fii 297 C 3-6 WHITE SHOULDERS COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY GEORGE KIBBE TURNER Published, August, 1921 Second Printing, September, 1921 PRINTED IN THK UNITED STATES OT AMERICA WHITE SHOULDERS 2138488 ' 1 L T IS the custom of our country, old Judge Cato Pendleton used to assert, for the matrons to lead in and offer up the marriageable virgins at three main seasons of the year, set apart by our unwritten tribal laws for that purpose. The first of these, he held, is established just preceding the winter solstice, when the male youth are gathered back to their family altars for the women's and children's festival of Christmas ; the second anticipates the ancient preparation for the vernal equinox in the period of joy and feast- ing just preceding Lent; while the 'third, the largest and most successful day of sacrifice, though local in its scope, is also doubtless due to the fixed climatic mutations of the year. I am alluding now to our Pageant, of the Roses, set by wise pre- cedent in the last of May, when the songs of our mocking birds, the blossoms of our Southland and the complexions of our women are at their best, and all alike invite to the immemorial spring feasts and sacrifices of love. It is upon this last festival at the height of the 9 10 WHITE SHOULDERS mating season that the minds and purposes of our women focus throughout the year. Here is, in fact, the fixed centre of our women's calendar especially for unusually successful mothers with unusually attractive daughters. For though there is no explicit award in set terms for the best offer- ing of the season, yet there is a very close approxi- mation to this in the choice by old custom of the Empress of the Roses the main figure of the central tableau vivant of that day ; and a distinc- tion of this kind, I need not point out to any ra- tional mother, has advantages to any marriage- able daughter much more permanent than the as- sumption of a crown of flowers as the ruler of one May day. It was in connection with this chief women's festival that I myself observed, as a close witness, the rather remarkable enterprise or speculation in the main business of women, with the details of which I am now about to acquaint you. In the pageant of 1919 an unusual and unfortu- nate event took place from the standpoint of local mothers. The winner of the chief honour of the day was a stranger from out of town a girl who, it was' charged, was brought to Carthage by her mother for the obvious and open purpose of matrimony; and who was soon known, by her critical and hostile contemporaries, as White or WHITE SHOULDERS 11 Snowy Shoulders a name bestowed upon her, I was given to understand, because of the over insist- ence of her somewhat astonishing mother upon the irresistible charms of that portion of her person. Her real name, or the name given out by her at that time, was Virginia Fairborn. Women strange or otherwise are not at my time of life the subjects of such eager scrutiny as they may have been at some earlier period. I am well by the first sweet expectancies of spring. But, being human, I could scarcely have avoided the observation of this striking girl and her no less striking though very different mother nor, if I had done this, could I have missed the other wo- men's whispering about them from the first mo- ment when the two arrived with their many and houselike trunks and stirred to the depths the ex- clusive boarding house of Mrs. Tusset, where for many years now I have held my residence. I heard the other women more or less from the first whispering about them among themselves, "Who are they? Where do they come from?" as women have always whispered among themselves, I assume, concerning stranger women since before Babylon; especially in socially guarded centres like the boarding house of Mrs. Tusset. In time this whispering usually abates and new feminine alliances take place. But in this case the whisper- 12 WHITE SHOULDERS ing, instead of dying, grew louder and more sus- tained. The two strangers still remained objects of inquiry to the other women not yet explained, or accepted, or forgiven, probably, for their in- trusion. "Who are they?" grew very soon to "Did you ever see anything like them in your life?" And they stood alone outside, so far as the women though not the men could arrange it. For the girl that Snowy Shoulders this was a ma/tter apparently of small concern. From the first she was the still, white, silent, unsocial creature she remained smiling but never laugh- ing, talking little, sitting much alone a strange unheard-of thing apparently a girl dumb and laughless in girlhood. Yet in a way her manner was an added attraction ; her indifference, together with her beauty, proved irresistible to the men, who as any woman will tell you love to love the mysterious qualities which they themselves invent and place behind the fine eyes of beautiful and silent women. "She may be handsome, but she never had an idea in her life," I could hear the whispering women passing judgment on her day after day. "She takes no more thought of the morrow than a lily of the field," was one more opinion I remember. "And she has just exactly as much sense." WHITE SHOULDERS 13 The mother was just the opposite of the girl a mystery at the other pole; rosy, where the girl was white and especially after three o'clock in the afternoon for she rouged wantonly and abomi- nably; strident, where the girl was still; strange and suspected, not from her silence but her much speaking; insistent beyond all precedent in her breaking into every conversation and her advertis- ing of her wondrous daughter; and known soon and generally behind her back with that keen concern for the sensibilities of others which pre- vails 1 in boarding houses by a name equally as kindly and striking as her daughter's as the Scar- let Cockatoo. These then were the two strangers, the two in- vaders of the matrimonial territory of our own women the two rakish craft, as old Sam Barsam would have said, who, appearing suddenly, had started poaching, contrary to all women's law, in the still, protected mare clauswm of the women of Carthage. I can recall with considerable sharpness and ac- curacy the information concerning them and their purposes which I received while reading my paper from time to time in the big hall before dinner, from the whispering women who were wont to gather there to exchange the results of their study 14 WHITE SHOULDERS of the two more especially as the date of the Pageant of the Roses was approaching. "Who are they? Who knows who they are, anyway any more than on the first day that they came?" one woman would inquire, turning her head in the direction of the stairway, down which the mother and daughter were soon to come to dinner. "Mrs. Tusset knows you can bet your life on that," another one would say that black-eyed, up-and-coming Belle Davis. "Yes, I know," said a third one that Mrs. Ella Armitage, the grass widow called a beauty once herself and spoken of for the beauty prize in her day. "But what can even Mrs. Tusset really know?" "They're adventuresses that's all we do know," added Julia Blakelock, the first speaker, again. Though scarcely a candidate herself at this some- what late hour, she had, I had been informed, a niece who had been mentioned as a possible ruler of the roses. "No, we don't. We don't know that either," said the positive, downright Belle Davis. "All we know is 1 what they showed Mrs. Tusset where they came from. They're Fairborns 'from Fair- born Courthouse, Dell County, ma'am,' " she went on, mocking a sharp voice sufficiently familiar now WHITE SHOULDERS 15 to all of us. " 'From the old Fairborn plantation the largest with two or three exceptions in old Dell County, ma'am.' " "Where's Dell County?" inquired the thin-lipped Julia Blakelock. "What's Fairborn Courthouse? Do you know?" "Yes. Certainly I know," replied Belle Davis. "When were you ever there?" asked Ella Armi- tage, surprised. "I never was. But I know jutft the same, just what it's like an old run-down county with a courthouse in a little old run-down town, with two or three spotted pigs in the main road, and a jail, and an old-time country hotel with pillars, and a livery stable where they all put up their horses when they come in from the plantations twice a year, when there's a court session." "Yes," said Ella Armitage. "I've seen it myself near enough, anyhow. But how do we know they even come from there?" "They showed that much to Mrs. Tusset. They must have to ever get in here, I believe." "I don't," said Julia Blakelock; "I don't be- lieve anything of the kind." "Why not?" "For one mighty good reason." "What reason's that?" "Those dresses. That wardrobe of the girl." 16 WHITE SHOULDERS I stopped reading now gave up trying to and sat there behind my paper drinking in, as Sam Barsam would have said, the quaint, ancient lore of the whispering women's trade secrets dresses, appearances, little manners the things the women talk about when they are considering and trying to estimate another member of their craft. "Well, what of it ?" Belle Davis wanted to know. "They never came from Fairborn Courthouse nor any other place like you describe. You can make up your mind to that not those extreme latest dresses on that girl !" "And yet her mother's did. It's