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THE VANISHING MEN


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THE
VANISHING MEN
º
By
RICHARD WASHBURN CHILD
AUTHOR of “THE velvet BLACK,” Etc.
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
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TH: w y QRI
Púñi, ºrary
Vºig A
Til-D fºrw F-1, i. TATIONS
CoPYRIGHT, 1920,
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
All Rights Reserved
First printing...... March, 1980
Second printing...... April, 1920
Third printing. . . . . . . June, 1920
- : : ; : : . :
‘. . . . . " ".. . ." .
Printed in the United States of America


THE VANISHING MEN
I
HE had gone to London the moment he was out
of uniform, and he had gone there for a reason
typical of him.
For most Americans a single track success is an
inspiration of life; there is a raw meat satisfaction
in hewing to the line until some tree falls and also
an instinct for playing the latest game. If it is
money making, or trade, or industrialism or produc-
tion-efficiency, the rank and file go panting after it
until some one rings for the undertaker. I have
always thought that the source of the imagination
which was responsible for Peter DeWolfe's tastes,
policy and conduct was most difficult to uncover.
The true sense of play, not only applied to play but
to all the endeavors of life, even those which are
I


2 The Vanishing Men
usually accounted grim—like war and marriage—is
a rare flower to bloom on the American soil; it is
still more rare a blossom to find growing on a fam-
ily tree rooted, as Peter's was rooted, in a bed of
money and only fertilized by that humdrum con-
ventional pretense of our large cities which at lat-
est accounts is still giving many persons the same
old pale glories.
This rare flower bloomed in Peter and saved him
from doing the commonplaces with himself which
rich young men who have become orphaned bach-
elors usually do. It made Peter a great deal more
like those individuals, rare enough even abroad—
the whimsical Englishman, the adventurous French-
man, the humorous Spaniard and the practical Rus-
sian, who, though they be the white crows of their
respective flocks, exceed in numbers the Americans
who value full living above that rather uninterest-
ing and easy prize which is called “Success.”
Peter took an interest in living. The common
run of bachelors who are provided amply with mil-
lions accept the alternative of going to hell or going
to business; DeWolfe's imagination came to his


The Vanishing Men 3
rescue and provided him with a third choice which,
in his quiet way, he seized about the time he left
college. It was to live for the sake of living.
To some this might have meant self-indulgence;
to Peter it meant an indulgence of mankind. To
some it might have meant fads and whims, such as
hunting big game from aeroplanes at the source of
the Nile; Peter would do that very thing perhaps,
but it was an incident not half as interesting to him
as an oil field he developed in Texas or a settlement
house he promoted in New York. He kept himself
as a very neat, well-cleaned slate upon which life
could write if it wished; if it failed to do so Peter
wrote on it a little himself—enough to keep him-
self useful. The same man who invented the De-
Wolfe milimeter also set down from time to time
some charming verses, and the public knows at least
one short lyric from the “Leaves of Argonne”
which he wrote in the hospital before his promotion
to Major.
Dark skin, blue eyes, thin sensitive lips, the ap-
pearance of one well bathed in ice cold water, the
flexible lean waist of a good horseman, the long


4 The Vanishing Men
muscular fingers of a good tennis player who had
not lost the delicacy of touch which made him some-
thing less than a distinguished performer upon a
cello—these were the outward introductions which
made that particularly admirable little group of
British gentlemen officers find his acquaintance so
quickly.
Eversby Benham of the R. A. F. must bear the
blame for the months in which DeWolfe found his
great adventure at a time when to Peter adventure
had become dull beyond words and the mind-image
of himself sitting on a New York park bench, sur-
rounded by engaging little foreign brats, listening
to a hurdy-gurdy in the summer dusk, was the most
exciting and delicious picture conjurable from his
resourceful imagination of what a wonderful mo-
ment of life after a whirl with war could be. For
it was Benham, who only later went home to the
office of the Air Ministry, and who has since dis-
tinguished himself in the development of civil-fly-
ing, who first steered the young American across
the path of Brena Selcoss.
“Are you going back?” asked Benham.


The Vanishing Men 5
“Home,” said DeWolfe, with an attempt to say
the word without sentiment.
“Red Cross ladies, Waacs, beautiful high caste
Parisiennes and even the charming daughter of your
what's-his-name at the bloody Peace Conference—
and still a bachelor! By the by, DeWolfe, what
happened to your lady with the gorgeous arms at
that flubby little café on the south bank of the
Seine?”
“An engaging goddess,” said DeWolfe. “She
is, I believe, a petticoat buyer. She tried to con-
vert me into the Methodist faith. Those beautiful
arms are for the neck of some Y. M. C. A. man
with glasses and a tickling cough. She borrowed
thirty francs of me and then went off to see a
daughter of hers who is driving an ambulance near
Coblentz.”
“You are well armored, Peter,” Benham had said,
gazing with a reflective and perhaps mischievous
smile across the flat fields of France with their
tilled squares and wisp-armed trees and thin mists
of dusk. “By the by, I say, doesn't this landscape
remind one of Corot's paintings?”


6 The Vanishing Men
DeWolfe grinned.
“What would make you fall in love with a
woman?” asked Benham.
“Almost anything,” Peter replied. “But that's
not the problem; the problem is what will prevent
a man falling out?”
“You’re saying that any woman—that is, with
the thing you Americans call a come-on, good or
bad—may make a man fall in love with her?”
“I was saying that we are all hypocrites. Such a
woman would touch us all—affect any of us—me,
for instance. We are made ready by a wise nature.
‘Stand by for love,' she says, and youth stands by,
Benham. But what's the use, if that's all? Life is
a long pull. No dimpled chin should be allowed to
turn the tide. No discourse of brilliance chattered
off like a disc record in a conservatory. No nose-
full of the faint odor of violets nor moonlight on a
bare shoulder nor a rating of the old man. That's
what I mean. That's why most men marry; but I
am hardened by too many inspections of dimpled
chins.”
“From a discreet distance?”
!


The Vanishing Men 7
“Exactly.”
“You want more than that pull of the moment or
the month.”
“To make me give up my own quarters in New
York where the sun comes in upon my bare ankles
and my coffee, and my Jap brings the newspaper
and the cigarettes? I should be glad to say so!”
“You should try Brena Selcoss.”
“Who?”
“Brena Selcoss.”
“Who is she?” asked Peter carelessly, as he tried
his arm out of its bandage sling.
“You like the name?”
“I confess—”
“Of course—so many names of women—just the
names—give a man a thrill. Most extraordinary!
She's an American, and yy
He paused.
“Well, what?” asked DeWolfe.
“A puzzle,” said Benham. “But then you are not
interested in women.”
“To tell the whole truth, they are my only in-
terest except food,” Peter said. “The devil of it is


8 The Vanishing Men
that if a man saw ten thousand of 'em he didn't
want and couldn't love he'd always expect year after
year until he was ninety that the first over the thou-
sand would be the one. Well, that's what leads us
on. We all say, ‘No, thank you,' when the dish is
passed, but we all look to see every last piece on
the dish just the same.”
“Brena Selcoss is a friend of my sister,” said
Benham. “I must say she takes the breath out of
me. It's that queer combination of beautiful fresh
youth with the flavor of all the guile and conspiracy
of the ages. She's a Saint Cecilia or a Lucrezia
Borgia. But that's not bothering my mother.”
“What bothers her?”
“Funny thing. We don't know who she is. From
Texas, I believe. With some money. But why
does a girl from the United States come down to
Beconshire Heath and buy a curate's cottage next
to our place and live in a garden and stay out of
London and read lying flat on the grass and see no-
body and evade all questions? And the look in her
eyes! I didn't see it at first because I was in a funk
at the eyes themselves.”


The Vanishing Men 9
“What look?” asked DeWolfe in the hush.
“Fear,” said Benham.
“Fear?”
“Yes, fear. And besides there is something
about her that tells a person that she is waiting—
marking time—treading water—staring out over
life—just like a watcher on the shore stares out
across the empty sea.”
“Maybe she's thinking of an ice cream soda.”
“There's nothing of that kind of thing in her,”
the British officer replied with positiveness. “Your
ice cream soda and millinery and looking-glass lady
has a personality of a pink color. Brena Selcoss is
the color of firelight on the walls of an old temple.”
“You might go on to say that she gives the im-
pression of an Inca princess. Some dried mummy
from the sands of a prehistoric citadel. Bathed in
some magic liquid, her limbs expanded to the lovely
contour of girlhood, her face warmed with a re-
newed coursing of spirited blood.”
“You’ve seen her!” exclaimed Benham.
“My dear fellow, I've never seen her; but I con-


IO The Vanishing Men
fess that as you talk about her I feel a little as if
I had known her—long ago.”
Benham said, “Perhaps you could lift the
y
COVer y
He stopped suddenly.
“And I'd like to have you meet Muriel too. She's
a very decent sort of sister. I’ve a mind to give
you a letter to my mother and send you over the
Channel to loaf around in flannels at our place in
the country.”
“I’m leaving Brest to-morrow night on a trans-
port. Sorry.”
“Oh.”
“Well, I said nothing about it.”
“Afraid of farewell dinners?”
Peter smiled.
“Home,” said he. “Bring your sister over to
America. She'll probably think it a jolly little un-
finished country.”
Benham clasped DeWolfe's hand and yawned; he
had seen the American covered from head to foot
with blood out of his own arteries when Peter had
brought him in with the aid of an artillery horse.


The Vanishing Men II
It was an intimacy not to be befouled with demon-
strations.
“So long,” said DeWolfe.
He climbed down from the broken wall of the
house where the Englishman had been billeted and
with a nod of farewell walked away, leaving Ben-
ham perched up there—a black figure as if cut out
of black cardboard pasted on the sunset glories of
the sky-line.
He walked a hundred paces and stopped. He
looked at a group of peasant children bringing in
fagots, but laughing and jostling each other as if
it were a game. Childhood had been untouched.
In one of the little rubble and plaster sheds a new-
born calf was bawling, and yet in Paris, as he re-
flected, serious men were discussing the future of
the world exactly as if they could touch or affect
its fundamental nature.
He walked on. The trees trained against the
high wall spread their branches like fans, edged at
the tips with the pink blossoms of a new year,
symbolic of the eternal round of promise, fruit and
decay.


I2 The Vanishing Men
“It goes so soon,” said DeWolfe aloud, and this
voice which spoke was just as if some old friend
had given him counsel as they strolled together in
the dusk. He turned.
The Englishman waved to him from the wall and
held one arm aloft in a gesture of farewell; Peter
could see every finger on his hand as if they all
were painted in sepia on the velvety gold of the sky.
“By the by,” called Benham, “the strange lady is
half a Greek. I say! Can you hear? Her father
was a banished patriot—a fighting professor of
chemistry or something.”
Peter smiled and waved his hand. He turned the
corner of the wall and stepped into the cobbled
street where the endless wagons of some French
artillery maneuver were rumbling deeper into the
ruts of War worn in the ancient stones.
Only at nine that evening did he hear more. Ben-
ham called him by the service wire of the Signal
Corps.
“Saying good-by, that's all,” said the English-
man lying glibly. “Good luck. And I forgot to
say that her mother was Irish.”


The Vanishing Men I3
“Send me that letter to your family care of the
American port officer at Boulogne,” said Peter
calmly after a moment in which Benham wondered
whether the line had been cut off. “I’m off for
England to-morrow.”
He put his cigarette down and allowed it to burn
the edge of the table, staring at the wall with its
maps and blue-prints, his eyes full of wonder.
This explains, in part, why the reason for his
going to London was typical of Peter DeWolfe.


II
MURIEL BENHAM was savagely a woman. She
conceived woman as a species as distinct from males
as flora is distinct from fauna. The acquisition by
women of the right to vote had been the occasion
for mourning, as Peter found out before Mrs.
Austin Benham had beamed through two meals first
upon her guest and then upon her lovely daughter.
The widow of Austin, as DeWolfe discovered
after a week of agreeable neglect of the cal-
endar, was a true beamer. She did not beam with
the insincere beam of affectation, but with the beam
of an expansive nature oozing good will and demon-
strativeness through the crevices it could find in the
walls of a life which was like a vessel of conven-
tionality, containing, according to all the traditions
of her husband's family, a liquor of precious quality,
not to be spent freely. She believed in new things
and in a new world, but she beamed upon Muriel
not because she agreed with her but because, not
I4.


The Vanishing Men I5
daring to voice an opinion, she could still love her
daughter for being so healthy and so irreproachable.
Muriel considered herself as dedicated by duty
and adaptability to being a woman, and being a
woman meant that her brown hair must be made at-
tractive and stable for tennis—a game which she
executed with a good deal of dash, in a costume de-
signed to keep freckles off a milk white skin. Even
her forearms were covered in the game she took
from DeWolfe, who made rather a botch of his un-
practiced play, because just as it was a womanly
woman's duty to be well exercised and in fine con-
dition for the market, so also was it her duty to
be milk white in an evening dress. The same
thought made her appear before Peter in the hedge-
walled garden before breakfast clad in a part wispy
and part fluffy gown with a basket of roses hung on
one elbow and flower scissors in the other hand.
“You do all things so well,” said Peter with a
great delight filling his being. “There is a thor-
oughness in your method which positively upsets
me. I looked at the library in your study and as
far as I can see you have spent your twenty years


I6 The Vanishing Men
collecting, among others, books on how to do things
—how to ride a horse, how to play golf, how to
knit, how to cast a fly, how to speak Italian, how
to grow roses and who knows what else.”
The English girl was sincerely grateful to Peter.
She said, “To know the way, to practice the meth-
ods—these are the sure steps toward results; but
you must not think I take myself too seriously, as
my brother probably told you. I think it is all as
nothing compared to the skill of being a woman—
a fit woman—a woman whose one aim is to be a
woman.”
“You have attained it,” said Peter, a little light
dancing in his eyes under his heavy brows as fire-
flies sparkle behind a hedge.
The girl tossed the ball up and caught it in her
white skirt spread from knee to knee as she sat
cross-legged upon the edge of the Benhams' lawn.
This lawn began again after the interruption of the
square of tennis court and rolled gently down to a
line of trees at the bottom of the hill that half
hides the little town of Becon with its nestling red
brick houses with their chimney pots and roofs


The Vanishing Men I7
tempered by the smoke of coals on home fires. They
lived peaceably together without any bold asser-
tions of individuality, none of them doing any out-
rage to the countryside, as Peter, contrasting it with
an American town, had said. Beyond the village
were the chalk downs where grass was light green
and the heather a deeper color, and narrow roads
were as white as marks of crayon, and trees stand-
ing alone were like feathery plumes stuck here and
there into the rolling country by some giant hand.
Somewhere, still further on, was the sea into which
the bright sky fell like a blue back curtain flecked
with clouds of feathery white.
Peter, with half-closed eyes, gazed out across this
magnificence of quiet space toward the distant back-
bone of a chalk ridge where ancient Britons once
drove their cattle into caves and Druid priests had
once held solemn rites. He was quite unconscious
of Muriel's attention fixed upon him somewhat as
a faithful dog watches a master; he had been in
many of his own dreams in these ten days and
might well be forgiven for failing to notice that
something of violence was going on within this


I8 The Vanishing Men
English girl whose outlines, like those of a volcano,
were still clear and cold against the sky, exposing
nothing of the fires and steam which may blow their
surroundings into fragments.
The most that Muriel had ever said was that
Peter was one of the “nice Americans,” a patroniz-
ing compliment which had made him tell the girl
and her mother that he was gratified at that judg-
ment expressed by “the better type of English.” He
did not know that by the processes within the Ben-
ham sister's lovely head, she had weighed carefully
his physical appearance, noting his high bronzed
forehead, his straight nose, his lean hard cheeks and
the thin judicial lips which had been an inheritance
of the family ever since Justice DeWolfe had been
painted by Copley. She had judged him as one
would judge an animal, and satisfied, had methodi-
cally passed on to his clothes.
Peter's clothes are famous for their charming in-
correctness. No one quite knows how he succeeds
in expressing through some expensively fashionable
and unimaginative tailor so much of his own brand
of distinction in dress. Evening clothes or bath-


The Vanishing Men I9
wrap, major's uniform Ör lounging flannels, it is
always the same; Peter's clothes and Peter are one.
An envious broker in New York named Moore once
said that Peter's clothes even expressed Peter's
moods—they could be limp, soft and contented in
his idleness; they could stiffen into fine dignity with
a turn of his thought. Muriel's father had given
attention to clothes; the hunter's-pink riding coat
that still hangs in the hall closet in Beconshire
Heath reminds his successors of the dominant,
rare roast beef personality of Sir Austin. His
daughter, like other women who are in the profes-
sion of being women, gave importance to the deco-
rative qualities of a male; she only forgot about
Peter's face and figure and clothes when they had
been swallowed by his complete whole—a whole
which defied her methodical judgment and made her
eyes swim and began to turn within her heart and
body the elementary machinery that two hundred
years of Benham tradition had kept locked in
neutral.
“Peter, I saw you before breakfast,” she said.
“From my window.”


2O The Vanishing Men
“You saw me?” he said. “Why didn't, you call
to me and say one of your cheery good mornings?”
She leaned so close that he could catch the faint
aroma of the lavender which Mrs. Benham, with
a beaming face, sprinkled in the drawers. She said,
“Because I was waiting to see what you were do-
ing.”
“What was I doing?” said Peter.
“The telescope—father's telescope.”
“Oh yes—the telescope,” repeated Peter, as if
he had been accused of stealing the squeaky old
glass. “I did have the telescope, didn't I?"
He was thinking that one could not very well tell
hosts like these two women who had treated him as
if he were the owner of the estate and of the old
stone house and even quaint Spode coffee cups which
came on at breakfast, that he had come to Becon-
shire not to see them. He was thinking that if they
had not chosen to mention an acquaintance other
than the rather stiff and dull and correct persons
who had come to tea almost every afternoon and
three or four times to dinners, saved by the Château
Yquem graciously left by Sir Austin as a legacy in


The Vanishing Men 2I
the wine cellar, he could not very well mention this
acquaintance. Furthermore he had begun to feel that
Muriel in some strange manner of her own had
created an atmosphere of a proprietress without any
other intimacy than calling him Peter and, upon one
occasion, dressing a cut of a hawthorn on the back
of his hand with a peculiar tenderness mixed with
all the care of procedure that one can find in
“What to Do in an Emergency.” He shrank from
making the one inquiry he would have wished to
make.
He now had a chance to make this inquiry, be-
cause Muriel said, “You were standing there under
that beech tree. I thought wn
“What did you think?”
“That you were looking through the glass across
the fields toward that place under the big trees—the
place we call the Curate's because one used to live
there.”
Peter might have spoken then to ask who now
occupied the little gabled house with its guardian
trees. It was the opportunity to hear a name he
had not heard since he had heard it from Colonel


22 The Vanishing Men
Benham's lips; Peter's characteristic perversity that
often made him allow life to set its own pace and
bring events at its own whim, added at this moment
to his disinclination to disclose one of his reasons
for idling under the Benhams' roof. It prevented
him from speaking. The sun was warm, there was
a fatalistic assurance that he would hear the name
soon enough, and there was the possibility that a
look of pain would come into Muriel's face and he
would hurt a girl for whom he had acquired a good
natured, companionable and almost paternal af-
fection.
He only smiled, and Muriel's pink fingers being
near upon the grass, he touched them lightly. After
a long pause, he said, “I was looking around the
country.”
“I do not believe you,” the girl said, jumping up
with startling suddenness.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Into the house. I have a-headache.”
She had often insisted that she never had head-
aches, as if not having headaches was a part of a
proper program for a woman who intends to marry


24 The Vanishing Men
square tower. That's Saint Dunstan's—the very
tower in which the fox sought sanctuary in the
song—the old song, written six hundred years ago,
they say.”
Peter, with his usual adaptability, acquired both
words and music. He sang. He danced upon the
rolling green plain. And at last seizing Muriel's
waist around the belt of her sporting coat, he swung
her almost off her feet and together they whirled
merrily—two tiny tops spinning upon the vast ex-
panse. When they stopped, the girl, almost dizzy,
and breathless, clung for a moment to his coat and
looked up into Peter's eyes. He could feel her
warm breath upon his chin.
Peter was not lacking in perception; he knew at
once that his visit at the Benhams' must come to an
end. All the cold assurance in Muriel's face, all the
steady, stable English look had gone. No refusal of
hers to vote or smoke a cigarette or adopt an article
of clothing which in any way might have unsexed
her could have proclaimed her as a woman rather
than as a companionable playmate as completely as


The Vanishing Men 25
did this searching, half-troubled, hungry look in her
swimming, brimming eyes.
“Come on now,” he said as if to a private soldier
who had disobeyed orders. “Let’s walk. Let's walk
hard and fast and long.”
He was wondering now whether he had made his
journey to Beconshire in vain, whether indeed his
willingness to solve the puzzle that Benham had told
him was waiting for him there had not been a piece
of folly leading to nothing. When he and the girl
had dipped down the slope into the single track path
that led across the moor he nearly walked blindly
into the silver stream through the rushes that grew
at the water's edge.
“You are not vexed?” asked Miss Benham in-
vitingly.
“Vexed l’exclaimed DeWolfe. “With you? God
bless you, dear, no!”
She looked up at him gratefully, watching him
as she walked by his side a good deal as a setter
might look up to catch a glance of approval from a
man. Peter expected no storm from her. He knew
he must pack up his things and go back to London.


26 The Vanishing Men
This was only fair to Benham and certainly fair to
Benham's sister who had let herself imagine so
much from an acquaintance with a stray American
who inwardly believed that to live a lifetime of
Muriel's program of days and years would be a
close second to a term in jail or to having a berth
in a Wall Street broker's office. He supposed, how-
ever, that if not actually, at least metaphorically
Muriel had read a book on “How to Keep One's
Balance.” He did not figure upon the explosive
forces which can be generated in a conservative
family, as if occasionally the fundamentals of man-
kind liked to show their half-concealed existence of
which all are aware, each for himself, but never as
to our armored neighbor. Muriel, in fact, was just
the person the fundamental human forces would
pick out to give a glorious exhibition of blowing up
the crusts of restraint. Peter, like most of us, had
heard a slight crack in her cover, but like most of .
us he had endless faith in the strength of habit and
conventions.
The depression which fell upon the girl, as
if a shadow cast by the dusk, gathering about


The Vanishing Men 27
them as they came back from Saint Dunstan's
tower after ten miles in the wind, gave no warning
of crisis to him. And certainly he was under no
obligation to foresee that which the night would
bring forth.
At dinner he discovered that he could talk to
Mrs. Benham; to his astonishment he found that be-
hind her beam there were a great many years of
orderly thinking whose product, not consumed by
her family, had been put up onto the shelf in many
careful layers like bolts of cloth with an unfashion-
able pattern. It was almost worth while to have
Muriel so silent; it was almost a relief to turn away
from her long Byrne-Jones face with its sensitive
lips contrasting with her stern eyes and be beamed
upon sunnily by the broad strong face of her mother.
Peter took a delight in making this beam expand
into a laugh. He was never so whimsical. Each
time he leaned forward toward the white-haired
widow who, with her middle-Victorian figure,
weighed at least two hundred pounds, Muriel
stared at her mother with a look which might have
been the expression of jealousy.


The Vanishing Men 29
The smile disappeared the moment the electric
lamp above the outer door just behind the French
windows threw down its light like an overturned
bucket of yellow liquid. A woman was standing
there, and Peter believed that as she had stood in
the dark, unseen, she had been looking straight into
his face. She wore no hat and her hair piled up in
immense snake-like coils was the color of certain
frost-turned leaves of Autumn which are neither
red nor gold, but both colors at once.
“Her Irish mother!” he almost said aloud. He
knew at once who she was. He knew by her hair
and her great dark eyes in which, even from a dis-
tance, there appeared the expectancy or fear de-
scribed by young Benham. The British officer had
not overdrawn her beauty. There was a still
grandeur about it, a permanence, a thing making it
awful as well as alluring; it was like the beauty of
Grecian sculpture dug from the dust and trans-
formed by miracle into living warmth glowing
through a skin which compared to Muriel's fine cold
white was as heavy cream is to skimmed milk.


30 The Vanishing Men
She stood in the posture which Peter learned later
to know was characteristic—a posture of one who
waits with resignation. For what? Heaven knows.
Perhaps for a reincarnation into a life less troubled,
less besmirched with small affairs.
That she wore a white draped gown over which
a wrap of flame color hung from her half bare
shoulders DeWolfe did not notice. She was one
who cannot be described in detail, and her clothes
made no impress though their illuminated colors and
contrast in any other case might have left a vivid
picture. One never saw her except as a whole—a
woman too short of stature, if one measured, but
the height of a goddess if one only looked; a girl
whose face, though capable of a great range of ex-
pression, nevertheless changed its moods as slowly
as the clouds in the sky change their contours; a
human being whose personality belonged, it ap-
peared, to the kind of personalities which are found
usually only in a deep forest, or belong to a pinna-
cled mountain range. Any detail was nothing.
“She has come to see my mother,” said Muriel.


The Vanishing Men 3I
“So she has!” admitted Mrs. Benham, beaming
out through the window.
“I might have known who it was. I heard a high-
powered car. But she doesn't like to be driven al-
most into our dining-room, so she stopped on the
South Wing. Let's go into father's den, Peter.
Bring the cigars in there, Lucy.”
No protest appeared possible. Mrs. Benham had
beamed and nodded, and the American could not
very graciously say, “Oh, no. I want to stay.”
He turned once as he left the dining-room. The
woman outside was still waiting at the door for
Mrs. Benham to waddle to the latch, the waterfall
of light still covering her, still looking in, apparently
at Peter, and with a smile and warmth thrown to-
ward him like a message from her great dark eyes.
He could not wipe away the impression of that
look. In it there had been a call, an understanding,
a password, a magic formula. To shake it off he
walked nervously about Sir Austin's old study,
stopping before the photographs of members of the
House of Commons who had been Benham's
friends, but were like the ends of so many empty


32 The Vanishing Men
spools to Peter's eyes at this moment. He read an
inscription on a portrait of General Wolseley, he
touched an ivory idol from Benares.
“Let's light the fire,” suggested Muriel in a weak
and trembling voice.
“All right,” said Peter, and struck a match.
He did not smoke.
“Why not?” asked the girl.
“I have a-headache,” he said with a laugh.
“Come here then. Lie down on father's sofa. I
don't mind. Be comfortable, Peter.”
He stretched out upon the springs bent and sagged
by years of pressure of the fox-hunting banker's
solid weight, and closed his eyes.
Muriel, who had drawn up a stool, sat down upon
it, staring into the firelight. There in the study be-
hind the heavy door which she had closed, the two
seemed suddenly very remote.
“I had a wonderful time—this afternoon,” she
said in a tense and trembling voice which made a
struggle to appear normal.
“Good!” said DeWolfe.
Her hand moved timidly forth and her soft fin-


The Vanishing Men 33
gers touched his forehead, brushing back the hair.
Peter closed his eyes.
She leaned over quietly and with a little cry
hardly audible pressed her lips to his.
He knew what had happened—the real Muriel
had come up through layer on layer of tradition,
training, pride, habit, restraint. He only was con-
fused by his own stupidity in allowing this to hap-
pen.
He sprang up.
“I never did that before. I never—by any one,”
she said clenching her hands.
“Oh, I say, I'm sorry ” he began.
“Sorry!” she said.
“Of course,” he replied with unnecessary cold-
ness. “Of course I'm sorry. I've allowed you to
think 2x
Muriel's eyes were wide and blazing. She
threw her clenched hands apart until her arms were
outstretched to their utmost. The firelight was upon
her face and Peter could see elementary passions
enough upon it.
“You needn't say more,” she almost screamed, so


34 The Vanishing Men
that suddenly Peter had a great distaste for the ex-
posure of things he did not know had lived in her.
“You needn't say more because I know.”
“Kn * * said Peter in a low tone, as if inviting
her to speak more quietly.
“Yes—know. It's her!” she said, pointing toward
the wall where the deer's heads were hung. “I
know it's my brother Eversby. He told you about
her. That's why you came. That's what you've
been thinking about. My brother was a fool!”
Peter raised his hand.
“I kissed you and I’m glad,” she went on furious-
ly. “Yes, I am. I'm glad. It has brought out the
truth. I never did it before. I'm glad. The
truth.”
“Yes,” said Peter sternly. “It has brought out the
truth.”
“You came here to see her. I know. I guessed.
I knew Eversby told you about her, but you never
asked. And I knew why. I didn't want to know.
22
'I want
“I'm sorry,” Peter said again.


