Of CALIF. 1IBR1FY, WS
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 BY 
 
 ELIZABETH FRAZER
 
 COPYRIGHT, ig2i. 
 THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922. 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PRINTED IN THE U. 8. A. BY 
 
 bt gniiui A gobtn Company 
 
 BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
 RAHWAV NEW JERSEY
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 CHAPTER ONE 
 
 KLAGGETT KING, like Pilate's wife, was troubled 
 by a dream. 
 
 That was the only point of resemblance between 
 him and the noble Roman lady, who was concerned 
 about a certain just man; whereas Klaggett King 
 concerned himself, neither sleeping nor waking, 
 about just men. He let just men look after them- 
 selves, and he did exclusively the same. Klaggett 
 King's dream was a recurrent dream. Like the 
 fabled flying Dutchman, or the phantom headless 
 horseman, at certain periods in his life, it appeared 
 athwart the horizon of his slumbering conscious- 
 ness, and each time it marked a milestone in his 
 career, and was the invariable precursor of a busi- 
 ness success. 
 
 Always the dream was the same in substance, 
 3 
 
 2129520
 
 4 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 It was a struggle a struggle in the dark between 
 himself and another whom, in his dream, King 
 hated with a wild, violent hatred, accompanied by 
 a hunger to kill. Whenever Klaggett King dreamed 
 that particular dream, he rose up the next morning 
 and went about his affairs with a warm glow of 
 satisfaction around his heart, for he knew that the 
 stars in their courses, or mysterious destiny, or the 
 subliminal will, or angels, or devils, or the ouija 
 board, or whatever one likes to call it, were fight- 
 ing on his side, and he was bound to win. And it 
 was so. Success followed the wake of this dream 
 as its blazing tail follows the wake of a comet 
 through the night sky. 
 
 King could not, by a mere act of will, summon 
 this dream, with its attendant success, out of the 
 vasty deeps of its hidden lair though, after he dis- 
 covered it was the precursor of good fortune, he 
 tried. He tried very hard. Who would not? He 
 tried Peter Ibbetson's method of lying with his left 
 foot crossed over his right confoundedly awk- 
 ward ! and his arms encircling his head. He tried 
 retiring without dinner; with a light dinner; with
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 5 
 
 a heavy dinner; he tried thinking earnestly of the 
 dream just before he slept; and he tried not think- 
 ing of anything at all carefully sponging out all 
 the stray wisps and tails of thought, and rendering 
 his consciousness a dimly drifting grey impression- 
 able blank. But never by means of these forced 
 and artificial devices did he ever once find himself 
 upon the right road of his dream. It seemed to 
 have its own profoundly secret times and seasons, 
 and came and went at will. 
 
 It did not appear in every important transaction 
 of his life, nor, so he discovered, was its non- 
 appearance necessarily a guarantee of failure. On 
 the contrary, in checking up his eventful, and, 
 taking it all in all, rather distinguished career in 
 the financial life of New York, Klaggett King 
 could put his finger on several devilish tight corners 
 he had been in, fighting heavy odds, with his back 
 to the wall, when he would have ardently welcomed 
 that little dream-harbinger. But had it come? It 
 had not. It had stuck stubbornly down in its hole, 
 away over the dim back of beyond, outside the rim 
 of his consciousness, leaving King to fight his battle
 
 6 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 as best he might. And he had fought and won. 
 Whereupon, had it been possible, he would have fired 
 the dream. But he could neither fire it nor hire 
 it nor could he leave it alone. It was, altogether, 
 an irritating puzzle, without apparent rhyme or rule 
 and that, for Klaggett King, was its chiefest 
 attraction. 
 
 There was another permanent characteristic 
 about the dream, aside from its arrogant inde- 
 pendence in the matter of its entrances and exits; 
 and that was, that like all silly old wives' tales, it 
 followed the law of contraries. For although it 
 invariably signalised success, nevertheless, in the 
 actual dream itself, Klaggett King was always the 
 defeated party. His enemy escaped. 
 
 In his dream King would come upon the other 
 fellow come upon him sharply, suddenly, with in- 
 stant recognition, with a violent sense of joy, a 
 kind of stark rapture of dark passion common to 
 dreams, which lifted him quite out of himself. And 
 then, in his dream, he would dash headlong after 
 his enemy, who always eluded him. Reflecting 
 upon this, King used to wonder impatiently why
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 7 
 
 the devil he did not in his dream carry a gun or 
 a knife. Why, with that enemy lurking about, was 
 he always caught weaponless? Or why, even if he 
 were weaponless, did he not catch up something, a 
 rock or a club, with which to assault his foe? His 
 dream-double, it would appear, was an over- 
 sanguine, aggressive, reckless fool. If it were really 
 Klaggett King and King could not doubt that it 
 was; the sense of identity with his dream-self was 
 altogether too powerful and poignant to deny 
 why did not that dream-self make use of King's 
 caution, King's big, scheming, strategic brain to 
 obtain its ends? Why did it rush headlong, un- 
 armed, to the encounter, with only that terrible, 
 joyous resolve to kill thrilling its heart? 
 
 This foolish, melodramatic quality of the dream 
 irritated King particularly. He was, to tell the 
 truth, ashamed of it, and never alluded to it, even 
 among his closest friends. This was in the begin- 
 ning of his career, before he climbed into power. 
 
 Later, as his success and his personality grew, 
 he altered his point of view. He ceased being 
 ashamed of his fool dream. Klaggett King did not
 
 8 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 underestimate himself. He saw no reason why he 
 should. Had he been another business man who 
 had come to him to negotiate a loan on the banks 
 to enlarge his plant, King knew very well what kind 
 of a report he would have submitted to the banks. 
 He would have indorsed Klaggett King up to the 
 hilt as a strong man, a safe and sane man, with a 
 brain and a will that would get him anywhere. 
 He would have recommended the loan. And in a 
 private memorandum, he would have advised the 
 bankers who were floating the loan to acquire as 
 large a block of stock as they could make King 
 give up. 
 
 That was the kind of report he would have sent 
 in, had Klaggett King been another man whom he 
 was asked to report on in his official capacity as 
 financial expert. And he did not see why he should 
 not take his own expert opinion on himself, seeing 
 that opinion was the best and most reliable of its 
 kind in New York. Banks advanced money on it, 
 up into the millions. Private corporations and 
 firms, seeking eastern capital to enlarge their plants, 
 paid him thousands of dollars for his opinion.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 9 
 
 There was, therefore, no legitimate reason why he 
 should not take it himself. As a matter of fact, 
 he did. And his estimate of himself was, in brief, 
 that he was one of earth's conquerors. This was 
 not vanity. Any banker in New York would have 
 indorsed that point of view. The latter might have 
 added, that of course Mr. King was a self-made 
 man, with a self-made man's defects. He was 
 arrogant of manner, caustic of tongue, and obsti- 
 nate to a degree. But powerful beyond a doubt. 
 If you questioned that, you had only to look him 
 up in Who's Who, and mark the number of im- 
 portant directorates he held in the biggest financial 
 enterprises of the day. 
 
 With this perfectly justifiable opinion of himself 
 as one of the conquerors, Klaggett King began, 
 little by little, to take stock in his dream. Not 
 much. Not enough to trouble his conscience or 
 spoil his business nerve. But a little. Enough to 
 amuse him, when, unable to sleep for that, in later 
 years, was his trouble he spent the leaden-footed 
 night hours which paced, slow as a chain-gang, turn- 
 ing and twisting upon his pillow. To ponder sar-
 
 io THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 donically upon a good-for-nothing fool dream was 
 at least as intelligent a means to court slumber 
 and perhaps even the dream itself as to count 
 imaginary sheep jumping through an imaginary 
 hole in an imaginary fence. 
 
 Starting from nothing, Klaggett King had created 
 for himself a significant position in the financial 
 world. His business, in its early stages, was unique. 
 He had formulated it out of his own head to meet 
 the need of the times. Later, other firms sprang 
 up, catering to the same need. But for years 
 Klaggett King stood head and shoulders above all 
 other competitors in thoroughness and reliability. 
 
 " What does Klaggett King have to say about 
 this proposition ? " was a common question in finan- 
 cial conferences, when application was made for a 
 loan by a new or hitherto unknown firm. If King 
 reported favourably upon the applicant, he could 
 buy credit almost anywhere. His big, scrawling, un- 
 couth signature signed at the foot of the financial 
 report was enough. But if he reported unfavour- 
 ably and King was flat-footed in decision; he
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 11. 
 
 came out with a straight yes, or a straight no the 
 unfortunate applicant might as well buy his ticket 
 home. No reputable banking-house would lend him 
 a dime. 
 
 The method by which he made his name power- 
 ful was characteristic of the man. First of all, he 
 selected his experts for their sound common sense 
 and breadth of view, as well as for their technical 
 excellence. When they were on a " case," these 
 experts departed singly and without knowledge of 
 each other to the scene of their labours, investi- 
 gated the client, returned, and rendered a verbal 
 and a written report. 
 
 These reports Klaggett King was wont to receive 
 in his private office, one after another, on the same 
 day, in order, as he said, to obtain a bird's eye view 
 of the entire situation at once. And so practised 
 had he become by dint of long discipline and in- 
 tense concentration to the matter in hand, that 
 often he was ready with his own final report before 
 the last expert had left the room. 
 
 But this sureness came only with years. In the 
 beginning he did not trust his reputation to intui-
 
 12 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 tion or chance. Sometimes, of course, the case was 
 smooth sailing from the start. But sometimes it 
 was so complicated, with the elements of failure 
 and success so evenly tied, that it took him days to 
 decide. And when this occurred, with the complete 
 data in his portfolio, he would go home, lock him- 
 self in his room, and there remain, without sleep, 
 diving deeper and deeper into the reservoirs of his 
 reserve strength, and coming out on the other side 
 of his first fatigue with a magnificent second wind 
 of intelligence and power that never seemed to tire. 
 Arrived at that point, his brain functioned with a 
 kind of clean-cut beautiful precision like a well- 
 adjusted, well-oiled machine. 
 
 There was a delight in this intense absorption of 
 all his faculties that exhilarated him like wine. 
 Once he had fought past the outposts of normal 
 fatigue, into that inner citadel of radiant strength, 
 he had a feeling as if he were a god, omniscient, 
 absolute. 
 
 About this time he began to complain to his wife, 
 Lucinda, of insomnia. At breakfast, one morning, 
 he confessed to a sleepless night.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER fi 3 
 
 " Well," said Lucinda, smiling her Lucinda-smile 
 which had made Klaggett King marry her, "if you 
 will be foolish about staying up that way, what can 
 you expect? " 
 
 "It's the fight which attracts me. It gives me 
 such a sense of power. I don't believe I could make 
 a mistake to save my neck after I've fought through 
 to my second wind." 
 
 "You'll make one if you keep on trying to go 
 without sleep. I've about decided you are a silly 
 man. It's not intelligent to kill yourself by inches 
 like that." 
 
 " My business demands it," said King. " And, 
 besides, if I don't sleep, I make the other fellow 
 pay for it. I put it in the bill." 
 
 " That's sillier still," said Lucinda. " For money 
 won't buy sleep." 
 
 Whereupon King kissed her to stop her criticism 
 he had not married her for that, and he would 
 not take it, even from Lucinda and went on just 
 as before. But he began to be troubled. Hitherto, 
 he had boasted of his power to do without sleep. 
 Now the darker side of that power began to make
 
 14 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 itself manifest, like the faint shadowy circle about 
 the new crescent moon. He could not, it appeared, 
 force himself to stay awake when he wanted to 
 without paying for it by staying awake when he 
 did not want to. Klaggett King was too keen a 
 merchant of values not to perceive a certain grim 
 balance in this. He was robbing Peter to pay 
 Paul, and Peter was beginning to show a deficit.
 
 CHAPTER TWO 
 
 DURING this first, or building stage of his suc- 
 cess a success, which in its spectacular height, re- 
 sembled the skyscrapers of New York to which it 
 was spiritually akin King had been content to 
 demand a handsome commission for his services, 
 reserving the option, if he saw fit, to buy a block 
 of stock in the enterprise he thus supported with 
 his name. So far, he had been an honest server 
 of industry, and he liked to think of himself as the 
 liaison officer between high finance and the in- 
 numerable worthy business enterprises throughout 
 the land which needed money to develop them to 
 their full power. 
 
 By this time he had become an arresting per- 
 sonality, even in New York, and was swimming 
 with the best of them, with a box full of notabili- 
 ties at the opera which he hated and called the 
 whoopera and welcoming foreign celebrities when 
 
 is
 
 16 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 they came down to the financial district, showing 
 them the Woolworth Building and the Stock Ex- 
 change, and afterward lunching them at the Bank- 
 ers' Club, while they pumped him discreetly as to 
 what he thought of the prospects of their floating 
 another loan. 
 
 Cartoons of his tall gaunt figure, spare to cadaver- 
 ousness, with the jutting jaw, the caustic, sensitive 
 mouth, the powerful nose which advertised that he 
 was not only a leader of men but a follower of 
 women, and the steady dark eyes lit by fires of 
 malice, began to figure in the newspapers. King's 
 eyes were his best assets, both with men and with 
 women. Women pitied him when he quietly turned 
 on them those great, dark magnetic eyes, encircled 
 by hollows, and often burning in their deep caverns 
 with fires, the true nature of which sentimental 
 ladies were prone to mistake. They concluded he 
 must be unhappily married with Lucinda, and one 
 or two of them threw their hats into the ring. 
 
 Men liked him too, though they said he had the 
 cheek of the devil unbreeched. And when he
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 17 
 
 talked, fixing his companion with those deep burn- 
 ing eyes which seemed to dilate and gather fire as 
 he went on, enforcing his points by a brusque 
 chopping gesture of one bony upraised hand very 
 effective other men in the company would stop 
 talking, and gather around him in a close knot. It 
 was impossible not to believe him when within 
 reach of those steady compelling eyes. 
 
 For a man whose father had been a country 
 blacksmith, who had never been to college, who had 
 never seen the inside of a theatre until he was 
 eighteen, who had never worn evening clothes until 
 he began to court Lucinda, Klaggett King had gone 
 fast and rather far. He used to tell Lucinda to 
 stick close behind him and keep hold of his coat- 
 tails, for he intended to go farther still before he 
 was through. 
 
 It was Lucinda who had been his spring-board 
 of opportunity, as a woman often is. The daughter 
 of Adam Brewster a solid, rich, respectable 
 woollen manufacturer of the old school Lucinda 
 had studied the violin three years in Paris, after
 
 i8 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 which she had returned to her father's country- 
 place on the Hudson, where she met Klaggett King, 
 who inside of six months had married her though 
 there is no doubt Lucinda had something to do with 
 that too. 
 
 Lucinda always declared it was the story of the 
 house without a staircase which had won her. At 
 that time King, then a struggling young contractor, 
 was building a house for a rich and avaricious 
 widow, who niggled and naggled over every penny 
 of expenditure, and tried to beat the young man at 
 every turn of the game. In particular, she tried 
 to beat King into giving her more floor-space, with- 
 out paying therefor. On the plans, she pushed out 
 one partition after another, striving to make her 
 rooms larger and yet pay no more for her house. 
 
 " But, madam," explained the young contractor 
 impatiently, " can't you see that if your entire 
 floor-space remains fixed, you can't enlarge one 
 chamber save at the expense of another? And your 
 floor-space is a question of initial expense." 
 
 " Oh, dear ! " fumed the widow. "I did want
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 19 
 
 this front bedroom a decent size. Can't you just 
 move back that partition four feet ? " 
 
 Klaggett King frowned. 
 
 " Yes ! " said he suddenly, fixing his sardonic 
 black eyes on the plans. 
 
 "And that won't affect the size of the rear 
 room ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 "You're sure?" 
 
 " Sure as that God made fools." 
 
 But she was suspicious, and she made him swear 
 to it before witnesses. After which, he went on 
 with the contract. The widow went south on a 
 visit and when she returned the house was done. 
 Klaggett King himself drove her out from the sta- 
 tion in a hired livery-rig which he could ill afford 
 to inspect the house he had built for her. The 
 widow was delighted with the exterior. She wanted 
 to go inside. A few labourers were still on the 
 ground, and they watched the couple with a broad 
 grin. Klaggett King stalked about as stiff and dour 
 as a hangman.
 
 20 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 Finally the widow said: "The downstairs is 
 charming. I congratulate you. Now let's go up- 
 stairs." 
 
 Upon which, Klaggett King permitted himself his 
 first smile. 
 
 " After you, madam ! " he grinned. " I have no 
 wings." 
 
 Neither, it appeared, had the avaricious widow 
 any pinions, and without them she could not get 
 into the second story. For she had telescoped her 
 staircase in order to enlarge her bedrooms, and she 
 had made Klaggett King swear, before witnesses, 
 to build it after that plan. Of course she sued him. 
 And of course Klaggett King won. 
 
 The story of the house without a staircase went 
 rolling humorously all over the countryside, and 
 eventually came to the ears of Lucinda, who, hav- 
 ing a keen sense of the comic, teased her father 
 to entice the young humourist around to dinner 
 some night. 
 
 King came, watched Lucinda all through dinner 
 out of the corner of his eye; decided she was the 
 nicest thing he had ever seen; decided that just to
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 21 
 
 be around her was a liberal education; decided to 
 give himself that liberal education as fast as he 
 decently could. All of which he did, without hesi- 
 tation, indirection, or beating about the bush. 
 
 And Lucinda took him. When her father expos- 
 tulated with her, and asked her what on earth she 
 saw in this scraggy young mountebank with the 
 wild eyes, Lucinda replied, laughing with pretty 
 confusion, that other men only said funny things, 
 but Klaggett King did them. She added that she 
 was sure she would get more fun out of him than 
 out of her violin. 
 
 Her father retorted that Klaggett King would 
 make her laugh on the other side of her mouth be- 
 fore they were married six months or he was no 
 judge of men. But Lucinda took him just the 
 same. Brewster died within the year, and with his 
 money which went to Lucinda, King got his first 
 start. And King knew, the week before his father- 
 in-law died, that things were drifting his way, for 
 again he had dreamed his fool dream.
 
 CHAPTER THREE 
 
 As King's business flourished, he built, in his 
 fiftieth year, a great turreted granite mansion just 
 off Fifth Avenue, in the East Seventies, and a 
 famous firm of decorators, after a discreet study 
 of his temperament and his bank-account, furnished 
 it in the Florentine fashion in the period of Lorenzo 
 the Magnificent, with heavy dark old carvings, the 
 walls hung with huge mirrors, gorgeous crimson 
 velvets and dim old brocades, most of them museum 
 pieces. 
 
 There was about it an air of sombre splendour, 
 relieved by patches of vivid, passionate colour which 
 consorted well with King's character. But he com- 
 plained that it was sunless, as dank as a vault, and 
 there was not a chair fit to sit in outside of his < 
 library. His library, a beautiful octagonal room, 
 with a carved oak ceiling, he had furnished to please 
 himself after riding rough-shod over the deco- 
 
 22
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 23 
 
 rater's plans and reducing that sensitive soul almost 
 to tears. For King had shouted at him. He had 
 a way of shouting, when it pleased him to do so. 
 In justification, it should be said that he only 
 shouted at a certain type of man. But he had sud- 
 denly shouted at the decorator, causing that highly- 
 strung gentleman to leap like a stung horse. And 
 then, standing with his head down and his eyes 
 gleaming, like a bull about to charge, King had told 
 the man exactly what he thought of all that 
 damned, moth-eaten, faded dago junk for which 
 the decorating firm had the chartered nerve to 
 charge him a cool quarter of a million dol- 
 lars. 
 
 After which, he furnished the library according 
 to his own ideas. And those ideas were, in fact, 
 much nearer to those of Lorenzo the Magnificent 
 than any which the unassisted brain of the deco- 
 rator could have conceived. For King loved books, 
 not for their backs, but for the distilled brain-stuff 
 inside of them. His book-cases rose to the ceiling. 
 Alternating with the book-shelves were dark old 
 mellow, carved oak panels, before which he had
 
 24 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 placed black-veined marble pedestals, surmounted 
 by the busts of gentlemen of whose intelligences 
 Klaggett King thought favourably. He had always 
 read voraciously, chiefly at night when he could not 
 sleep. He read, and then he estimated the author 
 with the same dispassionate, clean-cut, relentless 
 judgment, as if the writer were a client soliciting 
 a loan. 
 
 Some of the men whom he reported favourably 
 upon were Poe, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Montaigne, 
 and Fielding. Shakespeare he described as a fine 
 word-slinger, but a sentimentalist of the first water; 
 and sentimentalists he could not abide. 
 
 Thus, with at least a bowing acquaintance with 
 the giants and demi-gods of literature, King, for 
 his private pleasure, and to while away the long 
 sleepless nights, began an investigation into the sub- 
 ject of dreams. And he discovered some interest- 
 ing things. He discovered that the inventor of the 
 automatic brake had worked out the secret of its 
 mechanism in a dream. He discovered that Julius 
 Caesar, one of the gentlemen on his pedestals, had 
 a recurrent dream. So also had Lincoln.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 25 
 
 Klaggett King pondered long over the dream of 
 Lincoln, for it offered some points of resemblance 
 to his own. Like his own, it invariably marked 
 the milestones in his career; but unlike King, Lin- 
 coln, according to his biographer, placed implicit 
 confidence in it In his dream, Lincoln would find 
 himself aboard a strange vessel, sailing over a 
 smooth yet sullen sea, toward a sad-hued, misty 
 shore. It had come to him the night before his 
 assassination, leaving him expectant and wonder- 
 ing. 
 
 This dream King thought sufficiently noteworthy 
 to enter into his diary which contained memoranda 
 of the subject. For Lincoln as a humanitarian, 
 King had no use; but for Lincoln the statesman, 
 the politician, and shrewd manipulator of men he 
 entertained a profound admiration. And he once 
 remarked to Lucinda that if Lincoln had been alive, 
 and in business, he would have offered him a part- 
 nership in the firm. 
 
 Upon the subject of dreams he read widely, and 
 when he had examined and weighed all his mate- 
 rial, he found, like Omar, that he had come out
 
 26 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 the same door he went in. Nobody, it appeared, 
 knew any more on the subject than did Klaggett 
 King. 
 
 As a result of all this reading he fell into the 
 habit of writing down his dream, immediately upon 
 waking, while it was still "warm." He also set 
 down the first time the dream made its appearance 
 in his life. His notes, recorded in his diary, ran 
 as follows: 
 
 " I dreamed I was wandering in the sand-dunes 
 by the sea. (N.B. I did not then know any sand- 
 dunes, for I was brought up inland; and yet in my 
 dream I seemed to know every foot of those sand- 
 dunes, and they, and the sea off behind them, were 
 my best friends.) It was twilight, not yet dark, 
 but with a thickness in the air which obscured the 
 features and details of objects even close at hand. 
 Off beyond the dunes I could hear the steady 
 pounding of the surf (could that pounding have 
 been the throbbing of my heart, as one of those 
 experts suggests?) but the sea itself was hidden. 
 Hidden, but the high flying spray of the surf was 
 driving square in my face, and I could smell the
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 27 
 
 strong, clean tang of the sea. The tide was up. 
 The seaweed was coming in. (How should I know 
 that, who at the time had never smelt seaweed?); 
 All this I sensed as I ran, bareheaded, through the 
 dusk. 
 
 " Suddenly, a figure appeared, silhouetted on the 
 top of a dune. It was he ! In a flash, I knew him 
 for my enemy. It seems I had been hanging 
 about, waiting for him, though this had not been 
 apparent to me before. I ran toward him, to kill 
 him. I was filled with a violent, a savage joy. He 
 stood like a dark statue, looking down on me from 
 the hill-top. I could not see his face. I ran to 
 him, shouting I don't know what foul insult at the 
 top of my lungs. But when I arrived at the hill- 
 top he was gone. 
 
 " I was wakened by the sound of my own angry 
 laughter, with the sweat pouring off me, my heart 
 pounding as if I had been running a race, and in 
 my nostrils the strong acrid scent of the seaweed. 
 And all the next day, the thrill, the exhilaration of 
 that dream remained with me, a strange tingling 
 warmth about my heart. They say love uplifts.
 
 28 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 But in my dream it was hate that uplifted me. It 
 ran through all my veins like bright fire." 
 
 In this, the first dream, set down years later from 
 memory, he could recall only the high lights. But 
 in the subsequent ones, recorded as soon as he 
 awoke, he described every detail with the same 
 scrupulous exactitude that he required of his in- 
 vestigators in their business reports. After which, 
 just as in the case of the reports, he scrutinised, 
 analysed, summarised, turned back and compared 
 notes with previous dreams and in the course of 
 the years he evolved a theory as to the signification 
 of the dream. 
 
 He told himself, however, that he did not take 
 the thing seriously. 
 
