nett? »
“I bid you save him," said Mason.
“But,” continued the attorney, “when this agree-
ment is once effected, what will be there to save
him? ”
“ I shall be there,” replied Randolph Mason.
WHEN the attorney left after his conference with
Randolph Mason, I wrote a note to Margaret Gar-
nett. “Have a care," I said, “ Randolph Mason is
no longer neutral.”
The next morning brought an answer in the large,
firm writing of an Englishwoman: Miss Garnett
would be at the Dresden at one o'clock. Would I
come there? I was there at the hour, and we lunch i
together. I thought Margaret Garnett, in a dark-
blue traveling-dress that fitted perfectly to her figure's
more striking, more splendidly impressive than she
had been on the night of Gafki's drama; besides, she
was now aroused; her face showed inquiry, care, a
moving energy. Although John A. Garnett had ou
286


The Corrector of Destinies
rubbish of a garret. The ticking of the clock is
epic.”
She was leaning forward over the table, her elbows
on the linen cloth, her fingers linked under her chin,
her blue eyes beautifully full of light.
“ It would be crude, barbaric, ugly to throw to one
or the other a balance of power. It would ruin the
high dramatic tone of the game; it would be van-
dalism, like spoiling a canvas of Raphael, or a manu-
script of Horace. Besides, Courtlandt, it is against
our sense of justice. There is in every man, in every
people, a conception of fair play as deep-seated and
abiding as the instinct of life. It is that, I think,
upon which all justice is founded. It is the only ideal
in us that even tyrants dare not openly outrage. In
his most absolute hour, if two beasts evenly matched
had been fighting in the circus maximus, not even
Nero would have dared to assist one against the other
with an arrow.”
I would have turned such a speech of any ordinary
woman with some idle pleasantry, but Margaret Gar-
nett was no ordinary woman. She was not repeating
platitudes for the sake of their sound. She spoke
earnestly, passionately what she evidently felt. But
I could not understand that feeling; I could not bring
it out of Hellenic shadows to be the inspiration of a
twentieth century young woman, gowned fashionably,
at luncheon in a New York hotel.
“Miss Garnett," I said, “ this is all very beau-
tiful,' to quote your own appropriate words; but,
288


The Intriguer
searching, brutal inquiries. If she had any sensibili-
ties to be hurt, or any fragile ideas of courtesy to be
outraged, we would do better to go back on the in-
stant.
I was glad of this elaborate warning when the girl
stood finally before Randolph Mason. I think there
is no other man living who would have remained
wholly unmoved when this splendid young woman
came suddenly before him. She was no mere placid
beauty, but force, intelligence, energy, all-vital, all
instantly alert, like Jephthah's daughter, rather, had
she gone to the prophet, speaking against her father's
inconsiderate vow.
Mason deliberately laid down the pen in his fingers
and lifted his head, with the expression of one who
submits out of necessity to an interruption. There
was no gleam of interest, of concern, even of inquiry
in his face. He regarded the tall girl standing
superbly before his table, her eyes illumined, her ner-
vous hands gripping firmly the back of a chair, as he
might have regarded a beggar, slipping in unnoticed
through the door. He waited merely for the inter-
ruption to cease, the intruder to be gone.
“Mr. Mason,” the girl began, “ I am Margaret
Garnett. I wish to inquire why you care so greatly
for my father to prevail over Mr. Wood.”
“I do not care,” he said.
The young woman was evidently surprised. “What
interest have you in my father, then?” she in-
quired.
291


The Corrector of Destinies
“I have no interest in him," replied Randolph
Mason.
“No interest? ” she repeated. “Why did my
father's attorney come here?”
“Why do you come here?" returned Mason.
She began to speak then, her voice vibrating like
the tense string of a viol. She repeated, but in finer
sequence, all she had said to me on that night of
Gafki's drama, and all that she had later said over our
luncheon. But she said it now like one determined to
be heard, determined in the end to be obeyed. She
said it like an advocate, speaking for one's fortune,
one's honor, one's life. She said it like one who had
slept and eaten with every word uttered. Her sen-
tences rushed, streamed out. The spirit of the woman
came forth on the flood; she was deeply, vitally, pas-
sionately in earnest, speaking against a sacrilege,..
speaking against a wrong, demanding, urging, plead-
ing with Randolph Mason to remain immovably neu-
tral. Let the struggle between her father and this
man be fair. Let its thrilling, dramatic balance re- '
main undisturbed. She was the one whose interest for
her father should be deepest, and she, above all things
in this world, wished to see the game played out by
the two now seated at the table. It was weak, cow-
ardly in her father to come here for aid. If he could
not win alone, fairly, like a man, then she, his
daughter, Margaret Garnett, wished him to lose.
The woman thus fired with transcendent courage
was superb. My blood sang under her words. The
292


The Intriguer
nerves in my fingers tingled, but Randolph Mason sat
watching her with weary unconcern. When she had
finished he lifted his face, hard as metal.
“May I inquire,” he said, “ why you are thus en-
deavoring to deceive me?"
The girl caught her breath as though she had been
dashed with water. “I am not endeavoring to de-
ceive you,” she said.
“Why, then," said Mason, “ have you made me
these lurid speeches ? ”
“ I have made them,” replied the girl, “ to acquaint
you with my motive for wishing you to remain neu-
tral.”
“Pardon me,” said Mason, “ you have made them
to conceal that motive.”
The girl recoiled before this brutal thrust, like one
before a blow.
“I do not understand you,” she said.
“But I understand you perfectly,” replied Ran-
dolph Mason.
Then he arose and walked past her out into the hall.
I returned over the flag-stone walk with Miss
Garnett to her carriage. I could find no words of ade-
quate apology. The warning I had spoken was strik-
ingly justified, sententious regrets would be conspic-
uously vain. She was silent, like some voluble witness
struck swiftly dumb by an amazing query. At the
street gate she got herself once more courageously in
hand. “ Courtlandt,” she said, “ tell your cold, un-
emotional master that since he has so ruthlessly taken
293