The Vanishing Men 35
The girl came on several paces and leaned for-
ward toward him.
“For God's sake, Peter, keep away from her. She
might like you. Of course she'd like you. And if
she liked you »
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I know. I can't tell. It's a matter of honor, a
matter of confidence—her confidence—something I
learned. I wish I didn't know. But I warn you.”
She moved toward the door.
“Wait a moment,” he said.
“No. I want to go. I hate you now, Peter. Yes,
I do. It has been awful enough. I never want to
see you again. If you will only go while I hate
you!”
“Of course,” he said.
“But she is—”
Muriel stopped aghast.
“Well?” he asked.
“I can't tell you. But I warn you. It is too awful
to believe. If she takes you in, you will— This
is all I can tell.”
“What?”


36 The Vanishing Men
“Vanish,” she whispered, “–like the others.”
The door closed after her.
“Too late to go to London to-night,” he said,
looking at his watch. He listened for a moment.
There was rain upon the window panes. “Vanish?
Vanish—like the others? Oh, it's absurd. A piece
of jealous outburst. Vanish? Nonsense!”


III
THE name of Peter DeWolfe, U. S. A., was upon
the register of the Carleton Hotel written in a hand
purposely scrawled and blotched to prevent any one
in the flux of diplomats, army officers, correspond-
ents and gentlemen adventurers, the classes from
which this rich New York bachelor drew a large and
almost affectionate acquaintance, from bellowing
through his door to come down to the bar.
He was waiting for a steamer that had made up
her mind frequently not to leave Liverpool for an-
other five days. Two nights he had spent already in
London where, if he had wished, he might have
dined at at least one of half a dozen recognized
homes, had luncheons with a Russian ex-ambassa-
dor or Tommy Caminthorn of the War Office or
Boleby Broke, the critic who writes the reviews for
the International Gazette, or taken breakfast with
Mrs. Holderee Rabb, the widow of a certain Maha-
rajah's son who had gone wrong at Oxford. He
37


38 The Vanishing Men
had an inclination, however, to write verses and
wander by himself through the naughty jam of sol-
diers and yellow-haired girls in Leicester Square and
the Circus. He ate his meals in lonely state.
Unfortunately the unpleasant flavor which had at-
tached itself to the memory of his visit to Becon-
shire Heath still clung. He could see Lady Ben-
ham—that good old soul who had insisted that she
never be addressed by her title—beaming at him as
she told him how sorry she was that business had
called him away so suddenly. He felt guilty of the
polite lie he had told to make his exit from the lives
of the Benhams. He could see Muriel's cold, hard
expression when, having pressed her lips to his, she
found no response and told him at once that she
hated him. He would never see her again, and
though it had been none of his fault, or at least not
in large measure, there would be a certain impres-
sion in her mind that he had willfully dislodged her
from her correct and virtuous pedestal and Colonel
Eversby Benham—a good friend, provided with a
sense of humor—could not fail to see the affair
through his beloved sister's unimaginative eyes.


The Vanishing Men 39
Peter had tried to reach him through the Air Min-
istry and found that on forty-eight hours' notice he
had gone to Mesopotamia.
Above all, Peter had gone to England to do a cer-
tain thing—to meet the strange Brena Selcoss and
at Benham's challenge dissolve the mystery which
surrounded her. All that he had accomplished so
far had been to look once into her wonderful eyes
from a distance and hear from Muriel that ter-
rible and unspeakable and undisclosed horrors
awaited the man upon whom this extraordinary
young woman, with her mixture of Grecian and
Irish blood, her gorgeous hair and jersey cream
skin, her American origin and her inexplicable Eng-
lish isolation, bestowed her favor.
Peter had always said that many men were really
two persons—one, the actor in life, clothed with a
body of flesh and bone; the other, a second per-
sonality without tangible reality, but who, as a
counselor possessed of a voice almost audible, often
advised caution, sometimes played the rôle of con-
science, was always a friend, but sometimes took on
a damnable, patronizing manner. It was this in-


40 The Vanishing Men
visible friend who had advised Peter to shut him-
self up with his attempts at verse writing and had
led him to procure a passage home; it was Peter
himself who knew very well that he would not go
on board the Aquitania, that he had come to Eng-
land to meet some kind of a witch woman, that he
had seen her great dark eyes once and saw them
gazing at him out of every corner now, that he had
committed himself to finding out all that was to be
known of her and that in the end he would do some
unconservative, break-neck thing to throw himself
with a crash of conventions into her lap and note
what happened afterward.
Peter's determination, making ready to reject
every advice of his counseling and invisible second
personality, was completely wasted. Brena Selcoss
acted first.
On the third afternoon of his restlessness, when
the night was falling and the fog leaned on the
exterior of the window panes of his room like a
pile of wet sheep's wool, he had started a lyric
twenty-two times and twenty-two times balked for
meter or expressive word, had crumpled up the sheet


The Vanishing Men 4I
of paper and thrown it at a wastebasket. His pencil
was blunt; the crumpled sheets, in the evil gray
light of late afternoon, having missed their recep-
tacle, lay around the floor as if DeWolfe's product
were not poetry but snowballs.
“I’m a nice chump to be writing verses,” he said
to himself in the mirror. “You look less of a poet
than a lion-tamer.”
Some of Peter's friends who are able to realize
that this man who can play polo like a centaur ac-
tually is the author of the lines beginning, “Call ye
to the souls of shadows,” would have agreed with
him. There were strips of interwoven muscle upon
his bare brown forearms and a firmness about his
mouth, both tightened a little by his service with
the Army, and if there is a poet in him it is as a
Virginia farmer once told him, “a streak of some-
thing,” perhaps indeed a part of that fundamental
essence of Peter which calls him to a many-sided
life.
As he looked at his own troubled face in the
mirror the telephone bell rang.
“Are you there?” inquired the operator, using


42 The Vanishing Men
the conventional London phrase. “Right! Wait,
please.”
He heard a voice which came out of distance like
a voice which comes nearer through a damp grove
of dark green trees, like an aroma which comes for-
ward on the wind, until it rose slowly to its full
power. When the words were distinguishable he
knew that some one was asking for him.
“Yes,” said he, for the moment held enthralled
by the warmth and rhythm of that voice.
“I must see you.”
Brena Selcoss had come to find him. She had
taken the initiative; she had come to London. He
did not have to say, “Who is this?" She had
COInc.
Something, however, in that phrase, “I must see
you,” said with intensity by that extraordinary
woman, about whom the Benhams knew so little
and perhaps Muriel so much, filled Peter for the
moment with an inexplicable dread. This sudden
chill of self-preservation was not founded upon the
repulsion of that telephonic, “I must see you,”
uttered by a female and always the forerunner of


44 The Vanishing Men
pounded of the breathless expectancy and spon-
taneous pleading of little boys.
He found her sitting at a table beside a window
overlooking Bond Street where the fog was like a
gray stew and passersby hurrying home were like
solids stirred up to the surface from the bottom of
some kettle. She greeted him with a quiet smile
and pointed to the empty chair.
Peter, conscious of his shrewdness, said exactly
what she had said—nothing. He sat down across
from her, and for the benefit of the waitress whom
he could see out of the corner of his eye as a black
dress and white apron, he pointed to Brena's steam-
ing chocolate and nodded. He did not take his gaze
from his companion's large dark eyes which had in
them the same look he had seen once before and
which had made him think of eyes which knew no
death but had been looking out upon the world for
centuries and centuries. A friend of his had once
advanced the idea, at a dinner party in New York,
that men and women's souls were new or old, that
some of those present had been aged through count-
less residence in human form back through eras of


The Vanishing Men 45
history, that others had been created only a few
hundred years ago and that still others were new
souls just out of the wrapping. Peter recognized
as he looked into this young woman's eyes that if he,
in worldly terms, were a half a dozen years older
than she, in fact, she had outlived him in rounds and
rounds of ages.
Her eyes were so compelling that it was difficult
to give attention to the fact that her countenance
had in it a baffling riddle. Her face was long with
a straight and perfect nose below a forehead which
might be considered by a classicist lacking a good
fraction of an inch in height. She had a full
rounded chin below lips so flexible and of so warm
and rich a moist color that their thinness was
scarcely noticeable. But there was combined in her
features, which taken together were by no means
perfect, a still beauty which represented the Greek
in her, with some undercurrent of shimmering
chameleon elusiveness.
“You are shocked at my behavior,” she said at
last, arranging the white ruffling at her throat as if


46 The Vanishing Men
she preferred to treat Peter's state of mind casually.
“Perhaps you are pleased.”
“The two go together,” he said quickly.
“You did not ask me who I was. Yet, you had
never heard my voice before.”
“That struck you forcibly after you left the tele-
phone,” Peter told her with authority. “It was not
surprising. I had never heard your voice. But I
had seen you. It was only necessary to look at
each other >>
“Yes, that was memorable,” she said solemnly,
and looked far away. “But unfortunately the
tempo of this meeting does not warrant that little
laugh of yours,” she went on in reproval. “I came
to London to see you, but I came because of Muriel
Benham.”
Peter looked up in dismay. He said, “You don't
mean that she told you P”
“No one told me,” said Brena Selcoss. “You
were there. I heard scraps of conversation. Once
I heard my own name. It was no fault of mine.
Nor is it a fault of mine that with Mrs. Benham's
word or two about Muriel's desire to go away, after


The Vanishing Men 47
your sudden departure for London, that I can see
what has happened. I have come down from the
country to beg you to go back.”
Peter shook his head from side to side.
“In some way—some mysterious way—just such
a thing as this involves me always. I have been,
unwittingly, the cause of x -
“Oh, no you haven't,” said he, with vigor.
Apparently she did not hear; she leaned forward
and said with great earnestness, “It touched me
deeply—not because Muriel was once a great friend
to me—but because I cannot bear »
He interrupted her again by saying, “The whole
thing is nonsense, Miss Selcoss. I am sorry that
the only way I can put an end to it is to be un-
gallant. The plain truth is that I do not have the
slightest emotion of any kind about Miss Benham.
No doubt she is a very admirable English girl—
she is healthy, lovely and correct. No doubt there
was an unfortunate misunderstanding, but it was
not because of any inclination of mine, and nothing
need be said about it. I left Beconshire Heath be-
cause of it.”


48 The Vanishing Men
Brena sat back in her chair with a sigh which ap-
peared to Peter to state, sincerely, relief from a
great anxiety. She folded her expressive hands,
interlocking her fingers, free of all rings, and al-
lowed her eyelids to almost close.
“I would have liked to stay longer,” he said.
“Why?”
“To see you.”
“You did not know of me.”
“I had seen you.”
“But I would not care much for that kind of
judgment,” she said. “It is man's great delusion
to base inclinations on a glance.”
“Women do it too,” said Peter. “I admit—we
both admit—that it is a mistake, don't we?”
“Yes—perhaps. I am not sure.”
“Then you too hoped that I would stay?”
She neglected his question completely, but she
did not rebuke him for that smile of pleasure that
had arisen with the idea that she too had a belief
that upon a rare occasion the exceptional first ex-
change of the eyes is a true and a wise guide to the


The Vanishing Men 49
importance of the future. Peter felt a glowing
sense of understanding and of companionship.
Suddenly, with a quick tensity that startled Peter,
she looked swiftly about from face to face of the
persons, men and women, who sat at the other tables.
He saw in her eyes at that moment the look which
Benham had described so vividly—that expression
of fear of some unknown peril.
“You have been in the country a long time,” he
said as promptly as he could. “You do not like
London.”
She smiled rather sadly. “I love London. But I
choose to stay at my little retreat among the old
beech trees. I have not come to London since last
summer.”
“And you have no inclination to play in London
—to forget Beconshire for a day?” he asked. “Of
course, now you are here.”
“I do not know any one in London now,'
said. “I have an apartment here—one which I had
when I first came to England.”
“Came to England?” He inquired when, with-
out using the words.
2.
she


50 The Vanishing Men
“Yes, three years ago. I think it must have been
three centuries.”
She sat for a long time thinking, and the coming
and going of the waitress with check and change did
not interrupt her thought. Peter believed that she
was debating something; therefore he said, “Life—
even little life—the pleasures—the decent pleasures
—well, they ought to be seized.”
“You have a sentient mind,” she said, awakened.
“Then do it, whatever it is,” he said. “There are
two kinds of persons in the world—the minus per-
sons and the plus persons, negative folks and posi-
tive folks. You notice I say folks; I am from
America.”
“So am I,’” she said.
“Well, do it!” said Peter, referring to the un-
disclosed problem.
“Perhaps I have shut myself up too much,” she
said reflectively. “I did not know how much I
loved to see human beings—just see them sitting
here and there, walking in the street, jostling each
other, so various, so like—”
“Unsolved riddles.”


IV
HE was reckoned a shrewd player of life. Men
who knew Peter DeWolfe best say that if he left his
traveling bag on the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue
while he did his shopping within some store, it was
only because he had estimated carefully the
psychology of any thief and concluded that one
could depend upon human nature to believe that
luggage sitting alone on the pavement was placed
there as a trap. Peter always found his bag where
he had left it.
This is said because, unless some complex reason-
ing and calculation of the same kind can be applied
to his conduct, it is necessary to say he went blind
into love of woman.
“A few—a very few—men—and fewer women,”
Peter said once in a letter, “know just how near the
top of the world can be reached by the adventure of
free days together where there are no hours, and
52


The Vanishing Men 53
time springs in magic jumps from noon to next day-
light perhaps, and the world is a playground and a
city is your toy and mankind is the ultimate friend
of both of you. Unfortunately,” he added, “the
men who have the quality of greatness to see that
such a companionship over a span of hours is a
greater accomplishment than a life in a law office
or the presidency of some blooming bank, are few.
Those who ever find the girl are fewer. And those
who can prove some essential quality of a gentle-
man and a whole man needed to walk that delicious
tight-rope up above the moon, without taking a vul-
gar step into space with a nasty crash on landing,
are fewest of all.”
He may have been demonstrating these words.
But apparently he had abandoned his inquiry into
the mystery of past and future. He had abandoned
suspicion of her or curiosity about her life, though
ever and again he found her glancing around with
the unexplained fear in her dark eyes, as if she ex-
pected to meet the eyes of recognition or find some
fiend walking softly along behind. Outwardly he
had given over all but one inquiry, and that was the


54 The Vanishing Men
exploration of the heart and mind and soul of Brena
Selcoss as they met his companionship.
Just when he had shelved his first purpose,
awakened by Benham's challenge, and when he
wiped from his mind the memory of his one mo-
ment of dread of this girl, which of course might
be traceable to Muriel's extraordinary and tragic
warning, perhaps Peter himself could not have told.
It might have been at the moment when, after their
first evening of strolling aimlessly through the
mystery of the symbolic fog with their selves reach-
ing toward one another, they had perched like two
ravens on the pediment of Trafalgar Monument,
supperless, content, and watching the blurred lights
of one motor omnibus after another move like
luminous fish in cloudy water.
“What time is it?” Peter had asked, listening in
vain for the great bell of St. Paul's.
Brena Selcoss, sitting on her own coat, drew back
the loose sleeve of her white silk waist from her
rounded cream-colored wrist, and after a glance at
her watch, had said, “It is after two. I am hungry
and I am cold.”


56 The Vanishing Men
She had looked up with a wistful smile. “Who is
pleased when you eat?”
“Nobody,” he said. “You see I am an orphan.
There is an old waiter at the Club. I forgot him.
He rubs his hands when I am hungry, but for all I
know it is because the palms itch. He waited on
my father—the banker—and he looks like a shaven
Mephistopheles. That's all I can remember.”
“You may come with me then to my chambers,”
she had said. “We can stop on the way—goodness
knows where—but somewhere and get eggs and
butter and cheese and milk. We'll go there.”
“Can you cook!” he had exclaimed.
“Oh, no. Not at all. Does that make any dif-
ference?”
“Why should it?” Peter had inquired with sin-
cerity. He had come to the point of departure
from his first ideas of his destined relationship
with Brena Selcoss.
In the days which had flowed on, Peter's coming
and going at the new hotel to which he had moved
so that no one might attach themselves to him, at-
tracted the attention of the doorman with the worn


The Vanishing Men 57
livery, brass buttons and chronic apoplexy. “A wery
peculiar young 'un,” he had said to the porter. “A
wery odd 'airpin' 'E's in an' hout at hall hours.
I think 'e's gaming.”
Perhaps he was. That might have been how he
began. But the delight of a concentrated nothing-
to-do settled over the two and Peter's steamer at
last left the dock at Liverpool with American sol-
diers blaspheming between decks like a swarm of
hornets returning to their hive and a purser scratch-
ing his head over the name of one DeWolfe, who
was printed on the passenger list but did not claim
his telegram. Peter had lost himself, and like a
runaway child he was glad of it. There was only
this difference—for Peter no one but his lawyers
would make a search.
If one desires to know how far the breaking down
of conventions had gone, it is only necessary to
point out that upon one occasion where a laughing
Sunday crowd had gathered about a hectic man
preaching revolution from a stepladder in Hyde
Park, Peter had sat down with the girl to listen.
The sunlight was comfortable, the voice of the


58 The Vanishing Men
orator rose and broke with the regularity of waves
upon a long warm beach, and Peter, dropping back
with his head on the grass, watched a silvery air-
plane up from Hendon wheel about like a gray
beetle who couldn't decide where to light, until he
fell asleep.
When he awoke he was generating apologies. He
intended to say that Brena and he, like fairy folk,
had acquired the magic exemption from sleep but
that, of course, occasionally—
None of his embarrassment was negotiable; she
too was asleep; her hair, with its red-brown varia-
tions of autumn leaves, was alive with the sheen of
the sunlight, her arm was under her forehead. The
orator had spun his web to the end and all the crowd
had buzzed away like escaping flies; but a little stray
dog, with a face badly needing soap and water, had
gone to sleep at her feet with its face on its paws,
whining over a dream of a piece of meat with legs
which could run faster than he.
To them life had become abundant with those un-
noticed values, neglected by the commiserable blind
beings who run along the ruts of unimaginative


The Vanishing Men 59
existence with their hands put into the coarse fist
of some conventional, vulgar purpose. Together
they went to the docks at night and listened to
Chinese coolies in the galley of a tramp steamer
from Hong Kong, where up from the yellow smok-
ing interior as from a yellow smoking volcanic
crater arose the strange crooning, bubbling, wailing
songs of the Far East. They went to Hampstead
and laughed at the smug little houses with their
washed, respectable faces. They strolled through
the National Gallery where they found a room of
portraits of men of the time of Pitt, all of whom,
as if by a manner of the time, had their hands thrust
palm down into their buttoned coats; they called it
the Stomach-ache Gallery. They sat on strange
doorsteps while Peter wrote verses to the unknown
inmates behind the barrier. They invited a match
woman to dine with them and were well repaid by
hearing from her lips a discourse upon the conceit
of each age which always flatters itself into the be-
lief that it is the world's crisis. They said good-
night at all hours, they ate when hungry, and were
as skillfully silent when the mood came as they were


60 The Vanishing Men
spontaneously chattering when their minds danced
together.
Peter might have guessed, but he could not have
known to what crisis this would lead.
“We have not forgotten how to play,” he said
to her.
A look of pain had come into her face, and into
her eyes the old look of fear.
“I don't like it when you look like that,” he had
said.
“How P”
“Afraid.”
“I'm afraid of nothing, Peter—nothing which
makes ordinary fear in ordinary hearts, Peter. You
will see some time that I am not afraid.”
She had laughed at his perplexed expression, but
without joy.
“Don’t you bother about me,” she told him.
“You’ve promised that you wouldn't, you know.”
He nodded. “I’ve kept my word.”
“Perhaps—” *
“What?”


The Vanishing Men 6I
“Perhaps I’d better go back to-morrow—back to
Beconshire.”
It was the first word suggesting the end of their
holiday. Both knew that this word must finally be
spoken, but Peter had not expected to see quite the
quick pallor which came into Brena's face as she
forced out the sentence.
“We agreed, Peter, didn't we? And the time has
come, I think.”
DeWolfe felt as one who had been touched sud-
denly and unexpectedly upon the elbow by the dank,
bony fingers of a corpse.
“There is one evil passion which I think does
more harm than all the others,” he said, clasping his
strong hands over one knee. “It’s fear. It ought to
be made a crime.”
“You know nothing of fear,” she replied quietly.
“You have not lived with fear day in and day out
—year after year.”
“No, I have not lived with fear at all,” he went on,
looking straight into her eyes. “I have not lived
with it because it is a parasite. I have been
wounded, but I learned that five-eighths of the pain


62 The Vanishing Men
was fear. I have been apprehensive of some ter-
rible calamity and the fear was the major part of
the calamity. There are men in the world in
myriads who fear that they may lose their money.
Fear is worse than poverty, Brena. For God's sake,
let's not fear!”
“I did not say that I had fear,” she said. “I only
said I had lived with fear.”
“The world is a fool about fear,” Peter drove on.
“It makes cowards, but it is also the mother 22
“Of what?”
“Of murderers,” he said.
Brena was silent.
To Peter, as the day came to an end, it became
more and more plain that she had indeed decided
to go from London. She spoke of it as if it were
a flight from some kind of danger. Once she said,
“You are much too nice to take any risks, Peter.”
He had asked her about these risks, but she said,
“Among other risks, that of wasting your energies
on something which leads nowhere.” When they
had dined at a little café on Jermyn Street, she said,
“Come home with me. No one sees us go in and


The Vanishing Men 63
out. It is like a nest hidden in an old stump. We
can talk and then 22
“What?”
“Good-by. Good-night. Good-by.”
All the way up Regent Street she kept her arm
through his as if she feared that suddenly the
mortal part of him would melt away, as if this con-
tact might be made so real that it would live on in
memory, and sometimes the illusion of this strong
forearm, warm through its sleeve, might return to
her.
The apartment, which she had retained without
occupancy for some unexplained cause, was on a
street of colorless brick houses where three street
lamps, spaced with irritating precision, spread their
radiance on the front walls in a fan-shaped in-
solence. It was in a house at the far end of this
street—modest quarters for one who appeared to
have plenty of money at her command; two flights
of carpeted stairs led up to a little landing and her
door.
She lit the lamp in the corner while Peter took
the key from the hole, and the expanding light


64 The Vanishing Men
showed again the gray and gold room with its
chintz curtains and its old English mahogany and
the carved desk with its burly-maple panels and the
hangings woven in Java at the windows. But Peter
closed the door gently with his foot because he saw
none of the room where the light was dim. Once
more, as when he had seen her first, she stood be-
neath a light which poured down upon her its flood,
emphasizing her as if she, of all the universe, had
the quality of radiance and life. She had thrown
aside her cloak; she stood with an aura of eternal
youth about her, a girl who had come out of the
ages and would live on without end, the center of
all things. She gazed back at Peter from her dark
eyes, wondering, waiting for him to move.
He walked toward her slowly, but without hesita-
tion. In his face there was a square look—the look
of a fixed will that has come into its own at last.
“Brena, I'm going to break my promise.”
“Yes, dear, I understand. I can resist you, Peter.
It would be hard, but I could do it. I do not want
to do it. The promise was for your sake, Peter.
Not for mine alone.”


The Vanishing Men 65
*I've asked you nothing—no questions,” he said,
putting his hands upon each of her shoulders and
holding her at arm's length.
“No, Peter—none.”
“Because I did not care,” said he.
“No matter what might come?”
“No matter what might come.”
He drew her toward him and took a breath of
the unperfumed fragrance of Brena Selcoss. And
then with eager, hungry yearning, expressed only
through the restraints of tenderness and profound
respect, as if indeed he had some ancient deity in his
arms, he kissed her lips, he pressed his cheek into
her hair, he touched the back of her neck with his
fingers.
“I love you,” he said. “Can you understand all
I mean by those plain words—I love you?”
“I love you, Peter.”
“You must never leave me now.”
She sprang back, tearing herself from him as if
he had treacherously plunged a knife into her.
“Not that, Peter. Not that! I thought you
knew. I thought this was—good-by.”


The Vanishing Men 67
“I do not know.”
She shuddered.
“He-”
“Vanished.”
Peter was white. Breathing hard, he said, “You
-Brena—will you tell me everything?”
“Yes, Peter—before I go. I will tell you every-
thing. It will show you why I am afraid—for
you.”