 " A dream," he wrote one night in his notes, " is 
 just like anything else in this world it is exactly 
 what you make of it. You can make it into a 
 mountain or a mole-hill. You can control it or 
 you can let it control you. If I believed in this 
 dream, for example, it could play the very devil 
 with my nerve. I might believe that somebody was 
 going to assassinate me. I might believe any one
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 29 
 
 of a dozen things. One authority says it may be 
 caused by the way I lie in bed. Another says it 
 may be indigestion. Another thinks it may be a 
 race-dream, a hang-over from the struggles of some 
 arboreal ancestor. Do I, Klaggett King, honestly 
 believe any of these explanations which do not ex- 
 plain? Well, I'll admit this much. I don't know." 
 
 It was in the second period of his success, after 
 his reputation was solidly established, that Klaggett 
 King's business took a new twist, and he began to 
 make the industrial concerns which came to him 
 pay tribute money for the support of his name. 
 His levies were heavy, sometimes staggering, but 
 such was the stupendous industrial expansion of 
 the country, that his terms, exorbitant beyond rea- 
 son as they were, were accepted with resignation by 
 those who realised that it was worth any price to 
 have Klaggett King on their side. 
 
 Some lively and rebellious little concerns refused 
 to turn over what amounted practically to a con- 
 trolling interest in the enterprise, and continued on 
 what local capital they could command. Some
 
 30 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 others, rejecting his terms, and attempting to nego- 
 tiate directly with the eastern sources of capital, 
 discovered that word had somehow mysteriously 
 leaked around that the applicants had already been 
 to Klaggett King, who had reported adversely upon 
 them as an unsound financial risk. 
 
 Some of the concerns, finding themselves sud- 
 denly in such a vise, with a valuable business but 
 with all their money invested in the plant, and shorn 
 by Klaggett King's manoeuvres of their borrowing 
 power, were forced into receiverships. Upon which, 
 King, acting through agents, bought them in at 
 public auction, reorganized the company, put in his 
 own directors, and maintained a controlling interest 
 in the enterprise. Where he was opposed, he was 
 ruthless. Upon a certain occasion, the president of 
 one of these ruined companies blew out his brains, 
 and his wife died of a broken heart within the year. 
 And there were whispers of other tragedies, other 
 lives that he had broken. What Klaggett King 
 thought of these affairs, and his own part therein, 
 the world never knew, but he wrote one night in 
 his diary:
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 31 
 
 " Business, like everything else in nature, follows 
 certain profound inexorable laws. Puling senti- 
 mentalists cry out against these laws call them 
 brutal, immoral, unjust. But not all their whining 
 will make those laws one whit less operable in life; 
 for they govern alike animals and men and nations, 
 and the rule is the same for all : Little beasts must 
 keep out of big beasts' way or pay the penalty." 
 
 He was fifty-five years old when he wrote that, 
 and he knew whereof he spoke, for he had proved 
 every word of it up to the hilt by hard, actual ex- 
 perience. He added, with caustic humour: 
 
 "If sentimentalists could see life, as it really 
 exists, it would make them scream in their sleep! "
 
 CHAPTER FOUR 
 
 KLAGGETT KING laid down the book he was read- 
 ing, and sat back in his chair and sighed. After a 
 moment of abstracted meditation, he pulled out his 
 watch. It was two o'clock in the morning. Not 
 for many nights had he been in bed at that hour. 
 The fact was, he slept worse or stayed awake 
 better in his bed than any other place. He 
 had grown to hate the soft yielding of the 
 mattress, which promised a rest it did not ful- 
 fil. 
 
 The big octagonal room, with its busts and 
 faintly gleaming rows of books, was in sombre 
 shadow, save for the luminous halo cast by the 
 standing lamp beside the deep leather chair in which 
 sat Klaggett King. He leaned back and closed his 
 eyes. Seen thus, under the brilliant light, his heavy 
 pallid face, with the closed lids, the big nose, the 
 wide ironic mouth twisting off to one side, and the 
 
 32
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 33 
 
 clean-cut masterful jaw, was not unlike the marble 
 bust of some lean, rugged old Roman consul and 
 colonial administrator, and not lacking in nobility. 
 Hardness, obstinacy, and a certain caustic phi- 
 losophy were stamped on those features which at 
 the moment were as sharp and still as if cut in 
 statuary. Only an occasional slight twitching of the 
 eyelids proclaimed he was still awake. 
 
 As a matter of fact he was not asleep though 
 he had a feeling that sleep was hovering not far 
 away. Perhaps later. . . . For the moment he was 
 thinking of that Frenchman, whose book on dreams 
 he had just laid down. Of the whole crowd, he 
 was the sanest King had ever read. But what a 
 man! What a will! A scientist, at the age of 
 thirty he had set out to make a first-hand study of 
 dreams, and for ten years, holding that purpose 
 steadily in view, he had waked himself in the night 
 by means of an alarm-clock, or a bell, and recorded 
 his dreams. Or if he had none, he recorded that 
 fact. And it was the endurance of this admirable 
 imbecile of a Frenchman which had made King 
 sigh.
 
 34 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 " Good God ! " he mused, in weary admiration. 
 "What a fool! An alarm-clock, eh?" 
 
 He grimaced, pressing his lips hard over his 
 teeth, as he visualised that shrill, brutal little 
 destroyer of sleep. He slid down deeper in his 
 chair and cautiously elevated his feet to a more 
 comfortable position on the brocade seat of a pre- 
 cious fauteuil, his mind still playing around the 
 Frenchman who could wake himself in the night. 
 This was a game of visualisation by means of 
 which, sometimes, he could put himself to sleep. 
 
 The Frenchman's bedroom would be dark. 
 King's hand went up and switched off the light. 
 And he would be lying flat in bed, breathing regu- 
 larly, for, of course, he was asleep sound asleep. 
 King's chest rose and fell regularly, in simulation 
 of the slumbering Frenchman. His features re- 
 laxed. His consciousness seemed floating, exqui- 
 sitely floating, on a smooth dusky tide which was 
 bearing him softly away. A delicious languor en- 
 thralled him like a spell an enchantment, dewy, 
 drowsy, dim, of all his jaded faculties. His chin 
 sank lower upon his chest. He felt himself drift-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 35 
 
 ing . . . drifting. . . . Lights began to glimmer 
 in his brain. . . . They were the far-off lights of 
 the dim land of sleep. . . . 
 
 Suddenly it seemed to him that he was in his 
 private office, seated at his desk, looking at the 
 door. His secretary was ushering in Pinkney 
 Sloane. 
 
 " Morning, Mr. King. Royal day ! " said Sloane, 
 and King observed, but without surprise, that his 
 visitor had on neither shoes nor socks. His feet 
 were naked, and coming out from his blue serge 
 trousers, they looked abnormally big and white and 
 cold. 
 
 King decided not to say anything to Sloane about 
 his naked feet in Wall Street. . . . Might hurt his 
 feelings. 
 
 " Sit down, Sloane!" said he, and he laughed. , . . 
 
 Suddenly, a great agonising shudder shook him 
 from head to foot, and startled him into crude, raw 
 consciousness, the laugh still curving his lips. 
 
 King opened his eyes and lay staring into the 
 dark. He had not quite made it after all. Al- 
 most but not quite! A thousand times, by ruse,
 
 36 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 stratagem or guile, he had tried to outflank sleep, 
 to slide in behind the sentinels or outposts who kept 
 the guard, and then, just as he thought he had won 
 by and was well inside, would come this great nerv- 
 ous shudder, like a rough hand on his shoulder, 
 shaking him wide awake. 
 
 He reached up, switched on the light, and found 
 his place in the book. After a time his eyes strayed 
 thoughtfully down to his feet. They felt cramped 
 and chill; they were crossed, one over the other; 
 and one of his slippers had fallen to the floor. 
 King reached down and touched one of his ankles; 
 it was as icy cold through the thin silk as Sloane's 
 had looked in the dream. 
 
 " Hm ! " he deduced grimly. " And there you 
 are! That's the whole explanation in a nutshell." 
 
 He rose, somewhat stiffly, and stretched himself 
 to his full gaunt height. And suddenly, like a flash, 
 he felt again within himself a delicious, drowsy 
 languor, a faint, sweet yielding of all his senses, as 
 if the boat of his soul had been loosed, insensibly, 
 and was rocking, gently, to the outward drift of 
 the tide.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 37, 
 
 " By George ! " he exclaimed, " I believe I'm 
 going to sleep to-night." 
 
 He switched off the lights, and stepping care- 
 fully in order not to brush away the delicious, drift- 
 ing dimness of his mind, traversed the length of 
 the corridor to his own room. In ten minutes he 
 was lying flat between the smooth cool sheets, on 
 the yielding mattress, prepared to drift away. But 
 now, by a perverse contrariety of mood, he could 
 not drift. The delicious dreaminess which had 
 woven its enchanted drowsy web about his senses 
 had melted entirely away; and in its place was a 
 hard, live, alert devil of wide-awakeness, sardonic, 
 brazen, which seemed to mock at him. His eye- 
 balls ached with the tension. The dew of exhaus- 
 tion stood out on his cheek. But he fought on. 
 An hour passed. Methodically, one after another, 
 he went through all the sleep-producing exercises 
 he knew, and at the end was more brutally wide 
 awake than before. 
 
 Abruptly, he surrendered. He sat up, switched 
 on the current, grimacing with pain as the flash 
 of bright light streamed across his eyeballs, flung
 
 38 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 his legs over the bedside, and sat scowling and 
 blinking and brooding. He had never been a hand- 
 some man; but now, with his hollow eyes fixed 
 sternly before him, with his thin ravaged face under 
 the disordered grey hair twitching witR uncon- 
 trollable nervousness, and his mouth twisting off 
 to one side, there hung over him an air of terrible, 
 wrung seriousness which gave him a distinction all 
 its own. 
 
 For the moment he had come to the end of his 
 tether. He had to have help. Three alternatives 
 confronted him. He could summon his man, 
 Rene, who would offer him an opiate ; or he could 
 return to the library for another go at that damned 
 cool-blooded Frenchman and his alarm-clock; or he 
 could arouse Lucinda. 
 
 He decided for Lucinda, groped with an explor- 
 ing foot for his slippers, found them, and then sat 
 for a long minute, hoping against hope that the 
 sweet, delicious languor of drowsiness would steal 
 again over his senses. But his brain was as clear 
 as a bell. 
 
 With a grunt of impatience, he rose, padded
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 39 
 
 across to the adjoining room, pressed the button 
 by the door, and flooded the place with mellow 
 light. In the bed at the far end of the room, 
 Lucinda was lying, nestling her cheek in her palm. 
 One long silky strand of pale gold hair curled 
 across her shoulder. Her profile, pure and pale 
 against the white pillow, brought a subtle assuage- 
 ment to Klaggett King despite his antagonism 
 against her for her ability to sleep. He crossed 
 to her side and stood over her, half angry, half 
 appeased by the soft clear tranquil charm of that 
 still face. 
 
 "Lucinda!" 
 
 At a certain savage stage of his sleeplessness, 
 King would have roused all the world had he been 
 able with an alarm-clock to keep the vigil with 
 him. 
 
 "Lucinda!" 
 
 How soundly she slept! Across her temple 
 meandered a tiny transparently blue vein, definitely 
 visible just above the closed eye, and then sinking 
 to hidden levels. It was a head which would have 
 delighted a sculptor, small, but with an exquisite
 
 40 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 sureness of modelling of every feature, the eyes, 
 the delicately chiselled nose, the lovely faintly smil- 
 ing mouth, clear-carved as archaic statuary. 
 
 1 My love, she sleeps ! Oh, may her sleep as 
 it is lasting, so be deep! Soft may the worms 
 about her creep ! ' . . . Who was it had said that ? 
 Poe, of course another man who couldn't sleep. 
 ... A madman but fine. . . ." 
 
 " Lucinda ! " He bent down and put a hand on 
 her shoulder. 
 
 Lucinda's eyelids lifted. She lay gazing up at 
 him for a moment, her eyes still vague with dreams. 
 Then she smiled. 
 
 "Hello dearesty!" 
 
 " Hello yourself. I'm going to buy a trumpet 
 to wake you with. You sleep like the righteous 
 dead." 
 
 Lucinda laughed, and sat up, pushing back her 
 hair. 
 
 " I was tired. Celia dragged me around all day 
 with her, shopping. And then I saw her off on 
 the train. What time is it ? " 
 
 "Just off daylight."
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 41 
 
 "Teh! Teh!" She made soft little sounds of 
 pity, her quick glance taking in the nervous ravage 
 of his haggard face. "Why didn't you wake me 
 before? Why do you keep on battling away all 
 by yourself ? " 
 
 " Because the only way I know how to fight is 
 to fight. If I thought I could sleep better by wak- 
 ing you, I'd have waked you long before this 
 never fear." He spoke with a hard, biting irony 
 and eased himself down into a chaise longue. 
 
 Lucinda slipped out of bed, drew her arms 
 through a gauzy smock of translucent rose, and 
 rebraided her hair, her dark eyes fixed thoughtfully 
 on her husband's face. She saw before her a 
 struggle in which Klaggett King did not intend to 
 help was perhaps past the power to help her or 
 to help himself. To win him out of his gloomy 
 self -absorption was the first prerequisite of slumber, 
 and to achieve this object Lucinda had often to 
 anger him. 
 
 " Did you see Celia before she left ? " she began 
 conversationally. 
 
 " I did not see her, and I did not know she had
 
 42 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 left," King replied succinctly from behind closed 
 lids. " Celia doesn't trouble to acquaint her father 
 with her movements any more since she went to 
 war." 
 
 Lucinda smiled. Her ruse had been successful. 
 
 "Celia is a strong-minded girl," she said lightly. 
 " I've no idea where she gets that soft obstinacy 
 of hers." 
 
 King opened one sardonic eye. 
 
 " Soft ! That girl's about as soft as a young 
 marble quarry and as impervious to suggestion. 
 Where did she go?" 
 
 " Out to some place she calls a dude-ranch in the 
 mountains of Wyoming. It seems there was a 
 sergeant who was in the war no, this particular 
 one was a runner Do you know what a run- 
 ner is?" 
 
 " I might." 
 
 "Well, according to Celia, it's something won- 
 derfully brave and fine. He crawls through the 
 lines with letters and orders and so on and nearly 
 always gets killed." 
 
 "And did Celia's get killed ?"
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 43 
 
 " Yes. He came in all smashed to pieces to the 
 mobile unit she was with during the last months 
 of the war. You know, she worked as nurse in 
 the operating-room of one of those mobile hospital 
 units which, it seems, followed right behind the 
 army during the offensives, and was shelled and 
 air-raided and Celia, as you know, came in for 
 her share " 
 
 " I didn't know. I don't know the first thing 
 about her affairs. She didn't favour her father with 
 any letters " 
 
 " But Klaggett ! Do be just. Whose fault was 
 that? You washed your hands of her and in a 
 very forcible manner " 
 
 " What about that dead runner?" 
 
 He had opened both eyes now, and lay watching 
 her braid her hair. It was a thin little pigtail and 
 it made her look oddly like a girl. 
 
 Lucinda laughed. She had a pretty laugh, fresh 
 and musical, with a warm tenderness at its core. 
 
 " Well, he died, but Celia nursed him and went 
 to his funeral and took a picture of his grave. And 
 afterward she wrote to his people, who keep this
 
 44 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 dude-ranch. They invited her out to visit them. 
 You see, they don't know she's the daughter of 
 Klaggett King. Nobody does." There was a 
 thread of laughter in her voice. " For when you 
 renounced Celia, she followed suit and renounced 
 you. During the war, she was just plain Celia 
 King, trained nurse. She lived on her nurse's pay 
 when she got it and was as proud as Punch." 
 
 " I notice she's always overdrawn on her allow- 
 ance. I'm forever squaring her up at the bank. 
 She doesn't seem to be incognito there. I've ob- 
 served the fine independence of this present gen- 
 eration doesn't seem to extend to the bank-account. 
 Celia throws me over but she lets me foot the 
 bills." 
 
 " But you couldn't exactly call those demands 
 bills, dear. They're not for herself. They're for 
 soldiers' clubs, and vocational training for a 
 few disabled men cases the government won't 
 touch." 
 
 " Charities, then. All right. They're her chari- 
 ties not mine. Now, I'm going to have a talk 
 with Celia when she comes back. That's the rea-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 45 
 
 son, in my judgment, that she dodged off without 
 seeing me before she left." 
 
 " Celia would scorn to dodge you," laughed 
 Lucinda, " if you were the devil himself. She tried 
 three times to get you at the office, but your secre- 
 tary said you were in a conference and had left 
 orders not to be disturbed. The very last thing she 
 said to me when she kissed me good-bye at the 
 station was : ' Momkins, father and I are due to 
 have a row, a first-class pyrotechnic exhibition, 
 when I get back. Please give him my love and 
 tell him not to worry. I shan't! ' "
 
 CHAPTER FIVE 
 
 LUCINDA vanished into the bath-room, to chill 
 her wrists and fingers under a rushing spray of ice- 
 cold water. She could hear King's growled com- 
 ments over his daughter's shortcomings, but she 
 could not distinguish the words. She smiled sagely 
 to herself for the more he roared and raged now 
 the more likely he was to sleep later on. She re- 
 appeared presently, bearing a bowl of ice-cold 
 water and a towel, seated herself beside him 
 and proceeded to chill her fingers more thor- 
 oughly. 
 
 " Turn out the light," commanded King. 
 
 " Not yet. I've not told you all of Celia's mes- 
 sage." She was trailing her fingers lightly through 
 the water and spoke without looking up. " It's 
 about Mr. Pym." 
 
 "He proposed eh?" King spoke up sharply. 
 " He told me about three weeks ago that he thought 
 
 46
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 47 
 
 he'd try his luck again. Celia's kept him dangling 
 for about two years now. Well ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes, he proposed after a manner. Celia 
 said he didn't appear extremely enthusiastic. She 
 said he said : ' You know, Miss Celia, your father 
 has set his heart on this match. And I think 
 myself we'd we'd ah hit it off all right if 
 ah you'd ah consent to calm down ' " 
 
 " He was scared," growled King, smiling despite 
 himself. " Celia's enough to scare any man, and 
 Pym's timid with women. He's been a widower 
 so long he forgets how it goes." 
 
 "A widower and fifty " 
 
 " Hold on. Not forty-five." 
 
 " with no life, nor warmth, nor charm. A 
 
 shivery old maid finicky, fussy. Why, darling, 
 what would he do with Celia if he had her a 
 beautiful, live, gay girl of twenty-two?" 
 
 "You underestimate Pym," said King dryly. 
 " Women are no judges of men. They think if 
 a man has a shy or timid manner, there's nothing 
 to him. Pym is the sole owner and operator of one 
 of the keenest brains I've ever known. He's got
 
 48 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 better judgment than I have along certain lines. 
 He's cooler. That's the reason I chose him for a 
 partner. That's the reason he'll make a good hus- 
 band for Celia. He's dead right. She needs calm- 
 ing down. And Pym is the man to calm her. You 
 don't know him." 
 
 " It doesn't look as if I were going to have the 
 opportunity," she murmured. " If you'd seen 
 Celia's face as she told me about it! It seems 
 your Mr. Pym retreated without advancing, so to 
 speak." 
 
 " It's a wise man that knows how to retreat." 
 
 " Not in the opinion of an enthusiastic young 
 lady of twenty-two. You see, dear, Mr. Pym may 
 have brains and be an excellent partner and all that 
 but that's not what my Celia will marry him for. 
 He's slow when he ought to be swift, still when 
 he ought to speak, gentle when he ought to be firm, 
 and serious when he ought to be gay. In short, 
 he's too old. He won't do. And Celia told me 
 to tell you to break the news to him." 
 
 "I'll be damned if I do," said King gruffly. 
 " You're on Celia's side. Well, I'm on Pym's side.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 49 
 
 And we'll see who wins. Did she go out to that 
 place all by herself ? " 
 
 Luanda laughed. "Oh, no, I sent Miss Tauser 
 along. But Celia made little Tauser promise faith- 
 fully not to divulge her kinship with us before she'd 
 permit her even to get on the train. She had an 
 idea that the people who invited her might be fussed 
 if they knew who she was. You see, they think 
 she's just a regular professional nurse." 
 
 " Damned masquerading nonsense," muttered 
 King. " How long is she going to stay?" 
 
 " Well, she didn't say," murmured Lucinda. 
 " Two or three months." 
 
 She had switched off the light, settled King's 
 head comfortably among the cushions, and stand- 
 ing behind him, began to smooth his temples. Her 
 fingers, cool, yet tingling with vitality, assuaged his 
 tormented nerves like music. 
 
 " Celia's tired," she continued. " She deserves 
 a rest. Think of it, Klaggett! One year with the 
 mobile unit right up behind our lines ! Think of all 
 the horrible sights she saw! Then, when she re- 
 turned, nothing would do but she must continue her
 
 50 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 nursing down at the polyclinic, with the wounded 
 soldiers there. I tried to argue her out of it. But 
 Mrs. Danbury who has charge, told her that all 
 the other girls after the war was over had slacked 
 on their jobs and after that wild horses couldn't 
 have torn her away. She says it's an affair of 
 honour to the nation that somebody shall see those 
 boys through." 
 
 " Theatric," grunted King, drowsily. 
 
 " Yes, of course," soothed Lucinda. " And yet 
 the child has stuck to her guns." 
 
 Her voice, low, casual, with its little thread of 
 suppressed mirth, ran on close to his ear. 
 
 "Lucinda!" 
 
 His voice, heavy, blurred with fatigue, seemed to 
 come from far away. In the dark her brows drew; 
 together in a sharp line. Scarcely she breathed. 
 
 "Lucinda!" 
 
 When King began to murmur in that faint, de- 
 tached, yet lucid fashion, as if his soul were float- 
 ing far away, it meant nothing more nor less than 
 that he had started out on the road to sleep but 
 had lost his way, and might wander, half -aware,
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 51 
 
 in that dim, uncharted borderland for hours. Lu- 
 cinda hung above him, intent, speechless. Her 
 fingers, light and cool as first snowflakes, just 
 touched his temples and melted away. 
 
 "Lucinda!" 
 
 She bit her lip, but breathed softly: 
 
 "Don't talk, love. Just float away." 
 
 " Did you buy that book on dreams ? " 
 
 " Yes. It was trash." 
 
 " They usually are." 
 
 "Why do you bother about that silly old 
 dream ? " 
 
 " Oh, I don't take much stock in it." 
 
 " It makes you fight everybody and every- 
 thing!" 
 
 " Well, I like to fight. And I'll tell you this." 
 His voice sounded stronger in the dark. " I don't 
 believe in that dream the way you think I do. But 
 I'll say one thing. Without that dream to drive 
 me on, I'd have been a nobody, a nameless stick- 
 in-the-mud all my life. It's been a good partner 
 to me." 
 
 He appeared to drowse. In a moment he began
 
 52 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 again, in that still, remote little voice which sounded 
 as if it came over a long-distance telephone. 
 
 " There's a young man . . . name of Sloane. 
 . . . Pinkney Sloane . . . been in the army. . . . 
 Reminds me of Celia . . . pig-headed. . . ." 
 
 He broke off and was silent so long that Lucinda 
 thought he had gone. His head had sunk down in 
 the cushions; his limbs seemed a dead weight. 
 
 " Smart "... the dreamy voice flowed on, " but 
 pig-headed. Thinks he knows it all. . . . He's got 
 a good thing, and it's even better than he knows. 
 . . . Got to be handled right, though. . . . But 
 he's so pig-headed. . . ." 
 
 " Don't fight him ! " cried out Lucinda suddenly, 
 and her voice held a quiver in the dark. 
 
 " Not going to fight him if he's reasonable. 
 But he won't be. ... Pig-headed. . . . Think the 
 young ass is going to fight me ! " 
 
 She waited, hanging above him, watchful, im- 
 mobile, every faculty and fibre of her being con- 
 centrated, strung to a single issue. 
 
 Lu "
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 53 
 
 "Ssh!" 
 
 " cinda!" 
 
 "Yes, love?" 
 
 "I think. . . . I'm going to sleep." 
 
 " Of course you are. You're asleep already." 
 
 And that, presently, was the truth.
 
 CHAPTER SIX 
 
 CELIA had stopped all of two weeks at Hunter's 
 Ranch before there pierced through to the intense 
 inner preoccupation of her brooding young con- 
 sciousness which was sitting in high judgment upon 
 the world, the flesh, and the devil, the fact that 
 there was in her lonely Eden an Adam in the shape 
 of a lean, long-legged young man with a shock of 
 tow-coloured hair above a fine forehead, humorous 
 grey eyes, and a flashing smile. For a whole fort- 
 night she had been so wrapped up in her own prob- 
 lems that she did not see him as an individual, but 
 only as part of the general masculine furniture of 
 the scene. And this in spite of the fact that he 
 had been duly presented to her on the first night 
 of her arrival by Hunter, the owner of the ranch, 
 with something of a flourish. 
 
 "Miss King, meet Mr. Pinkney Sloane lately 
 Major Sloane, in the artillery. Say, Pink, didn't 
 
 54
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 55 
 
 you say you were up in that mess in the Argonne, 
 where you lost your guns in mud so deep you had 
 to take soundings to locate them? Miss King was 
 somewhere around there. You two ought to get 
 together." 
 