written all over them and her. She's just nothing but a regular old-time small-town Southern belle all loose ends and ribbons and pink parasol. "And the girl herself might have come from there too," said Ella Armitage. "Maybe that's why she don't talk any more to cover that up." "No," said Belle Davis in that positive, down- right way of hers. "They might have done this," contributed Ella Armitage. Having been a beauty once herself she could, I assume, speak with some authority. "They could have taken her to sbme good dress- maker " "Good dressmaker !" said Julia Blakelock some- what sniffingly. WHITE SHOULDERS 17 "Yes. Good dressmaker!" said Belle Davis. "They must have cost a small fortune," said Ella Armitage. "Yes. But who'd wear them?" "I would and you would," stated Belle Davis. "Yes. If we wanted to be conspicuous." "All I was going to say," said Ella Armitage, going back, "was that they might have taken the girl to some dressmaker in St. Louis or Louisville and given her carte blanche to fit her out." "Some theatrical dressmaker maybe or some- thing like that," said Belle Davis, nodding. "Accustomed to getting up women for the stage." "And told her to go ahead." "Yes," said Ella Armitage, the author of the theory. "Oh, you make me tired, with all your mysterious old talk about these people !" said Julia Blakelock. "They never saw Dell County, either of them. She's just a common adventuress with a big, com- mon, striking daughter for sale. It's a case of a girl for sale, that's all. It's written all over both of them. One calls out and auctioneers and the other poses. I've seen hundreds just like them." "The woman's common enough," said Ella Ar- mitage. "You see her all over the South." "But there's nothing common about that girl," 18 WHITE SHOULDERS stated Belle Davis. "Don't you fool yourself. I never saw anything like her in all my life. She sits there day after day like a girl cf ivory." "Not an idea in her head." "No. That isn't it." "Not an expression not a particle of expres- sion in her face." "That's more it," said Belle Davis. "That's what I was trying to say." "What?" "That it isn't whajt's there so much (that's! strange as what isn't there what's lacking." "Brains," suggested Julia Blakelock. "No." "What is' it, then?" "I don't know. I can't tell you exactly. Only it isn't natural for a girl of that age. I can't explain it exactly. But it's like all the life all the spring had gone out of her." "That's perfectly true," said Ella Armitage, "but what's strange about it?" "It's terrible, I think," said Belle Davis ; "per- fectly terrible." "Terrible?" "That expression on her face. I sit and study it. Do you know what I think it is sometimes?" Belle Davis asked them. "What?" WHITE SHOULDERS 19 "Fear." "Fear?" "Yes in both of them. But in that girl that pale-faced girl especially. Did you ever notice them," she asked "especially the Cockatoo just before the postman comes every day?" "I don't know as I have," s"aid Julia Blakelock. "I don't know what you mean," said Ella Armi- tage. "The one screaming louder and louder." "And the other one stiller and whiter like marble. Or getting away out of sight entirely." "It may be all my imagination," started Belle Davis, "but " "Hush! Here they come now," said Julia Blakelock. And the door upstairs closed and the two strange women were coming down the stairs the chattering mother first, the white silent daughter following her. That was the first hint I received that conver- sation of the real situation as it developed. II TO the best of my knowledge and belief it was two nights after that when the first of the telegrams arrived; an occasion which I myself witnessed and still can recall with con- siderable fullness of detail. It was the night of some species of rehearsal for the now fast approaching pageant. The girl had come out silent and alone from the dining room and sat silent and alone and indifferent to her sur- roundings in one corner of the room, noticing no one, thinking of herself, or of nothing at all or of s'ome fearful vision, according as you wanted to believe. The mother was having what was denoted in the boarding house as one of her "wonderful nights" 'screaming with exultation or apprehension or relief or whatever emotion it was that really drove her, and calling attention even more plangently than usual to the wonderful charms of her wonder- ful child. The reason for this exalted mood was not un- known or unadvertised to the other women of the House. The girl and her mother were both waiting 20 WHITE SHOULDERS 21 for the appearance of young Clayborne Gordon Captain Gordon now who was to be the partner or opposite of the girl in the main tableau of that year, the tableau of Victory ; and whose personal capture by these invaders of our peaceful matri- monial seas was expected now by competent ob- servers to be announced as a final climax for the two strangers* day of triumph. That interpreta- tion certainly received more or less corroboration from the manner on that particular night of the leader in the matrimonial raid that so-called Scarlet Cockatoo. The woman raved on as the current phrase went about the girl, in shriller and louder ac- cents, I should have said myself, that night than ever before. "Isn't she wonderful, ma'am, at that angle?" she inquired in that piercing whisper of the groupi she was holding up to talk to. "Just as she sits there now? So unconscious of everything of all of us." It was scarcely credible to any sane mind that the girl did not hear her, but neither in motion nor in manner did she give the slightest evidence of having done so. She sat colour, attitude and expression unchanged looking off in the cold, im- passive and almost stupid manner that she had, gazing at another corner of the room, like some 22 WHITE SHOULDERS one, I should sometimes have said myself, who had been drugged. It was the one defect in her really remarkable beauty the lack of any ap- parent interest or zest in life. Apparently her mother must have sensed this too. "Virginia!" she called sharply across the room. "Virginia, isn't Captain Gordon rather late?" By this I assume she was killing two birds with one stone announcing for the benefit of the other women the approaching advent of that very desir- able young man and stirring her exhibit up to a somewhat needed display of life. You may have seen horse trainers flick blooded horses so, maybe, pasbing by the judges' stand. The girl responded at best indifferently. "I don't know, mother, I am sure," she answered in her slow rich voice, lapsed again into her moody silence and sat there silent until finally her escort came. Each spring, as Omar Khayyam has, I think, neglected to point out, brings forth its crop of bridegrooms as well as' brides ; and with us an Emperor in fact, if not in name as well as an Empress of the Roses. And Clayborne Gordon, though somewhat hard at times to bear, was un- questionably the Emperor of that May. He had been across at war "near though not too near WHITE SHOULDERS 23 the Front," as was said by our rosy friend, Cupid Calvert, the women's licensed jester, whom our boarding house, like all other boarding houses, possessed. And, returning late, he still wore his uniform with an exaggerated valour and stiffness, which marked him even more than before the Great War from his fellow men. He was, as some one quite rightly said of him, a very Gordon of the very Gordons ; born, it might easily be believed, with a slightly lifted nostril, which made him some- thing of an impediment to joy in general social life. Yet after all he was what he was well born, well connected, w'ell supplied with means by the re- cent bounteous provision of Nature and war for us Southerners in our war cotton; and they were few and far between who failed to bow down be- fore him. He greeted the gathering in Mrs. Tusset's hall with a courteous indifference. So doubtless Ju- piter might have bowed to villages when in pursuit of some temporarily favoured maid. And the two went together to their rehearsal for the Victory tableau and the possible greater victory for the Scarlet Cockatoo and her white child, with the parrot's voice of the mother screaming wonderfuls after them like a litany. It was a wonderful night, it seemed, for a wonderful rehearsal for what was to be a wonderful affair, she knew. 24. WHITE SHOULDERS "Have a wonderful time!" she screamed after them as they passed through the entrance, and then turned back again to twang still further upon the already twitching nerves of her auditors. "You just ought to see her in her costume as Victory," she stated in a general and somewhat ominous silence. "She is simply wonderful, ma'am! Her shoulders oh, I never saw them so wonderful as they are in that so snowy white!" "Stop, ma'am," said Cupid Calvert, jumping up in mock alarm from where he was sitting, "be- fore proceeding any further. Remember there are gentlemen present." "You may laugh, sir," she told him playfully, relieved no doubt at any answer whatever from the circumambient silence, "but let me tell you that girl has the most wonderful skin in all the world. I am her mother and I know. Not a blemish not a blemish anywhere," she announced, including the women in her statement, "on her whole per- son." "Pardon me," cried the amuser of the women, starting towards the door and