V
BRENA SELcoss had been born on American soil.
One of her most vivid memories was that of her
father, an austere man, who all his life long had
carried about in the great and muscular body with
its slow movements and its suggestion of latent
giant power, a restless soul, ever seeking to find its
way hither and thither like a strong giant ant of
unceasing activity looking for new work.
She could remember dimly that her mother, whose
hair never lost the red-gold Celtic glory until she
and her second child died together when she was
forty-two, had referred with whispered awe to the
turbulent career of her husband, Demetrius. There
were vague recollections of the mother's pride in the
fact that he had risked and lost his career, begun so
early in life and so brilliantly in chemical research
and in a professorship in Athens, that he had tossed
aside all consideration for himself to labor for a
68


The Vanishing Men 69
constitutional Greece and to risk his life in a con-
spiracy for freedom.
Mary Vaughn, as her name had been before her
marriage, knew something of insurrection herself;
she had had the ill fortune to be the daughter of
the famous Tom Vaughn who was forced to flee Ire-
land with his family after the unsuccessful and for-
gotten “Secession Plot” of the 50's. Mary, from
the time she was a child, sang like a bird. She
might have become a famous contralto, for her
voice had that same warm, rich quality inherited
by her bewitched daughter, but like a bird her true
home was upon the open moors with their free
spaces and the shadows of the clouds passing over
the grass; New York, of adamant and rectangles,
was as good for the joy of her voice as it would
have been for that of a wild nightingale. She never
spoke harshly of that “turrible Babylon,” however,
without adding, “But 'twas there I met your father,
Brena, and I'll speak no ill of it.”
So, with some of her sparkling self dimmed, she
gave all her expression of loyalty to her husband;
her flight upon gauzy, unsubstantial wings was al-


The Vanishing Men 7I
throne of Greece was vacant, remained in Brena's
mind. She confessed to a thrill of pride that upon
an occasion, historic and momentous, her father,
then only twenty-eight, had been present in a major
rôle. This had been the top moment of his life;
those whom he had aided turned upon him. The
strength of a powerful secret organization, gradual-
ly falling into unscrupulous hands after its true func-
tions were over, had been turned against him. His
name became a traditional center of oaths of
vengeance; with knife wounds upon his great arms
and thighs and an unremoved bullet in his shoulder,
he came to America. He was a man who had lived
one life, and expected the world to recognize him
as an important being. It saw in him only a silent,
learned man, inventing a thousand ambitions and
from them choosing no fixed purpose, disregarding
money in a land where money, for the time, was the
fetich, careless of poverty but humiliated periodi-
cally by debt, discoursing upon biological chemistry
years before the scientific world had the imagina-
tion to listen—a giant, with dark haunting eyes,
long Homeric hair and beard, always brushed back


72 The Vanishing Men
as if he were eternally facing a hurricane, and a
voice and presence as mysteriously impressive as
that of some Elijah. Even Brena remembered his
affection for her, profound as it was, as being like
the affection of some god of mythology directed
down upon a beautiful but mortal child.
Between the frivolous sunlight of her mother and
the magnificent shadow of her father, Brena grew,
acquiring from one a whimsical humor and from
the other a calm of high cliffs and of a Parthenon.
According to Brena's own phrase, she “had no
childhood and all childhood.” She had none be-
cause her father, after a month or two of concen-
trated application of his mind upon studies of sim-
ilarities in the architecture of ancient Mexico and
prehistoric Greece, would find the butcher, landlord
and grocer at his door, and then as if awakened he
would take his little family and board the train for
some minor university where he would teach him-
self out of debt and into a period of bitterness of
heart because neither his learning nor his important
place in history were given recognition. With a
great sigh from his expansive chest, he would move


The Vanishing Men 73
on again in pursuit of some inquiry, some research,
some new application of his heroic, impractical head.
In consequence, the little girl, red of cheeks, with
spindling legs and great wondering brown eyes,
never stayed long enough anywhere for acquaint-
ance with children and for play. Tutored by her
mother and by the booming, terrifying voice of
Demetrius Selcoss when he, as he said, could spare
time for it, she learned a taste for books and con-
sumed them according to her own story “like a
hungry little pig regardless of the wisdom of a diet
and eating all that was within reach.” The books
served to give her a fake veneer of experience and
maturity.
This outer covering was fake because it failed
to represent the truth that Brena had reached six-
teen, with physical attributes which made men turn
as she passed but without any consciousness of hav-
ing approached womanhood. Without contacts with
childhood, ever on the move, living in hotels, in
boarding houses, in suburban cottages, ever de-
pendent upon one rickety patched old trunk and her
two parents, she had acquired the habits of child-


74 The Vanishing Men
like dependence. Like a child she found that life
was shaped without intervention of her own. She
allowed herself to be dragged along with her mixed
load of conceptions drawn from a helter-skelter
reading. Among other conceptions was that eternal
fiction of the gallant and perfect fairy story prince
whose bride she would one day be. To be a bride
meant little more in terms of real life than to be-
come an angel.
“If I ever have a daughter,” said Brena Selcoss,
“I will never allow her to have this dangerous
dream of a Prince Charming. It is the common
foundation upon which girls throw sensible judg-
ment to the four winds and come to critical moments
without a thought of the flowing years of real life
which are to come. It might have wrecked me
when I was seventeen.”
While Brena was seventeen, indeed, many land-
marks had been set up in her development. Her
mother had died quietly in bed the year before
without a gasp of warning, without a murmur, a
smile upon her engaging lips. Brena had been
asleep in the next room, and Demetrius, having one


The Vanishing Men 75
of his spells of insomnia, sat almost all night long
on the porch of their cottage in Dallas, Texas, in a
rocker which squeaked a little as his bulk moved.
He had come up at dawn to find his wife, with the
first rays of summer sun thrown through the shut-
ters and onto the happy, lifeless figure in bars of
gold. It shimmered on her lovely hair; in all the
red-gold mass there was not one strand of gray.
“This is the time for great calm,” he had said to
Brena, as he woke her with his giant's hand upon
her shoulder. “The life has gone from your
mother's beautiful body, my daughter, but she will
live always with us because she was a brave and
tender soul which endures forever.”
“I thought that she had endless life,” he said
after a pause, burying his bearded face in his sun-
browned hands. “It is the way with me always—
I am unprepared—always unprepared.”
This was the only flinching brought out in him
by the death of the Irish girl he had adored so
completely, to whose songs he had listened while
his life went askew and in whose smiles he had
warmed the chills of bitterness and whose arms had


76 The Vanishing Men
stilled the restlessness behind his great dark glow-
ing eyes. He went on his way unchanged, but no
doubt making new attempts to reach across the
chasm which separated him from the yearning heart
of his daughter.
These attempts were failures. Beside each
other, when he was home, they were as persons
alone; the one reminiscent, living in a past where
great figures of history stalked majestically; the
other expectant, with the eyes of youth turned away
from the shadows and toward the glints of the fu-
ture.
For three or more years before Mary Vaughn
Selcoss had died, she had been alarmed by a new
characteristic of her husband. In Dallas when he,
who once had known the tang of great deeds done
in a setting of romantic grandeur, came out through
the hot streets on a common electric car and walked
up a suburban avenue with its cheap bungalows and
its phonographs, its lawn sprinklers trying to raise
the sun-baked grass from the dead, and its con-
crete sidewalks, Brena's mother had noticed a look
in his eyes of a haunting fear.


The Vanishing Men 77
“I wonder what would become of you and Brena
if anything happened to me,” he had said in ex-
planation.
“Nothing will happen to you,” Brena's mother
had gayly answered. “Come into the house. I’ve
something to show you.”
“To show me?”
“Yes—a happy little home with the rent all paid
up till last February. Nothing will happen to you.”
But the fear was written upon his countenance
deeper and deeper, like a tracing often repeated. He
said to his wife on one occasion, “You say this fear
is new. No, dearest; I have carried it about for
many, many years.”
Long after her mother had gone Brena had seen
that look in her father's eyes.
“Perhaps he is afraid he will lose his place with
the oil company,” she had said to herself many
times.
Opportunity enough was given her in those days
to speak to herself. She had gone beyond any
school training not only in independence but in
learning; nevertheless she remained a child—a


78 The Vanishing Men
lonely, sensitive child in the heart of her ripening
womanhood. Her father's austerity and her own
peculiar shyness made the pair appear to the Texan
neighbors aloof, strange, like persons over whom
some shadow hung. And her father considered
alone? He too, even to her, was in spite of all his
giant desire for tenderness, also aloof, strange, and
over him some shadow also cast its menacing
shape.
Perhaps this shadow was explained when
Demetrius, the learned and impractical, the heroic
and the humbled exiled gentleman of Athens, stepped
in front of a moving train one evening as he was
trying to cross the tracks which run through the
Dallas streets, and then lay staring up at the sky,
his hair and beard brushed back as if he faced a
tempest.
It was the doctor who carried the news to Brena.
He stood beside the engraving of the Acropolis in
its frame battered with many packings and unpack-
ings and many hangings and removals and many
journeys in the bottoms of trunks.
“You do not weep?” he inquired.


The Vanishing Men 79
“No,” said Brena, looking at him with her
blanched face.
The doctor was a little dried up Southerner,
whose manner straddled between his Kentucky
birthright and the Prussian medical schools where
he had acquired his education.
“He was a noble man,” he said. “He was a
haunted man as well.”
Brena said nothing.
“If he had lived another six months, he would
have been totally blind. Only I knew that. He
would tell no one. And what would have supported
you both then, eh? The public funds, I reckon.”
The woman, who was still a child, shivered.
“He was sorely tempted—your father,” said Dr.
Gregory. “He had insured his life and he would
have killed himself to provide for you. Yes, that
was his plan. He asked me about it. Such a man!
Hesitating to blow his brains out because of what?
Honor. Not to defraud a soulless corporation, eh?
Not doing it, either. Too virtuous! Too just!
Splendid! Magnificent! Like his own forehead—
noble, classic!”


80 The Vanishing Men
Brena covered her face with her hands.
“Ah well,” said the Doctor, “it was well to know
such a man. You must be brave—a good girl, eh?
Your father may have been killed in answer to his
prayers. One cannot grope his way in front of a
moving train.” -
“Did he die—without—a word?” she asked.
“No; I was going to speak of that,” said Greg-
ory, chewing harder than ever on his ever present
toothpick. “He was conscious for a time—quite
conscious. He said that you never knew how much
he loved you—some awkwardness, he said, pre-
vented. He asked me to tell you that something
would protect you from danger. He didn't say
what. Something would. He said that you must
not be afraid.”
The Doctor sighed and looked about the room
with its few books, pictures, ornaments—the shabby
remnants of a life of discriminating taste, high
purposes and poverty.
“There isn't much for you to begin on,” he said
reflectively. “Five hundred life insurance. The rest
had gone because he didn't pay the premiums. Too


The Vanishing Men 8I
honest to take it by blowing his brains out—a noble
man—the timbers of a noble human craft deserving
better of life's sea!”
He was proud of that phrase.
“I think you will find that Mrs. Wilkie on the
corner will take you in for a while,” he suggested.
“You will find work.”
Yes, Brena would find work. The granddaughter
of the proud and intellectual Tom Vaughn, the
daughter of the man who in America called himself
Demetrius Selcoss, once the teacher of chemistry
in the National Institution of Greece, who had the
right to wear royal decoration and who bore on his
body the marks of battles for liberty—she was now
merely a girl alone in the world, without friends,
money, background, training, experience. A great
Democracy had leveled her. Possessed only of
that sun-ripened beauty of fruit coming into its
prime with untouched bloom upon it, to which was
added the charm and the dangers of immaturity and
innocence, her assets were a hazard. Her mind and
its capacities and its rich supply of academic learn-
ing were not currency which passed as legal tender


82 The Vanishing Men
among the persons she would know. Her father,
who had said that he always met life unprepared,
might well have added that he left it without pro-
vision.
Brena went to live with Mrs. Wilkie.
She remembers that lady as an intensely practical
woman who was always in a hurry and who often
repeated the phrase, “If one looks after pennies,
the dollars will take care of themselves.” On haste,
she had grown almost unpleasantly stout, and one
of the disagreeable memories of Brena's tragic
storehouse is the picture of this woman's absurdly
small mouth, which would not stay fixed in one
spot between her fat cheeks and her fat chin, but
moved about, appearing to be located first here and
then there, like a newly punched orifice. It never
moved so unpleasantly as when she was talking of
her ancestry, her relatives who had great wealth
and her husband's injustice and brutality in making
her give up Society. Her husband had given up
her society; he had gone to parts unknown. She
brooded upon her fancy that she could have been a
kind of dowager grandess if she had been born un-


The Vanishing Men 83
der a luckier star or had rejected Sam Wilkie. For
the rest, her principal interest was the income from
her boarders and a paranoiac aversion to the Ro-
manist Church about which she whispered scandals
and accusations in a kind of confidential mania of
prevarication, knowing no limit nor restraint.
She would not have been of any particular im-
portance in the life of Brena Selcoss had it not
been for two facts. One of them was that, lacking
other distinction, she could have that of giving
refuge at so much and so much for room and
board per week to the most alluring young creature
that, for the moment, was known to the male eyes
of Dallas as an unsolved riddle. The other fact was
that she was the half-sister of the mother of Jim
Hennepin of Virginia.


The Vanishing Men 85
This accounted for the presence of Jim Hennepin
in Texas. He had been there two years. Compton
Parmalee & Co. had found nothing to criticize in
his bookkeeping. In fact, it had qualities of genius
which sometimes make bookkeeping not only a cold
record, but a vitalized inspiration of business.
Hennepin was a useful addition to Compton
Parmalee's small staff. He drank at the Club, but
with a moderation considering his resistance to the
effect of alcohol. He was a popular young man in
Dallas, and the fact that so many men in that Texas
city have now forgotten that they ever heard of
this youth is only a commentary upon the truth
that the impressions most of us make are not even
fine scratches when time's roller has passed once
or twice over men's memory and to-day has become
so much more important than yesterday and that
which is in sight covers that which is gone like
new strata in a geological period.
It would be untrue to deny that Jim Hennepin
was an attractive figure. If he had craft and
viciousness, as some have said he had, it was belied
by the Hennepin smile—an inviting smile, invoking


86 The Vanishing Men
the cheer of the moment like a smile of a boy.
Furthermore he was tall and graceful, like an oars-
man in an English college eight. He was more like
the bad son of an earl than a bookkeeper, and per-
sons often inquired who he was, especially before
they had heard him speak in his care-free modern
American slang figures, and were surprised to find
that he was older than he looked, had fought his
education for several wasted years at the University
of Virginia and was earning 'forty-three dollars a
week and spending fifty-nine when he was over
thirty.
The first time he ever saw Brena Selcoss was one
morning when he had come back from a vacation
of several weeks at some ranch among the pecan
trees in Coleman. His vacations had become a
mystery to other young men who were employed;
all that appeared necessary was for Jim to go to
Compton Parmalee and tell him when he would be
back. It was ascribed to his magic quality of
persuasion. Some said that if Hennepin smiled
and asked in his inviting, breathless manner there
would be no surprise to find that the President of


The Vanishing Men 87
the United States had allowed him to take the
whole of Alaska under the Homestead Act. And
yet, though no one in Dallas then knew of it, this
was the man of unchecked wild youth, who had
beaten a train conductor almost lifeless in the Balti-
more station and had killed his riding horse with a
stone held in his strong young hand.
Brena was sitting at an early breakfast when he
came in. He did not speak to her; he merely stared.
After a while, without taking his eyes away from
her, he put his gun, his coat and his bag into a
chair behind him. He still gazed at her and she,
astonished, gazed back. He suggested Apollo; he
suggested vaguely the sudden appearance of the
fairy prince. He was giving an exhibition of his
supreme rudeness—his almost majestic and mem-
orable insolence; but it was also a supreme compli-
ment, the best he knew how to bestow.
“Well,” said he at last. “It's springtime.”
He spoke as if he had been a messenger from
Destiny, as if Spring were Brena's time and that
time had come.
It was like a sentence of a court.


88 The Vanishing Men
With a quirk about the corners of his mouth, he
walked boldly toward her and looked down into the
dish of cereal on the table beneath her eyes.
“Nothing but milk,” said he. “No, by God, you
shan't have milk on your rice! It's an outrage. You
are the young queen and I am the Captain of the
Palace Guards. And I'm off in a borrowed motor
car to get you the richest, thickest pint of cream
in the city, and the speed laws can't stop me.”
This absurd young man, with his infant smile, his
athlete's body and his elementary hungers, leaped
out down the steps, into a new touring car in which
he had come, cut out the muffler and was gone. .
He came back with cream. His aunt said, “Jim,
But he was not crazy. He had an
instinct for creating romance; he made the illusion
when he wished because he had learned that ad-
ventures, particularly those with women, failed or
succeeded according to the distance from the hum-
drum world he could lead on as a guide into the
you are crazy.”
tropical and gaudy-flowered jungle of Change.
He became Brena's knight. He said so himself.
He told her that for her to contemplate going to


The Vanishing Men 89
*
work was absurd—it was an impropriety like feed-
ing American beauty roses to army mules. Brena
laughed and went to work one Monday morning;
but Jim Hennepin had struck the right note when
he had told her he would be her knight. She said,
“I do like knights—not for myself, because I am
so healthy.”
“Yes, you burst with it,” he said, looking at her
forehead, her throat, her wrists. “It is my dis-
traction.”
“Nevertheless I like knights because they are
knights.”
“I am the originator of the knight idea,” he said.
“Somebody has told you it was King Arthur or
some one else. Mere plagiarism! Come with me
this evening on a ride to Waco.”
He took her everywhere and his aunt scowled.
“Jim, she is only seventeen,” Mrs. Wilkie said,
panting.
“She looks twenty-five,” he answered.
“But it leads nowhere,” said the aunt. “No-
where except to scandal.”
“Scandal?” replied Hennepin yawning. “Non-


90 The Vanishing Men
sense! Also piffle! A man takes a beautiful girl
around for the same reason that you'd wear a dia-
mond tiara if you had one, especially if it had been
given you by some broker. It's just a symbol of
one's ability to have the right things. It's ego.”
“Is that all, Jim?”
“Yes,” he said, lying glibly.
“Because you haven't the money to be married,
Jim,” she said, moving her little mouth over so
that it looked like a newly-punctured pink opening.
She liked to live near immorality; it gave her
vicarious pleasure. She had a magazine picture
of a certain French actress tacked up beside her
looking-glass. She would have been sorry if Brena
had suffered misfortune from Jim, but also she
would have been glad just as one, though sorry to
hear of a distant acquaintance dying, has a thrill of
interest in finding a familiar name in the obituary
notices. -
Hennepin was whimsical enough to repeat to
Brena, word for word, this conversation.
They were sitting in the motor car looking out
over the undulating Texas prairie. In the hollows


The Vanishing Men 9I
the red bud was in bloom and the air of dusk was
like the light, velvety. -
“It never occurred to her that I might love you,”
he said.
Brena said nothing.
“Don’t you love me a little?” he asked.
“I don't know, Jim—really, I don't know. I
don't know what love is. I've only read about it,
and it is just like reading about some place you've
never been. I wouldn't know when I had arrived
there and stood on the very spot.”
“My God, you're like a new flower, opened up
for the first time and wet with dew!”
As if he could not conceal haste, he seized her
hand and squeezed it until she said, “Oh, Jim"
“Well, you're fond of me?”
“Yes, I am, Jim. I'm fond of you.”
“Perhaps it's because you have no one else to be
fond of,” he suggested.
“I don't know,” she told him. “I don't know
yet.”
He looked around at the yellow horizon in the
West and shivered.


The Vanishing Men 93
ing home, sometimes with men staring at her, of
trying to find interest in the chocolate fudge minds
of girls who did not like to have her around be-
cause she talked like a professor and wore the beauty
they wished was theirs. It was not clear that Jim
was not the one man of all, the prince who stepped
out of nothing and held out his hands to her in some
kind of miraculous tableau. No one reminded her
that she was only seventeen; she felt that she was
as old as the pyramids, for her reading had made
her appear as related to the past. More than any-
thing else some fundamental part of her declared
that she was as nothing, that whatever she might
do or become there could be no disaster, no loss;
that she was created to be given away.
One day Jim came home at the noon hour. He
did not usually come then, and evidently he had not
come to have lunch there, for he stood outside the
door where his aunt's piggy eyes could not see him,
and beckoned to Brena mysteriously.
When she had come out onto the porch, he took
her hand and led her around the corner of the
house. She could always remember the heat of the


94 The Vanishing Men
blazing sun of noon which flattened its burning upon
them as if it were some great wrath.
“Look here!” said Jim, with a kind of ferocity
in his voice and eyes. “I’m going away. Compton
Parmalee won't be in Dallas, and I’ve an errand
to do.”
“You’re so excited, Jim.”
“Yes, I know. But the time has come. I want
to know if you love me.”
He did not appear to care much what her answer
would be.
“I think I do, Jim.”
“You’re willing to take a trip? Brave enough to
go to St. Louis alone? To meet me?”
“You mean you want to marry me, Jim?”
“Why yes, if it turns out all right.”
“I’ll go.”
“Brave enough?”
“I’m not much of a coward, Jim—that least of
all.” -
“Well, then—listen. Here's a hotel. The name is
written on that card. Be there on Friday, the


The Vanishing Men 95
twelfth of the month. I'll be there at four o'clock.
You better come the day before. Get a room and
don't be frightened.”
“No, Jim.”
“Why do you look at me so?”
“Because I have no money now.”
“That's all right. Here, take this. It's plenty,
eh? Don't let any one see it. And you won't
say y
“Of course not, Jim—not anything.”
“Your hand on that.”
She put her hand in his.
“Why are you going away, Jim?”
He looked into her eyes, and if Brena had known
the world better, she would have seen something of
the brutality of Jim Hennepin at that moment.
“Tell me, Jim.”
“I’ve had a call,” he said craftily. “If I can tell
you when I come for you in St. Louis you'll say
that it is all the strangest Well, I've had a call.”
Brena went to St. Louis. She had not marked
the date on her little calendar on the bureau; it was


96 The Vanishing Men
not necessary because she was not ready to forget,
and besides some one might ask her a question.
Some one might have asked why she went. And
she could not have told.


VII
BRENA SELcoss returned from St. Louis on the
sixteenth of the month.
The train arrived in Dallas in the early morning
when the night prairie wind was still cool but she
spent the last dollar in her purse to be driven to
Mrs. Wilkie's in one of the old city station hacks.
“Well!” said the round landlady exploding the
breath from her little mouth to express astonish-
ment, inquiry and disapproval all at once.
“Yes, I came back,” Brena replied lifting her suit
case up the steps wearily.
“I thought I was going to lose all my nice young
people,” Mrs. Wilkie said, turning on the disc record
of her false good nature. “Jim Hennepin went with
hardly a thank you. There's been no end of mail
for him. I didn't know where he'd gone; he made
such a mystery about it, so I sent the letters to his
office. They probably know about him—more than
I do. He didn't tell you where he went?”
97
f
V.


98 The Vanishing Men
“No,” said Brena, “he didn't tell me.”
“And not a word from him. Not so much as a
picture postcard.”
Brena was trying to pass around the bulk of the
older woman.
“And you went off yourself without much ex-
planation,” Mrs. Wilkie complained, putting herself
in the way, “and without knowing whether or not
you was coming back.”
She looked all over the girl from head to foot
with an expression in her beady eyes indicating that
it would have been better if a legal guardian had
been appointed for Brena.
“Well, I'm here.”
“So I see. Have you had breakfast?”
“I don't want any,” replied Brena.
She went up to her room under the roof where
upon the bedspread were the dust marks made
by her suit case when she had thrown it up to pack
six days before. She put it back on those marks
as if a round of life had been completed; wearily
she opened it and the first object she took out was
a piece of soap, done up neatly in a wrapper with


The Vanishing Men 99
violets in a wreath around the legend, “Made ex-
pressly for this Hotel.” She held it for a long time
in her hand, staring down at it. Then she got up
to cross the room to the picture of the Acropolis—
her father's picture, the last possession of the fam-
ily. For a long time too she looked at this en-
graving in its travel-battered frame—a relic of
Demetrius Selcoss.
“He said not to be afraid,” she told herself. “He
said something would come if I were in danger.”
Downstairs at about that same moment Mrs.
Wilkie was writing in her diary. At one time in
her life she had acquired the fancy that the memoirs
of women often were important—the original
sources of historical facts and the mirror of so-
ciety of a period—and the diary habit kept its grip
upon her long after she had ceased to say to her-
self, “Think what it would have meant if Madame
de Maintenon had kept a diary!” Now she wrote
in the same hasty, out-of-breath style with which
she conducted all life—leaving out pronouns and
writing sentences. “Went shopping. Saw Bertha.


IOO The Vanishing Men
Said her husband's teeth kept her awake getting
hot water bottle.”
She poised her fountain pen and wrote: “Brena
Selcoss returned to-day from St. Louis. Said she
had errand there. There is a frightened look in her
eyes.” A drop of ink fell and spattered out. She
blotted it and left the outline of a little black fiend
which danced upon the page.
It may have been true that Brena had in her great
dark eyes a frightened look but there was nothing
to show panic in her conduct. For a girl who was
not yet eighteen she exhibited a great deal of com-
mon sense. She went back to the Porto Rican
shop and asked for her old position. It was given
to her and life was renewed again in a pulsing
monotony of that slightly-soiled middle-class re-
spectable vulgarity which appeared to Brena as in-
finitely more sordid than the squalor of slums or
the crises of passionate crimes. That she was a
part of this dull brown cheapness, surrounded by
virtuous and smug persons who lived contentedly
without ideas or taste in a round of interest in such
things as strawberry festivals, new hats, pink


The Vanishing Men IOI
celluloid hair-receivers, Sunday newspapers, half
pounds of chocolates, card games, etiquette, napkin-
rings, the domestic lives of actresses and royalty,
souvenir spoons, picture postal cards, talking ma-
chines, baseball scores, spiritualism, and decorated
sentiments or vulgarities framed for the wall, was
an anomaly like planting a peony among the cab-
bages.
But Brena, conscious of this, found herself won-
dering whether every human being did not have the
feeling that he or she was a gem in an inferior
setting. Her mother's sense of humor was in her
and she saw her escape not by fluttering at the
walls but by climbing them. Even at seventeen, no
doubt her face had begun to take on that calm of
centuries with its tenderness and patience and wist-
fulness and understanding as if she carried eternal
hopes and bore the sufferings of all mankind; it
was only her mother's sense of humor that thrust
its light through this mountainous and heroic ex-
pression. Later the punctuation of fear, expressed
only through her eyes, had become a characteristic
interruption.


IO2 The Vanishing Men
Mrs. Wilkie often mentioned the journey to St.
Louis. She would have given Brena a week's board
to know why the girl had gone, but even Mrs. Wilkie
sensed some quality in this beautiful child which
made her a creature of a different species and filled
others with a sense of awe from which only Jim
Hennepin had been exempt; she never pressed her
questions beyond a point where she found herself
looking into the wondering, dark Selcoss eyes.
Brena kept her own knowledge without an effort;
it was done with a magnificent restraint and with
the suggestion that she who until that year had
navigated life not at all would hereafter navigate it
for a long time without another's hand upon the
tiller.
Brena even asked twice whether Hennepin had
written. She chose moments when the two other
women boarders and the accountant of the Southern
Pacific were at the table.
“Written!” said Mrs. Wilkie puckering her little
mouth as if she were going to whistle her sentence.
“Written? Not hel But I might expect that; I


The Vanishing Men I03
-
have never found that I could expect gratitude—
from anybody.”
She looked at each face at the table severely.
“But that's nothing,” she added. “His own
father who is dying of Bright's hasn't heard from
him—not for three months.”
“Oh,” said Brena as if reflecting and weighing
the matter. She left the table and going into the
front room she played in lively time upon the piano
there—a piano with a sheeny red case and with a
tone intended to be the startling opposite of the tin-
pan attributes of old pianos. This one had tones
extravagantly round like the softness of an elocu-
tionist reading poetry. Brena had remembered this
piano and described its affectation. It was nothing
to her that those who heard her play on it said, “Oh!
—She makes it talk,” for they were the same per-
sons who said, “What beautiful flowers! They're
like wax!”
Brena at the piano that evening felt as she al-
ways felt, that she was alone in her world—the
friend of certain dogs and cats which lived in houses
along the way home from work. She had grown


I04 The Vanishing Men
accustomed to this loneliness and was nearly con-
vinced subconsciously that it would go on forever.
Within sight there was nothing which might break
into it and she had no pangs because of that. She
envied no one unless it were the unidentified young
wife who lived in the green bungalow on the corner
of Deering Street and had appeared a few weeks
before, pale and transparent and smiling with a
baby in her arms. Brena set her face toward to-
morrows. She might have been expected, therefore,
to be startled when the past broke in upon her.
It came in the form of Compton Parmalee. -
Brena had been writing in her hot room under
the roof. It was still hot although the Texas Fall
had come and Brena with her sleeves rolled back
from her shapely young arms with their cream-
colored skin had been bending over her little table
trying to set down in the form of a written drama
the story of the one other girl who worked now in
the Porto Rican Embroidery store. The story was
not as dramatic a story as it may have appeared to
Brena at seventeen. Nor could Brena have written
a play because she had no knowledge whatever of


The Vanishing Men I05
the craft of writing plays, which she later found out
is a matter of skilled carpentry and not inspired,
as Brena had conceived it. For all of this she now
asks to be forgiven since every one, usually in ex-
treme youth, writes a play and nearly every one, as
Brena, startled and surprised at the secret labor,
thrusts the manuscript into a drawer when a knock
COIneS.
It was Mrs. Wilkie.
“Well!” she said, exploding her usual astonish-
ment, inquiry and disapproval in one puffed word.
Brena smiled.
“You better put yourself to rights!” said the land-
lady, holding the edge of the varnished yellow door.
“You better dress your best! You've got a caller.”
“To see me?”
“Yes, to see you. And such a caller! It's Mr.
Parmalee!”
Brena stiffened. She asked: “What does he want
to see me for?”
“I don't know,” Mrs. Wilkie admitted. “I cer-
tainly wish I did. He has oodles of money! He


IO6 The Vanishing Men
speculated during this year and he's made a for-
tune!”
“I will go down just as I am,” said Brena calmly
and firmly. “I do not care about his fortune, Mrs.
Wilkie. I want to find out what he wants of me.”
Compton Parmalee did not appear at all anxious
to say what he wanted. He was a small, wiry man,
careful of his dress, who above everything else was
self-contained. He thrust his glances. As Brena
Selcoss came in the door he thrust a glance at her
and then looked up at the ceiling as if his mind
was digesting that which his gray eyes had photo-
graphed. As she came toward him inquiringly he
rose, thrust another glance at her and looked out
the window considering. When she stopped he
thrust once more and sat down looking at the carpet.
Every one who ever knew Compton Parmalee will
remember the characteristic inspection of that dar-
ing speculator.
“Are you Miss Selcoss?” he asked as if now that
he was able to fasten his gaze upon her, he found
it improbable that the girl he saw in all her fresh-
ness of youth was the girl he had come to see.