 It was a promising beginning. But Miss King, 
 apparently, did not think much of erstwhile young 
 majors in the artillery. She presented him with 
 what Pinkney termed a sculptural smile, but above 
 it her dark blue eyes were about as warm as a gla- 
 cier in the sun. 
 
 For a week he endeavoured to make her see him. 
 He unlimbered his best line of anecdotes at table; 
 he talked to Hunter, to Mrs. Hunter, to Mrs. 
 Hunter's baby, a trenchant male of three summers; 
 he even tried to lure little Miss Tauser into a smile. 
 But out of Celia, for whom all the demonstrations 
 were intended, he could not win so much as the 
 flutter of a white eyelid. 
 
 At the end of a week he gave it up and decided 
 she must be shell-shocked. And it was that which 
 caused her to go about so pensive and cloudy-eyed, 
 as if wrapped in a dream.
 
 56 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 Waxing heavily sentimental within himself, he 
 called her his shell-shocked goddess. But shell- 
 shocked or not, he discovered that her face oppo- 
 site his at table was not an affliction to the eyes, 
 and he surrendered himself to the frank study of 
 that pure oval, deliciously tinted, with the long 
 fringed dark lashes and the delicate arched eye- 
 brows, under the aura of dull gold hair which she 
 wore twisted around her small shapely head like a 
 crown. 
 
 Her profile, he decided, resembled the medallion 
 head of the Maid of Verdun, a reproduction of 
 which he had bought one day at the citadel of Ver- 
 dun. There was the same firmly modelled chin 
 that obstinate little chin was the feminine replica 
 of Klaggett King's, but Sloane could not know 
 that; the same fluted lips these were Luanda's 
 gift archaic, adorable; and the same clear, fear- 
 less eyes which said : " Thou shalt not pass ! " 
 
 Thus he gazed and mused sentimentally and 
 gazed again during the age-long fortnight when 
 Celia did not look at him, save as one looks at a 
 stick of wood before putting it on the fire to burn.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 57 
 
 Nevertheless, he lost no opportunity, and he blew 
 on every little live spark of chance with all his 
 might to see if he could not thereby start a con- 
 flagration; for a conflagration was of all things 
 what he most desired. His steady humorous grey 
 eyes were never very far from her face when that 
 face was anywhere near; his long legs were always 
 ready to leap up and open the door, or to walk by 
 her side at night the few paces to her cabin; and 
 at table his pleasant voice was always ready with: 
 " Pepper, Miss King? " " Sugar, Miss King? " or 
 " It's a stunning night, Miss King. Come out and 
 look at the mountains. They've moved right up 
 into the back yard." 
 
 These remarks on his part always began or ended 
 with a little burst of laughter, for which he men- 
 tally cursed himself but could in no wise control. 
 Ever since his boyhood he had laughed when he 
 was in danger, or excited, or afraid; and in the 
 presence of Celia he was a little of all three. 
 
 In defence of Celia's unawareness three things 
 should be stated. First of all, though she was 
 neither outrageously beautiful, nor witty, nor good,
 
 58 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 she possessed that unnameable quality which made 
 men like to stick around, and leap up and open 
 doors. They had been doing it ever since she was 
 in pinafores, and the performance of Pinkney 
 Sloane was thus neither unexpected nor original. 
 In the second place, she had her father's gift of 
 complete absorption in the matter in hand. And 
 finally, in the third place, she could not for the 
 moment see Pinkney Sloane because her mind's eye 
 was filled, to the exclusion of all else, with the world 
 and the flesh and the devil. 
 
 The world was John Philip Pym, who wanted 
 her to marry him, but wanted it only with the wise, 
 cool, middle-aged moderation with which he would 
 want to play golf on a sunny afternoon. The flesh 
 was her beloved mother who wanted her to stop 
 choosing hard, live, ugly things; who wanted her 
 to stop working in the hospital, to stop fighting her 
 father, and to stop saying sarcastic things to Mr. 
 Pym ; who wanted her, in short, to give up her own 
 will and find her happiness in submission, as Lu- 
 cinda had done with Klaggett King. The devil was 
 her father, Klaggett King. And Celia was fighting
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 59 
 
 all three. The world she scorned, witH the mag- 
 nificent scornfulness of youth; the flesh she loved 
 with all her heart; and the devil, by a cynical look 
 or a caustic phrase, could turn her into his own 
 likeness, ugly, proud-willed, and hard so that she 
 was greatly afraid of him. 
 
 She had come out to this quiet spot to be by 
 herself and to think things through to the bitter 
 end. There is no bitter-ender on earth quite so 
 bitter as an earnest young woman of twenty-two. 
 It is the old ones who are the artful dodgers in 
 life. 
 
 But even at twenty-two, and even with the world 
 and the flesh and the devil all rolled into one re- 
 doubtable, horrific, scaly dragon, tail-lashing, fire- 
 splashing, the time arrives when bitter-ending ceases 
 to allure as a pastime and the mind turns lightly 
 to other things. So it was with Celia. At the end 
 of a fortnight she had about settled everything. 
 She had settled her own future an apartment 
 downtown, with a fire and a latch-key, and mother, 
 if she behaved nicely, coming in for tea. She had 
 settled her father let him cut her off with a
 
 60 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 shilling. And she had settled her luke-warm 
 elderly lover br-r-rrr ! 
 
 And having thus settled everything, and brought 
 her affairs strictly up to date, she awoke one morn- 
 ing tremendously refreshed and that was the day 
 on which she really saw Pinkney Sloane. 
 
 It was about time. Sloane had decided to go 
 back to work, and he had nailed that gloomy reso- 
 lution to the mast by riding in to the nearest sta- 
 tion and telegraphing his foreman that important 
 business still detained him in the west. Having 
 thus despatched his Magna Charta of independence 
 of women, he galloped sombrely back to the ranch, 
 reflecting contemptuously that a man who could 
 cave like that deserved the worst that could arrive. 
 After which, he returned to the important business 
 of sticking around until Celia should come alive. 
 
 And then, suddenly, as if to reward his patience, 
 Celia came very much alive all in a minute and 
 without any premonitory signs. She stepped forth 
 from her log-cabin one blazing hot mid-afternoon, 
 dressed for riding in a tan-coloured linen habit, and 
 a pair of beautifully varnished brown boots.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 6f 
 
 Those smart, lacquered little brown boots were 
 a masterpiece of French decorative art. They were 
 the kind of boots that Connie Gilchrist danced in 
 with a skipping-rope before the footlights, when 
 her feet were the toast of Londontown. They 
 were the kind of boots that Louise de la Valliere 
 wore when she rode in the forest of Fontainebleau 
 with the king. Of exquisite workmanship, they 
 were just a little more gay, just a little more auda- 
 ciously devilish, just a little more burnished and 
 flauntingly feminine than any one but a famous 
 French bootmaker could dream of or achieve. 
 
 And Sloane, who knew something of hand-made 
 boots in Paris, surmised that these must have come 
 from that celebrated maison in the Place Vendome 
 which had no sign on its door, where one entered 
 with reverence, by introduction only, commanded 
 a pair of boots, each member of which cost at least 
 fifty dollars apiece, and were delivered at the end 
 of several months, signed like a masterpiece on a 
 square of hand-embroidered silk in the lining, with 
 the name of the artist. 
 
 And Sloane's surmise was correct. But in addi-
 
 62 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 tion, in Celia's case, her boots bore a particular 
 title. For her feet had pleased the great boot- 
 maker, and upon the brocaded square which bore 
 his signature he had caused to be embroidered in 
 fine red silk the words : Petit Amour. Which sig- 
 nified, that in the estimation of the Frenchman, 
 Celia's feet were little loves. But this official cor- 
 roboration of his own private taste, Sloane did not 
 stumble across until considerably later. 
 
 At the moment he contented himself with the 
 mental comment that those boots must have cost 
 their owner not a sou less than one hundred dol- 
 lars which was going rather strong for one of 
 Uncle Sam's nurses. He was lounging on a bench 
 in front of his sleeping cabin which faced, at a 
 distance of perhaps fifty feet, the cabins of Miss 
 Tauser and Miss King. Celia, who had turned her 
 face to speak to Miss Tauser within the tatter's 
 cabin, was bareheaded, but a quirt dangled from 
 her wrist, and she carried a book in her hand. 
 
 She had the Anglo-Saxon gallant slenderness of 
 body, like the slim gracious curve of an infolded 
 bud, so different from the opulent charms of the
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 63 
 
 Latin race. As she stood, in that crystal-clear 
 mountain air, bathed in the sun's warm ruddy 
 beams which appeared to linger and become en- 
 meshed in the golden mazes of her hair, it seemed 
 to Sloane as if she were compounded, not of ordi- 
 nary flesh and blood, but of pure dazzling sunshine, 
 concentrated and shaped into the form of a girl. 
 
 She finished her conversation and turned, and 
 Sloane, who had awaited this moment for two 
 weeks, stood up and looked at her, but without a 
 smile.
 
 CHAPTER SEVEN 
 
 AND then Celia saw him. 
 
 Their eyes, intent, serious with the tremendous 
 seriousness of youth, encountered, held for a long 
 beating moment, and then the girl shifted her gaze 
 to the encircling mountains, stark granite shafts 
 and peaks and pinnacles, painted with the first 
 snow of the season. 
 
 " How gorgeous ! " she breathed. 
 
 " Not any more gorgeous than they have been 
 for the last two weeks," said Pinkney with ex- 
 treme dryness. " You haven't looked that's 
 all." 
 
 She laughed and blushed at the accusation. 
 
 " I've had a lot of things to occupy my mind," 
 she murmured defensively. 
 
 " I thought you were shell-shocked." 
 
 "Perhaps I was a little." 
 
 She threw back her head to take in once more
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 65 
 
 the lonely brooding splendour of that mighty ram- 
 part of stone. 
 
 " I concluded you didn't care for mountains," 
 said Sloane, still harping on his grievance. 
 
 " I love them," she declared enthusiastically. 
 
 " I love them too," said he. 
 
 Why was it that, with the introduction of that 
 innocent little winged word of four letters, a sud- 
 den silence fell a silence which Sloane, a certain 
 intentness in his grey eyes, employed to stare in- 
 dustriously at the girl, who with lifted chin and 
 the faintest shadow of a smile curving her lips, 
 studied the distant snow-capped peaks. 
 
 She stirred finally under his straight gaze, and 
 said, pensively: 
 
 " I wish I didn't have to leave so soon." 
 
 "Do you?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " Because " 
 
 " Because what ? " 
 
 She brought down her eyes from the mountains 
 at this, encountered the young man's with a lumi-
 
 66 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 nous flash in them, glanced away and said with 
 casual lightness: 
 
 " Oh, well, there's my nursing for one thing. 
 And there are others " She hung for a mo- 
 ment, brooding. 
 
 " My father wants me to do something " 
 
 She broke off, and then continued with a sudden 
 vehement rush : " My father wants me to do some- 
 thing I won't do, and he he's trying to bully me. 
 He's trying to break my will. He wants me he 
 wants everybody to get down on their knees. 
 He's not content until everybody submits absolutely 
 to his will. It it's horrible grotesque. And I 
 won't." She finished breathlessly, and stood frown- 
 ing at him with her Maid of Verdun face, as if she 
 visualised her father standing before her. " I 
 won't," she declared again. 
 
 " Rather not," replied Sloane, deeply interested. 
 " Don't give up the ship." 
 
 She was so confoundedly pretty when she flared 
 up like that, glowing and paling like a flame blown 
 on by the wind, that he groped for the right word 
 which should continue the delightful performance.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 67 
 
 " What does your father want you to do ? " 
 
 It was the wrong question. Celia came to her- 
 self abruptly, frowned, then laughed and said: 
 
 " Nothing much. Something that's impossible. 
 It doesn't matter except that . Well, it ex- 
 plains why I've been so blind to all this." She 
 waved a hand at the glowing landscape. " And 
 now I've decided and I'm going away." 
 
 She turned, but looked back laughingly over her 
 shoulder and murmured, " Good-bye." 
 
 He watched her walk over to the pony, which, 
 saddled, its reins flung loosely over its head, was 
 nosing among a heap of freshly felled pine logs. 
 It raised its head at her approach, nickered softly, 
 and sniffed at her pocket for the customary sugar- 
 lump. 
 
 Pinkney took two steps forward and then stood 
 stock still in his tracks. But he did not take his 
 eyes from Celia, who was bending over the pony's 
 head and uttering soft little love-sounds to the 
 effect that if a silly Honeyboy would look in her 
 right coat-pocket he would find a sugar-lump with 
 his initials inscribed thereon. It was a language
 
 68 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 which the animal seemed to comprehend, for he 
 cocked a sage ear, immediately withdrew his nose 
 from her left coat-pocket, thrust it into her right, 
 and emerged with the sweet morsel between his lips. 
 Beholding this performance, Pinkney took another 
 involuntary pace forward, and then very firmly 
 three paces to the rear, and reseated himself upon 
 his bench. 
 
 Celia transferred her book to the saddle-bag. 
 She caressed Honeyboy, rubbed her soft cheek 
 against his nose, tickled his ear by breathing into it, 
 and with meticulous attention removed a burr, a 
 nasty, prickly cockleburr, from his frowsy matted 
 bang. She then bethought herself that one of these 
 wicked prickly burrs might be under her saddle 
 blanket and press into her Honeyboy's tender flesh 
 when she mounted, so she lifted one flap after an- 
 other, and ran her hand along the underside of the 
 blanket. No prickly cockleburr materialised. The 
 pony nickered his contentment at all this sweet 
 solicitude on his behalf, and the young man con- 
 tinued to stare.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 69 
 
 Having disposed of the imaginary burr, Celia 
 decided that her stirrups were too short; she let 
 them out a notch. And now all was ready. She 
 grasped Honey boy's mane, placed one of the gleam- 
 ing petits amours in the stirrup and was about to 
 swing herself lightly up, when she heard a slight 
 exhalation. It sounded like a sigh. Was it Honey- 
 boy, who, in his lazy heart of hearts, despite sugar- 
 lumps, did not love strenuous girls ? 
 
 Arrested, Celia brought down her foot from the 
 stirrup, looked inquiringly at the pony who lazily 
 winked one eye; looked up at the clear pale sky 
 overhead, where hung a hawk, motionless, immo- 
 bile, as if suspended by an invisible wire; looked 
 around at the silent encircling hills, and so, com- 
 pleting the circuit, let her glance come to rest upon 
 Sloane, who was sitting bent forward in the attitude 
 made famous by a certain pugilist, jutting jaw 
 thrust out, and a clenched fist resting on either knee. 
 
 " Do you know," she murmured, "it's almost too 
 hot to ride to-day ! " 
 
 This was practically unconditional surrender, and
 
 70 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 he bit his lip to conceal a triumphant smile. He 
 stood up and said, " What is that book I saw you 
 tucking away?" 
 
 Celia extracted it from the saddle-bag. " It's 
 Homer," she said. 
 
 "Homer! Isn't that pretty stiff stuff for a 
 girl?" 
 
 " I expect you don't know much about girls," 
 observed Celia with a coolness that brought the 
 blood to his cheek. 
 
 " That's right I don't know a single thing," he 
 replied, while to Honeyboy he made a secret gesture 
 in the direction of his pocket which indicated to 
 that intelligent beast that girls were not the sole 
 repositories of delectable sugar lumps. Honeyboy 
 cocked an enquiring ear and Sloane nodded his head 
 and repeated the sign. Celia, her nose deep in her 
 book, appeared to search for a certain passage. 
 The pony, dragging his reins, ambled over to the 
 man's side, and the girl absent-mindedly strolled 
 beside. Honeyboy nosed in first one pocket and 
 then another, found no faintest sign of sweetness 
 but only an acrid tobacco smell, fixed his deceiver
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 71 
 
 with a mild reproachful eye, received a jovial whack 
 on the flank, and amiably roamed away. So Pink- 
 ney brought the mountain to Mahomet without ever 
 budging from where he stood. 
 
 After this, all was plain sailing. Celia still 
 searched in her book. " An old friend gave this 
 to me," she explained. " He told me that Homer 
 had said everything about this war three thousand 
 years ago." 
 
 " That listens well," he observed briefly. " But 
 it's damned silly rot. Nobody ever said it all about 
 anything, or ever will. Do you like poetry? " 
 
 "Some. Don't you?" 
 
 " Rather. I've taught it, you see." 
 
 That brought Celia's eyes out of her book, con- 
 sternation in their blue depths. " You you're a 
 teacher?" she faltered. 
 
 " Doesn't think much of teachers," he commented 
 grimly to himself. " Thinks I'm one of those 
 earnest asses that hand out recipes on life." Aloud, 
 he said, "Yes. Teacher in English Lit. Taught 
 last winter in a boys' school. I had some work I 
 wanted to do nights an invention. But I had to
 
 72 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 have some money to cover my expenses until I got 
 this other thing going and so I took that. Tem- 
 porary job. Not my real line. Yes, I like poetry 
 in its place." He paused and continued rather 
 eagerly, " Do you know that thing of Masefield, 
 ' The Dauber ' ? " 
 
 "No." 
 
 " I'd like to read it to you this afternoon." 
 
 " That," murmured Celia with a faint smile, keep- 
 ing her eyes carefully lowered, " would be rather 
 nice." 
 
 He dived into his cabin and reappeared with the 
 book and a steamer rug. " I thought of that pine 
 tree over by the river. There we have a straight 
 sweep right up to the mountain-peaks if you don't 
 mind the sun?" 
 
 Celia did not mind the sun. Silently they walked 
 over to the tree both slim, supple, and sublimely 
 self-poised; both in their twenties, yet veterans of 
 a world-war a radiant, high-flying pair. 
 
 In his exalted mood of expectation, Pinkney con- 
 sumed ten precious minutes before he could discover 
 a suitable spot to spread his rug. He even got
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 73 
 
 down on his hands and knees to clear the ground 
 of sticks and stones, while Celia leaned against the 
 tree, a tall glowing girl, head thrown back, her 
 dreaming gaze fixed on the mighty rampart of hills. 
 Presently all was arranged, she sat, Sloane stretched 
 himself at her feet, his blonde head reasonably close 
 to the petits amours, the mountains at his back, 
 opened his book, and dived abruptly into the busi- 
 ness of the day. 
 
 " You know, I'm crazy about this piece. Maybe 
 it's because it's about the sea. I love the sea. My 
 father was a sea-captain, and when he was twenty- 
 two he owned his own sailing-vessel and cruised in 
 the South Seas. He lost his ship when he was my 
 age twenty-six. It foundered in a gale and stove 
 to pieces on a coral reef. My father and most of 
 the crew were washed ashore. They said he lay 
 on the beach three days and three nights, watching 
 that ship break up, and crying like a child. They 
 couldn't budge him from the spot. And when 
 finally she went down my father swore an oath 
 he'd never own another vessel to break his heart. 
 He never did. He left the sea. You see, he loved
 
 74 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 that ship the way a man loves a woman. Can you 
 understand a man caring like that? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " So can I," said Sloane, with fine relish. 
 " That's the only way to love. Don't you think 
 so?" 
 
 " Certainly are you going to read ? " 
 
 " Oui, mademoiselle." He laughed and reddened. 
 " That was the preface introduction by Pinkney 
 Sloane to get you into the mood. Shall I let her 
 rip?" 
 
 She nodded and he began to read. He read 
 without a break for half an hour. The hot after- 
 noon sun streamed over them, bathing them and 
 all the world in a tranquil glory; above and around 
 them was the tiny droning hum of insects; and from 
 afar came the soft liquid complaint of a wood-dove. 
 Not a breath of air stirred. All nature seemed at 
 the pitch of still, burning perfection. And Pink- 
 ney, feeling the warm sun on his back through his 
 flannel shirt, intensely aware of Celia's nearness, 
 of the painted mountain peaks, and all the great, 
 live magically thrilling world about him, read those
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 75 
 
 bleak, beautiful lines of raging sombre seas and 
 cruel men with keenest delight, revelling in the con- 
 trast; narrowing his eyes as he visualised the wild, 
 boiling, writhing white seas, and the Dauber, jeered 
 by his mates, clutching with frozen fingers to the 
 rigging. 
 
 And presently, overwhelmed by the stern dark 
 beauty of it all, he looked up to share his fine emo- 
 tion with Celia. 
 
 " It's magnificent, isn't " He stopped, trans- 
 fixed, his eyes dilating in horrid astonishment. 
 
 Celia was fast asleep! 
 
 Thus ended the first day.
 
 CHAPTER EIGHT 
 
 THE second day he unfolded to Celia his scheme 
 for raising ships. But first he made her apologise 
 for going to sleep; for he argued that if she went 
 to sleep on him like that the first day of their 
 acquaintance, what on earth could he expect of her 
 after they were married ten years? It was there- 
 fore necessary to nip that bad habit in the bud while 
 it was a-budding. And this he did, characteristic- 
 ally. He tip-toed away that afternoon, leaving her 
 asleep under the tree. That night he absented him- 
 self from dinner; the next morning he absented 
 himself from breakfast; and he absented himself 
 from the midday meal. He ate in solitary confine- 
 ment in his cabin and wrote things in a shabby little 
 black notebook. 
 
 In the middle of the afternoon Celia came tapping 
 at his door, apologised, and Pinkney handsomely 
 forgave her but he permitted her to see that he 
 
 was a magnanimous man. 
 
 76
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 77 
 
 "Aren't you hungry?" she demanded. 
 "No. 
 
 'The thirst that from the soul doth rise, 
 Doth ask a drink divine/ ' 
 
 he quoted, laughing. " I beg pardon. I forgot 
 you don't care for poetry. That's old Ben Jonson. 
 He wrote it to a girl called Celia in the sixteenth 
 century. Do you suppose she went to sleep on 
 Ben?" 
 
 Celia looked at him without speaking, a spark in 
 her blue eyes. He decided not to rub it in. 
 
 " See here, Miss King," he said soberly. " I 
 want to talk to you awfully. About my work. 
 I'd like to tell you the whole scheme see how it 
 strikes you. Do you suppose you could endure 
 another afternoon without going to sleep?" 
 
 They looked at each other and laughed. 
 
 Love, that mystery of the fourth dimension, takes 
 its victims in diverse fashions. Some it steeps in 
 melancholy; some in insane jealousy; some in awful 
 solemnity or ineffable conceit. Sloane, it inocu- 
 lated with mirth. Laughter welled up from some
 
 78 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 bright and hitherto unplumbed fountain in the sec- 
 ret depths of his being; it ran over him in living 
 ripples of gaiety, and bubbled from his lips in 
 nonsensical nothings and absurd crude rhymes. 
 
 The second day, for reasons of his own, he led 
 Celia to the selfsame pine tree under which she had 
 slumbered the day before. And Celia, also for 
 reasons of her own, had discarded her knickers and 
 petits amours for slippers and a gown of soft gray- 
 ish, pinkish mauve, delicate as the gossamer mists, 
 shot through by the final rays of the sun, which 
 floated down the valley in the twilight. This time 
 Pinkney had brought with him, not poetry, but a 
 quantity of papers, figures, and water-colour charts. 
 
 " I'm going to lay this whole proposition before 
 you just like a deck of cards," he began, " and when 
 I get through, I'd like you to tell me exactly what 
 you think. In a nutshell, my scheme centres round 
 a new method for raising ships sunken ships. It 
 is my own idea, and the instruments are my own 
 inventions. You remember I told you yesterday 
 about my father, the sea-captain? Well, after he 
 told me of losing that vessel of his, I got to dream-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 79 
 
 ing, as kids will, about that foundered ship down 
 at the bottom of the sea. And that started me off 
 on all the rest of the lost ships that must be down 
 beneath the waves. I saw them as plain as day- 
 light, all kinds of craft packets, and slavers, and 
 coasters and clippers, big fore-and-aft, and three- 
 masted schooners, great steamers of the line, little 
 trawlers and smacks, lying keeled over on the floor 
 of the sea I figured that floor as a kind of wet, 
 sloppy, sea-weedy beach or imbedded deep in the 
 sand, while sharks swam in and out of the port- 
 holes. I used to dream about those ships and wish 
 I was a shark down there! And I suppose I drew 
 a thousand pictures of my father's ship, which he 
 told me had lifted suddenly and gone down by the 
 head. Here's one done when I was nine." 
 
 The picture, drawn with a heavy downright pencil 
 on cheap, blue-ruled exercise-paper, represented a 
 two-masted schooner, rigged fore and aft, capsized, 
 and impaled by its mainmast on the bottom of the 
 sea. Amidships in the hull, was a squat figure 
 lying stiffly asprawl, with bubbles ascending dramat- 
 ically from its mouth, to indicate it was being
 
 8o THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 drowned. Beneath, in scraggly capitals, was the 
 legend : 
 
 " Schooner ISABEL. Commanded by Captain 
 J. A. Sloane. Foundered in a gale off the Solomon 
 Isles, and all the crew saved but Joe, the cook, who 
 was below in the galley, soused." 
 
 Celia studied it, smiling, her bright head bent. 
 
 " Well," he continued, " all that was crude, raw, 
 kid-stuff. Dreams. But it was the kick-off my 
 father's wrecked ship. So I decided I'd salvage 
 ships. And pretty early in the game I decided that 
 this whole business of raising ships had to be sim- 
 plified. It was too complicated, old-fashioned, and 
 expensive. The cost of raising a ship ate up most 
 of the profits, so that in the majority of cases it 
 wasn't worth while. 
 