stumbling heavily over his feet, "I must be going, ma'am ; it isn't safe for me to stay." The guarded laugh which followed him cheered on the woman to further efforts in her advertising. "No," she said to him when he turned back WHITE SHOULDERS 25 again grinning his broad and foolish grin. "But truly, all joking aside, isn't she wonderful? Is it any wonder I am so proud and happy, sir, as her mother, after bringing her up and rearing her tenderly all these years myself; and lavishing everything that her heart desired on her and all that? How can I be anything else but proud to see how it's all come out? How all the men are crazy over her ! Just as you were yourself and are right now!" she ended, touching him on his coat lapel and drawing away. There was another laugh following this effort a real laugh, with the genuine, somewhat tart fla- vour of laughs at a professional laugher. For the career and personal ambitions of Cupid Calvert as a squire of dames, or a fusser, as I understand is the more contemporary expression, were more than a matter of common report; they were a subject of general jest. And no one present had forgotten the ill success of the youth's earlier efforts to awaken the attention of the cold and indifferent girl, nor his silent and somewhat red- dened retreat after various specific attacks. "You know it. You're like all the rest of the men. All of you are just the same," said the mother and exhibitor of Snowy Shoulders, clearly encouraged and emboldened by the rare stimulus of a general appreciation of her conversational 26 WHITE SHOULDERS powers and by her opponent's unreadiness of im- mediate reply. "You simply can't resist her. Oh, I know. I was just like her at her age," she added for heaping good measure. "All admirers and beaux and ribbons and dances. All the wonderful times a real Southern girl has when she's popular. Ain't that just the simple truth?" she asked in a general appeal to the other women. And just at that moment the height of exu- berance and playfulness fate, it seemed, chose to strike; and that first telegram arrived. The messenger boy must have passed the golden girl herself as she went down the outside walk with her golden escort; and must have been standing there outside, waiting for the mother to finish her shrill ecstasies, ringing vainly at the bell, for when nobody answered his voice called out through the screen door: "A telegram." "Who for?" "Mis' Fairborn. Mis' Leonora Fairborn." The woman that Scarlet Cockatoo whose real name, as I have neglected to state so far, this was supposed at that time to be, stopped talking suddenly, her smile frozen on her painted face, like a scared clown, as Cupid Calvert stated after- ward. After a moment she stepped out and took the telegram herself at the door. "Sign here," said the boy. WHITE SHOULDERS 27 And then, when she had signed with, I thought, a somewhat shaky hand and started to turn away, "It's collect," said the boy. "Collect !" she said after him, in a voice that was sharp and faint at the same time. She hadn't the money with her for it. I remem- ber that quite clearly, for I myself loaned her the necessary sum, which she afterward failed to re- member to repay. She settled with the boy with my change and turned away without opening the yellow envel ope yet. "Any answer?" the messenger boy asked her. "Why ?" she asked, more shrill than before. "They told me there might be." "Wait," she told him. "HI see." Her voice sounded still sharper and more appre- hensive. The other women turned themselves away with a somewhat exaggerated and vivacious indiffer- ence, talking together, watching her out of the corners of their eyes. "Have you got a pencil, Judge Dalrymple?" she asked me. I didn't have one. "Here's one, lady," said the messenger boy, and handed her the miserable old dirty stub that a messenger boy usually carries. 28 WHITE SHOULDERS She took it and went over to the writing desk in the corner. Her telegram was not opened yet. She was delaying opening it, it seemed to me. But now she tore it open with a flourish and read it with a fixed and steady smile. And then, after a pause, seeing, I assume, the eyes of the other women on her, she threw back her head and laughed. It was a mistake in judgment, so all the other women agreed afterward. The laugh was too sharp ; almost hysterical, I thought myself. "What's the joke?" caUed Cupid, looking curiously across the room. "Oh, nothing. Nothing," she said ; and put her telegram in the bosom of her dress and started answering it, planting the blank the boy had given her down on the desk with a decided motion, &s though all ready to start, and then putting the point of the pencil to her lips and sitting there, considering. For a minute maybe two minutes she sat there, the soiled stub of the messenger boy at hei scarlet lips, a fixed steady smile on her face, but no motion to write. The eyes of the whispering women, who were gathered round a bridge table now, were all the time furtively regarding her, as she doubtless was well aware. She was unable to write her reply that was WHITE SHOULDERS 29 clear finally; evidently not being able to collect her thoughts. "Won't the little pretty words come to mamma?" inquired Cupid, pushing in, as usual, as far as advisable. She broke off her writing and got up almost with a jerk. "Let me answer it for you, ma'am," continued Cupid. "Let me do it for you." "No," she said with hectic gaiety, "I'm going to save money. I'm going to answer this thing by mail." She gave the messenger back his pencil stub and blank and sent him off. And then, if I remember rightly, she started back across the hall, going toward the stairway. "You ain't going," asked Cupid Calvert, still pushing her, "without telling us the good news?" "What news?" she asked back, her voice sharp- ening again, it appeared to me now, in spite of all she could do. "What you were laughing at. What made you so terrible mighty happy in your telegram." "Certainly I'll tell you. Certainly," she an- swered him with a simple offhand gaiety. "It's just word from another old flame of Virginia's; sending felicitations on her first stage appearance, saying he'd certainly be here on the great day" 30 WHITE SHOULDERS "The day of the great victory," said Cupid, grinning with easy significance. The woman laughed again with that extraordi- nary half hysteria. And the other women almost stopped talking at her somewhat striking blunder. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Cupid," said Belle Davis, filling in the sudden silence ; "al- ways going butting into other folks' business like you do 1" "You don't mind, do you?" Cupid asked the mother of Virginia with a mock languorous look. By this time the woman had gotten over to the stairway, still wearing her fixed and rigid smile, and stood temporarily with her hand clasping the baluster. "Oh, no. No, certainly not," she said. "Nothing like that with you, Cupid! But one thing I wish you would do- for me all of you !" she added, taking in her breath so sharp that it was distinctly noticeable. "I wish you wouldn't speak of this this message to Virginia ; or allude to it in any way, please. I want the whole thing to be to be a surprise to her." "Oh, certainly not, Mrs. Fairborn," the other women told her warmly. And then she smiled that hectic smile of hers "bright roses on the withered snow," as Cupid said WHITE SHOULDERS 31 concerning her complexion and passed brightly up the stairs, her step, however, it appeared to me, lagging considerably as she approached the top. "Collect!" said Belle Davis, almost before the woman's door upstairs was closed. "Felicitations collect!" "From another old flame," said Julia Blakelock. "How humouresque !" said Cupid, that being the expression he was most favouring with his prefer- ence at that time. "What a fool !" added Julia Blakelock. And the women went on then, tearing to pieces the other woman's awkward hurried lie. "What a fool she is!" said Julia Blakelock again through her thin lips. "No," said Belle Davis. "What is she, then?" "You know what I've been telling you all the time about the postman how she acted just be- fore he came?" "What of it?" "Did you see her hands go when she first took that thing that telegram?" "I did," said Mrs. Armitage. "And how she sat there afterward, with that old pencil in her mouth like she was a paralysed woman ?" "What of it?" the Blakelock girl asked again. 