The Vanishing Men 107
(*Yes,” she said.
* No one ever understood where Parmalee had
acquired the judicial manner that he wore around his
daring as one wears the robes of an office for which
one holds no title.
He had come to Texas from the desert country
of Southern California when he was twenty-six.
He knew that country well. In his years in Dallas,
acting as a cotton commission man and commodity
gambler, he had collected a large and valuable library
about the whole historic Southwest, its Indian tribes,
the Pueblos, the strange customs and secrets of
savage men carrying some of the traits and tradi-
tions of prehistoric Aztecs, and the Jesuit mission-
aries. It was said by some persons that his quiet
ways were a veneer put on by some studious years
in Berkeley at the University, but rumor had it that
Parmalee with his rather pale, young face that made
him look thirty instead of forty-three, his small,
well-shaped hands, his immaculate linen, his soft
voice, had once shot a man across a roulette table
which he himself owned and operated.
That he was ever a man of violence is very doubt-


I08 The Vanishing Men
ful. He was an unquivering gambler but not with
his personal safety; his personal safety was his prin-
cipal concern. He wore gloves on all occasions—
to keep the germs off his hands; he had his massive
mahogany desk, in the office building across from
the new hotel, wiped down every morning with an
antiseptic; long years before the practice had be-
come a worthy fashion he had himself examined
periodically by specialists. He was always fearing
contagion. He gargled. He snuffed. He sprayed.
He read medical journals. He feared cancer above
all other things. He loved his life so much that he
had loved no woman for many years; the monopoly
of this devotion excluded competition. He loved his
life with an unending passion; he ruined it by fear-
ing to lose it.
This was the man who withheld his questions,
bided his time and gazed at Brena Selcoss with
frank admiration on his absurdly youthful and
academic face. He turned away from her, walked
to the window and looked out at the night, at the
wall of the neighboring house upon which the light
of the full moon was bluish white, and then like an


The Vanishing Men 109
actor who has rehearsed the part of a cool and col-
lected man he walked toward Brena and said clearly
and calmly, “I’ve come for information.”
He could not see the slightest quiver in the girl's
eyes, though he looked for it.
“Yes,” said he “May I close this door?”
Mrs. Wilkie, who was outside pretending to read
the names in the telephone book, saw the front room
door gently swing to and heard the latch.
“How old are you?” Parmalee was asking Brena.
“Eighteen this month,” she said.
“Well, that's surprising—very indeed,” he said.
“You are more of a woman than a girl.”
Brena was not pleased by the patronizing manner
of this rich cotton man. She said promptly:
“The information you wanted? Was it about
me?”
Parmalee looked up with a single sharp thrust
of his glance; he adjusted his tie and his opinion
of Miss Selcoss at one time. He put upon his un-
wrinkled clean-shaven face a typical ingratiating
smile. He took his pointed chin, which combined
with his upslanting eyebrows to give him a satanic


IIO The Vanishing Men
expression, not unpleasing, in his small white cold
hand.
He said: “Oh, no, the information I seek is about
a certain man.”
She glanced around her quickly as if to be sure
that no one else had come with him and was sitting
outside the circle of radiance from the gas mantle
that made the faces of human beings suddenly turn
livid and ghastly as Parmalee's had turned and as
she felt her own had turned.
“Yes. You want me to be more specific,” he said
in a low voice. “I will be. The man is **
He stopped, simulating perhaps a reluctance to
speak the name.
Brena held her breath.
“Jim Hennepin,” he said. “An employee or per-
haps a better word is associate.”
Without a flutter in her dark eyes, Brena said:
“Oh, then you do not want to see me—you want
to see Mr. Hennepin's aunt—Mrs. Wilkie.”
Parmalee shook his head from side to side. “Per-
haps we'd better sit down,” he suggested.
Her face flushed as she told him that she would


The Vanishing Men III
prefer to stand, but he only shrugged his shoulders.
“Has she heard from him?” he asked. “To-
day?”
“No,” said Brena, “she hasn't had a line from
him since he left Dallas. There isn't anything—at
the Office?”
“No, his accounts are all right,” replied Parmalee.
“It appears that you are anxious on that point—in
his behalf. Are you fond of him?”
“Not in the slightest.” Brena answered with a
voice which showed no emotion whatever: she might
have been asked whether she liked cold raw sliced
tomatoes.
“Well, that's surprising—very, indeed,” he said
with a thrust of his glance. “You were friendly?”
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose that we were very
friendly. I do not know why you are asking me
these questions.”
“That will appear,” he said gravely. “You will
see that I am your friend in this, Miss Selcoss. I
think you will say that I came here to do you a
service.”
For just a flick of time something rose from the


II2 The Vanishing Men
depths of Compton Parmalee and Brena saw it. It
was almost an effluvium of the buried best in him—
the stir of a dying thing trying to come to life. It
was half a benevolent love of fellow man: half the
call of an isolated, warped and lonely soul. It was
the thing which she saw later and to which she gave
in her folly, but now it flickered for a moment on
that strange aesthetic gambler's face and was gone.
“You telegraphed to Jim Hennepin from St.
Louis,” he said. “That telegram was opened.”
“When?” asked Brena. “When it came? Of
course.”
He did not deny it. He said: “It was just your
message, ‘I am waiting,' and it was signed, ‘B’. It
took a little inquiry for me to know that this tele-
gram was probably sent by you.”
“But nearly five months have gone.”
“I know.”
“And why now do you come to me?”
“You needn't tell me anything you do not wish
to tell. I assume that you arranged to meet him
in St. Louis.”


The Vanishing Men II3
Brena put her hand up and felt her throat. It
was hot—the skin was hot under her cold hand.
“It was a great mistake,” she said in a low voice,
“—a great mistake.”
“The idea was marriage?”
“It was my idea—if I had any clear idea.”
“You were very young.”
“Yes, I think so—looking back.”
“You know now what was in Jim Hennepin's
mind?”
She did not answer.
“The dirty dog!” said Parmalee. “What a smil-
ing face he had Î"
Brena shuddered.
“Well, here is the telegram,” said the visitor. “I
opened it myself. There is no one else who knows
it was ever sent.”
He wet his thin lips; he said:
“It is a secret—ours,” and stretched out his hand
with the yellow envelope held daintily in his
fingers.
The girl, however, was looking searchingly into
his eyes; she was young but not too young to be


II4 The Vanishing Men
suspicious of a secret shared by two, when one treats
that secret as if it were a kind of asset.
Apparently he read her thoughts, for he said
hurriedly, “You needn't feel under any obligation
to me for keeping that secret. I have my stains and
blights but they are not of that kind. As I said
all I came for was information.”
She took the telegram which he had held toward
her and nodded.
“Of course, if he were to meet you he probably
told you more. He probably told you where he was
going, eh—and why?”
He leaned forward as he asked this question and
turned one side of his face as if the answer could
best be heard by his right ear alone.
“No,” she said. “He spoke of making a great
sum of money, of getting it from some place.”
“He did not say where?”
“No.”
Parmalee sighed as if he had gone up a blind
alley and had found its end.
“He spoke of some call—some message,” said
Brena.


The Vanishing Men II5
The broker's eyes widened until they were in a
staring distention. -
“Ha! So he did! What did he tell you?”
“Nothing.”
Parmalee sat down in a chair and stared at the
carpet for a long time.
“It is very peculiar,” he said at last. “He left
you to meet him in St. Louis. He went on an
errand of some strange kind and refused to tell you
what it was. Well! Well! And then you waited
in St. Louis—in vain.”
“How did you know he didn't come?”
“Your telegram.”
Brena said: “I was there three days. I waited.
I was frightened. But I grew more in those three
days than I have ever grown before in three years.”
“Yes,” said Parmalee with a flicker of tenderness
again. “I can understand.”
“You have heard no word from him since?”
“No word. And I thought that it might be my
duty to tell »
“No, no, no!” exclaimed the man, jumping up.
“If there is any duty in the world it is not to tell.


II6 The Vanishing Men
Few would ever understand—as I understand. It
would do no good. If I can do nothing, what pur-
pose would it serve for you to try? For God's
sake think of yourself.”
“And I promised him,” she said. “What differ-
ence does it make that I see clearly now what a
man he is—my promise to keep silent.” -
“Quiet!” commanded Parmalee. “Not so loud.
No purpose is served by stirring up a search.”
“A search? You mean that you do not know
where he is, Mr. Parmalee?”
The broker lowered his voice: “Yes,” said he.
“Not only have you and Mrs. Wilkie heard nothing
and his father heard nothing, but I have heard
nothing. Apparently after he had decided to take
you away from Dallas this thing described as a call
came.” -
“Yes.”
“There is still a balance of a considerable sum to
his credit in the office. I will tell you confidentially
that he has not claimed it. As far as I can find out
no man, woman or child for nearly half a year has
seen Jim Hennepin. No one misses him to be sure.


The Vanishing Men II7
And for you to sacrifice yourself—that would be
utter folly! He has gone—like this!”
Parmalee held up his small clenched fist, opened
it suddenly and blew an imaginary speck of dust
from its palm into oblivion.


The Vanishing Men II9
his desk and when she sat down he touched these
furs caressingly for several moments. He might
have been thrusting his glances at her, but she could
not tell. Dusk had entered the office, too, and he
became only a figure of two dimensions, without
thickness, from which after a moment there came
a voice which Brena scarcely recognized, so weary
was it and yet so unrelaxed and tense.
“You are sure that all you told me was accurate,”
he said.
She needed no explanation; she said at once, “Of
' in a tone of indignation.
“I know,” said he. “But there was just one more
thing. Did he leave a paper with you?”
“A paper? No, he left no paper. He gave
course,'
»
Ine—
She hesitated and went on. “He gave me some
money and there was a little scrap of paper in it.
I remember because I did not know whether to keep
it or throw it away. He might have wanted it. It
had on it an arrow drawn with ink and a lizard
drawn beside it and two words underneath, “This
- > x2
-
Sign


I2O The Vanishing Men
“Well, that was nothing,” said Parmalee. “Where
is it now?”
“It disappeared. You haven't 22
“No. Not a word. He has gone.”
She was silent.
“In fact, it was not because of anything to do with
it that I wanted to see you,” the man said. “You
will say when you know why I sent for you that
you have never heard of anything like it in all your
life.”
Brena sat down.
“Did you ever hear of a man who had made a final
killing—who a year ago was juggling riches and
insolvency in one hand and success or failure in the
other, wanting to talk about himself to an eighteen-
year-old orphan?”
“No,” she said with a little laugh. “I never
heard of that.”
“I sent for you to tell you about myself—not
about what I have been—but about what I am. I
did this after having seen you once and once only.
It is because there was a sympathy between us that
was most extraordinary—more than you know.”


The Vanishing Men I2I
“I think I understand.”
“It is not love,” said he. “Let me make it plain
that I am not deluded, that I am not in love with
you. You will never hear me talking about the
love of youth. I am not old, but the passion and
idealism of love have gone—worn out perhaps in
taking risks and jarring to pieces within while like
a carved marble on the outside. No, I will not make
love to you.”
“No,” said Brena giving affirmation.
He played with the furs a little more.
“Ten months ago I scraped together all the
money I could and I threw it into a final play.
That's neither here nor there. I am now worth a
little over two million dollars, I am through with
business, with trading, with speculation, with this
office, and with Dallas, Texas—forever!”
“And now P” asked Brena.
He laughed. “That is it!—What?” The fur
stole on the desk in front of him he smoothed gently
with his open hand. Brena made no suggestion as
to what he should do with his life, and after a
moment he went on, “There is left to me now col-


I22 The Vanishing Men
lecting books, travel, perhaps an opportunity to do
some one a kindness now and then and taking good
care of my health. I shall buy a painting occasion-
ally. Can you think of anything else?”
To Brena the problem was new; she did not have
a ready answer.
“I have burned out,” said Parmalee. “I am
ashes.”
Of this he spoke cheerfully as if he had repeated
it over and over to himself until it had lost its
blackness and now gave the strange pleasure that
all final conclusions of human limitations and disas-
ters give at last when they are accepted.
“You see I am not a great man,” he explained.
“It was necessary for me to throw all of myself
into the fight—every resource I could summon. I
do not smoke. I know as much about smoking as
any man alive. I have measured its effect with
accuracy. It is a greater devitalizer than alcohol.
But I do not drink, either. I have conserved and
guarded all my sensations until I have none. All
my life—my last twenty years of life—I have prom-
ised myself indulgences—indulgences of gigantic


The Vanishing Men I23
and exquisite design, but now that I can have them,
this body of mine rejects them all, refuses them all.
Fate laughs in my ear and says, “You’re done for.
The most sensuous pleasure you shall have will be
the flavor of that apple sauce you have eaten for
lunch for fifteen years and will eat for lunch for
the rest of your days.' Isn't this a grim joke, Miss
Selcoss?”
“I do not know,” said Brena uneasily.
Even in the dark he sensed her desire to go.
“Don’t leave me,” he said with a voice which
almost broke into a low sob. “You are the only
one who can understand.” -
“All right,” she said, astonished that she had
become important to any one. “I’m sorry, Mr. Par-
malee.”
“Let me tell you something else,” he went on. “I
have dreamed of a certain prestige—a kind of
background of life that I would enjoy when I was
ready. To that end I have given liberally to cam-
paign funds. Next year if I wish I can be Minister
to Portugal. Personally I think this is a grim jest.
It is the system, however.”


I24 The Vanishing Men
Brena clasped her ungloved hands in her lap and
thrust her arms out until it appeared that she was
expressing something of the thrill of imagination
which the picture of diplomatic life in a European
capital had given her.
“But I shall not take the office,” said Parmalee.
Brena uttered an exclamation.
“No, I shall not take it. I do not want more bril-
liance. I want more dim light. I like the dusk.
I do not want to see my name in printed letters. I
never want to see it again. I do not want men and
women to say, ‘That is Compton Parmalee.' I
want all strangers to neglect me. I want to live in
a dim light—like this—now in this office.”
He sighed.
“I’ve made many mistakes,” he said. “I want
now to become buried, to be unseen—like a ghost.”
Brena protested; she said, “No, no, you don't
want that.”
Parmalee did not answer and the silence and the
dusk invited the girl to speak.
“There are so many things you can buy with your
money,” she said.


The Vanishing Men I25
“Only one,” he replied sharply.
“And that 22
“Is you.”
She pushed her chair back from the desk with
both her hands.
“You need not be alarmed,” said his calm voice.
“I have stated it purposely at its worst. It is better
for you to have this thought presented at first and
perhaps we can overcome it later. I put it in the
terms the world will use; Dallas will say, “He
bought her.' But, after all, we will not be in Dallas.
We will be in Pekin or in Bombay or in sight of the
Pyramids or in the crags of the Norway coast. I
am more than twenty years older than you are. But
the varied and interesting and important persons
with whom we may dine will only say, “He has a
beautiful young wife with a free mind. Her father
x -x
was a patriot of Greece.
“You know y
“All that I could about you,” said Parmalee.
“But it has been a long time,” Brena said, as if
cross-examination might bring clarity to displace
her puzzled mind. “You did not—”


I26 The Vanishing Men
“Come back?” he asked. “No.”
Outside the plate glass window the rising wind
tuned mournfully.
“You are very young,” he said. “You would not
foresee as I foresaw that I could not see you with-
out starting the tongues of scandal. You are penni-
less, young, working. I am rich, worldly, conspicu-
ous. I should have liked to send you extravagant
presents. You would not have understood. You
would have thought I was an old fool trying to be
a lover. I was not that, but the others would have
said even worse of me. So I waited, clinging to a
single strand that brings us together.”
“Us!”
“Yes—sympathy. Because you saw in me the
one thing left that you might salvage and find valu-
able. Not because I am a man and you are a
woman, but because I am a human being and you,
who can see with a vision of the gods, saw in my
ashes one unburned thing.”
“You knew l”
“Yes, I knew,” he said sadly. “No one else could
see. Underneath there is something left—a kind


The Vanishing Men I27
of tenderness for humanity. It is to fan this spark
that I want to buy you.”
Brena said nothing; he had made good his prom-
ise that he would tell her something she had never
heard of before.
“I do not want a wife,” he said. “That would
be the title, but I do not want a wife. It is too late.
I want a mother. I want you to make my spirit
clean and white as it was when I was ten.”
“And yet,” said Brena, “you do not think of me.”
Suddenly this unhappy man rose to his feet
trembling, intense, gesticulating.
“Think of you,” he said. “How can you say
that I have not thought of you? Is this thing I
propose so unnatural as the foolish world has said
of it? Is it base of me to want to take a diamond
from the mud where no one else has seen it? Is
it an ugly thought that I feel repulsion when I see
you, who are made of the rarest materials, wasted
upon cheap labors and cheap garish surroundings
and being worn down like a fine, wonderful machine,
abused by coarse use? Am I a fool to believe that
with the only contacts available to you, you will only


I28 The Vanishing Men
meet the vulgar men you can never marry? Did I
not see that you had a vision as from Olympic
heights which was being blinded in this routine of
middle-class horrors?”
Brena's face, upon which the last light fell, was
white and frightened as if she had seen a ghost.
It was enough to tell him that she knew that he
spoke truly.
“I do not ask you to give anything to me except
your help to make me new again,” he said. “I do
not ask young love. I have none to give. I cannot
take you away or keep you near me without mar-
riage. It would blast us both. But if you marry me
you shall be made free whenever the day comes that
you wish to go. I ask no promises.”
Brena got up and stood looking out the window.
The tall office building overlooked not only the old
center of the city and the red angular prisms of
brick and the square roofs laid out like fields upon
level farmland, but also the distant stretches of
rolling prairies. There was an impulse to go over
that distant horizon: the same strong impulse of
youth, adventure, ambition that runs like a current


I30 The Vanishing Men
it can ever be here. I am impatient for a richer
soil in which to grow. I am willing to help you, too,
if I can. It seems a little vague to me how I can do
this and yet, though I am very young, I can live in
you—I can feel all that you feel and I can see the
better part of you.”
He probably thrust a glance at the letter and
looked up with that satanic chin and upslanting
eyes turned toward the ceiling and with the judicial
smile upon his mouth. He read on.
“Therefore I assent to your plan as you stated it.
Always yours, Brena Selcoss.”
Parmalee, no doubt, said to himself that this was
no ordinary letter from the hand of a girl not
older than eighteen, the brevity and the calm of it
were symbolized somewhat by the direct and grace-
ful handwriting which, with breadth of line and
easy flow, none the less stood architecturally upon
the page.
They were married one evening at 8 o'clock in
the same room in which he had first seen her. Mrs.
Wilkie was glad to have her “home” as she called
it the center of an unscheduled social event which


The Vanishing Men I31
would start all the tongues when it was in the
News the next morning. This was the nearest
she could come to the adventure of a duchess and
she was willing to have the flurry in her life. It
would be she who would give out the interviews and
explain grandly over the telephone. They—the
two—would be on their way to that fairy world of
money and travel and airs and graces which had
opened its arms to this fated young beauty. The
girl would leave all her old life and its worn dresses
and cheap shoes behind—all but one thing perhaps,
and that would be the picture of the Acropolis in
its battered frame. The fortune that had befallen
Brena had been the very reality of all of Mrs.
Wilkie's life-long dreams, but she considered that
for herself, there would be certain crumbs fallen
from the table. She caught her breath: she had
almost lost it when she had learned from Parmalee
that he was giving the bride a check for one hun-
dred thousand dollars.
Not fifteen minutes had elapsed after the mar-
riage before there came into the lives of the two a
new element.


I32 The Vanishing Men
They had been whirled to the station and were
strolling up and down as casually as if he were
dictating to a young secretary the last memoranda of
a deal in cotton.
Little by little his conversation fell away; he
muttered a few last absent-minded words and it
was gone altogether. He walked on; she kept pace
with him. He walked on in silence.
Not until she heard a strange whiffling noise as a
sudden sucking in of breath of one who has fainted
did she turn.
“You are as white as linen,” she said trembling.
He wet his lips and looked at her almost snarling.
“What is this fate that follows you?” he asked.
“Fate?”
“Something.”
“Why? What do you feel?” she asked in a
frightened whisper.
“I feel fear,” he said, his upper lip fluttering, “a
horrible, unaccountable terror.”


IX
THE extraordinary transition in Compton Parma.
lee began with his marriage.
Apparently an inexplicable fear had seized him
within a few minutes; inexplicable fear little by
little took possession of his life and made him a
source of the contagion of unreasoning dread.
There was a six-month period after the departure
of the strange bride from Dallas wherein, whatever
emotions of apprehension he may have felt, a
struggle was made to conceal them and to fulfill
his bargain to give Brena Selcoss the variety, con-
tent and luxury that he had said should be hers.
He, who never had more than touched her hand with
his own cold, refined fingers, sometimes burst forth
with all the zealous energy he had put into his specu-
lations and with all the assurance in his own mystic
powers of foresight which had made him a great
gambler.
I33


I34 The Vanishing Men
“You are my speculation now!” he would ex-
claim. “I have bought a future in you!”
Brena would stare back at him, her great dark
eyes questioning and full of doubt.
“You think I have done badly? No. It was my
one great inspiration. You have the body and the
health of one among thousands. You are so beauti-
ful with the beauty of eternal things that even I
who will not touch your cheek can feel the same
thrill of pleasure that one may feel gazing upon a
Praxiteles.”
She had said, “Not Phidias, then?”
“Yes, Phidias—a work of Phidias! Because
there is not only your carved limbs and neck and
hands but something sublime as well. Beneath your
warm and velvety surface like the texture of flower
petals there is a wonderful mind, and a spirit
which has come down through eternities with im-
mortal life.” -
“You are an eloquent man,” the young girl had
said, with a quirk upon her lips suggestive of her
mother. “Your tongue is as silvery as those of my
Irish ancestors.”


The Vanishing Men I35
“Do you think I shall regret that I have played
a part in your growth?” he had asked, with one of
his short laughs. “I shall not be more to you than
I am now. How can I use you, eh? How could
I use my money? I deluded myself once. I thought
I wanted it for myself. But you? I do not want
you for myself. I only want your capacity as a
woman to be filled to the brim!”
He lived two lives; not at the same time, but
alternately. The one was in her; the other in him-
self. When he could put his own life into hers he
forgot his own. He became that being whose
warmth and light she had seen beneath the cold steel
shell of an unremitting fighter and plunger, whose
singleness of purpose and will had found dynamic
concentration in his spare body and had expressed
themselves in a mask of cruelty and craft upon a
face otherwise aesthetic and sensitive. At these
times his countenance wore that abnormal youth of
feature which was his most marked personal char-
acteristic. It was only upon rare occasions that it
was twisted up as if in a cramp of anxiety; as if
some distant but menacing forecast had pointed a


136 The Vanishing Men
finger at him from afar. For a moment he forgot
her; for a moment he had been immersed in his
self.
For more than half a year, in Paris, in Budapest,
in Petrograd, in London, this one of the two lives
of Compton Parmalee was dominant. Something
of the youth and the calm of Brena's eyes, looking
out upon a world which opened all its doors to her
expectant inquiry, was reflected in his own.
By manipulation of acquaintance and, when neces-
sary, by lavish expenditure, he procured her entry
into rare social circumferences. In that first year
Brena, considered by all strangers to be several
years older than she, in fact, was, and of whom no
one would have believed it if it had been told them
that she had been plucked out of that kitchen garden
of Wilkie's boarding house, the Porto Rican Shop,
the movies, and a sordid sickly-brown provincialism,
had dined with foreign ambassadors, hunted with
Lady Tremayn Nash, been courted over, through
and under her disgust by a cousin of the ex-King of
the Portuguese, occupied a villa in the Italian lakes
and voyaged in a luxurious yacht around the Baltic


The Vanishing Men I37
in midsummer with the family of Stockholm's larg—
est banker. With the credit of admiration that her
natural poise, her beauty, her talent as a linguist,
her mother's wit and her father's love of learning
had brought her everywhere, she was not dazzled in
the slightest degree.
When Parmalee, in Berlin, said to her for-
givably exulting, “Thus we work our miracle!
In November you are taking your laundry to the
Chinaman's in Harvey Street; in March you wear
thirty thousand dollars' worth of emeralds to con-
trast with that crown of red-gold hair at a ball in
the Château de Pontemori,” she said:
“The leap is no great one. There is a hair's
breadth of difference between the frauds of this
world and the pretenses of that. I rather think I am
the same Brena.”
“But growing!” said he as a horticulturist would
speak.
“Yes, growing,” said Brena with a sigh.
Other men, sensing subconsciously her ungiven
and unused affections, brought all their sophistica-
tion to their aid in making love to her. She com-


138 The Vanishing Men
bined the classic beauty of the Greek goddess with
the illusive shimmering charm of her Irish blood;
dozens of men in various capitals noting it, as Peter
DeWolfe marked it down later, gave amusement
to the Dallas broker and annoyance to her. She
said that she might have been thrilled by these
idolatries were it not for the fact that they always
came either from those whose attentions to women
were quite general and successive or from those
whose imagination could conceive only a very plain
driveway from the thoroughfare of formal society
to the sequestered dwelling place of a woman's
heart.
“You are rather tired,” Parmalee said to her
Once.
“At first my breath was taken away as if I were
an aviator up alone for the first time. But now the
flight is rather monotonous. It is as if it were done
only for spectators. It has no destination.”
He thrust a glance at her and looked up at the
ceiling of the railway carriage, reflecting. As usual
he understood.
“You rather want to produce something.”
*


The Vanishing Men I39
She nodded. “But I do not want to appear un-
grateful,” she added, speaking as one might speak
to an impresario rather than as one speaks to a hus-
band. -
“Not at all,” said he, hitting out squarely with
his pungent frankness. “That's all right. I've been
stupid. You are too big to be satisfied with this
low-neck nonsense. It is not enough to be the
wearer of a gleaming skin in the magnificence of
authorized exposure. You want >>
He stopped.
“What do I want?”
“Either love, man, children or else labor, output,
self-assertion, a product, a separate personality
standing on its two legs alone.”
Brena said, “I have an idea that no woman quite
knows whether she wants both or can have both or
can choose or stick to either. Whatever happens
there is always the haunting desire for more of the
other thing.”
“I know,” said he, looking at her with brimming
eyes. “It is the tragedy of big women.”
Not only because of his words, but equally be-


I40 The Vanishing Men
cause of the self-effacement, the sympathy that he
at moments could cast down from some calm
eminence which his spirit had learned to climb, Brena
always remembered this moment as that which
marked the best in him, as that which justified the
bargain she had made to salvage that better part.
The contest between that better part and the other
—the well-known Compton Parmalee with his ruth-
less daring instinct for hazards and his almost
frantic interest in self-preservation—was a losing
fight for Brena. She knew, as he knew, that her
power lay in no words, but only in the threads of
understanding, conduct and high aims that she could
weave with him into his life. Moments had come
when she had even believed that if she had won she
might have loved him. The things worth saving in
him were so rare! She would have thrown herself
into a new labor—the reclamation of his youth.
It was not to be. Perhaps he himself knew this
as he felt slipping from him the power to resist the
habits of mind of years of fierce avarice and the
passionate love of his own welfare and his own life.
He spoke no word of this realization to Brena.
º


The Vanishing Men I4I
After all, the two were far apart, and the girl only
sensed, as one who hears a low murmur of a com-
ing tempest, the menace which hung over them.
“There are times when you look at me as if I
were the bearer of some evil,” she said.
“It is absurd,” he told her, but his face had shown
the sudden twist of fear.
“You have some knowledge that I have not,” she
asserted accusingly.
“None,” he answered. For a long time he looked
at her and then said, “Your father was interested in
Aztec architecture?”
“Yes.” Her eyes had opened in amazement.
“He went to Mexico more than once,” said
Parmalee. “He considered that the civilization of
the Mayas was far more extraordinary than even
experts like Thompson and Nightingale have rep-
resented it. He believed that they had developed
forces quite unknown to modern life.”
“How did you know this?” she asked sharply.
Parmalee was quite nonchalant; he said, “You
forget that my library is full of documents and
books and monographs which your father asked per-


I42 The Vanishing Men
mission to consult. I am sorry I did not meet your
father.”
“You would have found him a man quite in-
capable of believing in the supernatural whether it
be a thing of to-day or attributed to an ancient
people.”
He thrust a glance at her. “You speak with some
heat,” he said.
“I suppose so,” Brena answered. “It is because
I have no patience with unrealities.”
“You would say more?” he asked with his un-
canny ability to read her thought.
“Yes. I think that you have some purpose in
creating this atmosphere of strange and unreal
things.”
He started to speak, stopped himself and after a
long pause exclaimed sharply, “I agree with you.”
They rode on toward Cherbourg without speak-
ing, but now and then glancing up as if each
weighed the motives and challenged the other.
“You spoke of a piece of paper given to you in a
roll of bills,” he said at last, with a marked absence


The Vanishing Men I43
of his usual assurance. “It fluttered out. You
saved it yy
Brena drew back as if the subject were odious.
She said with unwonted sharpness, “I have cause to
remember. You are always speaking zy
“I’ve spoken of it only twice,” he said. “This
time I xy
He appeared frightened.
“I think you said there was a drawing of an
arrow and a lizard.”
Brena, regretting her moment of temper, said,
“I said lizard. I don't see what difference it makes.
It wasn't exactly a lizard.”
With great promptness he thrust toward her an
envelope and a pencil.
“Draw it,” he said.
“I told you I had almost forgotten,” the girl re-
plied. “I lost the scrap—the figures and the words.”
“Draw it,” he repeated, “the best you can.”
Brena looked out of the car window at the flashes
of green and gray of farms and farm buildings as
if she were searching in her memory for a photo-
graphic impress. Then suddenly with the quick


I44 The Vanishing Men
precision that gave her hand and mind so many un-
developed talents, she outlined a strange figure on
paper.
Parmalee snatched it eagerly and stared; he saw
a figure, half snake and half bird.
“That?” said he in a voice which sounded muffled.
“Well, do you know what that is?”
Brena raised the arch of her brows.
“It is the Kuk-ul-can,” said Parmalee.
“The Kuk-ul-can,” she said repeating it.
“The symbol of the Mayan—the Aztec culture.
The supreme object of reverence. The fools who
go about the Southwest driving their oil wells, and
laying their railroad ties and eating their prepared
breakfast foods forget that this symbol is to be
found among the present day Zuni and other Pueblo
tribes, the degenerate fringes of a civilization which
flourished before Rome was suckled by a wolf.
They forget that a thousand years ago it was carved
on rude adobe walls in memory of a lost grandeur
and lost practices, dead these six thousand years.”
Brena possessed two laughs, both quite natural
and sincere. And now it was her merry Irish laugh.