 " So what I went after was some apparatus that 
 was simple, effective, and cheap. I kept hammer- 
 ing away on my experiments, and when the war 
 broke out I had about perfected my invention. It's 
 in two parts. First, I invented a machine to burrow 
 through the sand under the ship in order to get 
 lifting-cables under the wreck. Then I invented
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 81 
 
 collapsible balloons that I attached to the lifting 
 cables on either side of the vessel. When they are 
 all in place, the wrecking-outfit on the surface be- 
 gins to pump the balloons full of air, and as they 
 fill, they begin to exert lifting-power until the point 
 is reached when they lift more weight than the 
 ship. And then up she comes! Here are some 
 drawings to show exactly how it is done." 
 
 Celia looked, questioned and listened while he 
 explained every detail. 
 
 " It's all very wonderful," she breathed at last. 
 " And so simple I wonder somebody didn't think 
 
 of it long ago. But " She stopped, blushing 
 
 brightly. 
 
 "But what?" he urged. "Go on. Shoot." 
 
 " Does does it work ? " 
 
 He smiled tolerantly. 
 
 " I'm coming to that presently. But first I 
 wanted you to get hold of the two main ideas. 
 They're both patented, of course. I was just on 
 the point of forming a company when the war came 
 and knocked me flat. I was gassed, had pneu- 
 monia and influenza, and came home sick and dead
 
 82 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 broke. I was offered the chance to teach literature 
 in a boys' private school. As it was an easy job 
 after what I'd been through it seemed like heaven 
 and gave me spare time to work on my scheme, I 
 grabbed it with both hands. 
 
 "After I'd saved up a bit, though, I cut loose, 
 went to New York, and made some proposals to the 
 biggest marine insurance company in the city. 
 They investigated the matter thoroughly, and 
 finally offered to buy my inventions outright. But 
 Gilmore, the president of the company, took a fancy 
 to me, and he advised me privately not to sell out, 
 but to go ahead and form an independent company, 
 and he'd back me with his influence and some cash. 
 Which he did. 
 
 " I started the Sloane Salvage Company, and Gil- 
 more bought ten thousand shares of stock at a dollar 
 a share. I'll tell you, Celia " the name dropped 
 unconsciously, " the day I received the letter con- 
 taining that check I felt proud as the Iron Duke 
 when he received the news of the victory at Water- 
 loo. For Gilmore has a business head hard enough 
 to break the tablets of stone. And I knew if I
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 83 
 
 could swing him, I could swing all the rest. He'd 
 sent experts and practical wreckers down to my 
 office, and I'd explained and demonstrated my ap- 
 pliances thirteen ways from the ace. When he was 
 convinced, he sent out letters to all his marine in- 
 surance companies strongly recommending me and 
 asking them to throw wrecking jobs my way. Well, 
 after that, of course, things began to drift in my 
 direction. 
 
 " Gilmore interested a few of his banker friends 
 in me. They sent around financial agents and in- 
 vestigated me all over again. One or two of the 
 brokerage firms, undoubtedly tipped off by Gilmore, 
 suggested my stock to their clients as a good gamble 
 and I chopped loose a few more thousands from 
 them. Of course, it was Gilmore's weight and 
 Gilmore's high standing in the marine mercantile 
 world that has given me my start. I realise that. 
 Without his help, I'd be like one of my own deflated 
 pontoons. But he believed in me, and he's made 
 other men believe. So that part of the struggle is 
 done. 
 
 " Now I have a small plant that can turn out a
 
 84 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 dozen or so pontoons a week, and some old deep-sea 
 salts to cut and sew the canvas and splice the ropes 
 for the balloons. And every man-jack of them has 
 invested money in the concern! Of course, all 
 that's only a drop in the bucket, financially, but it's 
 their faith in me that counts. I've paid cash for 
 everything as I've gone along and I don't owe a 
 man a cent. 
 
 " Last month I came to the parting of the ways. 
 It was like this. I could go limping along in- 
 definitely, selling off a small block of stock now and 
 then as my expenses required; or I could do as 
 Gilmore advised, borrow a big lump sum, shove on 
 full speed ahead in my factory, raise a ship this 
 autumn, and demonstrate to all the world what the 
 Sloane Salvage Company can do. After that, if 
 it's successful, orders will flow in. In fact, I've 
 got some little beauties in my order-book right now. 
 The stock will jump five, ten, twenty points inside 
 of a year. After that all aboard the millionaire 
 express ! 
 
 " Gilmore has some big ideas of starting sister- 
 companies in London and Peking I won't go into
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 85 
 
 all that just now. But what I want to ask you is 
 this : Shall I take the long slow road, continuing as 
 a one-horse concern and keeping the whole business 
 under my own hat, so to speak or shall I take the 
 short cut, and borrow as Gilmore suggests? What 
 do you say ? " 
 
 Celia, looking up into his glowing eyes, perceived 
 that he had already made his decision, and, man- 
 like, wanted from her, not criticism, but confirma- 
 tion, applause. Nevertheless, she brooded so long, 
 her gaze fixed straight ahead, that at length he 
 stirred restlessly, and exclaimed, half -humorously, 
 half -aggrieved : 
 
 "Well Miss Sceptic! What is it? Am I a 
 fraud? You're harder to convert than Gilmore." 
 
 But still Celia brooded. At length she brought 
 her gaze down from the distant peaks; her serious 
 eyes lit full upon him; they were filled with soft 
 latent fire. For the first time in her young life she 
 was setting her own will absolutely aside and try- 
 ing to think what was good for this man. 
 
 " It's all so wonderful," she breathed at last, 
 " that I can scarcely take it in. Give me time. To
 
 86 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 think it all started from this ! " She gazed down 
 at the crude, boyish sketch of the schooner Isabel 
 which she still held in her hand. " It's like coming 
 to the end of a long pilgrimage." She paused, then 
 continued hesitatingly, " But if you borrow, won't 
 you have to meet a lot of tests ? " 
 
 " I've met all those tests," he returned proudly. 
 
 " And you'd probably have to borrow the money 
 from some bank ? " 
 
 " Yes but not directly. I'm leaving somebody 
 else to negotiate the loan. Somebody who knows 
 the financial game and can make good terms for 
 me. For I'm going to keep the control. Don't 
 you think I am right?" 
 
 " Of course. It's your idea." A smile hovered 
 about her mouth as she contemplated his square 
 jaw. " But I can't conceive anybody overriding 
 you." 
 
 " They'd better not try." He laughed, and added 
 soberly, " Though I've had my black days. Days 
 when I'd have sold out, lock, stock, and barrel, dol- 
 lar for dollar of what I'd put in. For there are 
 days, when the idea is still half in and half out of
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 87 
 
 your head, that torture and torment you and 
 stretch you on the rack ; days when details go wrong 
 or when you run short of cash and you go without 
 your supper or hock your overcoat in order to pay 
 a bill; days when all the world seems to mock at 
 you for a crazy dreamer and you wonder why in 
 God's name you keep on hanging on. It's not any 
 one thing in particular that overrides you then; it's 
 bitter stark reality it's life itself. And it's only 
 a kind of damned black fighting obstinacy that car- 
 ries you through. That's one reason I won't let 
 the control of this company out of my hands. I've 
 fought for it and it's mine." 
 
 Their eyes met; a sudden luminous flash passed 
 between them. Celia, with heightened colour, 
 glanced away. 
 
 " But won't the banks, if they lend you money, 
 want a controlling interest ? " she demanded after 
 a pause. 
 
 " They may want but they won't get. They 
 can't force me to accept their terms. I can still 
 plug along with my one-horse show." 
 
 " I wish you would do just that ! " she murmured
 
 88 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 in a low voice. " When I think of the others, I 
 I have a sinking of the heart. What do you know 
 about about the financial game? " She was think- 
 ing of her father, and her eyes darkened. " Why, 
 they could swallow you alive and you'd never 
 know! Why don't you continue as you've begun, 
 and keep everything, as you said, under your own 
 hat?" 
 
 "Why don't I?" he laughed. "Because I've 
 got a speed-streak, a get-rich-quick streak in me 
 just like all Americans. Why does everybody ride 
 in flivvers these days, instead of going afoot or 
 plugging along lazily behind the old grey mare? 
 Because they want to get there faster. Get where ? 
 They don't know and don't care ! They've caught 
 the speed-bug. Well, so have I. I want to get 
 there, and get there as fast as I can. As a matter 
 of fact," he continued seriously, " there's no more 
 intrinsic risk in the flight of a swallow than there 
 is in the pace of a snail; it's simply a case of being 
 fitted for what you intend to do. And in this 
 company of mine, the whole question boils down to 
 one thing: either it's a sound financial risk or it's
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 89 
 
 not. If it's good, I can as readily borrow fifty 
 thousand dollars as I can five. Well, it's already 
 been decided that I'm a good risk, and it's been 
 decided by a firm whose word goes with any bank 
 in the country the firm of Klaggett King."
 
 CHAPTER NINE 
 
 SLOANE, busily engaged in restoring the drawings 
 and maps to his portfolio, did not mark Celia's 
 great start, nor the sudden silence which fell upon 
 his remark. 
 
 Perfectly white, she stared at him with wide, 
 dilated eyes. This new complication knocked her 
 flat To be sure, she had never denied that she 
 was the daughter of KJaggett King, but neither had 
 she affirmed the fact. To the Hunters she had 
 simply been Miss King, professional nurse. Her 
 social background, who she was or where she came 
 from, she argued, had nothing to do with her job; 
 and hitherto, with considerable satisfaction not 
 altogether free from youthful romance, she had 
 managed to keep the two in separate water-tight 
 compartments and she meant to continue doing so. 
 It was not her intention that Pinkney Sloane should 
 know that she was the daughter of Klaggett King; 
 
 90
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 91 
 
 at any rate, not at present. Just why she was con- 
 cealing that fact she scarcely knew, save that she 
 desired intensely to be herself, and she clung, with 
 a kind of high fierce seriousness at which Lucinda 
 would have laughed, to an identity which she had 
 created by herself. She had made herself a nurse, 
 just as Pinkney Sloane had made his inventions; 
 and she had made good, even as he had. Well, 
 then, she had a right to control her identity, which 
 she had created, just as he had a right to control the 
 business which he had created out of his own head. 
 And her identity required, so it seemed to her in 
 that flashing minute, that he should not know her 
 relationship to Klaggett King. To tell him right 
 
 now, just when everything No, no, it was 
 
 impossible Things must be kept simple 
 
 At least until after 
 
 Thoughts like these went streaking like bright 
 fireflies through the confusion of her mind, as she 
 sat, hands clasped tightly in her lap, and stared 
 hard at the westering sun which was bathing all the 
 land in its languid glory. Not Klaggett King's 
 own chin was squarer than his daughter's in this
 
 92 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 beating moment of decision; it fairly jutted with 
 determination. 
 
 " Klaggett King," Sloane continued, all uncon- 
 sciously, " is a big man. I don't like him. For 
 that matter, he doesn't like me. But I can see he is 
 big." He glanced up with a sudden laugh : " He's 
 not by any chance related to you? " 
 
 By this time she had herself in hand. 
 
 " He might be," she parried coolly. " The King 
 family in America is a fairly large connection, 
 though. Tell me about your Klaggett King, and 
 I'll claim him if he's nice." 
 
 " Nice that's a regular girl-word ! " he jeered. 
 " No, I wouldn't say ' nice ' was the word to describe 
 Klaggett King. He's tall and black and emaciated, 
 with a big heavy nose, a wide mouth that twists 
 off to one side, and deep burning eyes which are 
 always slightly bloodshot. I've seen eyes like that 
 on our men up on the line when they were exhausted 
 and couldn't sleep. I can't explain it except by 
 saying that they're violent eyes and yet sort of 
 agonised. No matter what he says, and he's always 
 cracking some sardonic joke he has a humour like
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 93 
 
 a two-edged sword you always go back to that 
 dark little flame in his eye. Gilmore says he's the 
 most feared man in Wall Street." 
 
 Celia made an inarticulate sound in her throat. 
 
 " I wish you wouldn't borrow any money," she 
 said, steadying her voice with an effort. 
 
 " Oh, that's all right," he affirmed easily. " It's 
 all arranged now, except signing the agreement- 
 papers." 
 
 " And did my f did Mr. King treat you well ? " 
 
 For the first time he threw her a sharp glance. 
 
 " What do you mean by well ? " he retorted gaily. 
 " Do you mean, did he embrace me like a French- 
 man and kiss me on both cheeks? He did not. 
 King's not the kissing kind. But we lunched to- 
 gether one day. He wanted to take my measure, 
 I suppose. And when he shook hands with me 
 it was the first time we'd met face to face, though 
 we'd spoken over the telephone he said: 
 
 ' Well, young man so this is you ! I've heard 
 big things about you, from Gilmore. He seems to 
 think the shipping in the Hudson is in danger from 
 the fires of your great intellect ! '
 
 94 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 Sloane grinned ruefully. 
 
 " That's the kind of stuff he pulls. He carves 
 your head straight off without ever batting an eye. 
 Before that lunch was over he'd riddled me with 
 questions, and he knew as much about my company 
 as I did. Then we took a whack at other things 
 the war, peace, industry, destiny, free will I don't 
 know what all. He's deep. To talk with him is 
 a liberal education in the kind of a man I wouldn't 
 want to be." 
 
 "Why?" she cried, startled. 
 
 " I don't know," he confessed frankly. " I 
 haven't got his formula. Though he had mine 
 inside of the first half hour! I think he's sick. 
 Sick in his head, I mean. My father used to have 
 a saying : ' Keep your head cool and your heart 
 warm.' I suspect Klaggett King's been so busy 
 keeping his brain on ice that he's achieved a refrig- 
 erated heart. But I may be wrong. Anyhow, it's 
 not my affair." 
 
 Celia fought an obscure sinking of the heart. 
 
 " And is it all arranged so that you can't with- 
 'draw?" she pressed.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 95 
 
 " On the contrary, I can pull out any time right 
 up to the last minute when I set my signature to 
 the agreement terms. But I don't intend to pull 
 out." He laughed, nodding reassuringly at her 
 grave clouded face. " Neither do I intend to fail." 
 
 "Why did you come up here?" she queried 
 abruptly. 
 
 " I blew up," he explained with a short laugh. 
 " Before the war I used to be as tough as pig-iron. 
 I could stand any amount of stress. But since I've 
 been gassed, I get groggy under a prolonged strain. 
 And these last few months I've been working about 
 twenty-five hours out of the twenty-four. I've been 
 inventor and manager and sales-agent and publicity 
 man, all rolled into one, with a dozen different kinds 
 of troubles pestering me at once. It was like fight- 
 ing a swarm of man-eating mosquitoes that are 
 bound to have your blood; you slap one on your 
 wrist and the next second you feel another chewing 
 off your right ear. 
 
 " And one morning, after I'd finished with Klag- 
 gett King's men, I woke up and decided it wasn't 
 worth while getting out of bed. I was dog-tired.
 
 96 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 I wanted nothing so much as to fade right out of 
 the picture and stay faded for a couple of eons or 
 so." 
 
 " Were you alone ? " 
 
 "The alonest man on the face of the globe! I 
 was stopping in a cheap lodging downtown, in a 
 dreary, drab little cell of a bedroom as bleak and 
 pinched as a miser's soul. 
 
 "There was a coloured maid, Annie, whom I 
 subsidised to bring up my food. I'd peel off a 
 dollar bill from my thin wad, hand it to Annie, and 
 she'd presently return with a chipped soup-plate of 
 tepid slop, dotted all over the top with big pale 
 islands of grease like an archipelago. I figured that 
 Annie must have realised about a thousand percent 
 net profit on her investment. It made me think 
 that what Klaggett King once said about life being 
 a bear-pit was true. For I knew to an absolute 
 dead certainty that if I passed in my checks in that 
 horrible frozen little cell, Annie would frisk my 
 pants for my wad before reporting my demise 
 downstairs. And yet Annie was a pretty good 
 scout, at that according to her lights."
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 97 
 
 "Don't!" she murmured in suffocated tones. 
 " I I can't bear it ! To think of you alone ill 
 in that ghastly place." 
 
 Her hand dropped to her side and lit, by merest 
 accident on his, palm downward, soft and warm. 
 In a flash his hand turned and bade the newcomer 
 welcome to the city, in a clasp gentle and strong. 
 But their eyes avoided encounter. Pinkney's, very 
 wide and a glowing grey, were fastened on a .distant 
 pinnacle; Celia's, blue as a hyacinth, were glued to 
 the twin peak. 
 
 Down in the floor of the valley, gathering violet 
 mists were beginning to contend with the day; but 
 in the upper sky and on the summits of the moun- 
 tains a vivid orange glow still lingered in the mag- 
 ical air. From afar, subdued yet poignant, sounded 
 the liquid lament of the wood-dove. 
 
 Still accidentally retaining that which had been 
 accidentally bestowed on him, Pinkney continued 
 his narrative. But now he stammered ever so 
 slightly. 
 
 " I didn't bear it very well, either," said he. 
 " And finally, one day I staggered down the stairs,
 
 98 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 light-headed as the deuce, and found my way to a 
 doctor. He informed me I'd been under a severe 
 strain, and I paid him five dollars for the news. 
 
 " Then I drifted over to the station, climbed 
 aboard a west-bound train, and kept on going, peer- 
 ing out of the window every now and again to see 
 if I liked the looks of the scenery well enough to 
 stop off. Finally, I came to this wild, scraggy 
 country, with those big silent sentinels up yonder 
 keeping watch and guard, and I got down at a 
 station and negotiated with a man to fetch me 
 here. 
 
 " At first I thought it was blind chance that 
 landed me out in these hills. Then you came and 
 I saw that the Annies of this world are all a part 
 of the eternal design. For the last time she brought 
 up the soup, she upset it, grease archipelago and all, 
 and baptised me in bed. After she'd gone, I flipped 
 a coin: heads to kill Annie, tails to leave town. 
 Tails won and now I know, so did I. And when 
 I return, I'm going to make her a gift." 
 
 " For spilling the soup in your bed ? " 
 
 " For an oblation to the blind gods. Can't you
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 99 
 
 see that the spilling of that soup in my bed was the 
 real turning-point in my career ? " 
 
 "Isn't that Miss Tauser beckoning?" she mur- 
 mured suddenly. " Yes, it is." She sprang up 
 and stood shielding her eyes under a small curved 
 palm, rendered rosily translucent by the dying fires 
 of the day. 
 
 Sloane rose too and stood watching her with 
 narrowed eyes. Never again would he be able to 
 see her in quite the same clear, independent, radiant 
 light as that in which he beheld her now. 
 
 For there is a dead-line in love. Up to a certain 
 point, the lover is able to perceive with a clear, a 
 cool, and even a calculating eye. Then emotion 
 seizes him, pushes him over the line and he is 
 a lost soul. The beloved object is too near, too 
 intensely felt, to be visualised with any degree of 
 veracity. 
 
 And so Pinkney, with his eager heels on the dead- 
 line, was beholding Celia, as she actually was, inde- 
 pendent of him, independent of love, for the last 
 time. It was hail and farewell. Hail sweet, 
 warm, flesh-and-blood girl! Hail love! Hail
 
 ioo THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 wife! Hail care, responsibility, death, and birth 
 and miserable pain! Farewell all those bright 
 images and winged dreams that haunt the pillow 
 of heady youth. Farewell Romance! Hail 
 Reality ! 
 
 It was possible that deep within him, Sloane 
 glimpsed something of all this, for he had imagina- 
 tion too much, sometimes. . . . Perhaps that was 
 why he stared so hard at her and even swept his 
 gaze around the encircling hills, as if to stamp for- 
 ever this precious souvenir upon the tablets of his 
 memory. 
 
 "It's letters," murmured Celia. "See she's 
 waving them." 
 
 He started forward. " I'll get them." 
 
 But Celia, for reasons of her own, objected to 
 this. 
 
 " I'll race you," she cried, and she flashed by 
 him, while he stood still to watch her slim loveli- 
 ness in flight, won the goal, and took the letters 
 from Miss Tauser's hand. 
 
 " One for you and one for me." 
 
 She flushed as she marked the handwriting on
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 101 
 
 his envelope, forwarded from his New York ad- 
 dress, for it was identical with that upon her own; 
 and both were in the unmistakeable calligraphy of 
 Mr. Pym. 
 
 "Forwarded from New York, eh?" commented 
 Pinkney, thrusting the letter into his pocket 
 " That's from Pym. He'll keep. It's from Klag- 
 gett King's partner," he elucidated. " Funny old 
 cock! Writes all his letters out in longhand at 
 night in his office after the stenographer has gone 
 home. Says it rests his brain." 
 
 "What do you think of him?" she looked up 
 suddenly from the opening paragraph of her letter 
 to demand. They were standing so close that their 
 shoulders touched, but he had thrown back his head 
 to gaze at the red and naked sun which was just 
 dropping behind a smother of sanguinary clouds. 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 " That man Klaggett King's partner ? " 
 
 Had Pinkney looked at that minute he would 
 have seen her face glowing like the evening sky. 
 But his eyes were still intent on the fiery ruin in 
 the west, and he murmured easily :
 
 102 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 " Oh, he'll do." 
 
 "Do what?" 
 
 " Oh, anything Klaggett King says. What do 
 you want to know?" and he bent his head to her 
 with a smile. 
 
 " Nothing in particular," she stammered. " But 
 
 I thought That is you gave such a vivid 
 
 impression of your Mr. King, and I : Well, I 
 just thought I'd like to hear about this other man." 
 
 " I see," he said, dryly ; and it was a very flushed 
 and scowling young man who hurriedly withdrew 
 his eyes from her and stared once more at the 
 darkening pile of clouds. 
 
 " Miss King," he blurted out, " I expect you 
 think I'm the star-spangled limit, gassing on about 
 people I really don't know anything about." He 
 seemed to be having some difficulty with his w r ords ; 
 he swallowed and gulped, and his face was dark 
 as a thunder-cloud. " I I don't know Mr. King 
 and as for this Pym, I only saw him once. I 
 He drew a breath, muttered a smothered " Oh 
 hell ! " between clenched teeth, and bolted away.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 103 
 
 Celia started after him in utter amazement, her 
 eyes round and very blue. 
 
 " Well ! " she gasped finally, turning to Miss 
 Tauser. "What happened ?" 
 
 But Miss Tauser only shrugged her meagre 
 shoulders, smiled a smile of slow malice, and stalked 
 back to the ranch. 
 
 A word about Miss Tauser. In her horoscope, 
 she came under the sign of Scorpio, the scorpion, 
 and she was cast as the spiller of many beans. She 
 was one of those little elderly spinsters of whom 
 Stevenson said that they could not hear a man 
 laugh without feeling their virginity endangered. 
 For this drab, mouse-like little old maid harboured 
 within her the unshakeable conviction that all men 
 were indecent, outrageous Bluebeards of secret 
 iniquity and vice. No man smiled in her presence 
 but she imputed to him ferocious sinister designs. 
 No man performed for her a casual, trifling service, 
 that little Miss Tauser, twittering with feverish ex- 
 citement, did not that night search under her bed 
 and through the closet to see if the devilish monster
 
 204 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 had not concealed himself there in order to leap 
 out upon her in the middle of the night. 
 
 It will be seen that in a world swarming with 
 men, ice-men, mail-men, coal-men, milk-men, police- 
 men to mention just a few all of whom were apt 
 to be kind to an elderly grey-haired little creature 
 with scared-rabbit eyes, that Miss Tauser lived a 
 life of lurid mental adventure that would have 
 brought the blush of envy to the hardened features 
 of the buccaneers of the Spanish Main. 
 
 It was therefore natural that she should distrust 
 Pinkney and all his works. From the very first day 
 after their arrival she had watched him with the 
 deep, glinting immobility with which a cat watches 
 a mouse-hole, ready to pounce at the slightest sign. 
 
 Having observed the trend of events until she 
 was satisfied, Miss Tauser entered her cabin one 
 afternoon, locked the window, barred the door, re- 
 mained an hour in secret toil, rode over to the 
 station the following morning and shot her bolt. 
 
 She could therefore afford to smile with slow 
 malice at Pinkney and stalk in triumph away. But 
 Celia was deeply disturbed. She walked thought-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 105 
 
 fully back to her cabin, Mr. Pym's open letter for- 
 gotten in her hand. 
 
 Sloane remained invisible the rest of the day, and 
 rose the next morning at dawn and rode away. 
 Celia, who had slept fitfully, hearing voices in the 
 early morning twilight, flung on a sleeveless smock 
 of silky gauze, tiptoed to her cabin window, nipped 
 the curtains discreetly beneath her chin, peered out, 
 and beheld him crowding Honeyboy to a gallop 
 headed for the state road. 
 
 A sudden sharp pang assailed her, startling her 
 with its flash of revelation.
 