32 WHITE SHOULDERS "That woman's scared to death, that's all," asserted Belle Davis. "So scared she didn't know what she was doing or saying and don't yet!" "I think that too," said another one the quiet little older woman whom Cupid Calvert named the Sibyl or the Pessimist of Our Boarding House. "It must have been quite tol'able excitin'," said Cupid, "whatever it was. She must have been ex- pecting something right interestin'. She was shiverin' and shakin' long before she started open- in' it." "A guilty conscience, that's all, probably," as- serted Julia Blakelock. "She was scared, that's all," Belle Davis said again, "from first to last, so she didn't hardly know her name!" "What do you expect was in that thing that telegram?" asked Julia Blakelock. "I wish I knew," said Ella Annitage. "I'd give a right smart piece of money to." "I certainly would," said Belle Davis. "You just made up your mind to know, chillun?" inquired Cupid Calvert, who fell easily into negro dialect in his more humourous moods. "Is your mouth just waterin' to find out?" "Certainly is," said Belle Davis. "Why so?" "'Cause if you is, honey, here's the boy, maybe, who kin find the way to git it for you ; who's got WHITE SHOULDERS 33 a special particular means that ev'ybody don' have at his 'sposal." "Yes, I know," said Belle Davis. "I know it. I know the special means myself. It has yellow hair and peekaboo waists and stands looking out the telegraph-office window all day long, eating on a lead pencil." "Ne'mind. Ne'mind," said Cupid, who prided himself rather than otherwise, I always claimed, on the diversification of his interests in the fair sex. "Only you just watch this boy!" "What do you think, judge?" asked Belle Davis, bringing me into it finally. "Think about what?" "About that telegram. Was she scared or wasn't she?" "'She'd better be, if she isn't now," I said. "With all you whispering women after her with your trained sleuth hound." "Our reputation hound, eh, judge?" Belle Davis asked me, laughing. "Yes ma'am," I said. "You hit it there ex- actly. That's just the title. They'll never es- cape you and your reputation hound. He'll run them down before he's finished." "How humouresque you are, judge," said Cupid Calvert. m WHETHER or not the chain of events proceeding from this first telegram might under other circumstances have resulted otherwise and less disastrously for the two women, I am unprepared to state. Yet in few circumstances that I can represent to myself would the hunt that started after them with the coming of that document have been organized so expeditiously and got under way so fast. "Curiosity," old Sam Barsam used to remark, "is the strongest appetite of the human soul. It lures the budding mind of the infant to its sweet unfolding; it drives the parched and sandy traveller through the tawny wastes of the Sahara. When all else has failed when teeth are gone and eyesight, and reason totters, and ears threaten to fall off still curiosity remains unshaken on its throne, a pledge and presage of immortality; and reaches its grandest height in some senile woman in a boarding house." In any boarding house, he might have said, in my opinion. In any place where woman meets 34 35 woman face to face continually under one common roof, observing each other's souls and bodies and complexions in dishabille, curiosity must and will be served and most especially in an exclusive and careful boarding house like Mrs. Tusset's in the fierce light which shines upon social centres. I cannot speak for others, but I felt reasonably assured myself that our smiling friend, Cupid Calvert, would arrive that evening with the con- tents of that fateful telegram while I sat reading my paper in the hall before dinnertime. No better social retriever could be invented than this jovial young dog. He had, in fact, the so-called social gift, the many opportunities of the jovial for collecting information, and with his special opportunity in this particular case he could scarcely fail to bring back to his waiting friends and patrons, the whispering women, the news mat- ter he could get for them from their sister, that massive blonde with stately figure and gold hair piled up like a great golden pitcher on her head, with whom I had not infrequently myself seen him conversing in the telegraph office. It was evident to me at least from the mere dis- play of teeth as he came in the door that evening that he had not been unsuccessful in the main business of his day. "Guess what papa brought you home tonight?" 36 WHITE SHOULDERS he asked the waiting group who were there upon his entry. "We know !" said the lively Belle Davis. "We know!" And Julia Blakelock came forward, without further or unnecessary remark. "You never would betray me, would you?" he asked them, chuckling and holding them off. "Cross your heart. You never would let on you heard from me? 'Cause this is serious business, you understand." "Never. Never. Nobofly'll ever know from us!" Belle Davis promised him. "Well, here it is!" he told them finally. "I went and copied it down my own self." And he brought it out for them to read. That Belle Davis, being the quickest of the lot, grabbed it first and started reading. Her full round face got red with excitement. "My good Lord!" she said. "Read it," said Cupid. "Go ahead. Read it. Out loud," said Julia Blakelock. And she did. It ran, to the best of my memory, this way: "So you should make a get-away? Now you come through. Five hundred by Saturday. Or letters start. Wire answer. A. G." WHITE SHOULDERS 37 "What's this?" asked Ella Armitage. "A get-away? What's a get-away?" inquired Julia Blakelock. "It sounds to me like a city slum," said Belle Davis. "It is, I expect," Cupid Calvert told her. "A get-away?" asked the Blakelock girl again. "What is it? Tell me." "Don't pretend you don't know, Julia," Belle Davis told her. "I don't. Do you?" "It's just cheap talk for escape, Julia dear," explained Cupid Calvert. "Escape?" said the Blakelock woman. "Who from?" "From A. G., probably." "A. G.?" Belle Davis asked him. "Who's A. G.?" "You kin search me," said Cupid. "All I know's just what you see from just right there. A. G. from St. Louis." "Is that where it's dated from?" asked Mrs. Armitage. "See!" said Belle Davis, reading the date line and going over the thing again. "Five hundred by Saturday ! You know what it is, don't you? It's blackmail." "You might think thataway," said Cupid, 38 WHITE SHOULDERS "By some criminal some low-down creature," stated Julia Blakelock. "How do you make that out? How do you get all this?" the Davis girl asked her back. "It's right there, isn't it plain as day? Just the way that's written." "Blackmail!" said Ella Armitage, speculating. "What power could a man like that have over them?" "That's just it," said Belle Davis. "There's nothing very strange or mysterious about it that I can see," stated the Blakelock woman. "It's just what I said from the begin- ning. They're just two common adventuresses from St. Louis that's what they are. Only worse, probably, than we suspected at first. Two creatures from the slums of St. Louis." "You sure are ridiculous, Julia," said Belle Davis, "when you once get started, ain't you?" "Not this time, I'm not. I said, and I'll say it again, they never saw Dell County in this world. They're just two common low-down adventuresses from St. Louis." "I don't believe it," said Belle Davis. "Why not?" "I know they're not, that's all. The way they act the way they are. The girl's dresses might have come from St. Louis ; but she never did WHITE SHOULDERS 39 nor her mother. And I don't believe they are that kind the girl certainly isn't." "What did they come here for?" asked Ella Armitage, "it " "That's easy," Julia Blakelock answered, "Men for the girl!" "One will be enough," said Cupid Calvert. "I'm not so sure about that, either," said the Blakelock woman. "Don't be a fool, Julia," said Belle Davis, get- ting red. "They're here to sell off the girl maybe but no more." "I believe that," said Ella Armitage. "And even then the girl don't do her part even at that. She never runs after the men you've got to say that." "She don't have to," said Julia Blakelock. "Her part is to pose while her mother pulls them in." And they went back to the telegram again. "A. G. that's all you know?" Belle Davis asked Calvert. "Cross your heart?" "Yes, ma'am. That's all I could find out here," said Calvert. "No wonder she's restless," observed Belle Davis. "Who's that?" asked young Calvert all of a sudden, looking in my direction. 40 WHITE SHOULDERS "Oh, that's just the judge," Belle Davis said, re- assuring him, and came over to me in my corner. "What do you think, judge?" she asked me. "Think about what?" "Oh, you know well enough ! About those two women the White Shoulders and her mother?" And she started showing me the telegram. "Take it away," I said to her. "I don't want to be implicated in this. I can't afford to be when they bring you up before me from the Grand Jury." "The Grand Jury!" they said after me. "Yes, ma'am. For going in and stealing mes- sages from the telegraph company. Don't you know that's an indictable offence or ought to be if it isn't?" "You're fooling now, judge," said Calvert, with a kind of crooked grin on his face. He wasn't a very stout-hearted animal. "You'll see," I told him. "But look, judge!" said Belle Davis, bold and undismayed as ever. "Ain't it right, when you know folks are doing wrong, to try and expose them?" "All I know is, " I said, "you want to be careful and step kind of light. You might get in trouble yourself!" And I went upstairs and washed my hands for dinner. WHITE SHOULDERS 41 However, I knew now about the telegram like everybody else did; and watched with the rest those two go along with whatever it was hanging over them. The time to their day of victory as it was now quite commonly called was growing mighty short. It was on Saturday of that week. And as it came along the strain must have grown pretty strong especially on the Scarlet Cockatoo. Every day, it seemed, the contrast between the mother and daughter got sharper and sharper. The mother talked, always louder and more shrill concerning the old plantation, and the raising and the dressing of the wonderful girl from her beginning, the exceeding great whiteness of her skin, her ribbons, her hats, her French knots upon her baby clothes, the lavishing upon her of all that heart could desire from a child and the wild appre- ciation of it now by all the men. And all the time t]jat this was going on within earshot, to say the least the girl, White Should- ers, would sit alone, oblivious, indifferent, appar- ently impervious; thinking her own thoughts more silent and statuesque than ever. "Is she an absolute fool?" the Blakelock woman kept asking. "She must know about that tele- gram whatever it is there that's driving the mother screaming crazy." 