The Vanishing Men I45
“What of all this?” said she. “I will blush for their
ignorance, but what more than that can I do on a
sunny Thursday? I am not interested, old fellow,
in that which is dead. I 22
She stopped suddenly, sobered by a recollection.
“The Kuk-ul-can,” said Parmalee. “You’ve never
seen that scrap of paper again, have you?”
This was the last time he ever spoke of it.
^*


X.
WINTER had come again when the Parmalees had
settled into a quieter life in New York. Brena had
turned the back of her interest upon dining out and
the amusement of new acquaintances.
“There is a manner of savoir faire to be acquired
in it, Compton,” she admitted to her husband. “I
have acquired it a little, no doubt—a kind of veneer
of ease which is like a glass-covered surface of
troubled waters. It makes the pool of personality
appear calm down to the bottom.”
“Yours is,” said he. “Yours has shown me the
difference between the old deep streams and the new
torrents.”
“You know how they say that contact makes
breadth,” Brena went on. “They mean that touch-
ing the elbow of a statesman or an artist at dinner
provides the glib phrases of foreign relations or al-
lows one to mention casually the newest Spanish
º
146


The Vanishing Men I47
painter. But it is all surface. For instance there's
Mrs. Balmer-Roseboro in London. Her kind is cov-
ered with feathers plucked from every magnificent
bird that migrates into England. But her mind is
really only cotton-wool stuffing. She is only one
stage higher than the persons who draw their in-
tellectual reputation from reading book reviews, or
weeklies printed on uncoated paper which appear
authoritative because they are without illustrations.
It is being a second-hand dealer—in ideas.”
Compton nodded. As if suddenly he had been
reminded of a duty, he laughed outright with the
artificial laugh which had come with long periods of
absent-minded loss of sense of environment during
times when, as if in a daze, he stared far away.
“You want to cease seeing people?” he asked.
“I want to learn something—some art or profes-
sion, and learn it well. I want to tread upon a solid
ground,” said Brena.
“Good!” Parmalee said. “I cannot tell you how
glad I am to be free from seeing so many people.”
There appeared again in his face that weariness
from some tensity which would not relax, an ex-


I48 The Vanishing Men
pression that increased as the weeks went by and
the lives of the two drew more apart.
Less and less did he appear inclined to go out of
their apartment; less and less did he go anywhere
alone.
“There is a book auction—the Odin Collection
with two volumes of illuminated MSS. from the old
monastery at El Mayaquez,” he said one day in
March. “Will you go with me, Brena?”
“Of course,” she said, but his request marked
sharply the moment of her realization that unless
he were behind the closed doors of his library, he
always wanted somebody with him. She tried to
remember the various occasions when he had found
trivial excuses to take the butler or the chauffeur
on some short excursion beyond the pretentious en-
trance of the apartment house; she concluded that
he did not ask her to accompany him for the pleas-
ure of companionship. He seldom conversed with
her as he had once done; if there was a choice be-
tween going with her or in the limousine with Paul,
he chose the silent and cynical chauffeur.
Nor was this all. She began to notice frequent
*


The Vanishing Men I49
repetitions of the fear that had seized him within
so short a time of their odd marriage. He never
spoke of this, but she saw over and over again his
face, which had become less youthful now, contort,
the color leave it, his eyes grow restless and fill
with terror. She had observed him in a theater,
even at a moment when a tense dramatic situation
was being enacted on the stage, turn around as one
turns who feels eyes from behind, and search the
faces of those who sat in rows farther back. She
had known him to pause at the doorway of a bril-
liantly lighted café and without paying attention to
the beckoning headwaiter, who perhaps was im-
pressed by the distinction and beauty and carriage
of Brena, costumed as always with colorings that no
other woman of her tints of hair would dare to
essay, look searchingly at every party at the tables
before giving his hat to the check girl. She had
seen him walk from end to end of a limited train
gazing from left to right at those in the drawing-
room chairs, just as one does to discover an ac-
quaintance, but with his countenance smeared ºbver
with grotesque apprehension. He was forever try-


I50 The Vanishing Men
ing to scrutinize the faces flicking by, whether the
afternoon sun shone on them on Fifth Avenue or
they peered out in white patches from under the
black of jostling umbrellas in a rainy evening on
Broadway. Even Brena began to look apprehen-
sively into the world's stream of faces.
He who had once consulted doctors about his pre-
cious health; who, when she first had known him,
followed the trail of other rich men who amuse
themselves with their physical condition but with
that passionate love of his own well being and life
which was a characteristic developed in him as in
no other; who was steamed and rubbed, manipulated,
illuminated by various rays and baths of light to
add days to his number, now had lost all interest
in health. Some external menace had swallowed
the fears of those internal. He brooded alone. He
consulted no one.
Brena felt it her duty to interrogate him; she
was met by the first burst of rage he had ever pro-
jected at her.
“Let me alone!” he said evilly, as he thrust a


The Vanishing Men I5I
vicious glance at her. “I have problems that are
my own. Keep your hands off!”
“You forget that whatever it is that is making
you so strange affects my life also,” said Brena.
“Little by little it is isolating us both from normal
human beings. You glare into people's faces as if
you expected to have the next one fasten his or her
teeth in your throat.”
“So you are thinking at last of yourself.”
“Of course I am,” she answered, walking around
the living-room table and touching the books there
with her finger-tips. “I might say that I was above
thinking of myself. But they who say it always
excite my suspicion. I’m trying to think of both
of us—as an average human being should.”
He said, “You forget!” He was in a towering
anger.
“No, I don't,” Brena replied quietly. “You
bought me.”
She picked up a novel, read its title and dropped
it suddenly, as she said, “Yes, you bought me—the
bargain of giving me a life for growth and in re-
turn I was to be your companion. You asked for


I52 The Vanishing Men
no more than that and to have me help you come
back to some sweetness of spirit for which you
longed. Well, I've given you nothing more than
you bought. And nothing less. For I’ve tried.”
He looked up quickly, turned his ear toward her
and then, having listened, stared at the ceiling.
“I was wrong,” he said. “A brutish moment. I
only meant that there is something, of course—my
nerves, no doubt—a decay.”
“It would be unfair for me not to say more,”
said Brena.
He folded his small, cold hands upon the open
book in his lap and stared.
“You do not mean that some man
“No.”
“I couldn't tell, of course. A bargain is a bar-
gain. The truth is that I would be joyful if you
were made happy. I expect that. But I couldn't
know its approach. Your circles and mine are no
longer the same. You are ripening still—a won-
xy
derful miracle!”
“You have no circle,” said Brena.
“No,” said he, “I have no circle.”


The Vanishing Men I53
“There are times when I wonder whether this
new turn in our lives is not connected in some way
with me.”
“New turn?”
“Yes!” She was vehement. “This thing which
hangs over us like a guillotine blade. This thing
which makes you go about wrapped in your chills
of fear. This thing which makes your eyes flicker
from side to side as if every street corner were an
ambush. The thing which makes you afraid to be
alone.”
He sprang up.
“What if it were?” he said. “It is possible, isn't
it? It is possible that a person might carry around
in their trail some strange destiny. There might be
some extraordinary forces behind you, mightn't
there? It is possible that some tragic end awaits
all men who bind their lives with yours.”
Brena opened wide her dark eyes.
“That is enough,” she said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to leave you, Compton,” she said.
If she had spoken these lines in the theatrical em-


I54 The Vanishing Men
phasis with which they are spoken by several hun-
dred women in each thousand sooner or later, as
wise a man as Compton Parmalee would have
laughed in her face. It was only necessary to know
Brena to know that if she said these words it would
be with a calm, a sureness, a regretful sorrow all
combined in the tone of her voice and the expres-
sion in her eyes that would carry conviction. Comp-
ton was convinced.
The idea knocked him onto his knees. He came
half crawling, stumbling, struggling up toward her.
“No, no! No, no, Brena—for God's sake!” he
whimpered. “For the love of Christ don't leave
me!”
At her feet he shampooed his hair as in an
imaginary basin until its sparse growth had been
rumpled under the palms of his clutching, twitching
hands.
“Well, then never speak of any mystery trailing
upon my heels,” she had said. “Never bring this
insinuation that a curse follows me. You have had
your chance to be free of it and instead of wanting
me to go you want me to stay. I loathe dramatics,


The Vanishing Men I55
Compton. This is the twentieth and not the twelfth
century and those who now attempt to raise super-
stitions will fare badly if others believe as I do.
Get up!”
He stood. With his eyes indicating humiliation
through the terror which still lingered in his face,
he arose and walked toward the door.
“Very well,” he said at last in cold, hard syllables.
“You shall not hear of it again. Forget it. Call
it a mad and foolish thing. My lips are sealed. But
the time will come. There are stranger things in
the world than you know.”
He closed the door and left her alone, somewhat
shaken; and in spite of all that she had said, some-
what eager to ask him more. If she had, he would
have pressed his thin lips tight and said nothing.
He did this on later occasions; he had made up
his mind to wrestle with his fears, whatever they
might be, alone. His physician told Brena con-
fidentially that Compton Parmalee was suffering
only from a mild form of neurasthenia in which
dread had attached itself to some particular chain
of morbid thoughts.


I56 The Vanishing Men
In March Parmalee conceived the idea that he
was being followed. He spoke of it several times
and Brena laughed.
“Why should any one follow you?” she inquired
scornfully. “You tell me that you understand why
I am followed sometimes on my way home from
the Studio, but I cannot offer the same explanation
for you. Come, Compton, let's be sensible.”
He was not amused.
“Then report it to the police,” she said.
“The police!”
“Yes.”
“What a suggestion!”
She heard no more, however, of his morbid sus-
picion; no one was following him she was convinced.
And yet the unknown terror, of which he would now
say nothing, infected her so that the cloth of each
day had woven into it some threads of fear, in a
crazy, senseless, indistinct pattern.
A crisis came on one of those warm evenings
which descend suddenly upon the chill of the winter
and tell of an impatient, hasty, headlong Spring,
which has crept up through the open country and


The Vanishing Men I57
comes at dusk to the gates of the cities. Some
musical performance, long since forgotten by Brena,
took the pair out until nearly eleven, and Parmalee
wanted to walk home through the moonlight. A
sleepy elevator man took them up in a chaste, white
and gold car to their apartment door.
“Good night,” said Brena. “Good night, Comp-
ton. You seemed to-night more like yourself.”
He laughed and waved to her as she went down
the corridor to her chambers. She switched on the
wall lights of her dressing-room, bedroom and bath,
and undressed leisurely before the long mirror, look-
ing about as her memory took her back to the hot
room under the roof at Mrs. Wilkie's with its yellow
varnished wood-work and its plaster walls, stained
a hideous thermic orange, its little red ants that no
eradicator ever eradicated and the screams of the
baby coming out of a window in the next house.
Nothing in the luxurious quarters she now oc-
cupied could remind one of Mrs. Wilkie's un-
less it were the picture of the Acropolis that had
belonged to Brena's father, still in its battered frame
and hanging above her bed. And yet she stopped


158 The Vanishing Men
braiding her red-bronze hair as one of those strange
calls of wistful longing for the past, even for the
tragic or the sordid past, that comes to all of us,
came to her.
No one would credit her with remembering some
few years afterward the exact contents of her
thoughts at this moment, were it not a fact that
the thought itself had been interrupted and there-
fore engraved by three quick successive pistol shots.
They came and went as revolver cracks do behind
heavy closed doors with a muffled thudding; she
knew what they were. They were followed by a
little crash as of a vase falling.
Her first thought was that Parmalee had killed
himself. Perhaps if her mind had been less active
she would have screamed, flung open the door and
rushed out, expecting the horrors of a suicide; she
remembered, however, that there had been three
shots, more than the number usually fired by one
who seeks destruction. Brena concluded that what-
ever the menace her husband had feared, it now had
proved its reality. She has said since that, for the
moment, she at least believed, and even in her


I60 The Vanishing Men
present sent after them from Dallas by a Jewish cot-
ton broker, once one of Parmalee's bitter rivals. It
had been the subject of Brena's comment that the
donor gave it in celebration of Parmalee's retirement
from business rather than of his marriage, and she,
disliking pictures on general principles, had hung it
where it would be seen the least.
“I thought it was him,” said Parmalee, coming
forward with the revolver still in his hand.
“Him?” asked Brena. “Who then?”
“Why, a burglar,” he said, still quivering with
excitement.
“You saw only your own moving reflection on the
glass mixed into this figure which you've decorated
with three bullet holes,” she said.
A knocking and ringing had begun at the elevator
door of the apartment.
“Anything wrong, sir?” asked a voice outside.
“No, no,” Parmalee answered, feeling his way
back till he could lean against the wall.
“Very good, sir.”
Brena, who probably appeared more like a Grecian
goddess than ever in the white drapery of her night


The Vanishing Men I6I
attire, walked to Parmalee with deliberation and
took the revolver from his hand.
“Where did this come from?” she asked.
“I bought it.”
“When?”
“A month ago.”
“A month ago? Why?”
“I don't know. There are always intruders.”
“Compton, you are a sick man,” she said. “You
are a sick and unnerved man. You are living a
miserable life. You are making me live one. There
is nothing worse than fear. It is more horrible than
the thing it dreads.”
“I’ve often thought that—yes, I have!” he said.
“I’ve often thought I'd be driven to find out.”
“Tell me,” she commanded.
He shut tight his thin lips.
She came closer and put her hands upon his
shoulders as if she were a mother about to give a
child a good shaking.
“The city is bad for you, Compton,” she said.
“You are quivering yourself to pieces over some


The Vanishing Men I63
were spacious, lofty, hollow-sounding cubes, and
the garden was square in a square area which con-
tained itself and the house within a high brick wall
painted a slate gray to match the house and with a
great decorated iron gate which could be closed at
night. The upper windows looked out in summer
upon the tossing branches of old trees growing out
of vast, damp bald spots on the lawn and in winter
upon the stark boughs and the silver of the Hudson
River. The place was in a slight hollow in a hill
top, isolated, glowering, without the flavor of old
places lived in richly and warmly, but suggesting
questionings as to which room the family had used
to die in, and forecasting nights when the wind
would howl around the corners of the French roof.
Parmalee had a coping of concrete, filled with
broken glass, built all around the top of the wall. He
had ordered iron bars for the lower windows, and
a bill for an elaborate electric burglar-alarm system
was on his desk the morning that he disclosed to
Brena that he had bought her a house.
“At last you have a home,” said he.


XI
THE retreat into the walled estate which perched
like a great cube of gray gloom among the twisted
old trees overlooking the Hudson River gave little
relief to the secret fears of Compton Parmalee.
For a few months, to be sure, he showed lively
interest in the rehabilitation of the place. Brena,
who after a long struggle with her conscience had
made up her mind to stand by her extraordinary
husband, found herself wondering often enough
whether his interest was not like her own, a sham
erected out of a sense of duty by one to deceive the
other. During this first period of their terrible exist-
ence there, she built up a slender tottering hope that
she might, as she had agreed, reclaim him. She had
formulated a policy and to this policy she would
cling with all the tenacity of which she was capable.
Her policy had been formed with full knowledge
of the fact that it would be hard to follow. Her
own nature revolted against mysteries and supersti-
W64


The Vanishing Men I65
tions and fears of unrealities. Her husband had not
ever given her grounds to assert that these were the
basis for his morbid panics, but he had, by malice or
inadvertence, created a dim picture of some menace,
some secret human conspiracy, some strange force,
which pursued to the death any man unlucky enough
to have meddled with her destiny. At times it was
difficult for her to escape, by the exercise of com-
mon sense, a haunting idea that there was some
foundation for this apparent absurdity. As she said:
“It is just so with all things. The confidence of
knowledge isn't half as much because a person has
possession of the facts as because one has freedom
at last from the fear that there is so much that one
doesn't know.” But she disliked herself for her
own uncertainties.
A choice was open to her between turning her
back upon Parmalee's fears and setting out by sys-
tematic and persistent observation and cross ques-
tioning to uncover them. It was not because the lat-
ter course was difficult that she rejected it; it was
not because, little by little, he had built a wall
around his own thoughts which not only unfitted


I66 The Vanishing Men
him for social contact but excluded her from his
inner life; it was not because of his increasing
irritability when questioned, nor finally was it be-
cause he always, in the end, made her feel that he
was trying to spare her from some dreadful knowl-
edge, and some overhanging curse that was upon
her. She chose to neglect the terror that had seized
him because she felt that if sufficient neglect
were heaped upon it, it would gradually die. Often
enough in years that were to follow she wished with
all her being that she had not allowed herself to re-
main in the dark.
She wished often enough after the end came that
she had at least kept her eyes open, but there were
incidents which drew her attention by the very force
of their being extraordinary or bizarre.
Evenings spent in the high studded chambers of
this austere abode that none of her decorative skill,
given free play by Parmalee's money, could rescue
from their brooding gloom were far from cheerful.
The temper of her husband forbade entertainment
and, try as he did, there was no comfort for him in
his efforts to converse with Brena—efforts which


The Vanishing Men I67
like the squeezing of the juice from a sour fruit pro-
duced less the more the pressure had been applied.
Within a year he had developed an insatiable ap-
petite for his studies of the history of the Southwest,
his collecting of books and manuscripts bearing
upon the ancient civilization and tribes of Central
America, Mexico and the tangent region of the
United States where the painted deserts are, and his
compilation of data that bore in any way upon the
comparison of the Inca, the Aztec and the Yucatan
civilizations with those of Egypt, Greece and Persia.
There is still in existence, covered with dust, a pile
of manuscript in his own handwriting which, it ap-
pears, was the beginning of a work upon a subject
that only his interest qualified him to attempt. A
speculator, gambler, cotton broker and commission
agent, as Brena has said, does not bring to a pre-
tentious scientific work, the orderly mind, the ease
of expression nor the realization of its magnitude
that one might expect in a professor, for instance.
He might better have spent his time in furnishing
to his beautiful young wife a companionship of some
kind no matter how inadequate, but he had closed


The Vanishing Men I69
If the idea that she was wasting her rare youth,
her marked beauty and the full capacities of her
womanhood sometimes oppressed her, she at least
kept her peace. Something of firmness, not there
before, began to appear upon her face. Probably
no mirror could have shown her as clearly the
woman she was throwing away as the portrait of
her painted during this period by young Sydenham,
who had just come over from England.
He succeeded, it was said, in expressing in his
colors and bold method that extraordinary combina-
tion in Brena which gave her the atmosphere of the
permanence of a temple and yet the shimmer of a
golden moment, come and gone in a warm transitory
glow beneath her cream-colored skin, a glimmer of
light from her golden-red hair, or some almost im-
perceptible flexure of her sensitive lips.
Parmalee, urged by his wife, saw this portrait
when young Sydenham had finished it. He thrust
his glances at it in his usual way and several times
turned one ear toward the picture as if inviting
words from it.
“A person!” he said. “And most of her is there


I70 The Vanishing Men
—a good deal of her soul. A glorious piece of color,
—a massive glow and yet her eyes—they are the
->
masters of the canvas. That is astonishin
Of course Sydenham beamed. He fed upon ad-
miration—as much perhaps upon that which came,
to him because he was one of those men who may
be called a beautiful youth and had been petted by
the idle rich and their daughters, as upon the praises
for his extraordinary art.
“Well, I shall buy it,” Parmalee had said with a
sudden unannounced determination for which Brena
was unprepared. She showed it by the astonish-
ment in her eyes.
Sydenham smiled. He said: “But, Mr. Parmalee,
it was the understanding with Mrs. Parmalee that
I was to exhibit the picture. All things considered
it is the best thing I have ever done. I have planned
to exhibit my things rather widely in America. Shall
I say that I am going en tour across the country?
After exhibiting—whv then—of course—”
Parmalee's face contorted. He wet his lips.
“You have a price,” he snapped out.


The Vanishing Men I7I
Sydenham, the self-confident, the whimsical, the
theatrical youth waved his pale hand.
“At present there is no price, Mr. Parmalee,” he
said.
The cotton broker pulled at his collar rim as if he
had need of air.
“What have you proposed as the title of this
picture?”
“Why—the-name—Mrs. Parmalee—”
“That's foolish, Sydenham,” Compton said. “I’m
prejudiced in favor of the name Parmalee, but even
I know better than to exhibit a picture under the
title Mrs. Smith Jones or even Mrs. Parmalee.”
“Oh, I know,” Sydenham replied with his superior
manner. “I didn't mean that; I'd thought it better
to call the picture Brena.”
“Brena!” roared Parmalee.
“Yes.”
“I won't have it!”
“Why not?” his wife asked rising from the divan
and coming out of the studio shadows. “Why not,
Compton?”
“Because the name is a peculiar name,” said her


I72 The Vanishing Men
husband in a ridiculous petty rage. “It is yours and
I don't want it spread all over every picture gallery.
It's bad enoug
“Wait,” Sydenham interrupted. “You have no
cause to be disturbed. I shall call the picture “The
Riddle.’ It will be offered to you at the end of my
exhibitions under that title.”
» .
It never was offered to Parmalee as a matter of
fact and those who remember it only identify it by
the title Sydenham gave it, but Brena tried in vain
whenever she thought of this incident during that
period to escape the conclusion that Compton feared
that somewhere some one would recognize her like-
ness, especially if her own name had been attached
to it, and then through the artist trace back until she
were found.
Not six months later the suggestion that Parmalee
feared some individual or group of individuals
who would deliver to him a dreadful vengeance,
came sharply to her attention, leaping up, like a
horrid shape out of the quiet path of life, to stare
into her face.
She had been motoring out from New York with


The Vanishing Men I73
Paul, the tactiturn chauffeur, who always appeared
to her to be a man with the odors of the penitentiary
clinging to his bristled, badly shaped head, but who
had been retained by Parmalee, through many a raise
in salary and many an exhibition of insolence.
“I’m glad that you are well again,” Brena said to
him as they were winding up the vine-like road that
approached the glowering old house.
“I’m not well, madame,” Paul said. “But the
substitute—Marks—the man Mr. Parmalee engaged
to cover my illness, ma'am—he left.”
“I didn't know,” she said. “Mr. Parmalee en-
gages all the employees, Paul—even the maids. He
'wishes to do so. So I didn't know.”
“There's much that one doesn't know, ma'am,
isn't there?” he said in an oily voice behind which
was a snarl.
“What do you mean?”
“For instance, the reason Marks left.”
“What reason?”
“Well, ma'am, Mr. Parmalee is suspicious of ser-
vants. You probably don't know he requires a birth
certificate and all of that. Getting a job here is just


I74 The Vanishing Men
like getting a passport, ma'am. And Marks he had
one forged—he did—not meaning any harm. But
Mr. Parmalee found it out. He wrote himself to the
city clerk of the place. And when he knew, there
was no taming him, ma'am. He was like a rat in a
corner, if I may say so—frothing like a mad dog.”
If Paul had not occupied a position from which
no insolence of his own ever had dislodged him,
Brena would have dismissed him then and there.
She knew, however, that her husband would re-
instate him.
“Paul is a handy man—with his fists and perhaps
with other weapons,” Parmalee had said. “I feel
that he would be useful in an emergency.” "
Brena concluded that not only was Compton
living in terror himself, but that now and then he
yielded to the temptation to communicate this terror
to her just as one who suffers from a disease might
have a degenerate desire to spread its contagion.
She resisted this by pretending not to recognize the
existence of any abnormality in their lives.
The third winter of their marriage her husband
began a practice of finding relief from that terror


The Vanishing Men I75
which had crept in upon him at first but now had
begun to drive his nerves into a gallop. He who had
conserved so carefully his precious health, now un-
dertook a new burden.
Brena came down one morning when the rain of a
wild March day was beating on the windows. The
wind, tearing up the leaves of the Autumn that had
lain all winter beneath the snow and ice of the
mournful, dripping garden but was now released by
a thaw, was slapping wet refuse against the great
window panes behind the menacing iron bars. It
cast rotten vegetation at this house as if it were
throwing riff-raff into the face of an accursed per-
sonality.
Parmalee did not answer her call. He was not at
the breakfast table. The servants could not find
him in his rooms. He was discovered finally by his
voice which came in faintly with the sound of the
wind. Brena without protection from the driving
rain ran out the great front door, down the path
which cut a diameter in the circle of the driveway,
to the massive iron gate.
Parmalee was there with his little white hands


176 The Vanishing Men
grasping the upright bars—swaying backward and
forward like a caged animal, staring out with wild
red eyes at the high shores of the distant river bank
seen through the haze, his bare head wet and
disheveled.
“Come on and get me—damn your eyes!” he
screamed. “You’ve been waiting long enough.
Come on and get me. I'm not afraid of you all.”
Brena looked over his shoulder up and down the
road beyond the gate. Water was standing in the
shallow ruts and the shrubbery whipped by the wind
danced like lithe devils along the crest of the palisade.
But no living creature was in sight. *
“You better come into the house, Compton,” she
said with a tone of authority.
She realized afterward that she had leaped rather
joyfully toward the conclusion that this moment ex-
plained the menace which had hung over them so
long and that it promised a definite end of her
obligations. She remembered of thinking how like
an angry impotent little dog he was, coward at heart,
but barking behind a gate at an empty road. She
believed he had lost his mind.


