“Who is Sir Francis Levinson?”
“He’s a character in a play in which I took my first part back in New York. The play was East Lynne. The man who played the part of Sir Francis Levinson, the villain, became my husband. His real name is Nate Mitchell. We were married only a year; he was unbelievably cruel, he often beat me, and he drank heavily. He was a brute, Jim.”
“When I got my divorce he threatened he’d never let me be loved by any other man, he’d kill me first. I believed him, so I ran away, came out West. That was five years ago, and just when I thought I’d never hear of Nate again, I got that note. It’s his way of letting me know he’s found me. He wants me to suffer, and after I’ve suffered enough, he’ll kill me, as he promised!”
Tears of fright and self-pity rolled down Clara’s smooth cheeks.
Tory patted her hand. “Five years is a long time,” he said. “Do you really think Nate would feel as strongly about it now? Maybe he just wants to scare you.”
“Oh, no, Nate never forgot or forgave the smallest slight! He told me he waited fifteen years once to get even on an uncle who had struck him when he was a boy. Nate is cruel — unforgiving. Unless I can get away from him again and hide, I’m sure he’ll kill me.”
“Would you know him if you saw him?”
“I don’t know. Nate was almost ten years older than I was, and he had the kind of face that could look any way he wanted it to. He was an impersonator for years before he became an actor.”
Troy fell silent and listened to the rhythmic rattle of the wheels turn hollow as the train crossed a trestle over a manzanita-filled glen. Clara repaired her makeup while Troy studied the passengers speculatively.
Besides the man in the bowler hat there were two other men, four women and a little boy. One of the men, the closest to them, was a preacher in a broad-brimmed hat and high white collar, with the angular face of an ascetic, wearing a full black mustache that drooped over his compressed lips like the black mouth of a tragic mask. He was reading a newspaper and his expression left little doubt that he was privately condeming the worldly activities of his fellow men.
The other man, sitting a few seats behind the bowler hat, was a red-faced, sandy haired fellow with bushy eyebrows, who played a two-handed string game, which the little boy across the aisle watched with fascination. From time to time, the player shot an amused glance at the child, but the way he fumbled occasionally with the string, and lurched in his seat as the coach took a curve, made it apparent he’d had too much to drink. He wore a faded blue mackinaw and a heavy woolen cap, and Troy got the impression the man was, or had been, a sailor.
Troy leaned forward towards Clara and whispered: “It’s possible you might be followed. There are three men in the car. Turn around and see if you think any one of them is Nate Mitchell.”
She shook her shoulders helplessly. “I couldn’t tell from here, Jim. I’m near-sighted.”
“Then I’m going to walk you to the back of the car. As we go down the aisle, look at each man. The first is a preacher, the second a business man of some kind, and the third, I think, could be a sailor. Ready?”
“All right, Jim.”
The preacher looked up from his paper as they passed and transferred his disapproval from the printed word to the sight of Clara in her brightly-colored jacket and painted face. Troy could see his mind work. Painted face meant fallen woman, or her equivalent, an actress. As the preacher’s censorious stare passed on to him, Troy felt like saying aloud: And I’m a gambler. But instead he merely smiled, the kind of tolerant smile he hoped would infuriate the preacher. It did. The man flushed and snapped his eyes back to the newspaper.
Clara paused as they reached the seat of the man in the bowler hat, and the object of their scrutiny switched his attention from the passing scenery first to Clara, and then to Troy. The gambler felt again the wave of enmity from the man’s cold blue eyes, and wondered why the man should hate him. The next moment Clara moved on down the aisle.
But before they reached the Mackinawed man, the little boy, whose interest in that gentleman’s string manipulations had waned, ran into the aisle, looking up into Clara’s face, and piped in a childish treble: “Oo-oh! Look at the pretty lady!”
He ran towards Clara and threw his arms around her.
“Bobby!” A plain, sallow-faced mother, shock showing in every lineament of her face, half rose from her seat.
But Clara reached down coolly, her lovely face expressionless, and pulled the little boy’s arms from around her knees as one might disengage an impending branch of a blackberry bush, and returned the child wordlessly to his mother. Whatever else Clara might be, Troy thought amused, she was not in the least maternal.
“Ah, Miss Clara Berg, the enchanting actress!” the Mackinawed man said, rising with clumsy gallantry as they reached him, and pulling off his woolen cap. He stood blinking and grinning with his hair tousled, like some insolent leprechaun. Then the train took another curve and he went sprawling back against the window frame with a mighty thump.
Out on the vestibule platform, Troy let the coach door swing shut behind him before he spoke.
“Did you recognize any one of them?” he asked.
Clara shook her head, staring as if hypnotized at the twin ribbons of rails which unrolled behind them.
“Then why did you pause at the man with the bowler hat?”
Clara stiffened and turned with a gasp. “I — didn’t.” Then when she saw Troy’s evident disbelief, she said impatiently: “All right, I know him. But he is not Nate. Of that much, at least, I’m sure.”
“Why?”
“Because his name is Franz Auslander. He lives in Frisco and deals in mining equipment.”
“And he’s the man whom you knew there?” Troy remembered how Auslander had come rushing impatiently out of the hotel lobby. “And you’ve already talked to him this afternoon?”
“Yes. He asked me for the fiftieth time, I think, to come back to him, but I turned him down. I’m sick of him.”
“And are you afraid of him?”
“Of Franz?” Clara’s lip curled contemptuously. “He’s the last man I’d be afraid of. He doesn’t count.”
“Just the same, I’d hate to meet him alone in a dark mine.”
“He might try to get even with you, Jim, but he’d never harm me. He’s even a little bit ridiculous, in spite of his money. It’s Nate I’ve got to look out for!”
“Then could one of the other two be Nate? The sailor, maybe? He knew your name.”
“He could have seen me on the stage, like a hundred others.”
“The preacher then?”
“Either of them could be Nate, really. They’re both the same build, and Nate dyed his hair even when I knew him! They’ve both got gray eyes, too, just like Nate.”
The door from the coach opened suddenly, and the sailor, looking raffish now with his woolen cap tilted over one bushy eyebrow, poked his head out at them, ducking it in mock sobriety at Troy.
“The little boy was right, Mister,” he said thickly. “She’s a mighty pretty lady!”
Troy and Clara had returned to their seats, when Troy rose some twenty minutes later, and excusing himself, went back again to the vestibule to smoke his cigar. Here in broad daylight in a public coach no danger could threaten Clara, and although he had committed himself to protecting her, he found her insistent demands upon him a weight upon his spirit. He was also aware that he didn’t like her any more. Now that Clara knew their brief relationship was over, she did not bother to camouflage with coquetry her less charming characteristics — her self-absorption, her deceptiveness, her lack of charity towards others.
So it was with relief that Troy stood alone, clinging to the handrail halfway down the vestibule steps, sucking his cigar and watching the train glide through smooth cuts of warm, red earth, past cinnabar trunks of yellow pine and the thick, green foliage of the live oak. He remembered from his northbound trip this tree-tunneled passage, the steep ravine below. It came just before the loop to the bridge over the Bear River.