 CHAPTER TEN 
 
 ALL that day the skies wept, softly, continuously, 
 and the landscape, sombre as a beautiful, dark, 
 brooding woman, was hidden under a fringe of 
 clinging mist. And all that day Celia wandered 
 about like one in a dream. What is love? Is it 
 simply a more intent look a sudden deepening of 
 vision? How is it that an individual whom one 
 has never marked before, or marked merely as a 
 shell, a simulacrum, or a respectable dummy stuffed 
 with straw, changes on a sudden into a bright, 
 irradiated being, wig-wagging breathless, soul- 
 thrilling messages with the single flash of an 
 eye? 
 
 These and a hundred kindred questions Celia 
 pondered pensively and surrendered herself to the 
 pleasure of taking out and perusing her mental 
 portraits of Sloane. She discovered she had quite 
 a collection. There was Pinkney as she had first 
 
 106
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 107 
 
 beheld him, sitting on the bench before his cabin, 
 solemn to sullenness, his brows ridged, one fist on 
 either knee. There was Pinkney struggling gallantly 
 to chase away that scared-rabbit look from Miss 
 Tauser's eyes. There was an indecent Pinkney, 
 rocking with live laughter at some outrageous joke 
 of Hunter's which she was not permitted to hear. 
 A somewhat pale Pinkney this was the prize of the 
 collection holding her hand in a strong warm clasp, 
 his eyes glued to the distant hills. 
 
 Discreet inquiries elicited the information that 
 Mr. Sloane had not departed forever ; he had simply 
 decamped for the day. Discovering this at the tail 
 end of the afternoon, Celia settled herself before a 
 smouldering log fire in the main cabin and gave 
 herself up to the perusal of the forgotten letter of 
 Mr. Pym. 
 
 Feeling vaguely sorry for him, she wrote him a 
 long friendly reply, painting in lively colours the 
 mountains, her solitary rambles and rides; and in 
 all, creating, quite unconsciously, such an alluring 
 picture of beauty cast away on a desert isle that 
 Pym, reading it some days later in his comfortable
 
 io8 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 downtown eyrie, high above the windy canyon of 
 Wall Street, was smitten with a sudden mad desire 
 to chuck his dry-as-dust duties, catch a west-bound 
 train, and take a shot at roughing it a deux with 
 Celia in the wilds. 
 
 But he restrained his ardour, for he hated un- 
 expectedness as he hated crumbs in his bed. Mr. 
 Pym was not one of those who found the taste of 
 adventure sweet upon the tongue. So he whittled 
 down his unruly desires to a safe and sane reason- 
 ableness, and commanded his secretary to go out 
 and choose Miss King a book. 
 
 The day drew in to its moody close, and still 
 Sloane did not appear. Celia retired, deeply won- 
 dering and subdued. Snuggled soft in her bed, 
 with the patter of rain beating on the shingles, and 
 the round red ising-glass eye of the sheet-iron stove 
 blinking lazily at her through the warm dark, she 
 surrendered herself to drifting dreams, vaguely 
 melancholy, vaguely pleasurable. 
 
 She was suddenly wakened in the dead of night, 
 as it seemed to her, by laughter and voices. It 
 was Sloane's warm laughter and Hunter's admon-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 109 
 
 ishing voice. With a flutter at her heart, Celia 
 raised on one elbow to listen. 
 
 " It was a damn risky thing to do," came Hunter's 
 sober tones. " You had drunken man's luck. 
 Those mountain trails get so slick in the rain, what 
 with loose shale and clay, that the best animal alive 
 is apt to lose his footing." 
 
 " We slid once all right," laughed Pinkney, " and 
 I thought we were headed straight for kingdom- 
 come. The trail was so steep I thought we'd tumble 
 end over end. Presently we scrambled around a 
 turn and came out on an apron of smooth wet 
 shelving granite, lying at an angle of about forty- 
 five degrees, where a shoulder of the mountain had 
 sheared off with the frost. Honeyboy snorted and 
 turned and nipped me on the knee for getting him 
 into such a fix. Then he crouched with his feet 
 so close together that I could almost hold them in 
 my hand, and we took off like greased lightning, 
 and came up against a young sapling that Honeyboy 
 had picked for a goal. If we'd missed that sapling, 
 instead of talking to you, I'd now be explaining 
 my case to Saint Peter at the gate."
 
 I io THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 With a final laugh, he slammed his cabin-door. 
 For a long time Celia lay staring with wide eyes 
 into the dark. Her heart contracted painfully. A 
 big powerful hand seemed to have gripped it in a 
 vise-like hold, and the new, strange dolour squeezed 
 sudden tears out of her eyes. So he had gone off 
 mountain-climbing in the rain . . . for amuse- 
 ment . . . and without her. . . . What strange 
 beings were men! To prefer a mountain to a 
 girl! . . . 
 
 There is a tide in the affairs of women, which, 
 taken at the flood, leads on to fits of tears. So it 
 was with Celia. The fountains in the deeps of her 
 suddenly broke up with a rush, and she began to 
 weep to weep with a wild, passionate violence 
 which surprised even herself. 
 
 Just why she gave way at this particular juncture, 
 she herself could not have coherently told ; but once 
 begun, she followed a system. It was a system she 
 had built up from childhood. And now she wept, 
 not only over Pinkney's defection for it is a 
 defection, in the eyes of twenty-two, to prefer a 
 mountain to a maid but also over all the other
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER ill 
 
 untoward events which had happened to her for 
 months, and which she had been too busy to bother 
 with at the time; events over which other girls of 
 less stern stuff would have cried their eyes out, but 
 which Celia had merely tossed into the back of her 
 mind with the mental tag : " This is awful. Cry 
 over this sometime ! " So now, once the tears had 
 forced their way to the surface, Celia let herself go, 
 gathered up all her hitherto unwept- for troubles, 
 enumerated them, and cried over them one by one. 
 She began with Mr. Pym in order, perhaps, to 
 get him out of the way. She cried because she 
 could not love him, and because he was not the type 
 of man a girl was apt to love. Then she cried over 
 her father's ugly temper. She cried because she 
 fought him back. Then she circled wider, and 
 cried over the wounded men in her ward, poor 
 broken bodies, that never would mend in this world. 
 She cried for the men who had died, who had given 
 their lives for a faith, a shining vision of freedom, 
 which, so far as she could see, nobody cared for 
 any more. She cried because, here in America, 
 nobody now seemed to care for these dead. . . .
 
 112 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 She was now far from her original starting-point 
 and still going strong, sobbing aloud as if her heart 
 would break, when suddenly there came a firm 
 double knock at the door. 
 
 " Miss King can I can I do anything for 
 you?" 
 
 It was Sloane's voice, firm and reassuring as his 
 knock. 
 
 Celia was silent. 
 
 " I went out to see if Honey boy was under shelter. 
 I rode him pretty hard to-day. Returning, I passed 
 
 your cabin and heard sounds as if as if Are 
 
 you ill?" 
 
 " I was crying," said Celia, suddenly resolving 
 on the truth at least that particular portion of the 
 truth which was true at that particular portion of 
 time. " I was crying over our soldiers who died 
 over there and because nobody over here seems to 
 care. Do you remember how it used to r-r-rain 
 
 r-r-rain r-r-rain " her voice ran off into a sob 
 
 " at their poor, bleak little funerals ? " 
 
 " Don't cry any more," his voice came very earn-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 113 
 
 estly through the door. " They're all right, you 
 know. They've done their job. They've fought 
 the good fight; they have finished the course; they 
 have kept the faith. They're the real victors in 
 this war. They wouldn't want you to cry about 
 them." 
 
 " I know." 
 
 " Then promise me you won't." 
 
 "All right. I won't. I'd about finished any- 
 how." 
 
 "That's good." There was a smothered note 
 bf laughter in his voice. " Good night." 
 
 "Good night-o!" 
 
 In five minutes Celia was fast asleep, her lashes 
 still wet as the drowned grass of an inundated 
 meadow. But her lips curved upward in a smile. 
 
 As for Sloane, when he regained his cabin, still 
 laughing, he said aloud, presumably to his own 
 soul: 
 
 " I'm going to marry that girl if it's the last 
 thing I do ! " And he was glad he had gone up 
 into the mountain for a decision.
 
 ii4 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 The following afternoon, which was the fourth, 
 they again betook themselves to the tree, and seated 
 under it, they settled the affairs of the world. They 
 finished off the war, the after-war materialism, and 
 above all the sins of the reactionary, hide-bound, 
 and muddling elder generation which had brought 
 these evils to pass. And when Celia waxed too 
 severe, Pinkney, in a spirit of impartial justice, 
 went to the bat on both sides, contending manfully, 
 clinching his points with a : "Do you see that ? 
 Well call that Reason A. Now let's look at Rea- 
 son B," while Celia, chin in hand, her eyes blue as 
 cobalt, listened with profound attention, dissented, 
 or agreed. At the close of the day Pinkney was 
 somewhat hoarse and Celia had achieved a sunburnt 
 nose; but they both agreed, with high seriousness, 
 that it was indispensable to go into those problems 
 occasionally, and think them straight through to 
 the bitter end. 
 
 " I loathe these vague, fuzzy-minded old chuckle- 
 heads, who never check themselves up," declared 
 Sloane. 
 
 " So do I," affirmed Celia. " That's why I came
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 115 
 
 out here to the ranch to think things thoroughly 
 through." 
 
 " That's why I went off yesterday," he contrib- 
 uted. " I wanted to think." 
 
 Celia did not comment on this, and after a momen- 
 tary wait he continued, labouring slightly : " You 
 see, I've got to get back on my job. So I've decided 
 to beat it to-morrow night on the ten o'clock Over- 
 land." 
 
 He paused and turned to look at her, but she had 
 averted her face and he could see only the profile. 
 She had put on that austere look again, he reflected, 
 and her mouth, which he always conceived as his 
 ally, was as firm and unyielding as a piece of sculp- 
 tor's marble. That it was firm because she was 
 contending with strong emotions, did not occur to 
 him. 
 
 " And so yesterday you were saying good-bye to 
 your friends, the mountains ? " she asked with cold 
 carefulness. 
 
 " No." 
 
 His voice sounded sober, even strained. " No 
 I went off to decide something "
 
 n6 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 "And did you?" 
 
 " I did." 
 
 " I hope you decided wisely? " 
 
 " Oh wisely ! " His laugh was unsteady. " I'm 
 not so sure about that. I'll be able to tell you better 
 in ten years." 
 
 "You mean something about your plant?" she 
 questioned softly, still looking carefully away from 
 him. 
 
 " No. More important than that." 
 
 "Mr. King, then?" 
 
 Her face had swerved around so that he could 
 obtain a three-quarter view of her face, and the 
 marble of her mouth seemed trembling toward a 
 smile. 
 
 " No. Far more important than King though 
 he's in it. That's what makes it such a mess." 
 
 Celia now looked straight round at him in open 
 surprise. They had risen and stood facing each 
 other. 
 
 In justification of the base trick which Pinkney 
 now played upon Celia, it should be said that all 
 day he had been vainly striving to jockey the con-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 117 
 
 versation around to a point where he would have 
 an opening, an opportunity, to say with simple, un- 
 studied grace, ease, and sincerity the thing he de- 
 sired to say. But each time such an opening 
 occurred, his mind shied away violently as a timid 
 horse shies away from a scrap of white paper in 
 the road. And several times during the course of 
 that afternoon of easy conversation on popular 
 topics of the day, his temples became beaded with 
 fine pearls of perspiration, which could not be laid 
 to the sun. So now he essayed a justifiable ruse, 
 and did evil that good might abound. 
 
 It was a glowing twilight, just paling out into 
 night. The red and naked sun like a huge coppery 
 disc had sunk behind the sombre rampart of 
 mountains. The sunlight disappeared. There had 
 followed a momentary vast flare-up of magnificent 
 fires, slowly extinguished, and then came on the 
 dark. And the dark was the ally Sloane was wait- 
 ing for. He tilted back his head with a fine show 
 of unconcern and gazed up at the clear pale zenith. 
 
 " Look up ! " he murmured, laughter in his voice. 
 " Right overhead . . . The first star."
 
 ii8 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 Of course, as even the veriest dabbler in astron- 
 omy knows, first stars do not come out in the zenith 
 where the light lingers longest, but farther down 
 the twilight steeps of the sky. But this was Pink- 
 ney's own private constellation; he had manufac- 
 tured it for a particular purpose. 
 
 Celia, who had been watching the crimson cloud- 
 streamers change to an ensanguined purple, to vivid 
 rose, to delicate mushroom pink, and then to dun 
 smoke which faded into night, turned unsus- 
 piciously, tipped back her head, and sighted rather 
 carefully along the line of his index finger. 
 
 The pure oval of her face with its aureole of 
 burnished hair was directly beneath his own; her 
 head just touched his shoulder, sending live little 
 electric thrills racing up and down his awn. He 
 bent his head. He caught a flying glimpse of 
 her gleaming eyes, dusky pools of mystery, and 
 sensed rather than saw the palpitating whiteness 
 of her throat before he felt the softness of her 
 lips. 
 
 " I don't see your little old st " 
 
 She had just begun to frame the word when her
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER ,119 
 
 mouth was sealed by another descending squarely 
 upon her own. 
 
 Her startled gasp apprised him that possibly he 
 had erred in his plan of attack. But he was in so 
 deep now that he recklessly decided he might as 
 well be hung for a sheep as a lamb; for Celia would 
 certainly hang him anyway. So he stood away, 
 laughing, excited, and said: 
 
 "That's it st-ar! It's my st-ar! I made it, 
 with a crack in it." 
 
 Her indignant silence warned him he was on the 
 extreme knife-edge of danger. He possessed him- 
 self of her hand to give him courage while he 
 plunged, still laughing: 
 
 " Don't mind me, Celia. I don't mean anything. 
 I mean that I mean everything. But don't mind 
 my laughing. I'm one of these laughing fools. 
 Laugh at everything. . . . Laugh when I'm sad. 
 . . . Laugh when I'm mad. . . . Laugh when I'm 
 glad. . . . Teacher used to lick me for laughing, 
 and the harder he licked, the harder I laughed. . . . 
 Laughing just now because I feel as if I'd swal- 
 lowed the whole Atlantic Ocean and found it
 
 120 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 Pommery Sec. . . . Laughing because you kissed 
 me!" 
 
 " I didn't ! " cried out Celia. " Oh outrageous ! 
 Mr. Sloane!" She struggled to wrest away her 
 hand. 
 
 " One moment. Let's get this thing straight. 
 You say you didn't kiss me. I say you did. It's 
 not the sort of thing a man's apt to be mistaken 
 about. One may be mistaken about some things, 
 but not about " 
 
 " Mr. Sloane ! This this " She struggled 
 
 with her breaking voice, and took a fresh start. 
 " You are impossible." 
 
 " No. Highly improbable, but never impossible. 
 Slightly disfigured but still in the ring. Then you 
 didn't ?" 
 
 She was flying all the storm signals now, her 
 lips pressed hard together, her colour blazing. 
 
 "You know I didn't! This is Why, you 
 
 know very well you you took me by surprise. I 
 was just starting to say st " 
 
 " St-ar ? Hm ! Not so sure that's the way 
 you start to say st-ar. Say it, Celia, slowly
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 121 
 
 and smile when you say it. St-ar! My st-ar! 
 But Celia went and cracked it." 
 
 " Let me go, Mr. Sloane ! " she panted. 
 
 " No, no! " he declared. " I've not even begun 
 yet. Celia!" he implored. "Listen to me! Let 
 me explain. Been trying to for days. . . . Never 
 proposed to a girl like you before. . . . Do it better 
 next time. . . . Every time I looked at you, some- 
 thing inside of me said : ' Do it now, my boy. Get 
 the damn thing over.' Tried. . . . Couldn't. . . . 
 Felt like one of those naked little shavers shivering 
 on the bank, afraid to take a high dive. . . . 
 Thought I'd write it. ... Couldn't. Words are 
 clumsy things. Not yours, though, Celia. Love to 
 hear you talk. Managed to chop off some jazz 
 about that: 
 
 'Tis true words may be clumsy things. 
 (But not the kind my Celia slings!) 
 May twilight through young apple-trees, 
 The music of the twilight breeze 
 (My Celia's words are such as these!) 
 
 " But you'd not call that a proposal ! Well, I 
 couldn't do it, Every time I even started to think
 
 122 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 of saying it, my heart would race like a mill-wheel. 
 And I thought : ' You'll have to do something radi- 
 cal, my boy. Something that'll startle her. Some- 
 thing that'll break this infernal deadlock/ So 
 finally I doped out this practical project of proposing 
 to your mouth in the dark." 
 
 He broke off, suddenly feeling tired, as if he had 
 been lifting a dead weight. 
 
 "Celia!" 
 
 He peered into her averted face, but could make 
 nothing of her expression. 
 
 " Celia ! Look at me. My God, say some- 
 thing!" 
 
 Slowly she turned her head, and he beheld a glow- 
 ing girl with a laughing mouth and deep shining 
 eyes. 
 
 "What what do you want me to say? " 
 
 The look in her eyes seemed to warrant him in 
 discarding her hand and taking her in his arms. 
 He heaved a deep chest-lifting sigh, like a swimmer 
 in wild waters who gains the shore. 
 
 "Oh, any old thing!" he murmured. "Let's 
 take-off with st-ar!"
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 123 
 
 Walking back to the ranch beneath the crowded 
 glitter of real, uncracked constellations, which by 
 now spangled the black velvet curtains of the sky, 
 Celia suddenly stopped, disengaged herself, and said 
 seriously : 
 
 " Pinkney, I want to tell you something. Some- 
 thing very important. I I've deceived you." 
 
 "What? As bad as that?" he cried with a 
 laugh. And he bent down to kiss her. 
 
 " No," said Celia, standing away. " This is 
 serious." 
 
 " Very well/' he murmured resignedly. " But 
 who ever heard of a girl wanting to be serious right 
 after she was engaged? We'll make a bargain. 
 If I'm serious with you for five minutes, will you 
 promise to be strictly unserious with me for all the 
 rest of the evening? " 
 
 "Will you listen?" she entreated. 
 
 " Oh, all right. Shoot if you must this old grey 
 head but why don't you wait until morning? 
 That's the time to catch a man deadly serious. And 
 suppose," he concluded teasingly, " that I know your 
 old serious stuff anyhow ? "
 
 124 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 "You couldn't!" 
 
 "Couldn't? What'll you bet that I don't know 
 what's hanging this very second on the tip of your 
 tongue, panting to be told? It's a sentence a 
 sentence of five words. Wait. I'll whisper it in 
 your ear." 
 
 She bent her head doubtingly, and he put his lips 
 to her ear and hissed in fierce melodramatic ac- 
 cents : 
 
 "Sst! My father is Klaggett King!" 
 
 " Why, that's right ! " cried out Celia, opening 
 her eyes wide. " How did you know it?" 
 
 But Pinkney only laughed as he said : " Are we 
 through being serious ? " His hand lit upon her 
 waist, clasped it, and they moved on into the night. 
 And then he elucidated. 
 
 " When a girl holds an open letter from another 
 man whose handwriting you can recognise within a 
 foot of your nose, and when that letter begins : ' My 
 dear Miss Celia : Your father has had another bad 
 attack and is of! on his yacht/ it doesn't take a 
 Miltonic imagination to put two and two together 
 and make four."
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 125 
 
 " I see," murmured Celia thoughtfully. " Mr. 
 Pym's letter." 
 
 " Correct," he replied, and he gave her waist a 
 squeeze. " I believe," he said, still meditatively 
 unserious, " that you're what the French call fausse 
 maigre which means that you're fatter than you 
 
 look. I bet that you weigh let me see I 
 
 really ought to heft you " 
 
 " And so that is the reason you shot off that after- 
 noon like a catapult," continued Celia, who had a 
 consecutive mind. 
 
 " That was the reason. I don't like to mix politics 
 and religion, or business and love. But why didn't 
 you tell me your father was Klaggett King? I'll 
 have to keep a watch over you like Othello if you're 
 going to deceive me like that." 
 
 " I was afraid," she stated with candour. 
 
 "Of what?" 
 
 " That it might mix you up." 
 
 " It darned near did," he admitted. " It was 
 only after I slid off that granite apron and shaved 
 eternity by the width of a slim pine that I decided 
 parents didn't count."
 
 126 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 " That's what I decided, too." 
 
 At this juncture they became strictly unserious, 
 and continued so, with rare lucid intervals, up to 
 the moment when Pinkney boarded the east-bound 
 train. 
 
 Celia evolved a new adjective for him. She de- 
 clared he was a more-ish man; and although that 
 word was not in the dictionary, he understood it 
 instantly and gave a practical demonstration upon 
 the spot. 
 
 During their brief intervals of sobriety, it was 
 decided that Celia should remain at the ranch for 
 another month, which gave Pinkney time to arrange 
 his business with Klaggett King. And when the 
 salvage company had blossomed forth into full- 
 petalled success, he was to be free to speak to King 
 about his daughter. But not before. They had dis- 
 agreed flatly over this question of secrecy, Sloane 
 objecting strongly. But Celia said she knew her 
 father, and in the end she had her way.
 
 CHAPTER ELEVEN 
 
 WHEN Pinkney Sloane returned to New York, he 
 found the city sweltering in the intense heat of a 
 late Indian summer. Dust eddies skirled along the 
 street, flicking into his eyes refuse and scraps of 
 paper. The air was heavy and humid, with gusts 
 of wild wind alternating with flooding sheets of 
 rain which but rendered the atmosphere even more 
 torrid and oppressive than before. To Sloane, 
 fresh from his love-idyl and the crystalline pure air 
 of the hills, the jaded flat staleness, the frowsy dis- 
 order, not only of the heat-smitten city, but of the 
 people as well, brought a sense of irritation and 
 disgust. 
 
 Walking down lower Fifth Avenue at the noon 
 hour, he was caught like a cork in the dense stream 
 of swarthy, foreign-born workers, which boiled, a 
 vast dirty, turbulent tide, out into the street from 
 factories and loft buildings. And in all that enor- 
 
 127
 
 128 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 mous swaying tide of dark greasy faces, beaked 
 noses, and wildly gesticulating hairy hands, not one 
 word of English could be heard. He might have 
 been in the ghetto of any Russian or Polish city. 
 Not a touch, not a trace of America in all that vast 
 jabbering throng. 
 
 " We'll not live in New York ! " he decided 
 grimly. 
 
 He fought his way through the throng to the 
 quiet side street in which he lodged, mounted to his 
 room, and standing beside his bed, ran rapidly 
 through his mail. Most of the letters were ad- 
 vertisements, with a scattering bill or so. But one 
 among them apprised him that Gilmore was dead. 
 He had died unexpectedly, following an operation 
 for appendicitis. 
 
 Sloane dropped into a chair, badly shaken by this 
 sudden blow. He loved Gilmore. There had been 
 a deep bond between him and the older man. And 
 now he would never see him again, look into his 
 lean quizzical face, or feel the cordial grip of his 
 big bony hand. Gilmore had been the first man 
 to believe in him, and to see the practical mercantile
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 129 
 
 value of what he was trying to do. A keen, hard- 
 headed Yankee, flung early into the vortex of busi- 
 ness life and abundantly successful therein, Gilmore, 
 with no sons of his own, had taken Sloane under 
 his wing, counselled, advised, criticised, and inspired 
 the young man by the integrity of his own big, 
 uncomplicated nature. 
 
 Now he had gone or had he just gone on? . . . 
 
 For an hour Sloane sat, chin sunk on his breast, 
 his hat crowded down over his eyes, while he passed 
 in review his relationship with this man. He tried 
 to recall if Gilmore had ever talked to him about 
 death. He remembered one occasion. . . . 
 
 Sloane had come to the older man with a problem. 
 It concerned a girl a young Russian Jewess, with 
 a sweep of dusky hair, a large round, moon-pale 
 face, a sulky crimson mouth, and eyes which were 
 such deep dark inscrutable wells of mystery that 
 the young man found himself constantly staring 
 avidly into them, even while a cool inward mentor 
 muttered disgustedly inside of him : " Damn ! " 
 
 He had engaged this girl as a stenographer, and 
 also, as he had frankly confessed to Gilmore, be-
 
 130 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 cause he didn't altogether hate her looks. Her 
 name was Lena Delinski, and her prowess, both 
 with the typewriter and with the English grammar, 
 were not, he admitted, her strongest points. 
 
 " She can't write a simple letter without mis- 
 spelling ninety percent of the words. She's as lazy 
 and shiftless as she is good-looking. Comes down 
 to the office about eleven, and then has the nerve to 
 yawn under my nose. I called her Miss Do-Little- 
 sky the other day and told her if she didn't change 
 it into Miss Do-Moreski, I'd change it myself into 
 Get-Outski." 
 
 Upon which, he related, the girl suddenly blew 
 up like an ammunition dump, told him he was slowly 
 torturing her to death with the brutal coldness of 
 his Anglo-Saxon nature. Told him well, a num- 
 ber of interesting things. . . . 
 
 " And now," Sloane concluded, " I'm in a fix. 
 I hired her partly because she's good to look at a 
 fact she blamed well knows. She knows I don't 
 hate to look at her. What she doesn't know is 
 that I don't want her as a typewriter or anything
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 131 
 
 else any more than I want the toothache. But 
 she's absolutely determined to stick around. And 
 stick she does like glue. I've fired her a dozen 
 times, and half the time she laughs and half the 
 time she weeps. But still she sticks! Now what 
 am I going to do?" 
 