178 The Vanishing Men
out her hand toward the telephone instrument it
knocked over an empty glass. She raised this glass
to her nose. The supports of her heart suddenly
crumbled, for she knew then that her husband was
not mad, not changed permanently from the crafty,
secretive, self-isolated and haunted man that he had
been, but was only at the end of a long night of try-
ing to drink himself into the freedom of insensibility.
At this moment she wondered why she did not
feel a marked increase of the old loathing and dis-
gust that she had been unable to weed out as it
had sprung up like some rank growth. At this
moment she remembered his first appeal to her, how
he had begged her to help him win back the clean
spirit of his boyhood, how she had once seen the
glint of that treasured something, which men for-
get to keep, shining dimly in the midst of decay,
how having tasted the bitterness of success, he had
built new hope. Now he was a grotesque failure,
pounding to pieces upon some unseen rock below
the surface of the waters. He was paying the ac-
count of lifetime perhaps; perhaps the reckoning of


The Vanishing Men I79
one mistake. There surged up to the brim in her
heart a great pity.
To Brena the cause of his panic, his terror, his
suspicions, his isolation, the horrid exiled days he
led, the sleepless nights he spent now appeared of
less importance than the fact that no man was suf-
fering more than he. But she was unable to help
him: his defenses were now impregnable.
“I do not know what you mean,” he said. “We
live a clean, wholesome kind of existence, don't we?
You never hear complaints from me. I do not go
out much, it is true. But I am working. I do not
sleep well. Neither do many men. I drank too
much once, that is true. But that was thirty or
forty days ago. You have not seen me make the
mistake again.”
“You are forever sending John down for a new
bottle,” said Brena.
He thrust a glance at her.
“It calms me. My nerves are not good—there's
no denying. But why should you complain, Brena?
You have your freedom. You go your own ways.
You conduct your own studies. You can have any-


I80 The Vanishing Men
thing you want for the asking. Why complain?”
“I’m not complaining,” she had said shutting her
lips into a firm line. “I am inquiring.”
“Inquiring?” he said with sudden heat. “Well, by
God, if you ask once too often—you shall know! I'll
tell you something about yourself you'll not want to
hear.
“You cannot,” she answered quietly.
“Are you laughing at me?” he exclaimed angrily.
“I was smiling.”
“Smile on!” he snapped. “Maybe you can tell
where Jim Hennepin is. Maybe in the end you won't
smile. Maybe you will learn what it is that has
clung to you unseen and unknown.”
“I demand to know.”
“No-by God—you shan’t. Not until I know all
—myself. Not until I know how I shall pay.”
He paused.
“And let that come quickly,” he added throwing
his open hands toward the ceiling as if beseeching
heathen gods. “Sudden, swift and sure!”
He rushed out of the room.
Night after night she heard him pacing his study
py


The Vanishing Men I8I
floor beneath her room. He walked twenty paces
one way, twenty at right angles, twenty more, twenty
more. She had learned the count. He was pacing
off a square around his big, paper-laden desk in the
center of the room. She went to sleep with that
sound of a caged animal in her ears; she awoke in
the middle of the night when the moon of summer
threw the shadows of the plumed branches of the
great trees upon her floor, hearing that faithful beat
of footsteps she could recall, awaking when the
bright sunlight was prying at the shutters on the
western windows to hear the measure of his pacing.
Once she had awakened in the night and heard
no sound. She had crept down the stairs and peered
into his study. He was crouching down below the
window sill, only his eyes above, like a man in am-
bush, or like one who expects an attack upon his
home, watching the running shadows made by trees,
shrubs, wind and moon upon the lawn.
“What are you doing, Compton?” she asked.
He had jumped around and then laughed.
“What are you doing down here? You'll catch
cold. I was thinking.”


I82 The Vanishing Men
“Thinking? Thinking of what?”
“Of life.”
“And what about it?”
“How I love it!” he had exclaimed.
A few days later he rode in with Brena to New
York. A new spirit had come into him. His eyes
were filled with a new light; his voice had grown
more firm. He did not converse with his young
wife, but his silence had changed from that of fear
and brooding to that of one who plans and weighs.
On his countenance was a new expression, in his
motions something of the former dynamic activity
and decisiveness.
When Brena came home that evening she asked
if he was there.
“No, ma'am,” said the maid. “There's been some
one telephoning from New York. His lawyers,
ma'am.”
“Oh, Mr. Lanfrew.”
“Yes, ma'am. Several times, ma'am.”
Brena ate dinner alone.
At half-past eight the telephone rang again.
“I will answer it,” said Brena.


The Vanishing Men 183
Again it was Mr. Lanfrew. He wanted to speak
to Mr. Parmalee. It was about some legal document
that had been drawn that morning.
“But Mr. Parmalee is not here yet,” said Brena.
“That's strange,” said the telephone instrument.
“That's strange. I understood he was going home.
I understood you were going on a long journey, Mrs.
Parmalee. He had drawn the money to buy tickets.
I thought he said that he was going to surprise you.
He wanted to hurry home this afternoon.”
“I’m sorry but he hasn't come.”
“Or sent you any word?” the telephone asked.
“No word,” said Brena.
She shuddered. She wondered if by any chance
it could be that the blow had fallen at last—the final
dread conviction; she felt that it had.
Brena was right. Compton Parmalee, in spite of
the secret efforts of the police, in spite of all that
money could do to conduct a search without pub-
licity, had dissolved as completely as a wisp of
smoke in the blast of some great wind of heaven.


XII
PETER DEWoLFE drew in a long breath, put the
palms of his hands upon the tightest area of his
waistcoat over his expanded chest, threw back his
head and exhaled so that it sounded a good deal like
a sigh.
“Well,” said he. “That is not a very pretty
story.”
The lamp had gone out; the slate gray light of
early summer dawn filtered through the chintz cur-
tains of the apartment of Brena Selcoss. She was
facing this watery light, her beautiful hands folded
in her lap, her dark eyes looking into profound space.
In her attitude and in her expression Peter saw the
suggestion of one condemned, who has awakened
upon the day of execution and sits upon the side of
a prison cot, thinking.
“No, Peter,” Brena said at last. “It is not a
pretty story.”
184


The Vanishing Men 187
leaning upon the mantel with her face bent down
toward the firelight, waited for several moments be-
fore she said, wearily, “Yes, Peter—all.”
“And others know?”
“Only Muriel Benham,” she answered. “It was
when I was ill. I had fled from America. It was
ghastly there and I had the what can I say?—the
instinct for flight. I went to France. There was
pneumonia and after that I found my little retreat
in Beconshire. Muriel was kind. She attended to
my mail. I did not expect a letter from Lanfrew—
his lawyer. She read it. There was a reference to
—to both—to both.”
“I understand,” said Peter. “You explained a
little; you had to.”
He walked up and down the rug, touching the
repetitions of the pattern with the toes of his shoes.
“How long has it been since he—went?” he
asked.
“Over three years.”
“And no word?”
“No word. Like the other—nothing—complete
—nothing.”


188 The Vanishing Men
Peter made a wry face as if the phrases had made
real to him the fact.
“There was no publicity?”
“No-almost none—a paragraph or two. Less
perhaps than there would have been in London or
Paris. In New York we were unattached—just
people with a little money—making no acquaintances
—nobody.”
Peter nodded, reflecting that after all there could
be nowhere on earth quite the obscurity of a man
with a million or two living on his income in New
York.
“What became of his money?” he asked.
“It is there—”
“Untouched P”
“Untouched.”
He scowled. He said: “The house?”
“Just as I left it—one October day. Just as it
was. Nothing changed, I suppose—insured, and left
there. A haunted place, Peter—a place where one
expects to find a poor murdered creature lying face
upward just beyond every door sill. I fled. I even


The Vanishing Men 189
left the dog. I sent back a telegram to a neighbor
—the caretaker—and gave him the beast.”
“You didn't speak of a dog.”
“I forgot—a horror of a beast, turned loose inside
the walls at night when the gate was closed. It was
his dog, bought a few months before—a cross be-
tween a Great Dane and bloodhound—a thing with
white fangs. They had to shoot him, I've heard.”
Peter, walking to the table, picked up a small
bronze Buddha upon whose face there was a satanic
grin and with great seriousness the man gazed back
at the heathen thing for several minutes.
“What about this—whoever it was—this symbol,
half bird and half snake—Kuk-ul-can?... You never
found it again?”
“Yes,” said Brena. -
“You found it?” He appeared unable to believe.
“Yes,” she said. “I had kept the purse. It be-
longed to my mother. I kept it. In the lining—last
year—I found the scrap of paper.”
“It's here?” asked Peter with a marked eager-
Iless.
“Yes.” She got up again, brushed the stray red-


The Vanishing Men I9I
kiss—that now we are only obliterating that mem-
ory?”
He came back toward her and poking the fire
again he laughed to himself.
“You don't think there is to be an ending—now?”
he asked after a moment.
She looked at him with her eyes filled with won-
derment.
“Oh, no,” said he. “No ending, dear one. Here's
where we begin. There's just some cold hard busi-
ness to do now. If it weren't for that I’d be sitting
there beside you holding you very tight until we
were found by the authorities starved to death.”
“Peter!”
“Yes. I mean it. That wasn't a pretty story.
But it hasn't jarred me, Brena. We've definite work
cut out for us. First we've the job of getting your
freedom—or finding out and proving that some
death-dealing agency has given it to you already.
Then we'll uncover this trail of fear that tracks you,
dear. It's the work first.”
“You dare—”
“Dare?” said Peter. “Don’t make fun of me. Do


The Vanishing Men I93
for more facts if I want them. I'm going out now
to cable some persons on my own list, Brena.”
“It is useless,” she said wearily. “You forget I've
had nearly four years of it—leading nowhere, ex-
plaining nothing, dear. It will only cause me new
humiliation—perhaps drag my name—”
“No, it won't,” he said, “I’m going to do the job
myself.”
“Please—” she began.
Peter smiled grimly as he held up his hand.
“Well, I'm no detective, Brena, I'll admit. I am
glad to be able to tell you that I am not a Master
Mind, or a great Analyst or any other kind of a red
or yellow bound sleuth. I didn't even look for wire-
less apparatus in Central Park before I joined the
Army. Spies and mysteries bore me to death.”
He chuckled, however, as if glad that he was
alive.
“I’m more or less an idler whose time is almost
all taken up in one way or another. I'm a New York
bachelor on the loose who has written a little verse
and killed a few Germans, for which I have suffered
a definite nausea afterward, as I would not confess


I94 The Vanishing Men
to anyone else. I'm no unraveler of tangled skeins.
But 27
She took his hand and pressed its back against
her cheek.
“But—!” Peter repeated. “But—I’m going to
let some sunshine in upon this thing if I break my
neck—there's only one thing that's hard 2x
She asked him to tell her.
“To leave you,” he said. “It's going to tear the
roots like pulling up grass.”
Brena, arising, threw the wrap aside and paced
back and forth, as he had paced, with her hands
examining each other as if they were strangers met
for the first time. When she stopped her great dark
eyes were wet and filled with the old look of fear.
“You shall not throw yourself away, Peter,” she
said with a breaking voice.
“Nonsense.”
“But you don't know, Peter!”
“All that you know.”
“If it happened to you—”
“Yes?” asked Peter with his lips closing tightly
over the question.


196 The Vanishing Men
ger. It's a tonic! Anyhow I'll give you my own
lawyer's address.”
She glanced once more into his smile and then,
with something of the manner of a proud mother,
she looked fondly from head to foot of him, at his
lean, sinewy figure, at the clearness of his eyes, the
curve at his temples, the outdoor cleanliness of his
skin. There was a suggestion of possession in this
quick inspection of hers, a suggestion that he was
hers as much as if she had created him. But as if,
now, she belonged to him, she did his bidding.
When she had finished writing at the little antique
desk, she threw the red feather of the quill pen onto
the table.
Peter had been thinking.
“Once more,” he said.
He took her into his arms, holding her head close
to his shoulder; he turned her chin up with the palm
of his hand and pressed again his lips upon hers.
He could hear the watch in his own pocket ticking
away the seconds. He could hear her heart beating
a slower rhythm.


The Vanishing Men I97
“A long draught,” he said at last. “I could not go
so thirsty—away.”
“You mustn't go.”
“Brena, dear one,” he said. “There is only one
thing to do now and that must be done. Let's set
our faces like flint. I think after all »
She knew as if by magic that which he was going
to say.
“That there is more love in going than in staying
—for both of us.”
“Yes,” said Peter touching her forehead again.
“Good-by.”
He closed the door quietly.
“Peter!” she called from behind it.
He continued down the carpeted stairs and out
into the first morning sunlight that came tumbling
down over the chimney pots into the narrow street.
“Vanished?” he said aloud. “What piffle! And
yet or -
He looked about him: the street was empty except
for one small child who was sweeping the sidewalk
with a broom three times the youngster's own
height.


XIII
PETER had spent eight days upon the sea and had
landed on his own soil again before he came to the
full realization that mere reasoning will not solve
baffling problems such as that upon the untangling
of which he now had so much at stake.
He had come into New York without word to
his acquaintances; only Colby Pennington of Pen-
nington, Gould and Goodhue, who was the son of the
elder DeWolfe's attorney, knew of Peter's return
from his long absence. This lean, unemotional
lawyer looked upon his young client, put in hand by
the death of the elder Pennington, as he would upon
an odd heirloom without much intrinsic value. The
law business did not pay much in spite of the size
of the DeWolfe estate and the younger DeWolfe
was considered by those who are conventional, regu-
lar and of stock patterns, as a rather uncertain mix-
ture of quantity and quality.
Pennington had never expected Peter to explode
199


2O2 The Vanishing Men
fluence of the sea and the memory of Brena. There
had been the spell of the sea—the sea that Peter
loved so well, the personality of the sea that could
be a basin of iridescent oil in a tropic calm, an
enigma of chill gray mist-enveloped soul, a fury of
glorious racing rage, a beam of strange quiet mes-
sages from whining, crooning lands at the other ends
of the earth, a voice from far and unseen peoples, a
yielder of mysteries belched forth from its amethyst
and beryl depths, a thing able to cover, with a superb
superiority to the trivialities of life and death, the
last trace of all that it takes into the confidence of
its eternal peace. The sea had invited Peter to more
musing upon his problem but it had erased days with
its sweep of sunlight and its salt spray and with its
miracle of obliterating hours in the flow of a great
eternity.
The memory of Brena, whose personality had
seemed as everlasting as that of the sea itself, had
done its part. She had appeared, but with irritating
indistinctness, before his eyes and seeking to feel by
reaction the touch of her lips, to see again with all
the definition of reality, her dark eyes and her red-


The Vanishing Men 203
gold hair, to hear her vºice, to sense the warmth of
her lithe, flexible ... the miracle by which
for the first time in his life spiritual love, the love
of companionship and the love of woman had been
all woven into one fabric, he had realized more
than when he had been with her, the stability
of an affection that had come upon him with a fierce,
impetuous descent. Peter now realized that he had
been dreaming away the days of his journey lost in
the spirit of the sea and in the memories of the
strange girl whose future might depend upon his
success or failure in striking off the shackles of fear.
To avert the haunting destiny, to dissipate the
shadowing mystery that followed in her track, deal-
ing its fatal dark thrusts in the dark to the men who
played a part in her life had been a job he had be-
gun badly.
Once more Peter reviewed the evidence already
in his hands with the vague hope that from it a con-
clusion would suddenly stand forth, just as one
again looks through a pile of papers for the twentieth
time for one paper that the senses have proclaimed
repeatedly is not there.


The Vanishing Men 205
would aid her. These, however, were the words of
an impractical dreamer who having failed to provide
against all dangers to his orphaned daughter might
naturally enough, when facing death, have voiced a
vehement faith, hoping that it would help to make
up in part for a lack of works. Peter put this evi-
dence behind him as belonging to that class of im-
probabilities that only those who love to make more
mystery rather than to lessen it, seize with all the
joy of the amateur secret service men who had
amused Peter so much during the war.
The vital facts as Peter saw them were to be
found among those which attended the disappear-
ance of men—men of different types who at mo-
ments some years apart had sunk to the bottom of
non-existence like two plummets.
One of these men, Jim Hennepin, had gone to his
end without fear; he had only shown excitement.
He had hinted that some call or message of
great advantage had come to him. At the time he
left he had given, apparently without intention, a
scrap of paper bearing the symbolic figure of the
feathered snake—the Kuk-ul-can, god of the Mayan


The Vanishing Men 207
some one by chance seeing the picture and recog-
nizing it would trace the original by inquiries ad-
dressed to the artist.
What had it meant that this extraordinary man
had surrounded his life with defenses as if fore-
warned of his fate? He employed only servants he
knew, he built defensive walls, put up bars at his
windows, retained the chauffeur, Paul, because the
man would be handy with his fists in an emergency,
he bought a fanged mongrel beast to roam about the
grounds at night. He lived in a terror which
burned his nerves and chilled his heart, that drove
him jibbering to the bottle and he indicated more
than once that this was all due to his wife—that
it was she who dragged this trail of unknown horror.
But when he had gone—vanished without trace,
he, like Jim Hennepin, went willingly.
What was the bait? In Hennepin's case it had
been money. This could not have drawn Parma-
lee.
Peter got up and looked out over the city swelter-
ing in the purple hazy summer night, blinking its


208 The Vanishing Men
yellow eyes as if these eyes were full of salty perspi-
ration.
Well, the two men had gone willingly and had
thereafter disappeared as completely as wisps of
smoke in a tempest or raindrops on the sea. Some
force drew them, Peter told himself, some force
that perhaps was capable of calling craftily to that
which in each man would respond. Parmalee had
pretended to some knowledge of what this force was.
How did he know?
Peter walked back to the dark oak mantel and
opening his wallet that lay there he took out the
sheet of paper which had told him of his own
danger. There was the explanation! Parmalee too
had been warned. But in spite of that warning he
too had gone—had been dissolved, had been wiped
out like a tiny chalk mark by a giant thumb.
And what conclusion could be drawn from all of
this—all that Peter knew? He saw it suddenly. He
had been tumbling over and over again into the
error that pitfalls so many of his countrymen; he
wanted to assume the facts upon which a conclusion
is to be based. Often he had seen the same delusive


The Vanishing Men 209
yearning when a political leader with noble senti-
ments and high-sounding purposes based his pro-
gram upon a world not as it is but as good men
would like to have it and tolled, after him, those
persons who liked to call themselves idealists! He
had seen so much conclusion that would have been
right if only it could have been based upon the facts!
Peter knew now, as if by a sudden humiliating
revelation, that he had been foolish to even attempt
the method of the great analysts, as they are called,
who are always conveniently provided with every
vital fact beforehand; he knew that what he must
get was more evidence. *
On his key ring he looked for the key to Parma-
lee's house up the Hudson.
He had forgotten perhaps another failing of some
of his countrymen; as Peter once said himself, they
founded beliefs upon the wish to believe; it never
was suggested to DeWolfe that in spite of its ex-
travagance, any part of the story told by Brena
Selcoss might not be true.
He loved her.


XIV
PETER, who had presented Brena's letter to the
caretaker of the Parmalee estate and had received a
few sullen references to the fact that the place was
a great bother and was said by many persons in the
village to be a house of evil influences, had been
directed up the long hill under an archway of drip-
ping trees and stood at last at the very gate which
Parmalee in his alcoholic fury had shaken as he
invited his imaginary persecutors to attack him.
The change in the weather, brought about by the
sudden turning landward of a heavy Atlantic storm,
had transformed midsummer into chill, wet March.
The cold, damp wind swept across the top of the hill,
tossing the arms of the trees within the walled en-
closure to which the gate gave entrance, so that these
arms appeared to be assaulting the French roof of
the square gloomy old house, as if that house had
committed some crime. Weeds and rank growth had
sprung up along the wall and behind the gate in the
2Io


The Vanishing Men 2II
crevices of the flagstones of the walk; each stalk,
bending with the night's rain, shed drops of water
like a weeping mourner. Peter, having glanced up
at the windows behind which Brena had heard the
winds of winter whine and complain and had
watched the pale moon throw dancing shadows on
the dank lawn, felt his own skin shrink in response
to the thought of all that a young girl must have
suffered here. He would square the account for her!
The squeak of the caretaker's key in the rusty
lock of the gate started up a dozen crows, cawing
madly as if driven from some carrion feast. When
Peter had used Brena's key to unlock the front door,
hideous with its black walnut carvings and its stained
and leaded glass, the odor of dust and decay filled
his nose as with a dry and suffocating powder.
Without volition of his own his ears strained to
hear some sound, some retreating footsteps, some
whispered voice in that house, but none came; the
place was as still as a dry cave. In this stillness,
in the smell of the dead air, there was the faint
tremor of fear as if fear once having taken abode
in this gloomy old residence, was not to be evicted,


2I2 The Vanishing Men
as if indeed it clung when all other personalities
had gone just as the odor of dead smoke remains
long after the living fire has grown cold.
With a gesture of impatience Peter closed the door
behind him and walked toward the foot of the long,
austere flight of black walnut stairs. He could see
from his position the gray light coming through
barred windows into the dining-room where on the
table—a beautiful Chippendale, strangely out of
place in the unpleasant, high studded proportions of
the room—there sat a saucer with a spoon in it as
if some ghostly presence had just that moment
arisen from a lonely bowl of phantom gruel. The
door nearer the front of the house, the entrance no
doubt to the library of Parmalee, was almost closed;
Peter glanced at it and ascended the stairs.
A thin film of dust covered everything. It was
evidence of the caretaker's belief that no one would
quickly return to note his delinquencies. Otherwise
the house might have been untouched from the mo-
ment when, in a spirit of pursued flight, Brena had
shut the doors for the last time. A novel had been
put upon a table in the upper hall, its pages spread


The Vanishing Men 2I3
downward where a reader had left it; in Brena's
own chamber the tray upon the dressing table still
contained scattered pins and a railroad conductor's
receipt for a cash fare. In the bathroom a towel
hung over the edge of the tub as if a bather had
just come from the morning plunge and only the
stripped beds spoke of the vacancy of the hollow-
sounding rooms. To Peter, the whole house except
for that part which she had occupied, seemed to be
filled with unpleasant ghosts of the personalities
that had lived in it. He opened no door without the
feeling that one of these invisible beings had just
stepped out of the chamber from another exit. The
stairs up which he had climbed were complaining
gently, as if feet were following his; somewhere
there sounded the fluttering of soft wings—a star-
tling noise, but explained by the dead chimney swal-
low that lay below the sill of one of the darkened
windows—a tiny inert symbol of tragic imprison-
ment and death.
Peter had found nothing in his survey of the
house that could contribute to his purpose; he had
looked without more reason for looking than a


2I4 The Vanishing Men
desire to see where Brena had lived and to confirm
his belief that except in the library that had been
used by Parmalee nothing could be found of any
significance. It was not probable, he thought, that he
would open some door to find the cotton broker's
withering corpse stretched out with the handle of a
murderer's knife still sticking up from the collapsed
ribs. He was about to return to the lower floor
when he saw in front of him upon the bare dusty
varnished boards a distinct print of a human foot.
It was a small, well-formed foot that had made this
print—and the next beyond and the next—until
they stopped where the stair carpet began.
There sprang into his mind the gibbering ref-
erence of Parmalee to footprints, followed imme-
diately by the thought that these might be the rec-
ord of Brena's own steps and then as quickly by the
thought that Brena had left long before this layer
of dust had accumulated. He found himself listen-
ing now, the victim for the moment of fear, as if
suddenly the contagion had reached him. At last
he laughed. The prints were not those of a man:
they might be those of a woman but the chances


The Vanishing Men 2I5
were overwhelmingly in favor of their being made
by the caretaker's young barefoot boy. Peter smiled
again and went down the stairs.
At the bottom of this flight above the hall stand
was an old carved Chinese frame holding a dusty
mirror. Peter glanced at this mirror, saw himself,
stopped. The expression on his own face alarmed
him. He imagined that he was less ruddy, more
gray of skin, that he had caught himself in the un-
conscious pose of a man who involuntarily has be-
gun to walk softly and look about alertly, that upon
the face reflected in the glass was the first faint
expression of terror written not as it is written
upon the face of a man who is a coward before
known dangers, for Peter whatever he might be
could never wear that look, but the dim suggestion
of fear of unknown dangers and of subtle influences,
that may some day be engraved without regard to
the courage or will of the individual upon any
sensitive human countenance.
Peter had an unpleasant idea; it was that his sub-
conscious self was endeavoring to transmit to his
conscious self some message of warning. For the


The Vanishing Men 2I7
them had swollen with the damp, but none were
locked; they were filled with catalogues, pamphlets
and with clippings in envelopes arranged in alpha-
betical order. A deep drawer at the bottom con-
tained several account books, many packages of
canceled bank checks bound with elastic bands now
dried and crumbling under the touch. On the whole
Peter, who had Brena's permission to examine any-
thing he found, saw at first no interest in these pri-
vate papers, unless when time elapsed so that
Parmalee after another three years could be declared
legally dead, an executor might find value in them
as a record of the financial affairs of the vanished
man. No doubt his lawyer had seen many of them
already.
For the correspondence, however, Peter had a
greater interest. He drew it toward him, untied the
string, and having stopped to survey the room again
from the chair that once had known for so many
restless hours of panic and suffering, the warmth
of Parmalee's living body, began to go hastily over
the letters there.
They were not illuminating. If they represented


218 The Vanishing Men
the mail that Parmalee received they suggested only
the life of a man who has separated himself from
his friends or who had not acquired friends. One
or two from France and England expressed grace-
ful or formal messages of those who had known
this strange American as a liberal host and a skill-
ful and diplomatic impresario for his beautiful
young wife who had made something of a small
clatter in interesting social corners in Europe and
then had gone. Otherwise this mail was the mis-
cellany received by a man whose personality had
no power to be loved or remembered, who was on
the mailing lists of book dealers and others desirous
of reaching a man of means by personal letters ad-
dressed to his weaknesses or his vanities. Occasion-
ally Parmalee had drawn from some university pro-
fessor a reply to inquiries made in the interest of the
book he had been writing. There were a few let-
ters from stock brokers as to investment changes,
and a few bills.
One of these bills was the only piece of matter
that gave Peter the slightest interest. It was from
the famous old John Henry Wycoff of Baltimore of


The Vanishing Men 2I9
whose death Peter had read by chance, a man re-
membered only among those who are book collectors,
a dealer whose black coat was always covered with
dandruff and who left a third of a million dollars.
This bill was for two thousand eight hundred of
these dollars—an account that had probably been
settled by Parmalee's attorney, Lanfrew. It was
something of a bill for one book—a book described
as Kolb's privately reprinted version of the Jesuit
MSS. entitled “Explorations of Father Carlos in
Mescalero Desert,” shipped via registered post on
18th inst. Below this statement of account were
the words, “Please see letter.” There were two pin
holes at the corner of the paper as if Wycoff had
attached his letter to the bill. *-
Peter thought it would be interesting to see a
book, so obscure, that was worth nearly three thou-
sand dollars. He even wondered what plausible ex-
planation the old dealer had given. His letter, how-
ever, was now missing.
Peter was about to put the matter out of his mind
when he saw the date of the bill. He held up the
fingers of one hand and counted upon them with the