42 WHITE SHOULDERS "That's where you're wrong," Belle Davis told her. "You mean to stand there and tell me that girl don't know about what was in that telegram?" "That's just exactly what I mean. She meant just what she said the mother when she talked to us that night. She don't want the girl to know about that thing.'* "Why not?" "I don't know thai, naturally. Unless she might hope she could settle it herself some way before the great event !" For it was generally conceded now among the whispering women that the victory day, the Pa- geant of the Roses, was about to bring out the announcement of the final chapter of the magnif- icent and self-contained Captain Gordon. "Somebody ought to tell him," observed Julia Blakelock. "Who?" asked the Davis girl. "Clayborne Gordon." "That's a nice idea. Why don't you?" asked Belle Davis. "Maybe I will," stated the Blakelock woman, not backing down an inch. "Somebody certainly ought to." "I hope something will happen soon one way or the other to end this thing and shut that mother up," said little Mrs. Pennyworth, the small WHITE SHOULDERS 43 little brown woman whom Cupid Calvert called the Boarding-House Pessimist. "Or we'll go crazy if she don't." "She's so happy it hurts," said Cupid. "Worse than that. It deafens you," said Belle Davis. "It's just driving me crazy, that's all," said the Pessimist briefly. And then, right after that, on the third day after the first one, the second telegram arrived. The Cockatoo had evidently done what she said she would sent on her answer by mail. And the second telegram was in answer to this. It ran something about like this: "Coming down to look you over. See you later. A. G." You might almost have known mere was some new nervous strain from just sitting listening to the Cockatoo to her terrific outbursts of joy and laughter. "Did you ever hear such a noise in your life?" said Belle Davis, looking over across the room where the woman was talking. "And that girl what do you suppose she is thinking about? How can you claim she don't know what's going on those telegrams?" asked Julia Blakelock. "That would give her more brains than you 44. WHITE SHOULDERS claim she's got," Belle Davis answered her "if she could act out indifference like that." "Maybe she just thinks it's all part of the coming nuptial noise. The praise service over Clayborne Gordon," observed Ella Armitage. "She looks worse to me every day," said Cupid Calvert, who had stood studying the mother with that calm brazen look he had when he wasn't grin- ning. "Even with all that paint on. She looks more like a scared clown than ever." "She certainly sounds like one," said Belle Davis. "I wonder what he'll be like when he comes?" asked Ella Armitage. "Who?" " A. G." "What I wonder is, how we'll get to see him." "Oh, you'll get to see him all right," I told them, chiming in. "Leave that to our friend Cupid. He'll know all about him. Your good old reliable reputation hound will smell him out before the ink's dry on the hotel register." I left them exchanging speculations as to who the blackmailer might be, what relation he had to the women and what the two had done that he held them with all the dark and racy possibilities which lurked in the situation and no doubt several more. IV FOR awhile it looked to me as if the Fair- born woman had slipped them; as if in one way or another this A. G. this blackmailer, as he was then believed to be might have eluded the other women and their assistant. The preparation with joy and laughter and gar- lands for the festival the day of victory pro- ceeded, the happy clamour of the Scarlet Cock- atoo rising above all the rest. And still there was no visible appearance of the mysterious telegra- pher from St. Louis. It was the day before the festival that evening preceding supper when I saw finally that some- thing had occurred, from the beaming countenance of our jovial young friend Calvert. "You're a nice crowd," he was telling the women in the hallway. "Why?" "Do you know who was here today?" "No. Who?" "He was." "He who's he?" cried Belle Davis, all excite- ment. 45 46 WHITE SHOULDERS He didn't even answer that. He knew she un- derstood. "Right here under your noses," he told her. "Who?" she asked again. "Here take a look at this!" he said, and brought out that printed card, which they showed me afterward: A. GLUBER 183 N St., St. Louis, Mo. COSTUMES EASY PAYMENTS "For heaven's sake ! A dressmaker !" said Belle Davis, and stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth to stop her laughing. "A. Gluber. Costumes. Easy payments," the Blakelock woman read over slowly. "Weren't we the burbling boobs," asked Cupid, "not to get it before?" "The mysterious blackmailer," said Belle Davis. "Ain't that the screamingest !" "And that's all it was," said Julia Blakelock in a little small voice like she was disappointed. "A dressmaker !" "Isn't that enough?" asked Ella Armitage. "Isn't that enough?" "No," said Cupid, "not for Julia. She was looking for some real revelations." WHITE SHOULDERS 47 "There might be some yet," suggested Belle Davis. "Some what?" "Revelations. Supposing they hadn't paid for them all their instalments." "Which is just what they haven't done, prob- ably," said the Blakelock woman. "And supposing he went and took them all away !" "And left her " "Without!" "Oh, that would be terrible !" "You'd think so," stated Belle Davis, "if some- body came and took all your clothes away the day before what you'd planned for for weeks to show yourself at the announcement of your engagement." "It would be funny, wouldn't it?" "Pardon me?" asked Calvert, making up a face like he was shocked. ''What?" "If they took all that stuff back and left her just a few old duds." "What a crab you are, Julia," said Belle Davis to her with her usual frankness. And then they started questioning Calvert. "Did you see him?" "Who?" he asked them, pretending not to understand. 48 WHITE SHOULDERS "That dressmaker!" "No. Not yet." "Then how'd you get this?" "Ne'mind. Ne'mind," he said, making a mys- tery of it. What he had done, it came out afterward, was to bribe the second girl, that coffee-coloured ne- gress, Lucy, and she had managed when she got the card at the front door to keep it for him and just announce the name to the Fairborn woman. "Do you know, I heard her! I heard her go down myself," said Edla Armitage, "now 1 you speak of it!" "And White Shoulders?" "She wasn't here, I don't think," said Belle Davis. "I'm pretty mighty certain she was out all this afternoon over to the pageant grounds. She just came in here a little while ago. Clay- borne Gordon brought her over." "So she doesn't know anything yet," said Mrs. Armitage. "So you say !" said Julia Blakelock. "We'll see anyhow at dinnertime." "It certainly will be funny," said the Blakelock woman. The other woman that Scarlet Cockatoo would have been surprised in spite of her long ex- perience if she had realized that night how many WHITE SHOULDERS 49 eyes were studying her and with what intimate knowledge of her affairs. "It's all over," Belle Davis was claiming when I heard the whispering women comparing notes in the hallway after dinner. "You'll have no amusement tomorrow, Julia. Your day is ruined." "Ruined?" '^She's fixed it up with the dressmaker." "How do you know?" "How can you help knowing from her voice. From that laugh from just the look on her face." She confirmed what I had thought myself. The girl was just as usual. The hectic joy of the mother had abated to what it was before the com- ing of the first mysterious telegram. "How would she fix it up?" asked Julia Blake- lock, still grudging and disputing. "How could she help it when she had shown the dressmaker about tomorrow the day of vic- tory and the announcement that Clayborne Gor- don is to pay her bills from this time forth?" "Is that funny or not?" inquired Cupid Calvert, grinning his blandest, most vacant grin. "You talk about paying the bills for your own hang- ing 1" "Somebody ought to tell him," said Julia Blake- 50 WHITE SHOULDERS lock. "That's all. Before he falls into the hands of those two imposters." "I won't," said Cupid. "I love him too much !" "There won't anybody," said Belle. "For just that same reason." It was the general belief among the women that night that everything would go through that next day, that day of victory, for the mother and daughter, exactly as was now commonly under- stood to be the program first the tableau of Victory, the crowning of the Empress of the Roses and then the formal announcement of the sur- render and capture of Captain Gordon. What did occur of course, though logical enough, was due just to a chapter of accidents. THE Pageant of the