 Closing his eyes, Sloane could visualise just how 
 Gilmore's kindly rugged face and quizzical eyes 
 had looked, as he replied. And at first he had 
 seemed to be speaking upon another subject as 
 he said: 
 
 " Death, as I see it, is not our concern. And we 
 are not the concern of death. Nor is death the 
 great adventure. The big, live, real adventure is 
 inside ourselves. There is your fight! There is 
 your battlefield! Conquer yourself, and you'll 
 have no trouble with life, or death or the Lenas in 
 your road. I suspect," he had added dryly, " that 
 before ever you hired Lena, she had already hired 
 you. Now you say you have fired her; but Lena 
 knows better; she knows you've not fired her yet 
 in your mind. She knows you like her up to a
 
 j 32 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 certain extent; and what she's working for now is 
 to change her minority into a majority. It's been 
 done by Lenas before now." 
 
 " I get that," muttered Sloane, grinning ruefully. 
 " But how the devil am I to make her stay fired ? " 
 
 " Fire her to yourself first. Then I'll warrant 
 she'll stay fired." 
 
 " All right," said Pinkney soberly. " I'll do that 
 little thing." And he did. And Lena had stayed 
 fired. 
 
 It was not, however, of Lena he was thinking 
 at this time, but of that opening remark of Gil- 
 more : " Death is not our concern, nor are we the 
 concern of death." What had he meant? Was he 
 speaking of some inner, imperishable " we " ? 
 
 Finally, he went out, determined to see Mrs. 
 Gilmore if she were in town. But the big stone 
 mansion on Park Avenue was already boarded up, 
 and not even a caretaker responded to his repeated 
 assaults on the electric bell. 
 
 He walked over to the nearest subway and took 
 the downtown express to Gilmore's offices. But 
 here he fared no better. Gilmore's partner, Chap-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 133 
 
 man, was in Europe, looking into the shipping situa- 
 tion, and a stranger whom Sloane had never seen 
 sat in Gilmore's private room, in Gilmore's swivel 
 chair, and as he recounted almost indifferently Gil- 
 more's death, he fingered absently Gilmore's fa- 
 vourite paper-weight. It was as if a wave had 
 suddenly gone over his friend, obliterating all signs 
 of him. Suddenly Sloane could not endure it. He 
 rose, with a muttered excuse, and got himself out 
 of the place, his eyes blind with tears. 
 
 The death of his friend was fraught with conse- 
 quences, immediate and profound. For it was Gil- 
 more who had advised him to negotiate a loan 
 through Klaggett King; it was Gilmore who had 
 warned him under no circumstances to surrender a 
 majority of his shares, no matter what the pressure 
 might be; and it was Gilmore whom he had im- 
 plicitly relied upon to advise him in the final settle- 
 ment of the terms. Now he was left without guid- 
 ance to steer his bark through the perilous seas 
 of high finance. 
 
 Almost he was tempted to turn back, to follow 
 Celia's advice, and to take the long, slow, labori-
 
 i 3 4 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 ous route to success. For two days he threshed out 
 this problem all over again, and decided that Gil- 
 ' more was right and Celia was wrong. Having thus 
 reassured himself, he put on his hat and went to 
 call on Klaggett King. 
 
 But Mr. King had not yet returned. And Mr. 
 Pym, the secretary informed him, was in confer- 
 ence and could not be disturbed. 
 
 " Very well," said Sloane, turning away. " Just 
 tell him I called." 
 
 The following day he had a lengthy note from 
 Mr. Pym, stating, in his fine, clear, copper-plate 
 hand, a number of things. Mr. Pym deeply re- 
 gretted that he had not been able to see Mr. Sloane. 
 Mr. King was still absent on his yacht, The Saturn, 
 and his health was the cause of considerable anxiety 
 to his friends. He could, of course, be reached 
 by wireless if Mr. Sloane deemed it necessary, but 
 Mr. Pym would advise strongly against such a 
 course. As Mr. King was negotiating this loan for 
 Mr. Sloane himself, and the entire business was 
 in his hands, Mr. Pym could not move in the
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 135 
 
 affair; but he could assure Mr. Sloane that, to the 
 best of his knowledge, the matter was in very sat- 
 isfactory shape, and Mr. Sloane need have no 
 worry on that head. 
 
 Thus Mr. Pym. And Pinkney, after reading it 
 grimly through for the third time, decided it was 
 a fine letter as far as it went, but it did not go far 
 enough by several blocks of houses. In addition, 
 either Mr. Pym or Mr. King was a thundering 
 liar. At that particular moment he was not in- 
 terested in ascertaining which one of the two gentle- 
 men it was, for the net result to him, in either event, 
 was the same. It landed him in a hole. And the 
 next step was to survey the hole, its depth and its 
 magnitude, and discover if there were any red-light 
 exits marked. But the more he looked the more 
 he was forced to admit that, as holes went, it was 
 as thorough-going a specimen as any he had ever 
 been in. 
 
 In the first place, he had no ready cash. Up to 
 the present, he had not owed a dime in the world. 
 For his current expenses, which were not large, he
 
 136 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 had sold off from time to time small blocks of 
 stock, and had thus managed to maintain on de- 
 posit at the bank a small margin for emergencies. 
 But only the day before he had been advised by 
 a special bank-messenger that his last check had 
 been returned on account of insufficient funds. The 
 insufficiency had turned out to be a deficit of seven 
 cents. And that deficit he had made good by 
 pawning his fur overcoat, depositing the sum ob- 
 tained, and advising his creditors to put the check 
 through once more. But as he admitted sombrely 
 to himself, that was shaving things down to the 
 blood. 
 
 That was the first part of his trouble : no money. 
 The second, and more disastrous part was that he 
 did not know where to lay hands on any. For to 
 sell off a block of stock now, at this stage of the 
 proceedings, was to diminish the amount he had 
 sworn to as having on hand, k altered his status. 
 Not much. But it was like that seven cents' deficit 
 at the bank: it was enough to give King a handle 
 against him, if a handle was what he was looking 
 for which Sloane shrewdly suspected to be the
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 137 
 
 case. King collected handles as a blacksmith col- 
 lects horseshoes, and for the same practical reason : 
 he used them in his business. 
 
 Surveying his hole on all sides, he discovered that 
 he was not yet at the bottom of it, but rather, 
 perched perilously about half way down, on a slip- 
 pery little shelf scarce big enough for his feet, and 
 with a still deeper pit yawning blackly below. 
 
 For heretofore, his plant had been a small one- 
 horse affair, housed in a single floor of an old 
 building on a west-side street near the ferries and 
 close to the waterfront. But, acting on King's sug- 
 gestion, he had taken over the entire house, torn 
 down partitions, converted it into a factory, and 
 hired a score of sailors who were even now cutting 
 canvas and splicing ropes for his balloons. Not 
 one of them but had invested some of their weekly 
 earnings in the new salvage company. They called 
 him Captain Sloane, and talked eagerly of the day 
 when they should raise their first prize. The bare 
 thought of discharging or disappointing these men 
 made him clench his fists and determine to hang 
 on. Accordingly, he hung on. A week passed.
 
 138 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 Two weeks. A month. And still no sign of Klag- 
 gett King. 
 
 A crowd of petty debts began to hum and sing 
 about his ears like a swarm of mosquitoes; they 
 stung him, one after another, in his most vulner- 
 able spot his pocket-book. To get rid of them, 
 he transmuted into coin of the realm every article 
 in his possession capable of such transmutation: 
 his evening clothes, his trunk, a pair of riding-boots 
 bought in Paris. 
 
 The boots recalled another source of wealth. 
 
 While in France, in a moment of patriotic ex- 
 pansion, he had invested three months' back pay in 
 French Victory Bonds. These he now sold on the 
 market at a ruinous rate of exchange. He dug up 
 the deed to two lots in his home-town which he sold 
 at twenty-five dollars apiece. He pared his ex- 
 penses down to the bone and husbanded every 
 penny with the cool hard avarice of a miser. Him- 
 self he put on a stiff diet, walked instead of rode, 
 and even eliminated the morning paper. 
 
 His largest item of expense was the rental of 
 the building. After a scene with the owner, Di
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 139 
 
 Palma, a suspicious, grasping little old Italian Jew, 
 who owned most of the property on the block, he 
 had managed to stave off payment for another 
 month. He had two other outstanding accounts of 
 considerable size; but these firms, knowing his 
 friendship with Gilmore, were content to wait. 
 
 One result of this severe retrenchment was that 
 presently he was taken down with a cold. The first 
 early snowstorm of the season, far ahead of its 
 schedule, caught him without overcoat or umbrella, 
 and the following morning he awoke with a sharp 
 stabbing pain at the base of his right lung which 
 apprised him that that particular piece of his in- 
 ternal machinery had gone on strike again. 
 
 " It never rains but it pours," he growled, striv- 
 ing to stand, and discovering suddenly a blind diz- 
 ziness in his head. " Now I've got to stick to this 
 hell-bed and promote Annie to be chief of staff." 
 Which he did, doling out the quarters with a frown- 
 ing penuriousness which caused the freckled little 
 mulatto first to thrust out a disdainful underlip, and 
 later, when she discovered the reason, to forage en- 
 thusiastically in his behalf.
 
 i 4 o THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 In times past Annie had stolen from him what- 
 ever odds and ends in his room had caught her 
 greedy, roving black eye. Now she stole for him 
 with the same light-hearted ease. She descended 
 to the basement kitchen of a neighbouring automat, 
 presided over by a dusky potentate smitten by her 
 charms, and tranquilly purloined such delicacies as 
 she deemed might tempt a sick man's jaundiced 
 eye. And Sloane, engrossed in his own troubles, 
 ate what was placed before him, as Elijah did in 
 similar plight, without enquiring too minutely of 
 his dusky little rustler as to how the commissary 
 department was maintained. 
 
 With the assistance of Annie, Sloane shaved 
 pneumonia by a narrow margin. But by this time 
 he was habituated to narrow margins, with only 
 the width of a knife-edge between him and com- 
 plete catastrophe. Moreover, his enforced stay in 
 bed had enabled him to arrive at a conclusion con- 
 cerning the intentions of King; and that conclu- 
 sion, baldly stated, was that King intended to land 
 on him. Why he should wish to do this thing 
 baffled the young man completely. For hours, lying
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 141 
 
 on his lumpy mattress, his eyes fixed on the leprous 
 wall opposite from which the plaster was peeling 
 in flakes, he turned the proposition over and over 
 in his mind, regarding it from every conceivable 
 angle, but without discovering a light. For it was 
 not possible that King had forgotten his final words 
 when he bade Sloane good-bye. He had said, 
 holding Pinkney jovially by the arm: 
 
 " Well, young man, you've brought it off. I 
 thought Gilmore had exaggerated the commercial 
 possibilities of this scheme but these hard-headed 
 old Yankees never miss a trick. I'm going off on 
 my vacation but don't let that hinder you. We'll 
 shove on full steam ahead in this business, begin- 
 ning from to-day. Lease that whole building for 
 a factory. Start the carpenters to work. Do you 
 know where you can get trained men to make those 
 pontoons ?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 " Then round up a couple of dozen as many 
 as the place will hold. When I get back we'll see 
 about larger quarters. But right now what we want 
 are balloons. I'll deposit some money to-day to
 
 142 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 your credit for current expenses. Don't sell any 
 more stock. Later, we'll sign the papers and ar- 
 range details." 
 
 "If everything's settled, why can't we sign right 
 now ? " demanded Sloane bluntly. 
 
 " Because everything's not settled yet that's 
 why," laughed King. " You can't step out and buy 
 the use of a hundred thousand dollars as simply as 
 you'd step out and buy a pair of pants. There are 
 conferences, discussions of interest, risks and guar- 
 antees no end of technical stuff. But you leave 
 that to me. That's my end of the game. Your 
 end, from now on, is to make things hum. If you 
 want anything, go to Pym. He has this whole busi- 
 ness in hand, and he knows my intentions better 
 than I know them myself." 
 
 Fine words, but when Sloane came to cash in on 
 them, he found he had been short-changed. For 
 although he had duly turned over the agreed 
 amount of stock to cover the advance loan, King, 
 inadvertently or otherwise, had omitted to place the 
 promised credit at the bank. Pinkney could not 
 believe that it was inadvertent. King was not an
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 143 
 
 inadvertent kind of man. In addition, Pym, in his 
 letter, had expressly stated that he had no power 
 to act. 
 
 At the end of a month of dragging inactivity, he 
 had written a note to King's partner, stating 
 briefly his situation, and asking him to wireless the 
 substance of the letter to King. To this Pym re- 
 plied briefly but courteously that he had complied 
 with the request and would forward the answer 
 when it came. 
 
 But the answer failed to materialise. At this 
 point of the proceedings, there is no doubt that, 
 had it not been for Celia, Sloane would have broken 
 with King and gone his own way. But he told him- 
 self he had no right to judge her father on any 
 such light, airy, and insubstantial evidence, which 
 ten frank words might dissipate. King, according 
 to all reports, was a sick man a sick man, more- 
 over with many irons in the fire. There was noth- 
 ing for it but courage and patience until time 
 should untangle the snarl.
 
 CHAPTER TWELVE 
 
 ONE morning he was sitting in his office, listless 
 and brooding, when the friendly secretary of Mr. 
 Pym rang up, without orders, to inform him of the 
 arrival of Mr. King. Sloane, with a stir of excite- 
 ment at his pulse, thanked her with enthusiasm, reso- 
 lutely brushed from his mind any lingering cobwebs 
 of doubt, and then hung around within arm's reach 
 of the telephone all day. But no summons came. 
 And the mail brought him only bills. Passed ten 
 feverish, interminable days with their monotonous 
 processional of linked hours, while his taut nerves 
 were strung to the breaking-point and still King 
 made no sign. And Sloane likewise made no sign. 
 
 He had already come to the end of his financial 
 tether, and his men had not been paid for a week. 
 Di Palma had taken to dogging his footsteps. He 
 waylaid Sloane on the street, threatened, snarled, 
 
 and all but wept as he demanded his rent. 
 
 144
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 145 
 
 Finally, when he had given up hope, a letter from 
 King arrived, enquiring if Sloane were dead, and 
 if not, would he favour their office with a call. 
 
 " I tried to get you," said King when Sloane pre- 
 sented himself, "but your 'phone seems out of 
 order." 
 
 " It is," assented Sloane briefly. 
 
 It had been discontinued for lack of funds three 
 days before. He sat back in his chair and waited 
 for King to fire the first gun. In the meantime, his 
 busy eyes took note of the fact that the older man 
 had changed. His face was older, thinner, greyer. 
 The skin about his temples seemed to have shrunk, 
 as if from a wasting fever, and clung fast to the 
 conforming bone; and all about him was a hard, 
 wrung look of deadly purpose, as if he were pay- 
 ing out his last reserves. But it was his eyes which 
 shocked Sloane. The flame within them still per- 
 sisted; but the look of violence, of a ceaseless strug- 
 gle going on in the dark fastnesses of his mind, 
 was stronger than ever before. He was a sick, dan- 
 gerous man and all the more dangerous because 
 he was sick.
 
 146 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 Sloane, sensing this, made the first advance. 
 
 " I hope, sir, you've had a good summer? " 
 
 King's voice as he replied was easy, but very 
 dry. 
 
 " Summer and winter with me are pretty much 
 the same thing twenty- four hours in every day; 
 twenty-four chances for a man to make a fool of 
 himself. I hear you met my daughter ? " 
 
 Pinkney flushed to the roots of his hair. 
 
 " Yes yes, sir," he stammered, fairly caught by 
 surprise. He wondered how King had come by the 
 information. Did that explain his carefully cov- 
 ered antagonism, the easy insolence of his tones? 
 
 " I we saw each other a number of times. At 
 Hunter's Ranch. Great place! I sat at table with 
 your daughter for two weeks before she even marked 
 that I was there." He ran on hurriedly, under 
 King's eyes which gleamed bright as live coals un- 
 der the beetling ridge of his brow. "Miss King de- 
 serves a great deal of credit for continuing her war- 
 work now." 
 
 King grunted, lifting high one sardonic eyebrow. 
 
 " If you think my daughter's doing that from any
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 147 
 
 lofty patriotic motive, you don't know that young 
 woman, not by a long chalk. She's doing it to 
 please herself and to infuriate me. When the war 
 broke out, I wanted her to stay at home where 
 women belong. She'd already taken up nursing 
 as a fad. I offered to pay for a whole nursing unit 
 to go in her place. She took up my offer and then 
 had the confounded nerve to enroll herself as one 
 of the nurses in the outfit. And when I quashed 
 that, she blew off to Washington, pulled wires, used 
 my name" and influence, and signed up to go over 
 as a nurse though I telegraphed to a friend of mine 
 down there to head her off. Well, after the war, 
 I thought she'd quit along with the rest of the 
 amateurs. But not Celia. She hung on, simply to 
 exasperate me and wound Pym." , 
 
 He noted the young man's sudden start, and his 
 eyes gleamed as he continued his indictment. 
 
 " She's kept my partner dangling after her now 
 for two years, and every time he sets a day for the 
 wedding she flies right off the track. He's too easy 
 with her, and that's the whole case in a nutshell. I 
 tell you this frankly, Mr. Sloane, because Miss Tau-
 
 14$ THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 ser wrote me that you and my daughter had met 
 ' out on that ranch, and it is only justice to all con- 
 cerned that you should know exactly how the land 
 lies. My daughter is bound in honour to my partner, 
 Mr. Pym. But I'll venture she never once men- 
 tioned to you that salient little fact eh, what?" 
 
 He smiled suddenly, showing his teeth. 
 
 Sloane sat silent, his colour high. He admitted 
 that this Pym-business shook him. It could not be 
 denied that Celia had kept her own counsel about 
 this elderly suitor who had suddenly loomed in sight. 
 Were all girls secretive like that? Aloud he said, 
 with an attempt at lightness: 
 
 " I suppose she thought it was not my affair. I 
 don't know that it is. Or perhaps," he added with 
 a short laugh, "she doesn't know she's bound in 
 honour to Mr. Pym." 
 
 " The engagement was publicly announced and 
 then withdrawn. It left Pym in a fix. But women 
 have no honour." 
 
 " I think that we may leave Miss King to be the 
 custodian of her own honour. And if Mr. Pym 
 doesn't like to dangle, he knows what he can do."
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 149 
 
 " Well," said King impatiently, dismissing the 
 subject with a sideways jerk of the head, "Celia and 
 Pym will have to paddle their own canoe, and I 
 expect Celia will do most of the paddling if she 
 resembles the rest of her sex. They're not content 
 until they've got a fellow thumbs-down. What 
 most of 'em want is not a man but a kissing-stick. 
 But now about our business, Mr. Sloane. How's 
 everything going?" 
 
 He was staring down at the table, a faint smile 
 upon his lips. 
 
 " It's not going. It's standing strictly still." 
 
 " What do you mean? " 
 
 King played with a paper-knife, his eyes lowered. 
 But Sloane could feel mischief in him mischief and 
 power. 
 
 " Well," retorted Pinkney with heat, " you can't 
 get very far without cash, and I had no cash. You 
 omitted to make that deposit you promised, and I 
 spent all I had on those alterations." 
 
 " Why didn't you go to Pym? " 
 
 " Mr. Pym said he had no power in this affair. 
 Here's his letter."
 
 150 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 King waved it negligently away. 
 
 " Oversight," he explained. " It's this damned 
 sleeplessness of mine." He turned on the young 
 man suddenly, gnawing his lip. " I may as well 
 tell you I'm in hell, Sloane, and have been for 
 months, and I can't seem to get out. But I'll get 
 out yet ! A'nd I'll get out in my own way ! " He 
 paused, glooming and working his chin, then 
 dropped the subject abruptly and demanded, "You're 
 not in debt?" 
 
 " Not to any extent." 
 
 " And you've not sold any stock? " 
 
 " Everything's exactly as I represented to you, 
 except for a few floating debts that we can wipe out 
 any time." 
 
 King's great gaunt eyes stare'd at him. Sloane 
 fancied that he perceived a shade of disappointment 
 lurking in their sombre depths, but he could not 
 be sure. 
 
 " Well, then," King said with a 'dry rasp in his 
 voice, " we'll go ahead. I've arranged with Chapin 
 of the Central Trust about the loan. It wasn't 
 easy. Money is scarce and high. It's the inter-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 151 
 
 national situation, partly. Partly, it's because this 
 last year every Tom, Dick, and Harry in town 
 have gone into foreign trade on a shoe-string, and 
 are asking the banks to carry them. They've skyed 
 call-money until it's a crime. That's the general 
 situation on the banking side. Now let's take your 
 side. 
 
 "Your enterprise let's face the facts fairly 
 is still up in the air. Its chief backer is dead. It 
 may be worth something some day, and, personally, 
 I believe it will. If I didn't, I wouldn't be indors- 
 ing it now. And you'll admit that the indorsement 
 of Klaggett King is worth something eh ? " 
 
 Sloane who saw only too clearly the drift of this 
 argument squared his jaw in defiance. 
 
 " The Comptroller of the Currency," declared he, 
 "testified the other day that usury in call-money 
 in New York is gripping the heart of all honest 
 commerce. He said that under the control of cer- 
 tain private financiers, credit is administered, not 
 primarily to serve the needs of production, but from 
 the desire of financial agencies to levy a toll on 
 industry as high as the traffic will bear."
 
 152 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 " Talk," replied King with a sneer, " is the cheap- 
 est commodity on earth. You're not obliged to 
 take up this loan, Mr. Sloane." 
 
 " I know," muttered Pinkney, breathing hard, 
 " and I'm not going to unless I like the terms." 
 
 "If you think you can make a more advan- 
 tageous bargain than I can, just go around to the 
 banks and try." 
 
 He spoke easily but there was an edge of 
 mockery, of hidden menace in his tones which 
 whipped the red into Sloane's cheek. They were 
 fighting now, man to man. 
 
 " The trouble with you young high-fliers with 
 ideas," he continued coolly, " is that you consider 
 money of no account; and you seem to think that 
 just because you've got some wild scheme in your 
 head that the banks should ladle out cash for the 
 asking that it's your divine right. Well, speaking 
 from the vantage of over twenty years of practical 
 experience, I want to say that you're just about 
 one hundred percent dead wrong. 
 
 " An idea what is it ? An unknown quantity. 
 It may have been kicking around the gutters of
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 153 
 
 the world for ages before you pick it up and wipe 
 off the verdigris. But go in and try to buy your 
 breakfast on it in its raw state, hand it to the waiter 
 in lieu of cash, and see how quick you're hustled 
 to the door. An idea's no good to anybody until 
 it's proved up on, developed, cashed. But a bank 
 takes a risk in proving up on an unknown idea 
 and somebody's got to pay for that risk. You're 
 too broad-gauged a man not to see that." 
 
 He pressed a buzzer and said to the suave, sleek- 
 headed young man who appeared: 
 
 "Jackson, get those papers that came over from 
 the Central Trust." 
 
 As the secretary disappeared, King leaned back 
 in his chair and smiled a smile that flashed like 
 summer lightning over his heavy pallid features 
 and was gone. 
 
 "You don't look like one of these half-baked 
 idealists, Sloane," said he. " You look like a first- 
 class compromiser a man who can see both sides 
 of a question at once, his own point of view and 
 the other fellow's as well." 
 
 Pinkney, brooding stilly in his chair, wondered
 
 154 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 just how much stock they intended to rob him of 
 to pay for the use of the loan. If King could joke 
 like that, it must be a whacking fat lot. Probably 
 they'd take over the whole show and run it to please 
 themselves. They'd put in directors, and treasurers, 
 business-managers, and half a dozen pro-deputy- 
 vice-presidents, each with a neat block of stock; 
 and they would outvote him, and stick around and 
 boss and badger him, and he would have to ask the 
 permission of the whole gang in order even to blow 
 his nose. Was he, Pinkney Sloane, going to stick 
 his head into that kind of a noose? Of course, he 
 could reject the terms. But in that event King 
 could come down upon him like a ton of bricks 
 with his bill for services rendered. And if the 
 Sloane Salvage Company did not immediately come 
 across with the coin, he could throw it into the 
 bankruptcy court, and have it sold up at public 
 auction inventions, patents, shares, and all the 
 rest This was the deeper pit, whose blackness he 
 had only half -glimpsed hitherto. He did not like 
 the looks of that pit, and so aloud he replied 
 soberly :
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 155 
 
 ; ' Yes, I'm a compromiser up to a certain point. 
 But I'll fight for what's mine. And if anybody 
 takes it away from me, it'll only be because he's 
 bigger or has better brains." 
 
 "That's the stuff," said King with an acrid 
 smile. " Life's a bear-pit. Fight and lick or get 
 licked." 
 
 Sloane uttered a short laugh. 
 
 " Or shin up a tree ! " He paused, seeing King's 
 mouth twist off in a sudden spasm of pain. 
 