220 The Vanishing Men
forefinger of the other. Then suddenly he got up
from the chair and began a rapid search of the top
of the desk. He did not find the letter there.
He turned to the waste basket; it was empty. He
had forgotten that its contents had been dumped
into the fireplace and when he remembered, it was
with chagrin that he saw the ashes matted down
by the rains that had come down the flue and only
a few unburned scraps here and there powdered over
with fallen soot. Kneeling down on the hearth he
pulled out a great number of these bits of torn
paper that had fallen out of reach of the flames.
Peter was rewarded for his search by two bits
of paper no larger than calling cards upon which,
much faded, was the same old-fashioned, irregular
typing that had appeared in the bill. On one of
them was the “Yours most truthfully” of John
Henry Wycoff; on the other torn scrap the words
“reluctant to present but you” and below “Only this
justifies” and “the owner though aware of your
possession of the imperfect copy, accordingly he"
and “not in your confidence.”
Peter spoke aloud; he said: “Parmalee wanted


The Vanishing Men 22I
that book badly.” He looked again at the date of
the bill. “I wonder if this was the zeal of a col-
lector who has a passion for perfect copies.”
The words defined a thought for Peter. It would
be interesting to see whether “The Explorations of
Father Carlos in Mescalero Desert” had disappeared
with Parmalee when he had answered his strange
impulse to go to some unnamed destination. Peter
turned toward the library shelves and then with the
thought that a search among these volumes would
be saved if he found a catalogue he went again to
the desk. The copy of the book was there—under
two or three other books,—a handsomely bound
volume of large pages whose thick paper rather than
the length of text gave it bulk.
The book had been printed in English in 1830
from copies of manuscripts of Jesuits that with
other records had been lost in the destruction of the
mission church in Los Banos in 1812. The work
was a beautiful piece of bookmaking in perfect
preservation and Peter, though interested in quaint
descriptions of this old missionary who had braved
the terrors of thirst and heat to penetrate the coun-


222 The Vanishing Men
try along the eastern border of New Mexico, was
admiring also the rare skill and beauty of the pages
when he suddenly came upon a hiatus in its con-
tinuity. Page thirty-two began a description of the
Lost Pueblo, where according to legend a city whose
age was of centuries had been ended as a punish-
ment for failing to worship the god of water. A
scourge of thirst had been visited upon the degener-
ate Indian dwellers who had been so long protected
by the terrors that the waterless desert must have
had for more warlike tribes who would otherwise
have attacked them. The well around which the
pueblo had been built—the very life of the people—
had been dried up in one night by a miracle.
“Many and curious are the carvings upon the
walls of this Lost Pueblo. To copy them and their
heathenish devices I was sorely tempted and would
have done so had time been given me,” said Father
Carlos. “Especially I noted a figure of great size
upon the wall that faces the setting sun, for this
was a serpent with feathers like a bird, a figure such
as is seen never but in the lands to the south and
beyond the Great River. While waiting for day I


The Vanishing Men 223
drew the lines of the journey we had made which
I here set down again for the guidance of others.
On the coming of morn we went toward the purply
vapors of the L”
Peter had turned to the next page. It began:
“These accounts of treasure are but the poor specu'
lations of the ignorant. Long after the sandstorms
have covered the pretentious dwelling places of man
such perversity will endure that worldly avarice will
conjure into belief the tradition of fools.” This
was not page thirty-three but page thirty-seven. The
pages between were gone.
For a moment DeWolfe was puzzled. This was
not a perfect copy. After a moment's reflection he
felt the humiliation of stupidity. Of course the
copy he was examining was the imperfect volume
that Parmalee had owned originally: the one sent
by Wycoff probably would be found in its place on
the shelves where Brena's husband had put it—one
of the last acts he ever did in that house. Peter,
arising, walked along the rows of books looking at
the titles; in less than three minutes he had found


224 The Vanishing Men
the other copy of the quaint old book and taken it
down.
He blew the dust off the once gilded top of its
pages and as he did so he noticed that at one place
the pages did not quite press close together. The
volume fell open there—at page thirty-seven. The
two preceding leaves of the book had been torn out!
He went back to the desk chair, sat down, thrust
his feet out straight before him and whistled.
After a few moments he opened the first copy of
“Father Carlos" again and read over the paragraphs
on page thirty-two. He scowled, put the book down
again, and, getting up, paced around the desk just
as Parmalee, as a caged animal, had paced around it
in squares during his restless, sleepless nights of
fear.
“Serpent with feathers like a bird,” he said as
one who desires to hear the words so that their
meaning shall be more clear. He was thinking of
the scrap of paper in his pocket—that scrap of paper
that Jim Hennepin had left inadvertently with
Brena when she saw him for the last time, that scrap
of paper with the crudely drawn figure of the


The Vanishing Men 225
feathered serpent—the god, Kuk-ul-can—and the
two scrawled words, “This Sign.”
He took out this scrap and walking to a window,
with its barred grating through which the gray east
wind was hurling more rain against the spattered
panes, he examined the handwriting. With the man-
ner of a guilty man engaged in some nefarious and
shameful performance, he drew forth Brena's let-
ter of introduction addressed to Lanfrew, the at-
torney, opened it, and holding the two pieces of
writing side by side glanced from one to the other.
The capital S in the word “Sign” was not like hers.
And yet
He paced again, thinking; then uttering, an ex-
clamation, he pulled open the lower drawer of the
desk and took out a handful of Parmalee's canceled
checks. Shifting one behind the other, he went on
hurriedly glancing at the dates until he had found
one for eighty dollars made payable to “Brena
Selcoss Parmalee.”
Almost viciously he slapped this one over onto its
face and stared down at the endorsement on the back.
“Pay to Bearer, Brena Selcoss Parmalee.”


The Vanishing Men 227
a train for New York without too much delay, and
if good fortune would hold the lawyer in his office.
Peter wanted to get from the last man who talked
with Parmalee one fact that had perplexed him. So
much did he want to put an end to doubts which
had grown that when he had reached the city and
gone downtown on a subway express and had stood
at the mahogany rail in the office until he had heard
that Lanfrew was there, he walked through and over
the protests of a young law clerk, directly into the
room of the head of the firm.
DeWolfe, with his own characteristic vividness
of expression, had once said, “There are three kinds
of lawyers—silky pomeranians, lean foxes and bull
dogs.” Lanfrew was distinctly a bull dog.
He was short with a head too large for his body
and his shoulders stooped as if the weight of that
head had been too great. The hair that tumbled
around on his head, wherever it was left by the
thrust, the pluckings, the twistings and the ruffling
of his nervous, knotty fingers, was still almost free
from streaks of gray, although the lines in his face
were deep and spoke of his age. His lower jaw was


228 The Vanishing Men
eternally thrust forward and was eternally in mo-
tion as if the man was muttering to himself endless
imprecations upon life, existence, fellow men and
the vanities of the world. His face was that kind
of face which a great tragedian would have found
a comfort and an asset, but like a bull dog's it ap-
peared ready to open its square iron jaws and fasten
them into some one's throat.
Lanfrew spoke no sentence that he did not begin
with a low growl; he gave the impression to his
clients, perhaps by intention, that he was the per-
sonification of wrath and of reckonings, and the
fierce instrument of a terrible and brutal justice.
This was worth many thousands a year to him.
When he had read Brena's letter, he tossed it on
the desk and, glowering at Peter, he said, “Well?”
“I came to ask ” DeWolfe began.
“Yes?” the other interrupted with a growl.
Peter pointed at the letter.
“I know,” snarled Lanfrew. “I’m at your serv-
ice.”
“You were the last man who ever saw Compton
Parmalee,” Peter began.


The Vanishing Men 229
“He came to draw an instrument in my office.”
“A will?”
“Yes.”
“Which leaves to his widow—?”
“The man isn't legally dead yet,” Lanfrew said
severely.
“He has been—say gone—for several years.”
“Apparently wiped out. Yes. And there is
nothing more to be done. We did all humanly pos-
sible. We exhausted every means except that of a
nasty publicity. It's futile. The wise know when
there are limitations. I know. It is folly for you
to waste your time. Where did you meet Mrs.
Parmalee—old friend?”
“I met her in London.”
The old lawyer arose, thrust his jaw out as if
making it flexible and ready to bite, and stared for
a long time at Peter.
“Are you the son of DeWolfe of the Equity?”
“Yes.”
“Let it alone.”
“What alone?”
“This affair. Let sleeping dogs lie. You are


232 The Vanishing Men
for his concealed throat and sat down in his desk
chair.
“To be frank with you, he did,” he said. “This
of course is confidential. It was too brutal to give
her.”
Peter leaned forward. He said, “Too brutal?”
Lanfrew said, “Yes. He said to me, ‘If I make
up my mind not to take her away—if I go on a little
journey myself, you tell her that I'll be back in two
weeks. You tell her I’m going to cut a knot—that
I'm going to relieve the hell I've been living.’”
The two men sat silently looking at each other.
“Of course I thought he'd telegraph her,” said
Lanfrew argumentatively. “I didn't take his mes-
sage seriously. It wouldn't have done her any good
to tell her that brutal message, eh? And later?
Well, I put the thing off. It cleared no mystery. It
was inconsequential.”
Peter asked, “Then you thought he blamed her?”
Lanfrew threw up his hands, a gesture which said,
“There is no question.”
“For what?” asked Peter.


The Vanishing Men 233
Lanfrew chewed upon an imaginary mouthful;
he said finally: “God knows. Some women—
beautiful women—are poisonous. Rare cases. They
carry a deadly poison, DeWolfe. Some influence,
some bane, some corrosive withering, devilish, fatal
fluid or vapor or aura—whatever you choose. Who
knows what it is? But she-that woman—when you
find her, will blast a man like—”
He stopped.
Peter drew a deep breath. He said almost in-
credulously, “Did you tell me that you got the im-
pression from Mr. Parmalee that he was going to
investigate something?”
“Yes. Been invited to investigate something,”
the lawyer said.
DeWolfe stared at the carpet. After a pause he
got up and held out his hand.
“Let this alone,” said Lanfrew. “But of course
if you want anything else, come in again.”
Peter went home to his apartment.
He found there an envelope brought by a mes-
senger from the office of Pennington, Gould and


XV.
By afternoon on Friday Peter had acquired cer-
tain information that he had sought.
His father had often been criticized by smaller or
less successful men on the ground that he had
little ability of his own, that he made his way up
on the labors and the resourcefulness of his em-
ployees, his advisers, his lieutenants. Peter had
heard this criticism from men who believed that the
younger DeWolfe, with his nonchalant disregard
for all the conventional forms of success, with his
independence and originality, had much more native
ability than his father: but Peter had always an-
swered that no man was a good general unless he
could mobilize and utilize the efforts of other men.
A man who could choose the best cabinet would
have nine-tenths of the requirements necessary for
a great President, he said. And he often recalled
the habit of mind of his father saying to himself
235


236 The Vanishing Men
not “What would he have done?” but “Who would
he have sent for?” Old DeWolfe had left with
Peter the epigram, “Always get the best, no matter
what it costs, and, above all, get the best man.”
Now that he had need of three experts he had
conducted a careful inquiry as to the most infallible
men available for his purposes. He was able to pay
them for the work he proposed that they should do
and he felt a satisfaction when the three had been
picked out upon the judgment of shrewd men for
whose opinion he had spent twenty-four hours. He
laughed a little over the idea that destiny had cast
him in the rôle of a sleuth and that he was doing his
utmost to act more like a hard-headed director of a
business to be done, than he had ever acted in his
life before; it was not much like being the romantic
detective, after all.
In addition to acquiring the information that
would lead him to three men, Peter had wrestled
with the problem presented by Brena's cable. He
had sent her word when he had arrived safely in
New York that he was full of hope and optimism.
“We shall win,” he had said, “because any other


The Vanishing Men 237
thought is too terrible to bear.” He could not under-
stand then what new facts she had to justify her
strange message to him unless it were an anonymous
warning such as that which he had received in Liver-
pool. To accede to her request and to proceed no
further along the lines of inquiry which he had
chosen as significant would mean delay and perhaps
a loss of the thin threads that he had picked up to
unravel.
To have cabled Brena that she must seek the aid
of the office of the British Admiralty in procuring
prompt passage across the water would have served
Peter's inclination. He had suffered from that
extraordinary pang that comes with parting and
with the groundless and yet apparently prophetic
intuition that the one who is loved the most will
never be seen again. He had felt the pain of empti-
ness without her; he had felt the hunger for the
close presence of her spirit, her mind and the touch
of her tender hand from which there flowed so
marvelous a current of strength and well being. It
would have been easy for DeWolfe to have aban-
doned temporarily the task he had undertaken, which


238 The Vanishing Men
he might do in all good conscience and with the com-
plete absolution from any obligation that her cable
had given him.
The truth was, however, that he had in him a
great deal of the fiber of determination, a good deal
of a single-track purpose that frowned upon him
and made him wince when he became tempted to
postpone his plans and indulge his desire in waiting
idly for her to come. He knew from the beginning
that this was the side of self that would win; he
was only doing that which he knew in his inner con-
sciousness he would do when he cabled a reply to
her that said, “Do not come yet. I will cable you
again. If you have important news do not be afraid
to send it.”
He was glad when that was done. There was an
additional reason for it; he was not yet prepared
to meet Brena Selcoss for the second time. He
must first clear the way for relationship that had in
it no reservations.
The first thing to be done was to confer with one
Joseph Smallwood of Drennan and Co., the pub-
lishers.


The Vanishing Men 239
When Peter first saw Smallwood he felt a little
like one who has been sent to an armless dentist.
The man was pale and flavorless like the cream
sauce of cheap restaurants. He sat behind a desk
in a corner of the publisher's office, screened off from
the bustle of messengers, proofreaders, stenog-
raphers with an absurd fat publisher's list bound in
green open before him, turning its pages with fingers
that had the blue appearance of a cold storage
chicken, his transparent eyelids drooped as if his
profession were that of overcoming an intense de-
sire for sleep. DeWolfe had difficulty in believing
that this was the man to whom he had been referred.
“Mr. DeWolfe, how can I serve you?” he said in
a low drawl as if he were pulling his words like
molasses candy into long strips to match his own
long body.
“I understand that you not only maintain a con-
nection with Drennan but undertake commissions
and pass upon technical questions independently.”
Smallwood's smile was of the kind that snaps on
and off like an electric light. Now he snapped it on;
it was gone in a flash—a string-pulled smile.


240 The Vanishing Men
“Oh, yes,” he said wearily. “Did you want to
find—”
“A book,” said Peter.
“What book?”
“‘The Explorations of Father Carlos in the Mes-
calero Desert.' Here is the whole story.” Peter
gave him a card with the details. “I want to buy a
perfect copy.”
Smallwood shook his head from left to right and
then to left again with a sad expression followed by
the camera shutter smile.
“It will take a long time,” he said tenderly as if
he bore the weight of all human suffering upon his
heart. “It is a very rare book; Anderson, the sugar
refiner, owned a copy. That is how I happened to
know. I appraised his library. Perhaps it will
take a year.”
“A week,” said Peter. “No more.”
“A week,” repeated Smallwood, closing his eyes as
if resigned to anything, come what would.
“I thought it would be possible to telegraph to
every dealer in the country.”
“Please don't interrupt,” the other said in a


The Vanishing Men 24I
whisper as if Peter had clattered into some funeral
service. “I am thinking.”
When he had ceased thinking he looked up,
snapped on his smile and stared at DeWolfe out of
pale blue eyes.
“The operation will cost a great deal of money.”
Peter waved his hand.
“The book is a rarity but not one that the dealers
know how to locate—as for instance, a first edition
of Horace Walpole, where the location of every
copy is known.”
Peter nodded.
“I think I better say
appeared discouraged. He paused, he repeated: “I
think I better say, however, that I will make a trial
” began Smallwood who
provided
“That I am able to bear any expense?”
Smallwood appeared surprised that any human
being could have as much sense. He said: “The
search will require several stenographers, a long-
distance telephone bill of rather alarming size and
possibly a price for the book far beyond its real


242 The Vanishing Men
value—several times the probable amount it would
bring at an auction.”
“Go ahead,” said Peter.
“May I say that the your desire for a copy of
this book must be extraordinary?”
“Oh, yes, most extraordinary. A week ago I
would not have paid two dollars for it. Men have
gambled away their lives on it. I can't tell how
much I want it until I get it. But to get it I will
pay what it costs.”
The authority on obscure and rare volumes took
off his glasses, wiped them with a new dollar bill
and putting them on again stared at Peter. He
drawled:
“I am not sure that your desire is a folly. It
may be comparable to a desire for a personal and
unique identity that makes only one woman in the
world appear worth seeking. And I suppose that is
why fine tastes differ from coarse tastes; the latter
are not only coarse, but they do not know what it
means to insist upon the one thing that the desire
calls for, rejecting every compromise and every
substitute.”


The Vanishing Men 243
Peter nodded. “Thank you—you have furnished
me with an idea. And if you can locate a copy of
the book P
“I would let you know at once.”
“Time counts. I would be grateful.”
Smallwood blinked. Only when his visitor was at
the door did he say, with a switched-on smile: “Oh,
by the way, must the volume be in perfect con-
dition?”
“It can be a bundle of débris as far as I am con-
cerned,” answered Peter. “But all the pages must
be there.”
The other man was reaching for the telephone
instrument with his cold storage fingers as DeWolfe
left the office.
From the publishers he went to one Manfred
Eldegard at 6 Nassau Street. Eldegard is a public
accountant whose clients are the surety and bond-
ing companies. The vice-president of one of these
companies had said to DeWolfe: “You are not
familiar with auditing and accounting as I am,
Peter. If you were you would know that accuracy,
honesty, speed, reliability are qualities that can be


244 The Vanishing Men
hired in carload lots. It is easy to engage experts
in figures. But the genius among accountants is the
man who can read figures just as a pianist reads
music. That man is worth something because he
can translate into the terms of life. He doesn't
check up your books. He plays them for you.
You can tell how they sound. He can bend over
the figure on a corporation's account and smell the
truth about the company. If he wants to catch a
defaulter he can tell by looking at the red edges of
a journal's pages whether one has been there. He
is not a mathematician; he's a magician. There's
one of those fellows that can make circles round the
rest. Here's his letter head.”
“Is he willing to take a chance on getting shot?”
Peter had asked.
“Shot?” the other had repeated with a gasp.
“I may have to send him a long way off. I don't
know what hazards there are.”
The official of the bonding company had looked
at Peter incredulously but he had said, "You'll have
to ask him or his wife. I understand that there are
few witnesses for the State in criminal trials who
*


The Vanishing Men 245
have weathered as many blackmail and black-hand
threats as M. E. as we call him.”
• “Would he be more ready to keep his mouth shut
for his client than to open it to the police for in-
stance?”
“My dear sir, when you engage Eldegard you
buy a strip of his services. It's yours. If you don't
want him to disclose anything there is no process
server that can land him and if there were there is
no district attorney who would get anything out of
cross-examination except evasions.”
Upon a confirmation of this opinion Peter had
chosen this fat man with two chins, a pompadour
of bristles above a broad flat face with little eyes,
nose and mouth pricked into it as if by a point of a
pencil; to him Peter, following the appointment he
had made, stated his problem.
“Where are these accounts?” asked Eldegard.
Peter put them upon the glass top of the desk.
The little beady eyes of the fat man fixed a stare
upon the Russia leather covers; he extended a large
meaty hand and caressed these books as if they were
a delicacy brought to him to cook and eat—a pleas-


246 The Vanishing Men
ure of digestion—a mere morsel for a gourmand.
“May I look?” he asked.
“Certainly,” Peter replied. *
Eldegard pulled up his sleeves, pushed back his
cuffs, habits that were relics of the days when he
was a bookkeeper for a St. Louis brewery, of days
when he did not dream of owning a summer place
on Long Island and blooded Jersey cattle and a
limousine for his Laura. As he turned the pages
marked by Peter he began to utter chu-chu, chu-chu
between his teeth, increasing its speed as if getting
up steam as a locomotive puffs faster and faster
when it leaves a train shed.
“What's this Credit Account X.D.” he inquired
under his breath.
“That's the one that occurs most often,” said
Peter.
Eldegard drummed with his cushioned fingertips
on the glass.
“It looks that way,” he announced, “–the way
you said.”
“But you are not sure?”
“Only sure as a man is sure who finds watercress


XVI
ON Sunday evening, after he had dined early with
Colby Pennington, in one of the great deserted din-
ing-rooms of a certain New York club, Peter felt
the sense of revolt against the rut-running life of
his own kind. The groove that fortune had pro-
vided for him was smooth but it was deep. Its cus-
toms, like the rules of some labor unions, were de-
signed, purposed and intended to reduce individual
expressions to a common level. It was type life.
Peter could remember his first sense of its pain.
The initial, deep, agonizing twinge had come when
he was thirteen. From the time he was ten and
until he was fourteen he had owned a cat-boat. He
had been the skipper of that cat; the mate was Mike.
Mike's real name was August. He was eighteen and
the freckles on his face were frequent and deep of
color. He had a hare-lip, a good heart, and Peter
had loved him and hid that love. But Mike and the
cat-boat with its cruising quarters for two were the
250


The Vanishing Men 25I
real reasons why Peter was always so anxious to
have the family go to their waterfront estate on the
Long Island shore. On the morning of his four-
teenth birthday his father, clad in nightclothes, had
awakened him and dragged him to a second-story
balcony of their villa. He had rubbed his eyes to
see more clearly a steam yacht, slim, white, beautiful,
varnished, gleaming with polished brass, manned by
a crew of several men in uniform; it had come up
to the private moorings during the night.
“Yours,” his father had said. “A birthday.”
And then and there came the realization that the
days of the cat-boat had gone, that Mike would
never be the same again, that boyhood freedom had
gone, that great toys that he did not want in his
heart of hearts were now to be his, that the obliga-
tion of riches had put its giant hand upon him bend-
ing his free spirit into formal postures and like a
vampire putting its loathsome lips upon him to
draw away the untrammeled expression of himself.
From Pennington, with his naturally brilliant
mind, shackled in religion, in politics, in morals, in
taste, by those schools of petty imitation misnamed


The Vanishing Men 253
remembered that, in France, his idea of the most
wonderful moment in the world, the sharpest con-
trast to the gigantic nobilities and the colossal
triviality of War, was a moment on a New York
park bench with children of the tenements still play-
ing in the dusk, perhaps with an organ and a monkey
thrown in for good measure. Since then how life
had changed for him. When he sat down the chil-
dren in the dusk—the realities—faded away and were
lost in unreal pictures of Brena in her Beconshire
garden, perhaps with her great dark eyes turned to-
ward the sunset because he had gone behind it.
He felt an extraordinary restlessness—like
that which comes upon those who have been
deprived of some drug and are in torture while it
goes slowly out of the system. He who wished not
to wait, was waiting. He felt the dread of un-
known calamities. And with this haunting sense
of hovering crisis, he turned back to his apartment.
There Peter tried to read, experiencing that ir-
ritating lack of concentration which comes to all
readers whose minds steal away from the page al-
lowing the eyes to travel on alone like independent


The Vanishing Men 255
color of a moonstone by contrast with the shell rims
of his glasses. His free hand hung listless as if it
were just out of refrigeration. He wore a suit of
pale gray the pattern of which was so delicate that
it might have been only the fancy of weak eyes.
Smallwood looked as if he were something that had
stood out through a rainy season.
“Here I am,” he drawled.
“You don't mean ?” exclaimed Peter.
The other man in answer placed the package un-
der his arm on Peter's long Jacobean table. The
motion was almost surreptitious.
“Yes, I did find one,” he drawled. “Not so far
away either.”
He looked up inquiringly into DeWolfe's expres-
sive face, now swept by many emotions like puffs
of wind scurrying across the surface of water.
“That's great!” Peter exclaimed. “It’s great.”
“Oh, how kind of you to say so,” Smallwood said.
“I found this to-day and I thought I would drop in
with it.”
He appeared about ready to lie down and go to
sleep.


256 The Vanishing Men
“Look here,” said Peter. “You know that was
mighty kind, to come up here—and all that. I'll
not forget it. Quite aside from the professional
obligation.”
Smallwood raised his cold storage hand as the
orator does when pretending that applause is un-
deserved. The gesture also appeared to give Peter
permission to inspect the prize. Off came the string
and off the wrapping paper. Without a glance at the
binding or title Peter flapped over the pages. Thirty,
thirty-one, two, three, four, five. Thirty-six!
Thirty-seven!
“All here!” exclaimed DeWolfe looking up, but
as if even the pallor of Smallwood had faded out
completely, the book collector's counselor had gone;
he had closed the door noiselessly as if the paleness
of him not only was for the sight but for the sense
of hearing as well.
Peter pushed the third copy of the rare volume
upon which he had put his hands under the arc of
the bronze lamp. r
“The way presents no obstacles to progress save
the sand which is loose for the feet of horses,”


258 The Vanishing Men
something that followed his search for this quaint
old volume and its possession?
To Peter it appeared now that one more piece of
material was needed to fill the pattern. He had been
reluctant to seek this piece but now there was too
much confirmation to allow anything to stand in the
way.
He could not wait; he took his hat. The evening
was now filled with moonlight, so clear, upon white
cloud banks on a purple velvet sky, that it invited all
to walk leisurely under a spell of silvery calm that
even transformed the rectangular prisms of the city
and the deep streets between. Peter knew nothing
of the moon; he pursued one end, blind to all else.
After hurrying on foot for two blocks he suc-
ceeded in stopping an empty taxicab that was clat-
tering southward on the Avenue.
“Take me there,” he said to the driver, putting a
card in his hand.
The car turned about as if it had forgotten some-
thing uptown and after ten blocks on the asphalt,
swung through a cross street to the car tracks upon
which it purred like a brush on velvet until it turned


The Vanishing Men 259
around a hospital on a corner and found a block of
old-fashioned brown-stone houses.
Up the long steps of one of them, Peter climbed,
looking for a doctor's sign, and finding it there he
rang the bell.
The man he had come to see met him in a typical
doctor's office with its mingled and vague impres-
sions of milky glass slabs, nickel instrument trays,
the vicious appearance of a harmless nose and throat
apparatus, books bound in dark red, scattered medi-
cal journals folded twice lengthwise, the sound of
water dripping into a washbowl behind a white door
and the faint smells of ether and aristol powder.
Peter gave no inspection to the man who re-
ceived him; he began abruptly by stating his name.
The professional man, acting from habit, nodded,
put on his glasses, took out a card-case and said in
a carefully nurtured tone of sympathy:
“What's the matter?”
“Nothing is the matter,” replied DeWolfe, “I’m
not ill. I took a chance on finding you on Sunday
evening. I know nothing of your office hours. Ap-
parently I'm lucky.”


260 The Vanishing Men
“Possibly.”
“I came to consult you in your other capacity.”
The other man got up: Peter could now see that
he was a tall man who had neglected to shave that
morning. He guessed that the practice of this physi
cian did not flourish, but he sensed at once the vanity
of the man the moment his second field of skill had
been mentioned. -
“Yes, I do a little of that, too,” the doctor said
with fraudulent modesty.
“I should say so,” replied Peter. “Who do you
suppose sent me here?”
“One of many lawyers, perhaps.”
“The district attorney.”
The doctor was plainly pleased. He said, “Well,
handwriting has been my hobby, Mr. DeWolfe, for
nearly twenty-two years. It began curiously enough
by a triviality—an attempt to read character through
penmanship; it has ended in a scientific inquiry, the
development of method, a system of rhythm meas-
urements. Scarcely a day goes by that I am not
consulted by the prosecuting authorities in many


262 The Vanishing Men
He placed this indorsement up and not down as he
put the two pieces of paper side by side upon the
table.
“Huh !” said the doctor, bending over them.
Peter looked up at him sharply.
“That,” said the doctor, putting a square-ended
fore-finger upon the words “The Sign.”
“What?” asked Peter.
“It is an excellent example of an attempt to dis-
guise penmanship.”
DeWolfe felt it necessary to contract his muscles
to hold in an exclamation that had tried to leap
from him.
“That is not the problem,” said he.
“What is it?”
“The problem is whether the same hand wrote
the words on these two pieces of paper. Did they?”
“Did they?” repeated the doctor scornfully. “Did
you expect an answer to that—at once—in a minute?
Upon the specimens you have brought? My stars!
Man! There are only two words on this piece.”
“I thought it would not require much time
“Much time!” exclaimed the doctor. “Well, it


264 The Vanishing Men
At about half past four in the afternoon five days
later Brena Selcoss walked into the office of Colby
Pennington. She had come directly from the pier
on the North River. Her face was white, her
sensitive lips moved uneasily as if seeking to sup-
press emotions of their own. Pennington was moved
by her presence.
“I am a friend of Mr. DeWolfe's,” she said. “I
have sent a wireless addressed to him here. I have
been on the sea for eleven days.”
Pennington held up the undelivered envelope.
“Are you Miss Selcoss?” he asked. “Well, Peter
DeWolfe sent you a cablegram—something about
advising you to delay your coming. You had
started. Too bad. Just now Mr. DeWolfe is out
of town.”
“Out of town P”
“Why, yes. He went a few days ago. He had
something to investigate. We rather expected to
hear from him. He went off in a hurry—some
hurry and flurry. I believe he had received some
kind of message.”
Pennington stopped.