Roses of that year took place as it had in many others at Bellevoir, the estate of our Colonel Rob- ert Bragdon. I was there, together with all the other residents of the town, with but few and tri- fling exceptions. I sat well back in the temporary amphitheater, which was eracted as usual under the trees on the natural slope of the so-called grotto. At two-twenty-five, just five minutes before the exercises were supposed to begin, I observed for the first time the short squat man in striped clothes three seats ahead of me. Cupid Calvert going by called my attention to him. "Did you get a good look at him?" he asked me. "Who?" I inquired back. "A. Gluber, of St. Louis." "Who that?" I said. "A dressmaker!" "Yes. The one with the ears." "He looks like there might have been toads in his ancestry," I told him. "You see a lot of them like that," he said, "in the cities in certain parts. Dressed up like that too." 51 52 WHITE SHOULDERS "I expect you do," I said, "if you frequent those parts!" "They've all seen him now. They're all talking him over. They're all wise," he said, "about the instalment dressmaker and his bill." "Trust you," I told him. He grinned like I had given him a compliment. "All but Gordon," he said. "It's an undying wonder to me," I told him, "that you haven't let him know." "Damn Gordon !" he said, grinning a little sour grin. "Let him have her. He deserves her." And he went on to pass along the good news to others, I presume. I could hear over the heads of the crowd the Scarlet Cockatoo laughing, apparently in fine feather. She couldn't see and didn't know, it seems, that the man was there, nor suspect the whispering that was going on behind her. And then just before the thing began I heard that Child of Hell of Cole Hawkins come up the drive, barking like a great dog, and stop shut off suddenly, the way he ran it. "He'll kill somebody with that machine yet," said my neighbour just beyond me, looking back. Then just before the thing started the boy came and flung himself into the seat beside me, his face and neck red from hurrying. He had been drink- ing again ; I saw that. He would have liquor, law WHITE SHOULDERS 53 or no law; more, it seemed like some others since the law was on than before. "Hello," he said to me in that hoarse voice he had when he was that way. "Hello, Cole," I told him. And then the thing started. "I came late," he explained in an overload whis- per, "so's to miss the cackling." He had the reputation of a woman hater, especially since he came back after his big dis- appointment, his accident on the aviation field and his grudge against the world in general. "The squawking sex," he called them; "the cacklers," and got out of the way and avoided them whenever possible. "Hush up !" I told him. "They're starting in." The spring festival of love and matrimony was under way once again the new crop of marriage- able or almost marriageable daughters displayed on the raised platform in the latest spring styles of dress and posture. The mothers, with their best hats and stiffest smiles and dresses, watched principally their own offspring from below; all making a curious and diverting study, as old Judge Pendleton used to say about the affair, for a traveller from the antipodes like all our tribal customs dealing with matrimony. The great change was accomplished, which our portion of the race demands the lengthening of 54 WHITE SHOULDERS the skirt, the raising of the hair ; all the set tribal advertisements that the noisy natural happy hu- man child has now been broken for the bonds of matrimony. But even more wonderful than this, our traveller would observe, was the firm stoical unconsciousness in the manners and the faces of both the exhibitors and the exhibited of the real and critical significance of this chief and most trying ordeal of a woman's life of the great main question of whether or not in the scant half dozen years the new offering would be taken. The Rose Pageant we were watching was no different from those in other years, except for its chief keynote, the military note, a note common enough in that year, I assume, all over our land as could be expected, especially when the well- known piquancy which war costumes give to young women's charms is considered. Beginning with the younger and less practised, then, the celebration moved always forward, with, let us say, an increasing and cumulative display of charm, the military motive furnishing a contrast of exceptional success in the method of exhibit beauty in armour soft, fragile flesh encased in hard forbidding steel a masquerade attractive to mankind since the first legend of the Amazons and the grand old red-headed goddesses of Scan- dinavia. The enthusiasm arose then step by step as the WHITE SHOULDERS 55 height and closing tableau approached the cli- max of the day of victory ; and the hour drew near for the chief heroine of our national victory and that spring the final triumph of the girl, White Shoulders. A hush came as she appeared, followed by the murmur which is the inarticulate voice a human crowd gives to its emotions. The girl was cer- tainly wonderful all that her mother had claimed, and more. She was Victory, panoplied and crested Vic- tory in flesh and blood. Straight-gowned below, steel-helmeted above, a spear and shield in her hand and on her arm one white shoulder deeply bared. Athena, of the ancient Greeks, had no more triumphant or warlike beauty than this strange, silent, suspected girl when she first appeared. Even the women murmured their approval. She was Victory herself as she moved forward. Even the man beside me, the hater of women, was stirred. "She's a looker, ain't she?" said Cole Hawkins to me in a loud stage whisper. "Shut up, Cole!" I told him. It was planned, as I learned afterward, that Clayborne Gordon, as the triumphant hero, and garbed also in Grecian costume, should approach from the other side of the sylvan platform and be in some way suitably rewarded by the goddess for 56 WHITE SHOULDERS his valor. He started out when (Victory had established her final pose; all necks were craned. There was another murmur of a different kind; another statement of mass emotion by the audience. "What's this?" said Cole Hawkins, half aloud, from beside me. Victory had lost her pose, had turned half around, was looking with dilated eyes at a place in the audience. I straightened up and saw the man myself his striped coat, his flashing necktie pin as he raised his short fat body from his chair to stare at her. "No! No! No! I can't! I can't! Not again !" cried Victory, in the voice of a half fren- zied child. And she crashed down upon her armour, her helmet rolling from her black hair, her wonderful bare white shoulder scratched and bleeding from her fall upon her shield. The words were perfectly distinct in the silence were heard and remembered by at least a dozen I spoke to. And following that, by a fraction of a second, rose the well-remembered voice of the Scarlet Cockatoo : "Virginia ! Virginia ! My baby 1" She was up on the stage before Captain Gordon and the rest of them had taken her Victory, her baby, to the anteroom. WHITE SHOULDERS 67 "Did you see that?" asked Cole Hawkins beside me his face redder than red against his dead- black hair. "That man she was looking at. What the hell's going on here?" The whole place was buzzing with the knowledge that was so well disseminated now concerning the strange dressmaker. The man sat there, brazen- faced, like his kind are, bluffing it out, waiting for developments, rather pleased than otherwise at the attention he was receiving. I told my young friend Hawkins about him what I knew in a word or two. "Is that so?" he said, with the ugly, insolent, lingering emphasis upon the last word that's liable in men of just his kind to come before some ugly action. And before I knew it he was on his feet, out of his seat by the aisle beside me. "Cole," I said, "come back here!" I knew nat- urally what he was capable of. But he went straight up the aisle in silence. In back of the flimsy dressing room you could hear the voice of the Scarlet Cockatoo calling. "My child! My child! Virginia! Virginia wake up ! It's all right. It's all right." The black-eyed, black-haired boy walked up the aisle, with the little lameness from his accident showing in his slow gait. He stood there by the side of the stranger with the striped coat and the diamond horse-shoe in his tie. 58 WHITE SHOULDERS "Stand up," he said in a thick low voice, with his big hand on the man's shoulder. It was an outrageous thing, on the face of it. Several of the men sprang up, looking for trouble. "Sit down," said Cole Hawkins in a low voice. "This is my funeral." They sat down. "What do you think you're doing?" asked the Stranger, turning a dark and rather puffy face up at him. "Stand up didn't I tell you?" said Cole Hawk- ins ; and dragged him by main strength from the chair. "Cole, you fool!" I said, taking him by the elbow. But he shook me off. "Who do you think you are?" inquired A. Glu- ber, staring at him. He was quite a strong look- ing man, for a dressmaker. They are, quite often I understand. But he didn't use strength if he had it, preferring apparently to reply on his voice and ugly look. "Who do you think you are?" he inquired again trying to stare Hawkins down. "I'm the man that's