 The older man sighed. His heavy, slightly em- 
 purpled lids drooped down over his cavernous eyes, 
 shutting in his restless, embittered spirit. His face 
 twitched a moment, then became still. 
 
 Sloane studied the impassive mask before him 
 with feelings torn between pity and scorn. He 
 knew now that King intended to break him, or 
 subjugate his will; but he still could not tell 
 why. He wondered. . . . How dreadfully thin 
 he was ! . . . 
 
 For perhaps a full minute the older man slum- 
 bered, his head sagging down, with sundry small 
 jerks, toward his breast. Then he opened one eye.
 
 156 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 His iris widened; he regarded the young man 
 fixedly for a space. 
 
 "Was I asleep?" 
 
 Sloane nodded his head, without speaking. 
 
 The door opened and the secretary entered with 
 a sheaf of papers which King took and ran through 
 rapidly. 
 
 " All right," he announced briskly. " Chapin and 
 the others have signed already. Have you got 
 duplicate copies, Jackson ? " 
 
 " Yes, sir. They're underneath." 
 
 " Then send in the notary. And tell Mr. Pym 
 to step this way. Return yourself as a witness. 
 Mr. Sloane/' he went on, still briskly, " you'll ob- 
 serve that Chapin, Pym, myself, and a few others 
 have taken some stock in this concern, and I've re- 
 organised it along lines which I feel is for its best 
 prosperity. You'll probably want to have a look 
 at these documents before you sign on the dotted 
 line?" 
 
 " Two or three looks if you don't mind." 
 
 " Look as hard and as long as you like," replied 
 King carelessly. " And if you look long and hard
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 157 
 
 enough you'll realise that your best interests lie in 
 signing those agreements as drawn. Jackson, show 
 Mr. Sloane to a private room where he won't be 
 disturbed." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 " I think," said Sloane, rising, " that I'd prefer 
 to go through them at home." 
 
 He found his heart beating furiously, and with 
 a flash he realised what was the matter with King : 
 he killed people's wills. That was why he disliked 
 Celia : she opposed his will. That was why he liked 
 Pym: the man was an automaton with a brain. 
 What he had been striving for, with all this flow 
 of ironic small talk, was to blunt the sharp edge 
 of resistance he had sensed in the young man. And 
 Sloane admitted his power. It had required a des- 
 perate effort on his part to rise, to oppose that quiet 
 formidable will. 
 
 " Take them home by all means," agreed King 
 dryly. "And if you don't like the terms for I 
 can see you've got something stuck in your craw 
 remember two things. First, you're a free agent 
 and you're not obliged to accept those terms.
 
 158 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 Second, if you want money these days, you've got: 
 to pay for it. That's all. But don't keep those 
 bankers too long on their knees. They're not used 
 to the attitude of prayer ! " 
 
 He rose, shook hands with Sloane, and with a 
 certain sardonic geniality, even accompanied him 
 as far as the elevator, and stood chatting, chaffing, 
 cracking jokes, exerting all his magnetism, while 
 several cars passed. Presently he drew forth his 
 watch, exclaimed at the lateness of the hour, and 
 proposed lunch together. It required all of Sloane's 
 determination to tear himself away from that hyp- 
 notic will. 
 
 Arrived at his room, he sat down and went care- 
 fully through the terms of agreement. They were 
 far worse than he feared. By imperceptible degrees 
 he had veered around to the point where he was 
 willing to pay, and even to pay high for the use of 
 money to enlarge his plant. But this arrangement 
 snuffed him out completely. He was not even a 
 figure-head. They had made him manager of the 
 factory! First came King, president of the re- 
 organised company; then Chapin, vice-president;
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 159 
 
 then Chapin's right-hand man ; then Pym ; and then 
 God save the mark ! down at the very foot, the 
 founder of the company, Pinkney Sloane. " They'd 
 have thrown me out altogether, if they'd dared," he 
 muttered bitterly, " but they're afraid something 
 might go wrong with the patents and pontoons, and 
 in order to guard against that they've made me 
 Lord High Custodian of the Spittoon!" 
 
 He sat, deadly pale, gnawing his lip as he went 
 over and over the terms which sheared him of 
 power but left him heavy responsibility. 
 
 Finally he arose and went out into the street, 
 despair in his heart. For hours he tramped the 
 pavement, heedless of a light dry snow which, fall- 
 ing shadowily, touched the angles of his hurrying 
 figure with a silhouette of ghostly white. His rage, 
 as he walked, mounted, bitter as gall. He went 
 over and over the situation from the beginning, 
 fighting his way step by step, as one fights fantastic 
 battles in a nightmare. 
 
 Once, momentarily, he came to himself in a de- 
 serted night square, beside a dry stone fountain, 
 speaking aloud to the naked dim forms of trees,
 
 160 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 as if he were defending his case before a court of 
 justice; and as he talked he struck his knuckles 
 against the stone coping of the fountain until they 
 bled without any awareness of what he did. 
 
 When at length he returned to his room, stag- 
 gering from fatigue, he found himself resolved on 
 one step. He would break off relations with Klag- 
 gett King. With this decision fixed, he took the 
 terms of agreement, and standing with his hat on, 
 in his snowy clothes, he tore them foursquare, 
 thrust the fragments into an envelope, addressed, 
 sealed and stamped it, then descended to the street 
 and posted it in the corner-box. 
 
 This done, he returned and prepared for bed. 
 As he reached up to turn out the gas-jet, his eye 
 caught a glimpse of something white under the 
 door. He stooped and picked it up. It was a letter 
 from Celia. The envelope bore the wet imprint 
 of his snowy heel where he had trodden it down 
 as he entered the room. He brushed it off care- 
 fully with his handkerchief, and opened it, stand- 
 ing under the flaring gas-jet. 
 
 It began with two words, with a girlish dash be-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 161 
 
 tween. And those two words, with their sweet 
 confession, melted the heavy frozen lump that was 
 his heart, and warmed his blood like wine. What 
 followed was just as good. He raced avidly 
 through the four closely written pages to achieve 
 their general tenor, after which he sat down to a 
 more leisurely perusal and to luxuriate in those 
 particular portions which he characterised as " sweet 
 spots." It was his first real love-letter from Celia. 
 Notes he had received before, precious, gay, absurd 
 little nothings Cupid's pin-feathers, he called them 
 as alluring as Celia herself, but containing noth- 
 ing to sustain a hungry man. They were, in fact, 
 mere teasers. But in this letter, Celia, as if she 
 sensed his need, let herself go, and it was a whole 
 divine meal. He sat long over it, King and his 
 company forgotten, wrapped in dreams. . . .
 
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN 
 
 IT was well for him that he received this rein- 
 forcement of the spirit, for in the next few days 
 he found himself ground between the upper and the 
 nether millstone of necessity, and with no visible 
 means of extricating himself. He was roused the 
 next morning at an early hour by Annie, who an- 
 nounced he was wanted on the telephone. And 
 when, a few minutes later, he placed the 
 receiver to his ear, he heard his foreman's anxious 
 voice : 
 
 "Say, Major, can you get down right away?" 
 
 " Yes. What's up, O'Connor? " 
 
 "It's that dirty little shrimp, Di Palma. He's 
 locked us out." 
 
 " Is he down there now ? " 
 
 "You bet big as life and snarling like a cor- 
 nered wildcat. The men started to rough-house 
 him and he hollered for a cop. Said you hadn't 
 
 ife
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 163 
 
 paid your rent, and I don't know what all. I 
 wanted to hand him a couple on the jaw but I 
 figured that mightn't do you any good. Shall I, 
 just for luck? " 
 
 " Not yet," laughed Sloane. He thought a mo- 
 ment deeply. " O'Connor." 
 
 "Yes, sir?" 
 
 " Dismiss the men." 
 
 " I've done that already, Major. I told them 
 you'd square things up with them all right. But 
 they know that. I told them a rotten little egg like 
 Di Palma couldn't get away with a regular fellow 
 like you. It was then they started to rough-house 
 the wop and he yelled for the police." 
 
 " Fine-o ! " murmured Sloane. "I'll be right 
 down." 
 
 " Can I tell the wop you're coming down to fix 
 him?" 
 
 " Sure ! Scare him out of his hide." 
 
 He took a cross-town car and arrived on the 
 scene to find O'Connor and the policeman, seventy- 
 two inches of blue-eyed Irish brawn, in close and 
 jovial confab, while the little Italian, his eyes
 
 164 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 flaming like those of a cornered rat, stood on guard 
 before the padlocked door. 
 
 " There's the boss," exclaimed O'Connor, as 
 Sloane swung lithely down from the car. " Now, 
 wop, watch out ! " 
 
 Pinkney ignored the savage, glowering little man, 
 and addressed himself directly to the guardian of 
 the law. 
 
 " Officer, this man has no legal right to lock the 
 door of this house." 
 
 " And that's what I told the dirty little shrimp! " 
 cried O'Connor triumphantly. 
 
 " It's true I owe him for the rent. But he can't 
 dispossess me without due process of law. He 
 can't take the law into his own hands like this. 
 Where's his writ? That man's guilty of misde- 
 meanour right now. I've a good mind to have you 
 run him in." 
 
 The officer's keen blue eyes glimmered with en- 
 joyment, as he said : 
 
 " And I guess you're right at that, Major." 
 
 He winked broadly at O'Connor, stepped over to
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 165 
 
 Di Palma, prodded him good-naturedly in the ribs 
 with his stick, and said: 
 
 " Show me your writ, Spaghetti." 
 
 But Di Palma, it appeared, had no writ. He 
 explained, in a venomous burst of broken English, 
 that this was his house, and he had a right to lock 
 it when he pleased. 
 
 The officer listened to the tirade with calm 
 judicial contempt 
 
 "Shall I run him in, Major?" he enquired at 
 the close. 
 
 "Yes!" cried O'Connor. 
 
 " No," said Sloane with a laugh. " Just tell him 
 to open that door and then make tracks out of here." 
 
 Di Palma unlocked the door with fingers that 
 shook with rage. 
 
 " Mr. Di Palma," said Sloane, " I'm going in 
 after my private papers, and after that you're free 
 to lock up this place and plaster dispossess notices 
 all over the shop." 
 
 "I'm goin' to sue you!" promised Di Palma 
 thickly.
 
 166 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 " Sue and be damned. But you get out of here 
 right now or I'll break every bone in your body 
 see?" 
 
 The little man backed away precipitately, shrilling 
 venomous threats. 
 
 " You're dead wrong, Major ! " protested O'Con- 
 nor's earnest voice in his ear. " You ought to run 
 him in when you got a chance. He's a trouble- 
 maker. I can tell by the red danger-lights in his 
 eye. He's going to hurt you if he gets a show." 
 
 They entered the office and Sloane squatted be- 
 fore the safe and began to empty papers into a wire 
 basket. He looked up to his foreman to say: 
 
 " You'd better hunt another job." 
 
 O'Connor's fresh face paled. "What?" he 
 
 faltered. "Why, Major is it Are you ?" 
 
 He gasped in pure dismay. 
 
 " Busted ? I don't know yet. If I'm not busted, 
 I'm pretty badly cracked. But Di Palma can't 
 make me or break me. I'm in too deep for that." 
 
 O'Connor's jaw was still dropped. 
 
 " Well," said he with a forced laugh, " it never 
 rains but it pours."
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 1*7 
 
 Sloane stood up. 
 
 "Why?" he demanded. "Does my smash hit 
 you?" 
 
 " In a way " acknowledged O'Connor with a 
 
 troubled face. 
 
 "How?" 
 
 " My wife's gone to the hospital. First baby. 
 And you know what sink-holes for dropping money 
 into thpse places are. I sold off my last Liberty 
 Bond. I figured it was all right because " 
 
 " I see," said Sloane. " You figured the Sloane 
 Salvage Company was going to make good. How 
 much have you got invested down here? " 
 
 " Not much. Not enough to raise a howl about. 
 And I'm not squealing, Major. It's just that this 
 thing sort of took me by surprise." 
 
 " How much cash have you got? " 
 
 O'Connor mentioned the sum, and Sloane 
 breathed relief. 
 
 " Well, that'll hold you until I find a job. After 
 that, I'll turn over half of my pay until we get past 
 this kink " 
 
 " Never in your life ! But, Major," his eyes were
 
 i68 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 eager, "could you find me a job working with 
 you?" 
 
 " I'll see. What I'd like is to take charge of a 
 diving-crew. Some of that apparatus is as old- 
 fashioned as Noah's ark, and if I could study the 
 
 practical workings for a while " He stuffed the 
 
 papers into his pocket and moved toward the door. 
 "Well, we'll see. Don't bother your wife about 
 this." 
 
 " Not likely! " laughed O'Connor. " She thinks 
 the Sloane Salvage Company is the greatest little 
 concern on earth, and that you and I have the 
 Carnegie-Schwab outfit nailed to the mast and 
 screaming for help. She keeps track of every ship 
 that goes down between San Francisco and Bombay. 
 She has a map with pins stuck in, and the name 
 of the wreck, its tonnage, cargo, and the depth of 
 water it foundered in. Talk of the pot of gold 
 at the end of the rainbow! It's not in it with the 
 wealth Minnie's figured out for us that's lying at 
 the bottom of the sea. What do you think is the 
 last idea she's got in her head?" 
 
 " Don't know," muttered Sloane, to whom this
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 169 
 
 friendly turning of the knife in the wound was raw 
 agony. 
 
 " That we'll lift the Lusitania! " 
 
 " And why not ? " cried Sloane sharply. " Other 
 firms have figured on it. Why shouldn't we ? " 
 
 " I'm willing," murmured O'Connor with a laugh. 
 
 The two men, shoulder to shoulder, moved out 
 into the street. Pinkney signalled a car, and with 
 a hasty " If I find something, I'll let you know " 
 sprang aboard. It was while searching in his 
 pocket for his fare that he brought forth, in much 
 surprise, a wad consisting of two tightly twisted 
 bills which had not been there before. Smoothed 
 out, the greasy little strangers introduced them- 
 selves as two five-dollar bills. 
 
 " And they wonder," murmured Sloane, " why 
 God loves the Irish ! " 
 
 In due course of time, involuntary petitions in 
 bankruptcy were filed by two sets of creditors 
 against the Sloane Salvage Company. One of the 
 creditors was Di Palma, with a claim for two 
 months' rent, and the accounts of the two firms to
 
 170 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 which Sloane was most heavily indebted, which the 
 shrewd little Italian, acting under instructions from 
 Klaggett King, had bought in. In all, a sum 
 totalling upwards of four thousand dollars. The 
 second creditor, represented by a legal firm of in- 
 ternational reputation, was Klaggett King, whose 
 bill for services rendered amounted to two thousand 
 dollars. 
 
 The offices of the Sloane Salvage Company were 
 closed, but to one industrious reporter who tracked 
 him to his lair, the young bankrupt admitted grimly 
 that he guessed he had bitten off more than he could 
 chew. And thus he was heralded in the chief morn- 
 ing dailies: 
 
 " Smart young man bites off more than he can 
 chew!" 
 
 Sloane smiled painfully when he read the caustic 
 pleasantry, and reflected that, to be strictly accu- 
 rate, the headline should have read : " Smart young 
 man bites off more than he can chew and gets 
 skinned alive by Klaggett King." 
 
 He did not, however, reveal to the reporter the 
 direct and intimate connection between his failure
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 171 
 
 and Klaggett King, nor yet the results of his visit 
 down to the financial district after his rejection of 
 the latter' s offer. For he had tried to borrow 
 money on his own prospects in order to dam the 
 flowing black tide of adversity, and he discovered, 
 like many a better man before him, that to need 
 money desperately is the best means of scaring it 
 away. The temperature in those small rooms with 
 " Private " marked on the glass doors, where to im- 
 passive, saurian-eyed brahmins of high finance he 
 explained the nature of his errand, fell so rapidly 
 that Sloane, regaining the street, turned up his 
 overcoat collar, concluding it was about to hail, and 
 was astounded to find the sun still up in the sky 
 and doing business at the same old stand. The 
 black frost belt began at the bank's revolving-doors. 
 The bottom fact was that Pinkney Sloane, under 
 the powerful protection of Gilmore and backed by 
 Klaggett King, and Pinkney Sloane, impecunious 
 young inventor with a financial axe to grind, were 
 two vastly different persons. And that difference 
 was demonstrated with brutality and despatch when 
 he tried to borrow money or sell stock.
 
 172 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 Had the fact leaked out of his disagreement with 
 Klaggett King? Had King himself disseminated 
 the report that, after all, the project was not so 
 sound? Sloane had no means of ascertaining, but 
 it was significant that he found all financial avenues 
 blocked. It might be simply the long arm of coin- 
 cidence, but he grimly suspected that the shoulder- 
 socket from which the long arm began to reach was 
 the private office of Klaggett King. 
 
 In Gilmore's office, whither he had turned in the 
 crisis, he fared little better. Gilmore's partner, 
 Chapman, was on the continent, his return uncer- 
 tain. Nor was Sloane at all certain that Chapman 
 shared his late partner's enthusiasm for the Sloane 
 Salvage Company. Nevertheless, he sat down and 
 wrote him a letter, disclosing his quandary and 
 asking for a loan. This letter, forwarded to Eng- 
 land, had borne no fruit, and in due time he went 
 into insolvency, and a receivership was appointed 
 by the court. Whereupon, he gloomily chucked the 
 entire affair out of his mind and damned the flow- 
 ing black tide.
 
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN 
 
 AFTER a short delay, Sloane found positions for 
 himself and O'Connor with a practical wrecking- 
 man and salvage master who operated down in the 
 harbour. He found work and thus some ready cash 
 not a day too soon. For the same evening he re- 
 ceived from Celia, who had loitered another month 
 on her homeward route visiting friends, a wire to 
 the effect that she would arrive with her mother 
 in town the following Sunday at noon, and sug- 
 gested that he lunch with them at some quiet place 
 downtown. 
 
 What he was to say to Celia about his affairs, 
 he had not as yet decided; but what he was not 
 going to say was extremely clear in his mind. 
 Around his transaction with her father he drew a 
 circle which was the dead-line of discussion beyond 
 which he did not intend to pass. 
 
 But Celia had no use for dead-lines, and from
 
 174 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 the first moment at the station when she clapped 
 eyes on his thin cheeks and hollow eyes, Pinkney 
 was in trouble. She saw him first inside the gate, 
 and waved her hand. After that her eyes never 
 left his face until she was in his arms. 
 
 The first heart-beating moments over, she drew 
 back, still in the circle of his embrace, and studied 
 him with wide intent eyes. 
 
 "Why, Pinkney!" she breathed in soft con- 
 cern. And after another look, " Why Pinkney," 
 this time with a catch in her voice. " You've 
 changed ! " 
 
 "What's wrong?" he demanded with a laugh. 
 " Do you mean I'm not the man you took me for? 
 You want to be let off ? " 
 
 " What have you done to yourself ? Have you 
 been sick ? " 
 
 "Oh that! Well, I caught cold and it hung 
 on. All right now. I'm fine as silk." And he 
 gave a cough to prove it. 
 
 " I don't like your looks at all ! " she reproved 
 him severely. Still within the curve of his arm, 
 she turned. " Mother ! " she said over his shoulder.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 175 
 
 He started and swung swiftly about " This is 
 Pinkney." 
 
 "So this is Pinkney!" 
 
 Mrs. King extended both her hands and Sloane, 
 rather pale, took them in his own. They looked at 
 each other, looked, smiled, and were friends. What 
 he saw was a gracious attractive woman, thin, al- 
 most translucent, with shadowy eyes and a tender 
 smiling mouth. The mouth was Celia's; so also 
 was the vivid changeability of her face as her 
 thoughts raced inside of her. But Celia had a 
 strong rosy vitality, a supple strength comparable to 
 his own. Beside her, Mrs. King was a wraith 
 a beautiful pale wraith with lovely twilight eyes. 
 And now those lovely twilight eyes were laughing. 
 
 " Do you look at everybody like that ? " 
 
 " I I don't know," he stammered. " You're so 
 like Ce Miss King." 
 
 "Mother knows," interrupted Celia, laughing. 
 " You needn't * Miss King ' me to her." 
 
 He continued to gaze. 
 
 " It's perfectly extraordinary, the likeness. And 
 yet you're as different as day from night."
 
 176 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 " I'll tell you the difference," said Celia gayly, 
 slipping her free hand under her mother's arm. 
 " I'm just plain flesh and blood, with all the good- 
 ness, and all the meanness, of my ancestors fighting 
 for the upper hand in me. I'm jealous, strong- 
 willed, perverse, and I'll trample on other people 
 who stand in my way." 
 
 " You silly child ! " murmured Lucinda. " Don't 
 believe her Pinkney." 
 
 " But mother," continued the girl, unheeding, " is 
 not flesh and blood at all. She's love made mani- 
 fest and dwelling among us for our good. So she 
 sees in us only the beauty that's in her." 
 
 "Don't be too sure of that," laughed Lucinda. 
 " Come on, children, to lunch." 
 
 It was not until they were ensconced in the 
 limousine with its delicate feminine appointments, 
 and he was seated between the two women, Celia 
 nestled up so close to him that the grey fur of her 
 collar tickled his ear, Mrs. King leaning back in 
 her corner scrutinising him with her grave dark 
 eyes, that he spoke the sober thought of his mind. 
 
 " This," said he, " is so unreal that I can't get
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 177 
 
 hold of it. I'm afraid if I shut my eyes and open 
 them again, you won't be here." 
 
 ' Try it ! " exclaimed Celia. " Mother, shut yours 
 too. I want to come real to Pinkney." 
 
 Obediently, Lucinda closed her eyes and turned 
 her face away. A single crystal tear gathered in 
 the web of her eyelash. Surreptitiously she wiped 
 it away. 
 
 " Yes, this is realer," she heard him murmur, 
 after a longish pause. " But even at that, it's more 
 like Paris than here." 
 
 " What do you mean ? " Celia cried, springing 
 away. " I didn't know you in Paris. Do you mean 
 that " 
 
 " No, no," he chuckled. " Certainly not. How 
 could you think of such a thing! But don't you 
 remember the taxis at twilight kissing time and 
 how they used to speed up and down the Champs 
 Elysees like mad, and always the same thing going 
 on inside a man and a girl and the girl on the 
 
 man's knee, and always Well, one night I 
 
 counted twenty-five. It was enough to make a man 
 lonesome ! "
 
 i;8 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 "Pinkney!" 
 
 His chuckle deepened into a laugh. 
 
 " Now you're coming real at the rate of a mile 
 a minute. But I didn't know you were that kind 
 of a girl." 
 
 "What kind?" 
 
 " The kind to whom you can't mention the his- 
 torical fact that Cleopatra was not an affliction to 
 the eyes. Are you?" 
 
 " I I don't know. So long as you keep them 
 historical " 
 
 They laughed. 
 
 " By Jove," he exclaimed suddenly, " I forgot. 
 I've a grievance against you. What about your 
 alleged engagement to that elderly spinster, Pym?" 
 
 " Nothing." 
 
 " That's just about what I thought," he muttered. 
 
 " May I open my eyes ? " asked Lucinda. 
 
 It was in the middle of a rather gay luncheon, 
 served at Lucinda's command, in the quiet corner 
 of an excellent little restaurant in a side street, that 
 Celia exclaimed suddenly: 
 
 " But, Pinkney, you've not mentioned a single
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 179 
 
 word about the great and only Sloane Salvage Com- 
 pany, Inc. Mother, do you know that he has a 
 perfectly wonderful inventor's brain " 
 
 " St ! Can that ! " He raised a threatening index 
 finger. " If you start that, I'll start something 
 that'll make you blush for a week. Now come on! 
 Once as I was walking down the rue Royale " 
 
 " Oh, all right ! " She looked at him, blushing 
 divinely, as she hauled down her flag. " Though 
 I'm sure nobody cares for your old rue Royale. 
 Tell us about your agreement with father." 
 
 " That's rather a large order." 
 
 "Is it settled?" 
 
 "Just about." 
 
 "Satisfactorily?" 
 
 "To whom?" he countered. 
 
 "To us! To Sloane Salvage Co. and Co." 
 
 He turned to Mrs. King. 
 
 " Do you know anything about my business with 
 Mr. King?" His voice was easy, but there was a 
 hard light in his eye. 
 
 " Not the details," she murmured, looking rather 
 carefully at her plate. " Of course, Celia has chat-
 
 i8o THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 tered. My husband said something about you one 
 night but that was at the beginning. No, I don't 
 know what it's all about. But I occasionally read 
 the newspapers." 
 
 His heart gave a great leap, like a hooked trout, 
 and then seemed to rush suffocatingly into his 
 throat. She had read, then, about the bankruptcy 
 proceedings ! He sat silent, staring at her with eyes 
 so full of misery that she reached out, laid a cover- 
 ing hand on his clenched fist, and chafed it gently 
 as she continued, " I'm not much of a business 
 woman. You'll have to tell me about your won- 
 derful invention some day!" 
 
 " I'll send you a prospectus," he muttered, achiev- 
 ing a ragged smile. He continued to look at her, 
 intensely grateful for her discretion. She knew! 
 At least, she knew something. And she had not 
 told Celia! 
 