The Vanishing Men 265
“For God's sake what's the matter?”
Brena Selcoss, leaning forward in her chair, had
thrown her arms upon his desk and in the curve of
one elbow she had buried her face.
For a moment she appeared as lifeless as if she
had been struck a crashing blow upon the head.


XVII
BRENA SELcoss raised her head from Colby Pen-
nington's desk and stared at Peter's lawyer with
an expression of terror in her parted lips, in her
eyes, in her white hands, held out as if to ward
away a hideous idea.
“You let him go!” she exclaimed in a breaking
shaken voice.
“Let him go?” asked the astounded Colby. “Why
->
shouldn't he go? Is there any reason
It was evident to Brena that this man had not been
in Peter's confidence; he could not know that a call
like this had come to the other two men and that
Peter might be the third to go. She interrupted
him with a gesture of impatience, saying, “He left
no word—no address—nothing with which to trace
him?”
“Not with me.”
Leaning forward he pressed a pearl button on
266


268 The Vanishing Men
framed calendar and moved his pencil on it. He
said, “He was to be there on the 24th, but gave no
address there. The twenty-fourth is four days from
now.”
“Kremlin Wells, Texas? I never heard of such a
place,” said Pennington scowling after the manner
of one who dislikes any fact not within the swing
of his own radius.
“Nor had I. I looked it up. Not in the geography.
But it's in the railroad guide—a way station, prob-
ably with a water tank, on the Texas Central and
New Mexico—on the desert near the border between
the two states, Mr. Pennington. That was all that
he said. He left some papers to put in our safe and
asked me to open them and attend to them if he
was not back in three weeks.”
“Thank you,” said Pennington. “That's all,
Fred.”
“Wait!”
Brena had spoken in a low tone, but with that
authority sometimes heard in her voice.
The chief clerk stopped as if her word had been
a bullet in his lungs.


The Vanishing Men 269
“Will you help me?” she said to Peter's lawyer.
“I assure you that he would wish it.”
Colby looked at her as one would look at a new
model of some automobile; at last he nodded.
“I want to know the first train leaving New York
for St. Louis and Texas,” she said. “I want some
one to go for a ticket and reservations to Kremlin
Wells or the nearest point. I want a taxicab. I
want you to do everything in your power to get me
to Kremlin Wells before the twenty-fourth. It must
be done!”
Pennington stared at her.
“Very unusual,” he muttered. “But I said we'd
do it, Miss Selcoss.”
Partly because of the assistance of his office force,
Brena was on her way to St. Louis, without even
hand baggage, but within an hour; partly because
of it she was on a train that rolled into Dallas
through the railroad yards with the shabby wooden
settlements, seen again from her berth through the
slit of window beneath the curtain as she raised her
weight on one elbow. It had not changed com-
pletely since she had seen it on her return after Jim


270 The Vanishing Men
Hennepin had disappeared. This morning began
the 23rd of the month; she had the sense of racing
to Kremlin Wells in a contest with death.
At the final junction point of her long journey,
tired, nerve-wracked by unremitting heat of night
and day and by the strain of suspense, she found
it necessary to wait under a train shed, where in
the waiting room or on the platform the midday
humidity created a smothering steam filled with the
gases belched from locomotive stacks and the ear-
smashing explosions from engine exhausts and the
impact of car couplings. The train for the West
was three hours late. She could not leave the sta-
tion; she walked back and forth, her weary eyes
held open wide by will, her jaw firm. And dogging
every step she took was the fear that she would be
too late, that when daylight came on the twenty-
fourth she would not yet be at her destination.
The conductor on the Westbound Mail was not
of the same mind. Beautiful young women travel-
ing alone do not alight every day in “holes in the
desert” as he called the Wells; he considered it less
desirable to set her down sometime in the dark hour


The Vanishing Men 27I
between three and four. He said the place consisted
of a siding, a water tank, a general store, five
houses, two saloons where roulette wheels were go-
ing during the sheep herder's season, an adobe ruin
and a hotel with three rooms above a bar.
“I am sure it will be all right,” said Brena. “But
even if it were not I would have to leave this train
there.”
At about three the porter woke her. There were
ten minutes for dressing, and then she heard the
whine of the brakes, and with muddy, sleep thick-
ened senses, with the ache of stiff bones and muscles
and nerves after the heat, the inadequate sleep and
the strain, she felt out from the lower step with one
foot into the bottomless depths of blackness for the
boards of the platform.
When the soft night breeze that flowed in a steady
stream from the Southwest had blown the daze
away as if it were a dust that had settled on her,
the train had been swallowed in the dark.
She could hear the splash of water leaking from
the bottom of the railroad tank and occasionally
the heat lightning on the horizon covered the desert


272 The Vanishing Men
toward the South with the white flare of a photog-
rapher's flashlight powder, disclosing the vast ex-
panse broken by black patches of desert vegetation.
But her attention was now held by a dim swinging
lantern that came toward her out of the black plush
of the dark, as if it came with volition and move-
ment of its own.
When this light came close to her, she felt an im-
pulse to leap back into the dark as one who is
desperate might leap into the depths of black waters;
when the light was raised toward her face so that
its possessor might see her, she wished that she had
fled.
The face on the other side of the light was the
essence of brutality—the black pupils in bloodshot
eyes, the sun-baked skin drawn taut over immense
protruding cheek bones, the thin wrinkled upper lip
over a full red drooping under lip, the broad, wide
nostrils, the thick gleaming muscular neck of the
half-breed Mexican and Indian.
Brena closed her fingers under cover of the dark
and made the pressure of nails in her own palm
summon her will to put her face nearer his and to


274 The Vanishing Men
direction squirming and alive with black maggots
of fear.
Suddenly the lantern illumined an entrance cut
in a high adobe wall. The man, turning around,
said in his petting voice. “Come.” Brena stepped
through into an enclosure without roof; the stars of
the sky shone down with their little white needles
of light. The lantern, however, now threw its light
upon a little two-story wooden building within the
old walls. This structure was dark below except
for the lantern's light flung from the glass; its faint
two squares of windows above were black on either
side of a doorway reached by narrow rickety wooden
stairs built on the exterior of the house.
“Up,” commanded the Mexican with his hand on
the rail.
Brena hesitated.
“I take you to heem.”
She began to climb, gripping the hand polished
rail to steady her nerves by the force of her own
arm muscles.
“In This my house. I keep for Mister Glaub.
In " -


The Vanishing Men 275
She passed by him as he flattened himself against
the door jamb.
Four closed doors, unpainted and covered with
penciled signatures, dates, arithmetic, and scrawled
faces and verses, almost filled the walls of the nar-
row seven feet of square hall. With a grunt, like
a pig's, the Mexican opened one of these doors and
plucked at Brena's elbow.
“Look! What I say? This heem?”
The lantern's circle of light rose and widened as
he held it higher until it covered a cot on which a
waking sleeper was pushing himself up on one arm
and reaching under a pillow with the other hand.
“A lady,” the Mexican said, and putting the
lantern on the bare boards, he slid out and closed the
door.
The man on the cot sprang up, raised the lantern,
and at the end of a high exclamation he gasped for
another breath and ejaculated, “Brena!”
“Yes, Peter. Thank God, Peter, I came in time.”
“Time—time for what? I’m all right, dear. I
cabled you to wait.”
“I’d started, Peter. I didn't get it.”


The Vanishing Men 277
going to fix everything. If not, there's something
too big—too ghastly yy
“But if you never came back to me—if any-
thing ” She stopped. “Why Peter, I flung my-
self down sometimes. I prayed to be forgiven for
ever having spoken to you. I begged relief from
the hideous idea that I had let you start at all.”
“Look here,” he said severely. “Did you send
me that warning—to the steamer?”
She was silent.
“Answer.”
“Yes. I thought I must stop you, dear.”
“Bad business,” he said. “Look here, Brena.
For the first time in my life I’ve been figuring what
a real partnership really means. And it can't exist
without perfect unbroken truth—playing the game,
not separately, but together—all the time—an un-
broken record.”
She said, “I know. There isn't much to say. My
fear. My conscience. And it was you who were
going to take the risk. Not anybody else, Peter—
and I loved you. I took the paper from a package
from the chemist's shop. I wrote.”


The Vanishing Men 279
“We will,” he said. “I’m almost at the point
where I score, Brena. I've brought a high-powered
car here. Two hundred odd miles into this hell of
desert. And to-morrow. I go to-morrow.”
He struck a match and relit the lantern.
“Tell me, Peter,” she said, brushing the red-gold
hair back from her forehead.
“I did tell you. I said I had a theory—a theory
about where they went—Hennepin first—and
Parmalee. If I am not right, heaven help us! I've
not been afraid yet—not in my real self. If I'm
right I'll laugh at myself for toting a gun around
and for a lot of fool ideas I’ve had. But if I'm
wrong now, I'd be afraid. I'm no coward, but I'd
squirm with fear!”
Her eyes were full of a troubled expression.
“But you don't tell me, Peter.”
“I can't.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I was wrong it would always appear
to you that I had been the inventor of injustice. Let
me test your faith in me, Brena. Give me three days
more.”


280 The Vanishing Men
“Yes, but when you ride off into the desert—to
danger, you said, provided you were wrong—I'm
going too.”
“You can't.”
“Yes, I am going with you, Peter.”
“It might be too hideous.”
“I am going.”
The strange authority with which she sometimes
spoke was now in her voice and in her eyes; it was
as if she were speaking, not out of herself alone,
but were one who voiced a decree of those who
had willed an inexorable end.
“Let me show you then where we are going,” he
said with his lips pressed together. “Let me show
you a map. Let me tell you how we shall have to
steer our way over a trailless waste by compass
as if we were at sea! It's a country of terrible dis-
tances and heat and thirst. If the car breaks down
they'd never hear of us.”
“We'd be out there for years,” she said in the
voice of one who in a great happiness feels sleep
pulling down the eyelids, drawing its mists across
the mind. “We'd have our hands—like this—to-


XVIII
AFTER night had begun to creep in again across
the desert from the East, with a flow like melted
tar, suddenly that ooze was split in the middle by
the great arc of the moon's top coming over the
horizon like the top of a bald head of one who pulls
himself over a wall. The heat of the day yielded
suddenly to the patient Southeast wind whose flow
was as changeless as that of some gentle river.
Brena, who had slept long and restfully in spite
of the stinging dry heat, had awakened before the
sun had gone down to find Peter was attending to
the last details of equipping the high-powered car
that he had bought in El Paso. It was below the
window in the old courtyard with the crumbling
adobe wall.
“Hello,” he had said, looking up. “You just
missed seeing the population of this town. The
entire ten were here. They don't know we're going
to strike into the desert instead of going eastward.”
282


The Vanishing Men 283
. He had held up his fingers to count on them.
“We're all provisioned now—from the General
Store—gasoline cans, water in demijohns, matches,
canned beans and other things, a bottle of olives,
guaranteed very old, and one paper napkin. I say
—why do you ever do your hair up at all? It's
rather wonderful, falling all around like that.”
“I didn't take it down.”
“No, I did. I ran it through my fingers like a
miser with his gold—and his untarnished copper
threads, if a miser has them too. Why not braid
it? We're going where there are no fashions,
Brena.”
“To-day?"
“To-night. There'll be a white moon as big as
a plate for hours. We'll make a hundred miles at
least through the depression that runs along the
bed of some prehistoric torrent to the Northwest.
Thanks to old Father Carlos, the hard-headed
Jesuit, it's on the map. Easy to follow.”
When the purple crêpe of evening had been
spread over the baking sands and the stars had
been set out in their infinite careless pattern in the


284 The Vanishing Men
high desert sky, the car, with opened muffler, turned
her nose out of the trail that followed the line of
the railroad and began to kick the sand behind as
if she were a hound. It was as if she were leaving
forever the sight and memory of mankind.
This country is without mercy to living things.
After thirty miles of hard pulling through the bare
loose-surfaced plain, tossed gently about as if they
were riding in a motorboat over the long rollers of
the sea, they saw before them on the crest of a sand
wave a running pack of coyotes, who came up sud-
denly, black against the moonlight like dog fish
lifted into sight on a wave. But after that all
vegetation and even the cacti which stood like
trained seals, their flappers held out as if ready to
begin a dance, became sparse, and the emptiness was
that of the frontier of death itself.
Peter turned to look at Brena. Her face,
illumined by the moon, was lifted a little; with the
hair blown back by the hot wind, her eyes glistened
like those of one who rides toward battle in a calm
spirit. She felt, perhaps, his gaze, and, turning,
smiled. She wondered why he had been unwilling


The Vanishing Men 285
to tell her why they went, what he sought, the facts
he had found.
“Will you tell me—afterward?” she asked.
“Yes—if I win,” he answered. “I will tell you
then. Before that I've no particular right to do it
—not till I'm sure. The thing is too tremendous!”
She pulled back the silk sleeves from her round
arms that in the pale moonlight were those of an
ancient Grecian marble. She folded them and, as
they drove on, she fixed her dark eyes again upon
the North with the same calm, the same suggestion
of being the possessor of a spirit as eternal as that
of the sea.
When the moon had reached the bottom of the
bowl of the sky, DeWolfe looked again at his
speedometer.
“Did you notice that our searchlight no longer
picks up little insects and turns them into flashes of
silver?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He stopped the car to fill the radiator.
“We are coming into the most arid land in the
world, where no rain falls and there is no dew. It


286 The Vanishing Men
is the country of eternal stillness. There is no life;
not even the insects exist here There is no mo–
tion. There is no sound. Listen!”
Brena looked about at the great flat disk of the
desert as she stood with her hand on Peter's shoul-
der; it was like a world of hardened concrete, with-
out flexibility, without a motion. She listened and
heard only her heart and the throb of silence that
comes only in places of utter stillness.
“I’m glad I'm with you, Peter,” she said. “There
is a threat here, isn't there?”
He nodded. “We’ve been seventy-five miles. To
a man on foot without water that would be death
—a horrible death with the sand dragging at the
feet—just like the flies one sees trying to pull their
legs along fly paper, with the heat burning all mois-
ture out of the body, with the silence and the still-
ness inviting him to madness, and his aching limbs
gradually turning his footpath around and around
in smaller circles to a center of death.”
They plowed on, saying little. Brena felt the in-
fection of Peter's tensity; at times it caused her to
grip the edges of the leather cushion beneath her.


The Vanishing Men 287
The ride became like a nightmare with the eternal
desert slipping behind, and ever coming forth from
the horizon in front like an endless belt on which
the wheels beneath them rolled madly without
progress. The heat was like the heat in a dream,
sprayed in a needle shower into their faces as the
car rocked on. The stars, once white and cool,
became red hot—a million little knife points of
spiteful light. The ears were tired of the song of
the motor and the unceasing swish of the sand un-
der the mud guards—a noise that suggested a drill
boring endlessly and scattering its fine débris. The
desert was a petrified sea yielding brackish, sulphur-
ous odors to the dry and aching nostrils. And
Brena's thoughts became giblets tossed up in a hot
stew in the cauldron of anxiety, pieces of memory
arising to the bubbling surface and whirling about
among doubts and fears, hopes and prayers.
At the end of a hundred miles dawn began to
come in the brilliant colors of silken veils of rain-
bow diversity shaken out from the East With
startling suddenness the air of the desert became
the tint of heliotrope. The dark sky split into great


288 The Vanishing Men
cracks where jagged peaks of the red glow had
climbed and then with a clang the yellow rays of
day came over the horizon like long golden spears
of a charging host held low above the sands.
Peter had driven his car over the great flat disk,
scarred with irregularity, but nevertheless like a
talking machine record with its tiny impressions.
The hours had called for endurance of smarting
eyes that had stared so long for gullies or chasms,
and of aching arm muscles that had held the twists
and tugs of the front wheels. He allowed the car to
come to a stop and shut off the engine.
“Both of us need a rest and water,” he said to
Brena. “And you need breakfast.”
She did not talk to him as he fixed the car, nor
when, having looked back along the slight cut of the
old prehistoric torrent bed now filled almost to its
old banks with drifting sands, he squatted over a
map, measuring and consulting a pocket compass.
His anxiety was evident.
They went forward again, however, under the
full light of day into a trackless waste where there
was not even a depression to guide them and where


290 The Vanishing Men
“Hush,” he said. “I’ve seen more than you have
seen. It means everything to us!”
He bent over her as if he were going to take
her in his arms, but he tossed his head at some
thought that had restrained him, and took the
wheel once more.
At nine o'clock they came within sight of a great
mound on the desert; it appeared as if it were the
fat round back of some gigantic creature that had
buried itself for a sleep of centuries in a sand
wallow of vast area. -
“There it is!” exclaimed DeWolfe. “Look,
Brena. Look to the West. Somewhere up there
is the Llano Estacado—the Staked Plain—as the
Spanish explorers called it. And there's the haze
on the horizon—the haze that the Jesuit mission-
aries told about. It comes from the colder air of
the Mescalero Ridge!”
“And it means that we have found our way?”
“Yes, found our way. There's ninety miles
more.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the oldest city, Brena, in America. To a


292 The Vanishing Men
gateway, the sui, was still sending down its beat
in throbbing layers over the desert. It slanted down
from the West following the angle of declivity of
the wall of rock behind the ruin that mounted up
in ragged overhanging crags of red and brown.
Upon the base of this rock, rudely smoothed and
carved, was the symbol of the feathered serpent.
Brena clutched Peter's forearm.
“It did have a meaning then?” she said with halt-
ing syllables.
“A terrible meaning, Brena,” he said with awe.
Amidst the gigantic proportions of desert, sky
and cliff, this figure of the Mayan god—a symbol
brought from the lands of the Central Americas
by a craven tribe fleeing from its enemies—had
looked down with its heathen eyes upon the growth
of a city around an oasis, around a flowing giant
spring. It had seen perhaps in the coming and
going of generations within that fortified pueblo,
strange rites, barbaric human sacrifice, the march
of a little pomp and power, moving funerals, the
dance of naked priests with painted yellow bodies,
the endless stream of laborers bending under their


The Vanishing Men 293
loads of water carried from the well to irrigation
ditches, the harvest, the miracles of water. But
perhaps it had seen too the day when a subterranean
shift had driven the underground water course
away, and in a night drained out the life-maintain-
ing supply of five thousand panic-stricken praying
men and women and their lamenting priests. Per-
haps, if tradition were right, it knew where the
treasures of that city had been hid away. It had
seen the fine sand blown from the edge of the mesa
far above hang in the air and come drifting down
through the centuries to cover the crumbling ruins
within an enclosure where no longer a living thing
moved and no breeze, however slight, ever disturbed
the veil of dust that was spread upon the level space
within the walls.
“A place where no wind ever blows,” said Peter.
“Father Carlos over two centuries ago wrote that
down. A lifeless place.”
“You are not going into it alone,” said Brena
firmly. “I will go with you.”
“It isn't right, Brena. I do not know what we
shall find.”


294 The Vanishing Men
He looked at the opening in the high wall as if
it were the maw of Destiny opened to belch forth
upon them a sentence.
“Tell me, Peter—are there dangers there? Do
you know?”
“I only guess,” he answered. “I think there are
none. I think, Brena, that beyond that wall there
is freedom for us—life for us—a message for us.”
“I must go with you.”
He nodded.
At the entrance he stopped, gazing down at the
ground—the film, the blanket of fine dust. He
uttered an exclamation.
“What do you see, Peter?”
“I see a record in the sand.”
“What record?”
“We shall see more,” he said grimly. “Come.”
In the center of the enclosure, containing sev-
eral acres of the almost level site of the crumbled
and vanished pueblo of clay and rubble, there was
one monument of permanence; it was the great well-
curb of mighty slabs hewn from the rock of the
cliffs. A part of it had fallen into the hole, block-


The Vanishing Men 303
“I understand,” she said. “I understand. And
the scrap of paper was a part of the bait?”
Peter raised his hand as if to say that he wished
to go on in his own way. “It was chance too that
led me to the motive for ridding the world of
Hennepin. That miserable man had become a
menace. He knew too much. He knew of a long
series of embezzlements from a certain estate in
Texas. A capitalist had bought vast quantities of
something—on speculation—and his agent after his
death deceived the executors as to the extent of his
holdings. I have had a clue from an old account
book sifted to the bottom.”
“And Jim Hennepin knew?”
“Knew and began a merciless blackmail, threat-
ening ruin. I can see him now, insatiable, hungry,
losing in speculations, asking for more, hounding a
man who was balancing between success and fail-
ure and always hinting at bankruptcy and the
penitentiary.” -
Peter went on. He told of the probability that
Compton Parmalee, the hounded man, a physical
coward, but resourceful and ingenious, had come


304 The Vanishing Men
upon an old volume describing this lost city of the
desert. There were traditions of vast wealth hidden
there. Parmalee had pretended to the possession of
• knowledge confirming it. He had shown old letters,
the scrap of paper with the Kuk-ul-can symbol. He
wanted to take the blackmailer to a place from which
he would never come back.
“To kill him?” asked Brena.
“No,” replied Peter. “He hadn't the courage.
He feared that. He feared the work. He feared
the result. He had a better way.”
“And how?” she asked.
“It is all there—here in the sand—a record,” he
said. “A ghastly record. Seven years have gone,
but in this deep fine dust, Brena, there still remains
the story.”
He paused; he lit a cigarette; went on. He said,
“There around the entrance are the marks of horses’
hoof-prints—almost lost—but still readable—three
horses, two saddled and one carrying the packs.
They came in two horses abreast, and the pack
horse led behind. Two men in the saddles. Night


The Vanishing Men 305
came on. One man slept. The other crept to the
animals and he rode away.”
“Rode away? Left Jim Hennepin here?”
“Yes, beyond hope—no horse, no water.”
“How do you know?”
“Because, Brena, when the three horses went out
into the desert their footprints are in single file—
one man led the other two. I will show you. It
is in the sand—a record and a good guess.”
He was silent and he broke his silence with a
cry.
“I can see him—Hennepin—awakening, realiz-
ing, seeing far away the little galloping specks in
the pale moonlight with the treacherous man upon
the leader—a tiny bobbing figure. I can hear the
curses hurled after them. And he—the one left—
alone under the moon, alone under the sun, alone
under the moon again—without a drop—rushing
out into the desert, only to be driven back to the
shade after weary marches dragging through the
sand, hunting among the rocks, crazed with thirst,
gone mad, cursing, blittering mad—his tongue black
—the end—perhaps a thought of you—the cur!”


The Vanishing Men 309
employment as a servant. He never knew when
Hennepin might come—and kill.”
“But he saw the other picture too. He saw the
buzzards hovering over what was left of Hennepin,
he saw a whitened skeleton grinning up at the sun-
lit sky and at the stars, Brena. That's what he
saw. And some day some one would somehow
come there. Perhaps some one had been there al-
ready. Perhaps at the very minute a prospector,
dirty and unshaved, or some accursed archeological
explorer from a university was in that very town
where they had bought the horses and was telling
of the skeleton and of finding the skeleton of the
riderless horse with the bit still held between the
white teeth. He might have that bit in his pocket.
Some one recognizes it. Somehow the chain once
started never ends until wn
“There comes a hand upon the shoulder,” said
Brena, as if in a dream, “and a voice saying, ‘We
have looked a long time for you.’”
“Yes. There wasn't one fear,” Peter said, mark-
ing two lines in the sand with his forefinger. “There
were two fears. They fought each other and their


3IO The Vanishing Men
battleground was Parmalee's soul. It was trampled
into a wallow of terror, of questioning, of doubt.
Do you know, Brena, that somehow there creeps
into me a great pity for him?”
“If he had been able to put his finger upon some
button that would have blown him to bits he would
have taken that way,” she said. “But he had an
exaggerated instinct for self-preservation. It threw
him back from any approach to suicide.”
Peter, getting up, came to her and put his hand
upon her shoulder as if to give her strength. She
had spoken with a voice too evenly measured to
deceive him as to the strain she felt. It had been a
long pull for her, he thought. The last steps,
though they might lead out into the sunlight of
freedom, were upon rough ground—rough even for
a man. He was wondering how he could save her
from pain. He wanted to have this surgery over,
and to have it over there was only one way.
“It was inevitable that he would come here—in
the end,” he said. “He had to see. He had covered
his terrors by a cowardly process of trying to make
you believe that some mystery that clung to you


3I2 The Vanishing Men
into the vast distances of the desert, her lips closed,
her eyes unseeing, like some carved deity who had
been sitting thus for centuries.
“He bought a high-powered car, Brena,” said
Peter. “And all alone he came.”
“And where is he now?” she cried out at last, in
sudden disclosure of her pain. “Do you know?
Where is he now?”
She looked searchingly at Peter's sun-bronzed
face, where upon the surface of youth lines of
strength had been engraved by war, and lines of
tenderness perhaps by a great new understanding
of love and life.
“He is here again,” he answered. “He is here.
. . . Do you understand?”


The Vanishing Men 3I5
a half a hundred miles. Like Hennepin, he too
now screams and the scream comes back from the
cliff with a terrible mockery.”
“But he did find fuel, Peter,” she said. “He
must have found something.”
“Yes, he found something that would do—not
very well, as we can see. He had hoped for befter
results than he got. Come.”
On the way toward the gate of the fortification
walls Peter stopped and kicked at a blackened spot
on the sand. He said laconically, “Their fire.
Where they ate their last supper together—the
vanished men.”
The sun had dropped below the mountains above
the mesa; its needled fire had settled down into a
hot layer of dull, sullen heat. But beyond the wall
where their car stood the open desert, bare, cruel,
with the heat waves running like endless herds of
sheep along the quivering horizon, was a relief from
that strange spell of the dried well, the ruins, the
fine yellow-gray dust, and the silence.
Brena filled her lungs as one does who has come
from the interior of a mortuary.


The Vanishing Men 3I9
Brena stared at him in open-eyed wonderment.
“He was the instrument of justice—he himself,”
Peter went on. “A man who would save his life,
lost it. The madness of fear brought all that he
had to fear—and more.”
He paused.
“Brena, I will tell you,” he said in a hushed,
awed voice. “The man was mad, irresponsible,
without power to reason. He was in a panic of
fear. He wanted to hide his crime at any cost. He
had filled his gasoline tank for the return journey.
Look!”
Peter pointed to the hole in the back of the car
into which the gasoline is poured. The screw cap
had gone. A bent copper pipe still dangled out of
that hole.
“He wanted a hat-full of gasoline. That was
the fuel, Brena—the fuel to burn the remains of
Jim Hennepin.”
He wet his lips.
“He used a siphon. This bent copper pipe taken
from his tool chest—a spare length of oil feed


324 The Vanishing Men
dark eyes moist, and a calm smile upon her sensi-
tive, flexible lips.
For now she knew that he too understood the
way to the greatest of all the mysteries.
THE END


****
Fr.