here telling you about the train service." "Yeah ?" said A. Gluber, his stare still firm, but with no physical action yet. "I came to tell you," said Cole, still in a low ivoice, staring back into his small dull eyes, WHITE SHOULDERS 59 "there's a train goes up north in just about an hour from now." "Well, what of it?" asked the man. "That's the one you're going on." "I am, huh? Why am I?" "Because I don't want you here in town." "Is that right? Why?" "I don't like your face, that's why. That's all. Come on now." Instead of another rough reply the man gave out a sudden oath now. Hawkins had closed his hand upon his arm. Several of the women gave little cries. But the talk was low ; no one could hear what was going on, exactly, but those of us who stood near them. "Now, lemme tell you something," said Cole Hawkins. "I ain't going to urge you. But lemme tell you something. I don't like your face but I'm telling you this just for your own good. Your going on the five o'clock train or at five-fif- teen the angels will have a new dressmaker working for them. Come now," he said, "come on over to the hotel. We've just got about time." A. Gluber looked round once or twice at the other faces near him for moral support but didn't get much. "This ain't right," I did say to Cole, but he shook me off once more. And they went out. "You don't want to fool with him," said the man 60 WHITE SHOULDERS beside me, "When he's like that. You know what he's done two or three times already. Besides, I didn't care much for that fellow's looks myself." "Some doin's, judge. Some doin's," said a voice back of me, and I turned and saw Cupid Calvert grinning. "Quite some day of victory!" "What are they doing with the girl?" I asked him. "She's come to all right. They're taking her and the Cockatoo over home in a machine." "I didn't hear the mother," I said, "after the first." "No," he told me. "Wonderful thing, judge. She's gone silent for a minute or two." "It rather postpones," I said, remembering, "the announcement of that engagement." "Postpones!" he said. "Have you seen Gor- don's face?" "No." "It's just starting to sink in the meaning of it all. He'll get it all before night." "I'll bet on that," I said, looking at him. "No more days of victory like this for me," said Cupid, pretending to be wiping the perspira- tion off his face with his handkerchief. "It's too much for my frail condition, judge." I went over to my office and sat there and smoked and tried to work the evidence in the thing over in my own mind, while the general populace WHITE SHOULDERS 61 went home talking and whispering about it. I could understand in the first place that I had seen a curious thing a climax, and undoubtedly, as it looked then, the collapse of a woman's campaign; a strange, unusual speculation in matrimony by these two strange figures mother and daughter if that was what they really were. For we were all at sea now. They were adventuresses most likely, and financed, we might conjecture, in their enterprise by this fat dressmaker with the bloated face. But there were many things not so simply explainable by this theory. Who were they? Were they city women, or what they looked country women with city clothes? If so what was their relation to A. Gluber, dressmaker or costumer? Why the mother's noisy consternation at her telegram? And why, above all, the white girl's sudden panic terror when she saw that face in the audience and pushed out her arms, palms outward, like a child warding off a haunting danger in the dark, and cried out: "No! No! No! I can't! I can't Not again!" The whole thing brought up many conjectures, which to my mind were far from being solved by the assumption of a debt to a dressmaker. How, for example, would that explain the girl's outcry the words of it: "I can't! Not again!" VI IT WAS between sessions with me. The day after the Rose Pageant, about three o'clock, I was once again in my office in the Beaure- gard Block when the door opened and there was Cole Hawkins. "Well," I said to him, "you certainly made a fine public scene scaring that dressmaker out of town." "Maybe I did." "What was your idea?" I asked him. "What started you?" "I told you, didn't I? I didn't like the looks of his face." "You'll kill somebody in this town," I said, "be- fore you get through. It's God's mercy you haven't already, in some of the things you've been mixed up in," I told him. For he had broken up one or two men already something scandalous. "When are you going to let the liquor alone," I asked him, "and stop being the town devil?" "Look here, judge," he said, giving me that black devil-may-care stare of his and not answer- 62 WHITE SHOULDERS 63 ing me, "what are these cackling women here try- ing to do to that girl?" I told him as much as I knew about the story, the situation about that dressmaker, as we under- stood it at that time. "Since when," he wanted to know, "has it been made a crime in this state to owe money to a dress* maker a damned tailor? There'd be several of them in jail right along if that was law," he told me. "There's some truth in that," I told him. "But you've got to remember," I said, "they haven't proved even the dressmaker's bill against her yet. It's all conjecture and guessing still." "And lying cackling gossip ! But that'll be enough and plenty for the women." "Cole," I said, "you don't always talk so re- spectful about what you should the women es- pecially." "I'm sorry for that girl," he said, going along his own line of thought as usual, "with everybody after her. You heard the news, didn't you? What they're saying this morning?" he asked me. "No, sir. I don't know's I have." "Clayborne Gordon, they say, is leaving town today ; called off sudden on a business trip. You know what that means." "I expect I can guess." 64 WHITE SHOULDERS "He's quit her already. He always was a yel- low-bellied pup." "That ain't the language of the polite drawing- room, Cole," I told him. "Who said it was?" he asked me back. "You know what I'm going to do," he asked me after a little bit, "if he's really gone? I'm going to give her a good time myself, if she'll let me. I'll give her a chance to show these screechers she ain't out of a man, if she wants one." I grinned a secret grin at that. And yet it was just like him too. "They'll be getting after you pretty quick and your character, Cole," I said. "What'll all your fine friends and relations say for you to start beauing this strange girl round?" I asked him. For in spite of his rough talk he belonged to one of the first families in our county. "To hell with all of them," he said. "And all the women in this little mean-spirited town. I'd do it for nothing else than to spite them. I hate the whole squawking back-biting lot of them." "Yes, I know you do," I said, grinning at him. "But how'd you go about it? How would you amuse a girl?" "I could give her some excitement anyhow," he told me. "That's more than Gordon could do to anybody. I could give her a ride or two in the old Child of Hell." WHITE SHOULDERS 65 "You don't expect," I asked him, "for a minute that you'd get any woman in her right senses to ride out with you in that murder car?" "Well, she don't have to. If she don't want to all she's got to do is to say so," he told me, and he went out and shut the door after him. I had to smile a small fraction of a smile after seeing him watching and defending the girl the day before, without the slightest provocation: and yet I knew it wasn't just the looks of the girl, her beauty, either. He was always that way, a gener- ous great-hearted type of boy, from the tune he got into long pants ; always willing and ready to fight for anybody or anything that he believed was getting worsted and more than ever since that trouble of his own. In spite of all they said about Cole, I always liked the boy and was sorry for him; and more than ever since that great dis- appointment he had had, that accident at the be- ginning of the war. In war, I always held, the first line out are the natural fighters the ones who are really looking to fight. There's always a certain percentage of roving foot-loose, devil-may-care boys who just jump at war as the one great big adventure. It was just the same with us in this war as in the old Civil War young boys begging and cheating and lying to the Government to get out and get shot to death. This Cole Hawkins was one of that kind 66 WHITE SHOULDERS always a natural-born, reckless, devil-take-the- hindmost, harum-scarum fighter. He was a double orphan, with all the money that was good for him and a little more. One of the kind that always go in for speed. For horses, it was, in my day fast horses but now it's gasoline. Ever since the automobile came he had been round breaking speed laws in one. So the first thing he Hid, naturally, when war came, was to go in for this aeroplane flying death not being sure and certain enough on the ground. He was especially suited for it, they claimed too good, too anxious and reckless. One day, as they explained it, he stole in and got out his machine against orders before he'd hardly learned to run it and he was down on the ground again, it seems, about as soon as he was up; through with flying and all other warlike pursuits one leg shorter than the other, and lucky to get off after months spent in the hospital with his