 " My husband," she continued, with a soft gravity 
 that he found adorable, " is ill. Just how ill he is, 
 no one realises least of all himself. So you can 
 imagine," she looked deeply into his eyes, " that I 
 do not harass him with questions. That letter to
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 181 
 
 him from silly Miss Tauser upset him quite dread- 
 fully. He thought you were intriguing behind his 
 back." 
 
 He drew a deep breath. , 
 
 " But I don't see " he began. 
 
 " Neither do I," she cut in swiftly. " I only say 
 that it complicated things." 
 
 " What things ? " demanded Celia, glancing 
 alertly from one to the other. "You two sound 
 mysterious." 
 
 " Well, your vacation, for one thing," evaded 
 Lucinda, smiling. " For your father wirelessed me 
 to go out directly and bring you home or he would 
 go himself." 
 
 " Mother did give me a fright ! " laughed the 
 girl. " She swooped down on me after you left, 
 and the first thing she did was to fade little Tauser 
 right out of the landscape. I never saw moms 
 really furious before." 
 
 " I knew she was silly," murmured Lucinda, " but 
 I didn't know before that she had a vicious 
 mind." She sat thinking deeply, her eyes staring 
 off, her chin in her hand.
 
 i82 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 " You children," she said finally, " will have to 
 promise me one thing." 
 
 "I will," said Sloane. 
 
 "I won't!" cried Celia, with a rebellious lift of 
 her chin. " Now, mother you have to be on our 
 side!" 
 
 " Of course I am, silly. But just at present " 
 
 She stopped to pat her daughter's cheek. "At 
 present, I'm going to ask you and Pinkney not to 
 see each other until well, until I give the word. 
 Your father is ill, and I won't bother him with 
 trifles " 
 
 " Do you call us trifles ? " exclaimed the girl in- 
 dignantly. 
 
 " I call anything trifles in comparison with your 
 father's health." 
 
 Celia's mouth was mutinous. Her eyes, very 
 wide and blue, telegraphed to Pinkney: 
 
 "You hear? What did I tell you up on the 
 ranch? He's hateful and obstinate. And yet, she 
 adores him. She'd sacrifice us like a flash. But 
 you just can't help loving her, can you?" 
 
 And he flashed back the response:
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 183 
 
 "All right I get you. But you are mine and 
 I am yours, and nobody can alter that. Yes she's 
 adorable." 
 
 Celia nodded, her eyes diamond-bright. 
 
 Lucinda, glancing up, caught the silent colloquy, 
 and laughed. 
 
 " You babes in the wood ! " she breathed. " Do 
 you promise then not to see each other until I can 
 
 work something out? I " She faltered, and 
 
 for the first time, a trouble, or a doubt, or an an- 
 guish showed itself in the twilight gravity of her 
 
 eyes. " I want to help you " she murmured to 
 
 Sloane. 
 
 " Don't bother about that," he muttered huskily, 
 squeezing her hand. " There's no use cry -baby- 
 ing over spilt milk. Much obliged, just the 
 same." 
 
 They rose from the table and Lucinda said: 
 
 " I'm going to drop you two chicks in the park 
 for a stroll. I'll meet you in the Egyptian Room 
 at the Museum in an hour." 
 
 In the park, they rambled for a time in silence. 
 Jhe trees were bare and leafless, and a thin crust
 
 184 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 of snow covered the grass. The air was clear and 
 fine. Occasionally he stole a quick sidelong glance 
 at the girl by his side. She walked gracefully, with 
 a swimming, undulating movement, as if she were 
 breasting an invisible flood. Her cheeks were a 
 splendid rose. Walking beside her, so thrillingly 
 alive, so mysterious and dear, Sloane had a sudden 
 sense of ecstasy, of conscious communion with the 
 spirit of life, such as he sometimes experienced when 
 he swam far out to sea and then floated, eyes closed, 
 upon the buoyant breast of the deep. 
 
 The corrals of the spotted deer appeared around 
 the curve of the path. Suddenly he laughed out. 
 
 " Well ? " she queried, smiling deeply too. 
 
 " Come on. Let's go and ask the keeper about 
 the new baby peccadillo. They say he's a cute little 
 beggar." 
 
 " Baby peccadillo ? " she murmured. " I never 
 heard of one before.'* 
 
 " Well, I've never seen a live one," he admitted. 
 " But I've often heard of them. My idea subject 
 to correction is that it's something on the order 
 of a baby kangaroo."
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 185 
 
 "You're sure you don't mean peccary?" she 
 mused, with puckered brow. 
 
 " Lord, girl ! A peccary's a pig. Come on. 
 We're losing time. You ask the keeper." 
 
 Celia paused, screwing up her pretty brows. 
 
 " Peccadillo pecc pec Why," she sud- 
 denly burst out, " that's not an animal at all ! It's 
 nothing but a fault a little fault ! " She looked 
 at him reproachfully, blushing like a rose. " How 
 absurd you are ! " she breathed in a low voice. 
 
 Sloane took her in his arms and kissed her. 
 
 " Well," he laughed, " it ought to be an animal 
 if it's not. That word has missed its vocation. 
 Baby peccadillo can't you fairly hear him chew ? " 
 
 They found a secluded spot and sat down in view 
 of the lake. Sloane, who sensed impending danger, 
 was all for carrying the conversation back to the 
 ranch. But Celia asked no difficult questions. She 
 sat very still cupping her chin in her hand, while 
 he rambled on or sat silent, wrapped in the warm 
 contentment of her presence. 
 
 Presently, as if the time were ripe, she bent for- 
 ward, and breathed rather than spoke:
 
 1 86 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 "What is it love?" 
 
 Under the freighted tenderness of that word, he 
 felt the very moorings of his soul tremble and give 
 way. But he did not yield. And Celia, when she 
 caught the pinched bleakness of his averted face, 
 did not press him. 
 
 That night in his room, reflecting upon the tre- 
 mendous tractile power which Celia had suddenly 
 exerted with that single small word, Sloane decided 
 sagely that love rendered women strong and men 
 weak. He decided, moreover, that now he knew 
 what Delilah had said to Samson when she wished 
 to discover the secret of his strength. She had bent 
 above him, with a mouth like Celia's, and breathed 
 in thrilling tones: "What is it love?" And 
 Samson, overborne by the linked sweetness of her 
 tones, had replied: 
 
 "Enchantress of my heart! 
 It is my hair ! " 
 
 Whereupon, the enchantress of his heart had 
 watched her chance and scalped him as he lay 
 dreaming of her charms. So deep an impression
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 187 
 
 did Celia's voice make upon him, that all during 
 the next week at intervals in his work out in the 
 harbour, he burst into sudden song, bellowing in a 
 melancholy baritone: 
 
 " Enchantress of my heart! 
 It is my hair ! " 
 
 And occasionally, being absorbed or distraught, 
 he would unconsciously alter a word and troll out: 
 
 " Enchantress of my heart ! 
 It is thy hair!" 
 
 Which, as O'Connor remarked, made some sense 
 to the blasted thing.
 
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN 
 
 UPON reflection, Mrs. King mitigated somewhat 
 the severity of her sentence and permitted Celia 
 and Sloane to see each other occasionally. But 
 their meetings were brief and unsatisfactory. Celia, 
 who still remained at home, not having fulfilled her 
 threat of a downtown apartment, had resumed her 
 work at the hospital, and had her two hours off 
 daily. But Sloane, down upon the waterfront, or 
 out in the icy winds of the harbour, could not pos- 
 sibly get off in the daytime. To Celia he had ex- 
 plained that he was conducting some practical ex- 
 periments in connection with a heavier deep-sea 
 diving-suit he was working upon. And that state- 
 ment was strictly true, as far as it went; but 
 he saw plainly that it did not go very far with 
 Celia. 
 
 The work itself made exorbitant demands on his 
 vitality, but it kept him absorbed. At night, after 
 
 188
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 189 
 
 he had scrubbed himself and dined, he fell asleep 
 at table with the newspaper in his hand. 
 
 In his brief interviews with Celia, held in the 
 bare little reception room at the hospital, smelling 
 of disinfectants, he could not disguise from himself 
 that she was constrained and cold. But she asked 
 him no more questions, and he could not determine 
 whether her reticence tortured or relieved him 
 most. 
 
 After one of these bleak interviews, Sloane, des- 
 perate, and feeling as lonely as a lost soul, betook 
 himself to Gilmore's office to inquire after Chap- 
 man. He had decided he would consent to any kind 
 of an arrangement, even to Chapman's taking over 
 the whole concern, if by so doing he could wipe 
 out his indebtedness to his men and refund the 
 value of their stock. But Chapman had not re- 
 turned. And if he had received Sloane's letter, he 
 gave no sign. 
 
 The case of the Sloane Salvage Company took 
 its slow routine course through the courts and 
 judgments were rendered against Pinkney, who one 
 morning awakened to find himself bankrupt, with
 
 190 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 a date set for a public auction sale of the company's 
 property, patents, stocks, machinery, and pontoons. 
 He fervently hoped that, at least, he would not 
 figure a second time in the headlines of the papers. 
 And this extra humiliation he was spared. Busi- 
 ness crashes that particular week were numerous, 
 and the item heralding his failure was relegated to 
 an obscure corner of the last column of the finan- 
 cial page. The date of the auction was set twelve 
 days distant. 
 
 During that final week he did not dare go near 
 Celia, lest some intimation of the approaching 
 disaster should inadvertently fall from his tongue 
 or look forth from his eyes. After he had attended 
 the final obsequies of the company, he supposed the 
 time would arrive when he would be obliged to 
 confess something. How little should be told her, 
 or how much, he did not at present know and did 
 not greatly care. 
 
 Upon one thing, however, he was gloomily re- 
 solved: to release Celia from her engagement with 
 him. For Pinkney Sloane, president of the Sloane 
 Salvage Company, with the nest-egg of a fine for-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 tune in his possession, had vanished off the boards. 
 And Pinkney Sloane, unshaven young rough-neck, 
 day-labourer in oilskins, in charge of a salvage crew 
 in the icy slush of the harbour, who had taken his 
 place, was not a fit mate for the daughter of Klag- 
 gett King. After a sombre survey of the subject 
 from all aspects and angles he decided that the best 
 thing to do, after fate in the shape of the auc- 
 tioneer's hammer had knocked his hopes on the 
 head, was to leak noiselessly out of the landscape. 
 
 Luckily, he had few spare hours to brood. Life 
 that week on the New York waterfront was a lively 
 affair. It kept the young bankrupt absorbed from 
 morning until night. Barges and ferry-boats and 
 tugs and little harbour-craft collided, sprang aleak, 
 or stranded, or blew up their boilers; and Sloane 
 and his salvage crew were in heavy demand on all 
 sides at once, sweating in their oilskins, despite the 
 icy blasts, as they toiled to release a stranded vessel, 
 or reduce to a minimum the jettisoning of a valu- 
 able cargo. 
 
 One night, as he sat dog-tired on the edge of his 
 bed, Annie knocked to announce the presence of a
 
 192 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 lady downstairs. And before he had more than 
 time to rise, the lady herself was at the door. It 
 was Mrs. King, more pale and shadowy than ever. 
 
 " Mr. Sloane," she began at once, and her voice 
 sounded old and worn, " I am in trouble and I have 
 come to you for help. Have you seen Celia? " 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 " Not for days," he replied sombrely. " This 
 work ties me up hand and foot. And at night I'm 
 dead with fatigue. But I'm going to see her soon. 
 Going to have a long talk. . . . Settle every- 
 thing. . . ." 
 
 She listened with a strange, bleak, brooding air 
 that dismayed him to the heart. 
 
 " I want you to come with me to see her. To- 
 night. Now. She's left home." 
 
 He could only gape in mute consternation. 
 
 " Where has she gone ? " he demanded at last, 
 stupidly. 
 
 " To the hospital. She telephoned me just be- 
 fore I left." 
 
 " But why did she " He broke off abruptly, 
 
 with a shrewd suspicion of what had occurred.
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 193 
 
 " She read in the paper the notice of the sale at 
 public auction of the property of your company," 
 replied Mrs. King. Her absolute quietude was like 
 the intense calm at the heart of a storm. " After- 
 ward, she showed it to me and accused me of 
 
 well, all sorts of wild, bitter untrue things. But 
 until I read that notice I never even dreamed that 
 things had gone so badly with you. I knew, of 
 course, there was some difficulty, but when I spoke 
 
 to Klaggett, he said he said " Her voice 
 
 broke and she could not go on. 
 
 " Never mind," he soothed her gently. " He 
 probably said there was a temporary snag, but that 
 things would right themselves soon." 
 
 She threw him a grateful glance. 
 
 ;< That's precisely what he did say ! " 
 
 "Well, it's true," he observed with grim hu- 
 mour. "And it covers just about every situation 
 in life." 
 
 " I hated to trouble him," she continued, still with 
 that same soft steadiness of voice as if bracing 
 herself to some stern inner ordeal, " for he is ill 
 nobody but myself knows how ill he really is. And
 
 I 9 4 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 when he gets those nervous spells and cannot sleep, 
 he goes frantic. He fights . . . and fights . . . 
 and fights . . . everybody, everything. He can- 
 not endure to be thwarted. You understand, he 
 has always had an iron will; he has never wanted 
 friends only subjects. He can't bear he never 
 could to have any one cross his will. . . . It's 
 partly on account of a recurrent dream he has, in 
 which he believes implicitly. . . . He says that he 
 doesn't he pretends to mock at it but in reality 
 it governs all his thoughts, his deeds. He must 
 conquer that is his idea. You see, he has a dream 
 adversary, whom he has never been able to conquer, 
 whom he has never been able even to see. Don't 
 ask me," she continued rather wildly, " who that 
 dream adversary is! I tell you he has never seen 
 his face. But he is determined to get him. And 
 to get him, he must first have the dream. . . . And 
 to dream, he must have success. . . . And that suc- 
 cess means the ruin of some of his business oppo- 
 nents in this case it was you! You see, how it 
 is horrible . . . grotesque . . . unbelievable, even!
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 195 
 
 ... A phantom-chase after what? And with the 
 recent months it has become a kind of malady, an 
 obscure sickness of the soul. ... I am the only 
 one he does not fight, and he trusts me not to 
 trouble him to give him rest." At this 'point, she 
 broke down altogether and the tears brimmed and 
 fell. 
 
 " That is why I have not bothered him about you 
 and Celia, for I thought it was more important that 
 he should weather this crisis than to anger to 
 antagonise, to thwart him at this stage. . . . Oh, 
 you must forgive me if I have made a mistake! 
 It is not that he hates you, personally. It is only 
 that it maddens him to be opposed. He must have 
 his own will." 
 
 " I believe that," said Sloane dryly. " Klaggett 
 King is not the only one who likes to have his own 
 will. It's a pretty universal failing. But when he 
 lets that desire get the upper hand of him; when 
 he makes a secret partner out of it and tries to 
 
 break everybody who won't bow down to him " 
 
 He paused and finished with harsh abruptness,
 
 196 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 " Well, he can have his dream. For he's broken 
 me. I'm done for. Let's leave that. What about 
 Celia? I suppose she opposed him too?" 
 
 She nodded. " It was a dreadful scene. You 
 know how Celia is. Where she loves, you can twine 
 her round your finger like a silk ribbon. But Klag- 
 gett freezes her into stone with one harsh word. 
 She accused him of trying to ruin you in order to 
 marry her to Mr. Pym. They both said wild, ter- 
 rible, flaying things. And finally, just as she was, 
 without a hat, she ran out weeping into the night." 
 
 " When was that ? " he demanded briefly, reach- 
 ing for his hat. 
 
 " About an hour ago. But she telephoned me 
 she was safe and stopping the night at the hospi- 
 tal. She said that day after to-morrow she has to 
 appear in the police-court." 
 
 "Wha-at?" he gasped, astounded. 
 
 " She drove her own car downtown, and well, 
 you see, she was still terribly angry, and so I sup- 
 pose she drove faster than she was aware, and a 
 traffic officer gave her a summons." 
 
 She smiled at him, a faint, humorous, compre-
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 197 
 
 bending smile, and immediately fell grave again. 
 
 " I want Celia to come home. I have promised 
 her father that. If Celia won't listen to me, you 
 must persuade her." 
 
 " I'll do my best," he promised shortly. 
 
 They descended to the waiting automobile, and 
 after she had given the hospital number to the 
 chauffeur and they had seated themselves inside, 
 she went on, still with that same soft steadiness of 
 purpose which distressed him to the heart. 
 
 " There's one thing more. When the effects of 
 your company come up for sale, Celia swears she's 
 going to bid against her father and buy them in." 
 
 His hearty laughter floated out into the night. 
 
 " Some live kid ! " murmured he. 
 
 " But she mustn't. I forbid it. And I want you 
 
 to promise me to buy them in yourself. I " 
 
 she spoke hurriedly, " I will provide the funds." 
 
 "No!" 
 
 " Please " she began desperately. " Are you 
 
 going to turn perverse on my hands too?" After 
 that she gave way and sobbed softly behind her 
 veil.
 
 198 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 He comforted her as best he might. 
 
 " See here," he said at last. " That sale isn't due 
 for four days. To-night our business is to find 
 Celia. After that well, we'll plot out something." 
 And with this evasion she had to be content. 
 
 They found Celia at the hospital, locked in her 
 room. Sloane sent up three notes in succession, 
 each stiff er than the last, before she consented to 
 descend to the reception-room where he awaited her. 
 Finally she came, pale, hard, wearing her dark 
 Maid of Verdun expression. At the door she 
 stopped and looked at him, so beautiful, so fierce 
 and haggard, that despite himself Sloane laughed. 
 
 " Where is your sword ? " said he. 
 
 At that, she turned sharply away, and then, with 
 a dry sob, ran forward suddenly, and flung herself 
 upon his breast. 
 
 "How could you? Oh, how could you?" she 
 wept. 
 
 "How could I what, my darling?" he whis- 
 pered, holding her close. 
 
 "Keep it all a secret from me!" 
 
 " How could I not? " he asked, simply. He drew
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 199 
 
 a deep breath and stooped his head to hers. Their 
 lips met. 
 
 Inside of ten minutes he had her promise to re- 
 turn home for the present and had put her inside 
 the car with her mother. She leaned out, tremu- 
 lous and dewy-eyed to wave him a last good-night. 
 He watched them roll away and then walked back 
 to his room through the starlight, happier than he 
 had been since he left Hunter's Ranch.
 
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN 
 
 THAT night Lucinda did not attempt to sleep. 
 
 Her mind, finely attuned to the changing moods 
 of Klaggett King, seemed preternaturally alive and 
 alert. Somewhere, back in the dim hinterland of 
 her consciousness, was sounding a note of danger, 
 like the muffled, melancholy note of the buoy-bell 
 on a dark sea. 
 
 She slipped into a soft grey robe, and prepared 
 to make a night of it. Several times, during the 
 hours around midnight, she tip-toed, velvet-footed, 
 to King's bedroom to listen at the door. He ob- 
 jected strongly to any kind of surveillance, and so 
 she could only watch and listen from afar. 
 
 Celia she had tucked into bed with many soft 
 dewy hugs, and a promise reluctantly wrung from 
 the girl to look in upon her father in the morning 
 and to present him with a penitent kiss. It was an 
 outward token of submission, and beyond that, at 
 
 200
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 201 
 
 the moment, Lucinda did not trouble her head. She 
 had deeper things upon her mind. 
 
 She paced broodingly up and down the room, 
 picking up first one object and then another with 
 unseeing eyes. A bottle of milk and an opiate and 
 a hypodermic case stood upon her night table. 
 
 Finally she switched off the lights and threw her- 
 self down on the chaise longue. Whether she dozed 
 off, she never afterward knew. It seemed to her 
 she was only thinking more deeply, more intensely 
 of Klaggett King, when she was roused by the 
 deafening crash of a pistol-shot, followed, an in- 
 stant later, by a wild choking cry. 
 
 With terror hammering at her heart, she flew 
 down the corridor, flung open his door, and 
 switched on the electricity. Even before she 
 reached him, she knew it was the dream. 
 
 " It's the dream," she said to herself reassuringly, 
 and she felt relieved, for the dream was an old 
 friend. 
 
 The sudden flood of mellow light revealed Klag- 
 gett King standing in the centre of the floor, glar- 
 ing austerely before him, the revolver still gripped
 
 202 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 in his hand. Little wreaths of acrid smoke still 
 curled from its steel blue muzzle. 
 
 He stood, solid as a rock, legs braced wide apart, 
 head down, his heavy penthouse brows blackly bent, 
 his jaw thrust out aggressively, as if about to 
 charge. His big gaunt face with its strong shadows, 
 all blacks and whites, was deathly pale, and his lips 
 were twisted off into a smile, dreadful to behold, 
 half of triumph, half of anguish. A damp sweat 
 beaded his temples. 
 
 He kept on looking past her, smiling that faint, 
 harsh, bitter smile brooding, sombre, remote. 
 That dark austere look of triumph, mingled with 
 malice, mingled also with was it wonder, or wist- 
 fulness? froze her very heart. But her sharp eye 
 noted not a sign of a wound upon him. 
 
 At her cry of " Klaggett ! " slowly, without 
 moving his head or his body which seemed fixed 
 like a post in its place, he slewed round his deep 
 inscrutable eyes upon her. 
 
 " I got him. Killed him deader than Cock 
 Robin." His tones were casual, almost indifferent. 
 " I always knew I should. But this time I laid for
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 203 
 
 him with a gun. You understand, Lucinda, I 
 realised the danger to myself in stalking that fellow 
 with a gun. For I had an idea about his identity. 
 Oh, I wasn't sure! ... It was always dark and I 
 
 could not see his face. But I suspected " 
 
 He staggered suddenly. 
 
 Lucinda sprang to him and placed a supporting 
 arm about him. 
 
 "Darling!" she cried, with a sob in her voice. 
 " Come to bed. You you frightened me horribly. 
 You mustn't go shooting up the house like that 
 even in a dream ! " 
 
 She strove to laugh, but her voice shook with a 
 horror she could not master. 
 
 "Stop staring away like that! . . . Klaggett! 
 . . . My love look at me ! " 
 
 He seemed not to have heard. His dark eyes 
 burned austerely before him, as if fixed on some 
 inner scene. His voice, when finally he spoke 
 again, came as if from a distance, in a faint 
 whisper, like a light breath, an exhalation, a sigh. 
 " It was night ... on the beach ... in the 
 sand dunes, as before. ... I can still hear the
 
 204 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 pounding of the surf. ... It is roaring now in my 
 ears. ... I came upon him suddenly. . . . And 
 as I shot, he turned his head and slowly looked at 
 me. . . . Lucinda! That fellow I've fought all 
 these years . . . and killed to-night in my dream 
 . . . had my own face on him! " 
 
 "But that's not strange, beloved. That's what 
 often happens in dreams. We're always changing 
 into somebody else. That's what makes them so 
 absurd. Come to bed." 
 
 His breath still came in spasmodic jerks, but his 
 eyes shining out of their cavernous hollows, were 
 calm. 
 
 " He had my own face on him ! And my God, 
 but he looked sad ! " 
 
 " Come to bed, darling." 
 
 She reached up to touch his cheek coaxingly with 
 her fingers, and at the same moment Klaggett King 
 gave a lurch, as if pushed forward by an invisible 
 hand from the rear. His knees buckled. And still 
 staring austerely ahead, half in sombre triumph, 
 half in wistful wonder, he collapsed in Lucinda' s 
 arms, and from his lips issued a crimson stream,
 
 THE SECRET PARTNER 205 
 
 drenching her robe with bright arterial life-blood. 
 
 The papers, respectfully recording his death, 
 noted the fact that Klaggett King had been in fail- 
 ing health for some time. A special interview with 
 his partner, Mr. Pym, confirmed the same. Sloane, 
 who heard of the affair from Celia the next day, 
 was deeply shocked. For there was something he 
 liked about KJaggett King. 
 
 Before the properties of the Sloane Salvage Com- 
 pany went under the hammer, Chapman arrived 
 from London, called Sloane on the telephone at 
 eleven o'clock one night, and as the result of a con- 
 ference which took place the following day, the 
 company was consolidated with the firm of Gil- 
 more and Chapman, and Sloane came into posses- 
 sion, not of a fortune, but of a chance to make 
 good. 
 
 After he married Celia, at her particular request 
 he transformed King's yacht, The Saturn, into a 
 salvage-craft, and Celia re-christened it The Isabel. 
 
 He has not raised the Lusitania but he is figur- 
 ing on her, along with a dozen other firms. She
 
 206 THE SECRET PARTNER 
 
 lies if you want to know on her starboard side 
 at a depth of two hundred and eighty-seven feet. 
 Sloane intends to cradle her with five hundred lift- 
 ing-chains, attach one thousand balloons, pump 
 them full of air after which, he declares, there is 
 no power on earth can keep the giant Cunarder 
 down. 
 
 All of which Celia, her eyes blue as hyacinths, 
 will explain to you proudly at tea. But if Sloane 
 is there, he will hiss in a warning undertone : 
 
 " Sst ! As I was walking down the rue Royale 
 
 " and Celia shuts up like a well-trained little 
 
 clam.
 
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