The Intriguer
to the Petit Trianon there arose a lack of harmony.
If the firm white fingers of Margaret Garnett had
been touching, like those of Marie Antoinette, the
throne of France, the bored beauties of the court
would not have patted butter in the forests of Ver-
sailles.
This conference between the richest man in America
and the most ambitious was held in the library of this
transplanted Parisian lodge. Louis would have gone
there for a conference with Mirabeau to avoid his
ministers. It was a room on the second floor, admira-
bly planned, the light falling softly from above, the
walls paneled in Circassian walnut. A great table
and chairs of that beautiful wood covered with mo-
rocco were the only furniture. An Indian rug, glis-
tening like frost, soft, priceless, covered the floor like
a skin.
I could not easily bear in mind in the atmosphere
of such a place the hard, practical nature of this
meeting. It was the hall of some stately council of
Florence, sitting above the Arno, or, rather—and the
fancy became almost real—it was the council chamber
of some doge, where on this night he was to meet the
captain of Barbarian armies lying with bared teeth
along the Adriatic, and treat with him for the city.
The men in this conference might appropriately have
taken the characters of such a scene. Garnett, tall,
white, impressively patrician, attended, like that
doge, by two counselors, characteristic, I fancied,
of an empire in the evening of decadence-his at-
295


The Corrector of Destinies
torney and Randolph Mason; and the other, this
giant, this captain of Barbarian armies, courage-
ously alone.
This romantic medieval fancy persisted. It became
for an instant even more real when through an open-
ing of the door I saw Margaret Garnett. She stood
erect, motionless in the hall, her head lifted, her face
strainingly alert. She was strikingly, superbly beau-
tiful in an evening dress of white chiffon embroidered
with silver lilies, a single gleaming strand of pearls
falling to her waist, her hair vitalized, burnished by
the jewels set in it. The lights of the hall threw her
figure into alluring, exquisite relief. She was the
daughter of a doge, awaiting the result of a fateful
conference, out of which Venice would emerge, ghast-
ly, streaked with blood, burning, or with peace at
some staggering, hideous cost.
She was not listening. She carried rather the air
of one depending upon some desperate hazard, the
arrival of some event, the sharp stroke of some im-
pending fortune. I recalled on the instant her words,
which I had not repeated to Randolph Mason. What
strategy had this woman laid? To what subtle, mys-
terious lengths had she gone in support of an idea
purely lyric? Whence arose the potent, dominating
strength of such a fancy as that moving her to jeo-
pardize the fortụnes of her father? Were these in-
tangible, shadowy inspirations of romance, then,
stronger in our lives than the love of gain, the love of
power, the love of victory! She went slowly down the
296


The Intriguer
steps, her hands slipping along the marble rail of the
balusters.
The attorney seated at the table began to read the
protocol of treaty which he had drawn, and I came
swiftly back to the commonplace business character of
the meeting. The paper was merely an assignment
under the legal form of a majority of the common
stock of the Consolidated Fuel Railroads to certain
persons named by Thomas B. Wood. The attorney
explained that, in his opinion, no further writing was
necessary. This assignment should be placed in
escrowl and delivered to Mr. Wood upon the resigna-
tion of his office. It would put a voting control of
the railroad into the hands of his agents, who would
carry out his plan.
! The strong, masterful face of the United States
marshal set in a cynical smile. “ This assignment is,
I think, sufficient,” he said; “but I will hardly take
the chance of a legal battle over an escrow, after my
resignation shall have been accepted.”
Mr. Garnett and the attorney were disturbed. They
spoke for the escrow persuasively, with elaborate care.
This was a gentlemen's agreement.
Mr. Wood replied with telling irony. “A gentle-
men's agreement,” he said, “ is subject to exigencies
of memory. I will hand to you my resignation of
this office, and you must deliver to me in return the
assignment of this stock. The two papers must pass
*A fully executed writing, but put into the custody of some
third person to hold until the fulfilment of some condition, .
297


The Corrector of Destinies
legal form and recites another and valid considera-
tion, when the moving consideration was in fact the
resignation of a federal office."
The atmosphere of victory rising about John A.
Garnett was less impressive than that atmosphere of
disaster fallen thus swiftly on his daughter. The
wondrous vitality of her figure vanished; the light fled
from the silver, the blood from the porcelain. Then,
as by some masterful effort, going to the very springs
of life, it all splendidly returned. She looked steadily
at Randolph Mason, her eyes two lines of light.
“I repeat it,” she said slowly, “ you have failed.
This man shall receive everything that he expected to
receive—my father's influence, the controlling interest
in this railroad and a seat in the United States Sen-
ate.”
The lips of Randolph Mason parted in a cynical
smile. “I should be interested to learn,” he said, “ by
what avenue of propitious fortune he is to obtain
these benefits.”
“ I shall marry him,” replied Margaret Garnett.
For the legal principle involved in this story, see the follow-
ing leading cases: Forbes v. McDonald, 54 Cal. 98; Basket v.
Moss, 115 N. C. 448, 20 S. E. 733, 44 Am. St. Rep. 463, 48
L. R. A. 842; Eddy v. Capron, 4 R. I. 394, 67 Am. Dec. 541;
Meachem v. Dow, 32 Vt. 721. The officer's real motive for
resigning is immaterial. Eddy v. Capron, 4 R. I. 394, 67 Am.
Dec. 541.
4107
30219


onsider
fact the
-John
here di
1. Th
gith
Then
spring
stead
failed
ted to
Iterest
- Sen. ..
MICH!
Stain
1107