“The name Marcus North does not occur. Naturally I had that looked up at once. But the omission may be accidental. I was fooled that way before. Vital statistics figures lie like all others. In itself it is no proof that Marcus North is alive. The only way to find out is to see him.”
“Mr. Trent, sir,” More cried, “I’d be scared to, honest.”
Anxiety was reflected on the little man’s round face. He felt he was behaving very badly to his benefactor, but he could not shake off the terror he experienced at the suggestion. He expected to be reprimanded.
“I don’t understand,” he went on, “how those fellers can face that crowd and have authority over them.”
“It’s largely a matter of when you were born,” Trent said. “I can say with certainty that your birthday doesn’t come between the third week of January and the third week of February.”
“It’s May,” More said, “but I don’t understand how that makes it any different.”
“Nor I. But it’s almost universally true that men born under the Zodiacal sign of Aquarius have a strange influence on the insane and make the best attendants for them. I’m an Aquarian and I have it. You’ll find probably that your friend who makes light of epileptics and straying ears was born under the same sign as I am. Be reassured, More, you shall not be delivered to the lions yet, but I want all particulars about this Marcus North. He murdered his manservant and should have been hanged. Instead the family wealth got him to Deerfarm.”
“I’d rather have been hanged,” More cried.
“He was sent there just seventeen years ago. Not a word of the Addison case to any one. If you hear it discussed just listen. Offer no suggestions at all. That’s all for the present. I suppose if any one asks about me you’ll say I’m the money behind the Fort Lee Hosiery Company? Good. That’s a perfectly good reason for your seeing me. You want more capital. Is business good?”
“Too good,” said Mr. More, “I don’t have any time to myself. I’ve got to raise prices.”
Chapter XIV
A Maniac at Large
Dr. Stephen Lang was a big, gray-haired man of fifty. He had learned his golf when a student at Saint Andrew’s University and because of the correctness of his form, he was still a first-class player when most men of his years had begun to drop behind. He had been offered the Deerfarm superintendency after one of the periodical scandals when the politically appointed head had allowed the institution to become a byword. He was to find that there were many in the State more important than its new superintendent and much of his long tenure of office had been embittered by strife. The relief he felt at his freedom was tinctured with regret that his successor seemed to forget that he was a physician and began at once to appoint inefficients at the dictation of his party.
More than ever Dr. Lang was in favor of divorcing psychopathic establishments from lay control, but his influence was now very small. Rumors were circulated that he had been dismissed for incompetency and Trent met him in a bitter mood. The professional offered the new temporary member, whose approaching on the practice hole he admired, as a victim to the club’s best player.
In the beginning Dr. Lang disapproved of Trent. Lang addressed the ball with great deliberation and drove it two hundred and thirty yards. Trent stepped up to it and without a preliminary waggle outdrove the doctor by twenty yards. A fluke, the older man told himself and waited for the second drive. In the end Trent was beaten by a hole, but this was mainly because the links were strange to him. Even Dr. Lang conceded that and looked forward to some excellent golf. After all, he admitted, Duncan, too, had this absence of the protracted waggle and a man who could play as well as this stranger need make no apology for style, stance or speed. And there was something he might learn in putting from the new member. Perhaps he was over-deliberate himself on the green.
The two men dined at the same table and Lang’s Caledonian reserve dropped away from him. He referred to his long connection with Deer farm. Trent did not think it would be long before the doctor would talk freely. “I should think golf must be a great relief in work of that sort,” he said.
“I should have gone mad without it,” Lang answered. “I created the old nine-hole course that this is built on, almost single handed. Golf wasn’t the proletarian thing it is to-day and the natives thought I must be one of my own charges. I’m inclined to be sorry to see it so popular. Golfers’ manners aren’t what they were.”
In the two weeks that were to follow, Anthony Trent managed to beat Dr. Lang three matches out of four. The friendship that ripens so quickly among devotees of sport, a growth impossible under ordinary conditions, found the two men seeking one another’s company in the evening. It was a bond between them that Trent was the son of a distinguished physician who had turned his uncommon talents to the hard work of a country physician in a mountainous locality and had died of it in the end.
There was much of the reformer about Stephen Lang. Prison abuses stirred his ire no less than those of the psychopathic institutions.
“We are too prosperous here,” he contended, “to investigate the conditions of prisoners and lunatics. Because they are housed in fine buildings, and cost a lot of money to maintain, we assume everything is all right. Take prisons for example.” Trent did not yet dare turn his mind to the discussion of Deerfarm. That had to come as an outcome of this allied subject. “How many Americans know that nearly ninety per cent of commitments are made to local institutions such as county and municipal jails, workhouses, farms, chain gangs and camps where there is filth, indescribable filth and overcrowding disease. Innocent are herded with the guilty, the well with the foully diseased. How many of these club women who prattle loyally know the prevailing practice of subjecting female prisoners to the oversight of male attendants?
“And then, too, that pernicious system of paying jailers a daily sum for boarding prisoners without specifying how much food is to be given. Great Britain is more than half a century ahead of us there. That’s a chance for the professional jingo, Trent. Let them stop battleship rivalry and cleanse their own Augean stables.” Dr. Lang smiled a little. “I apologize,” he said. “I have made many enemies by talking that way. Truth is not always pleasant. What time shall we tee-off tomorrow morning?”
“What you say interests me very much, doctor. I can only say that our women don’t know about those things.”
“They ought to,” Lang said, “I’ve lectured and written about it enough to get thrown out of Deerfarm.”
“Are places like Deerfarm run as badly as prisons?”
“Deerfarm wasn’t in my day. This new man who is using it as a step to something more paying will set it back a generation. There can always be abuses when politics run things. You know that. I had a fairly good set of men with me, but the new bunch will probably take its tone from the men higher up. The State doesn’t worry much about Deerfarm. The buildings are old and ought to be condemned. It isn’t light enough and it isn’t warm enough.”
“You had some famous patients there I’ve heard,” Trent said. “Mrs. Pate, for example. I suppose she was undoubtedly mad.”
“No more than you or I. She planned her crime very carefully. She made her husband so drunk she had almost to carry him into the garage. Her watchdog could be depended on to warn her of the approach of any one to her remote farm, but he hadn’t the habit of barking at airplanes and it happened that a passing flier saw that Pate was intoxicated and that she was helping him to the garage where carbon-monoxide finished him. His evidence convicted her. It was death for Mrs. Pate, or Deerfarm, and she chose a spell of the latter. She’ll be out before long. The term shyster lawyer is often used, but no one speaks of shyster alienists. I tell you they are a peril to civilization.”