life. Since then he had been drinking too much, to put it plain and bald ; driving in that big red car of his, that Child of Hell, that he had bought him- self; staying by himself and reading the news- papers on the war; and getting blacker and ug- lier and louder, sitting at home, nursing his wrath, like natural fighters have when they can't get into a fight ever since the days of Achilles s He got WHITE SHOULDERS 67 worse and worse as the war went on without his assistance; every battle fought was a personal insult to him because he wasn't in it. He was a public menace to the town, riding round in that roaring speedster, half drunk very likely, trying to forget that way. He was right I believed then and as it finally turned out in what he had said about Gordon, and what he had thought about him and the girl. Gordon was gone, nobody knew for how long or how far. He had not committed himself publicly to any engagement to the girl, no matter what might have been agreed between them for an- nouncement on that day of victory. Anyhow, whatever your theory might be, the fact was that the situation was entirely changed. Almost at once Gordon was gone, and the girl, White Shoulders, whiter faced and stiller yet, was taking her first ride with Cole Hawkins, the Lame Duck, as Cupid Calvert kindly called him, but only occasionally, to a select few, not desiring, I as- sume, that appropriate and kindly name to get back to its bearer as originating from his lips. Yet if you are a humourist, I often notice, humour will out regardless of consequences. "She must be desperate, I'll say that for her," said Julia Blakelock, "to go out in that death trap with that drunken murderer." 68 WHITE SHOULDERS '^Without even taking out a death warrant," said Cupid. "Let me tell you something, Cupid," said Belle Davis, "Cole Hawkins can drive better drunk and asleep than you ever will with all your faculties. I only wish he'd ask me to ride but he never will, I expect. I've given up all hope now!" "Speak for yourself," said Julia Blakelock. "I will. Don't you fret." "I don't want to die yet awhile," said the Blakelock woman. "But at the same time you can't blame her, either. It was a godsend to her, after that expose after that scandalous thing about the dressmaker. If it wasn't for this new man they'd both have been laughed out of town the next day after the day of victory." "It was a bitter end to a hard-fought cam- paign," said Ella Armitage. "It was a rout, I should say," Cupid Calvert contributed, "with just one avenue of escape.'* "A poor avenue," said Julia Blakelock. "You know as well as I do how likely that devil of a Cole Hawkins is to marry her or any other woman. And how long they could live together if he did. But what I don't see," said Julia Blakelock, going on, "is how those two can stay here at all after what's happened." "Why not?" Belle Davis asked her. WHITE SHOULDERS 69 "After what has come out?" "What has come out? What do you know?" "We're practically certain," said the Blakelock woman, "that they were just two adventuresses who came up here to marry off the girl, with a wardrobe they'd bought on instalments from that terrible creature from St. Louis, who came up here looking for his money. "How do we know even that?" asked Belle Davis again. "We know it practically speaking," the other woman told her. "We don't know a thing that we can prove," repeated Belle Davis, "except a stolen telegram and a stolen business card and what we saw of this man." "Wasn't that enough?" "No. We know there's something very strange very funny there. But that's all we do know." "It was enough for Clayborne Gordon, evident- ly," said Julia Blakelock. "We don't know that either," Belle Davis in- sisted. "For all you know he's gone away on a business trip as he says." "We can guess," said the Blakelock girl. "Yes. That's all you can do about the whole thing." "There's one thing sure, anyhow," said the 70 WHITE SHOULDERS other woman, "and that's the reception they're getting everywhere since the thing happened." "I'm not so sure about that either as far as I'm concerned!" Belle Davis told her, snapping her black eyes. "I'm sorry for them, myself, and especially for the girl. She looks more like a girl of ivory than ever stiller and whiter. And her face has got that kind of haunted look on it, deeper than ever." "That's one grand idea ! Haunted by a dress- maker!" said Cupid Calvert. "What do you think, judge," Belle Davis came out suddenly at me, "sitting over there, wiser than a barrelful of old owls, listening?" "They're haunted, I expect, all right, Belle," I told her, "with you all after them. They've got that look. They look to me now like two lost souls, as old Sam Barsam used to say; just two short hops ahead of the devil." "That's what the Cockatoo sounds like, any- how, since the unfortunate event." "Her gaiety does grow," I said, "a little ex- cruciating, I'll have to say." "Clayborne Gordon may come back," remarked Mrs. Pennyworth, the Boarding-House Pessimist. "Or they may be getting ready for a good old breach-of-promise suit," suggested Julia Blake- lock. WHITE SHOULDERS 71 "More business for you, judge," said Calvert. "I believe we had all better shut up and keep still till we know more," said Belle Davis, who was taking the girl's part more and more now she was down. The exact fact was that there was nothing in the testimony yet sufficient to warrant more than a general arraignment in the women's courts of the two women as suspicious characters, which they had been all along. On the other hand, there was something more to the point now in evidence a warning to the men, especially to a man of Clayborne Gordon's finer sensibilities ; and so the probability that the women were right in their belief that we were witnessing the last stages of the matrimonial campaign. The appearance and manner of the Scarlet Cockatoo were the best evidence of this. Her rouge was redder than sin, but not red enough to cover up the purple circles round the eyes; and her gaiety, aimed at those who would still listen to it, was more hysterical than ever. She was directing attention mostly now to the delicacy of White Shoulders in her speech since that unfor- tunate indisposition on that dreadful day that terrible happening. She reverted in detail to this how natural it was, after all, in a girl who had been so delicately 72 WHITE SHOULDERS reared, so sheltered from everything that would disturb a sensitive nature. She was discussing this that night before her next misfortune fell. "What can you expect, sir," she was saying to me, "when you care for them and shelter them the way we Southern folks do?'* She might be an imposter from St. Louis, I said to myself, watching her and listening to her, but she did not sound like it ; she talked like the gen- uine old-time Southern country woman. And then she went upstairs to get ready for dinner again. And just precisely at that minute Cupid Calvert was coming in grinning. I saw him enter. "Come over here," he called in a low voice, and cocked his finger at Belle Davis and grinned a kind of secret way. "Come over here," he said, "in the corner. I've got something to show you." "The judge won't mind," said Belle Davis, and came over and sat on the arm of my easy-chair. "It's the opening of the second act, dear friends," said Calvert, and brought out that type- written letter. "What's this?" Belle Davis asked him, with her eyes out on her cheek after reading it. "Read it to Julia," said Cupid, "before she blows up entirely." WHITE SHOULDERS 73 So she did. "Just a word," it said, "to a wise boy. If you're looking around for amusement, ask that woman that calls herself Mrs. Fairborn if she ever heard of the Pitman family the celebrated Pit- man murder case." "Murder!" whispered Julia Blakelock. "It isn't signed?" asked Belle Davis. "No. Nor dated." "Just typewritten." "The plot curdles," said Calvert, grinning one of his happiest grins, from ear to ear. "Just an anonymous letter," said the Davis girl. "I don't believe it." "Don't you understand yet?" Calvert asked them. And the two looked at him. "You're slow," he said. "Oh," said Belle Davis, flushing up. "The tel- egram !" "Certain sure. Don't you remember? What we couldn't understand at that time?" "How was it it ran? I forget," said Belle Davis. 'Tike this," he told her, taking it out of his pocket once more and reading it : "So you should make a get-away? Now you come through. Five hundred by Saturday. Or letters start. Wire answer. A. G." 74. WHITE SHOULDERS "Letters start!" said Julia Blakelock, nodding her head. They were all naturally talking in half whispers. "That dressmaker!" said Belle Davis. "Look," said Cupid, and turned the envelope of the anonymous letter so they saw the postmark. "St. Louis!" said Julia Blakelock, reading. "And if he wrote it," Calvert went on, "there's probably something somewhere behind it." "Do you mean to say you think they are mur- derers," asked Belle Davis "those two women?" "Well, no. They wouldn't have to be, would they, to be mixed up in it some way?" "Did you talk to him?" asked Belle Davis, eying him a little close. "No; only just for a minute," Cupid Calvert told her, his eyes turning off from hers the way they did sometimes. "Long enough so you exchanged names?" "Why, yes, I expect so. I expect we did. We would."