“Behold,” she said, “the admiral on a sunny day in July. Note the starchy grandeur of him, even with the thermometer up in the clouds. That’s one of the things the rocking-chair fleet adores in him. Can you imagine the flurry at the approach of all that superiority? Theodore Roosevelt, William Faversham, and Richard Harding Davis all arriving together couldn’t overshadow the admiral for a minute.”
Mr. Magee gazed at the picture of a pompous little man, whose fierce mustache seemed anxious to make up for the lack of hair on his head.
“A bald hero at a summer resort,” he commented, “it seems incredible.”
“Oh, they think he lost his hair fighting for the flag,” she laughed. “It’s winter, and snowing, or I shouldn’t dare lèse-majesté. And — over here — is the admiral on the veranda, playing it’s a quarter deck. And here the great portrait — Andrew Rutter with a profaning arm over the admiral’s shoulder. The old ladies make their complaints to Mr. Rutter in softer tones after seeing that picture.”
“And this?” asked Magee, moving farther from the group by the fire.
“A precious one — I wonder they leave it here in winter. This is the admiral as a young man — clipped from a magazine article. Even without the mustache, you see, he had a certain martial bearing.”
“And now he’s the ruler of the queen’s navee,” smiled Magee. He looked about. “Is it possible to see the room where the admiral plays his famous game?”
“Step softly,” she answered. “In here. There stands the very table.”
They went into the small card-room at the right of the entrance to the office, and Mr. Magee quietly closed the door behind them. The time had come. He felt his heart sink.
“Well?” said the girl, with an eagerness she could not conceal.
Mr. Magee groped for words. And found — his old friends of the mountain.
“I love you,” he cried desperately. “You must believe I want to help you. It looks rather the other way now, I’ll admit. I want you to have that money. I don’t know who you are, nor what this all means, but I want you to have it. I went up-stairs determined to give it to you—”
“Really.” The word was at least fifty degrees below the temperature of the card-room.
“Yes, really. I won’t ask you to believe — but I’m telling the truth. I went to the place where I had fatuously hid the money — under a brick of my fireplace. It was gone.”
“How terribly unfortunate.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” Mr. Magee rejoiced that she took so calm a view of it. “They searched the room, of course. And they found the money. They’re on top now. But I’m going—”
He stopped. For he had seen her face. She — taking a calm view of it? No, indeed. Billy Magee saw that she was furiously, wildly angry. He remembered always having written it down that beautiful women were even more beautiful in anger. How, he wondered, had he fallen into that error?
“Please do not bore me,” she said through her teeth, “with any further recital of what you ‘are going’ to do. You seem to have a fatal facility in that line. Your record of accomplishment is pathetically weak. And — oh, what a fool I’ve been! I believed. Even after last night, I believed.”
No, she was not going to cry. Hers was no mood for tears. What said the librettist? “There is beauty in the roaring of the gale, and the tiger when a-lashing of his tail.” Such was the beauty of a woman in anger. And nothing to get enthusiastic about, thought Mr. Magee.
“I know,” he said helplessly, “you’re terribly disappointed. And I don’t blame you. But you will find out that you’ve done me an injustice. I’m going—”
“One thing,” said she, smiling a smile that could have cut glass, “you are going to do. I know that you won’t fail this time, because I shall personally see you through with it. You’re going to stop making a fool of me.”
“Tell me,” pleaded Billy Magee. “Tell me who you are — what this is all about. Can’t you see I’m working in the dark? You must—”
She threw open the card-room door.
“An English officer,” she remarked loudly, stepping out into the other room, “taught the admiral the game. At least, so he said. It added so much romance to it in the eyes of the rocking-chair fleet. Can’t you see — India — the hot sun — the Kipling local color — a silent, tanned, handsome man eternally playing solitaire on the porch of the barracks? Has the barracks a porch?”
Roused, humiliated, baffled, Mr. Magee felt his cheeks burn.
“We shall see what we shall see,” he muttered.
“Why coin the inevitable into a bromide,” she asked.
Mr. Magee joined the group by the fire. Never before in his life had he been so determined on anything as he was now that the package of money should return to his keeping. But how? How trace through this maze of humans the present holder of that precious bundle of collateral? He looked at Mr. Max, sneering his lemon-colored sneer at the mayor’s side; at the mayor himself, nonchalant as the admiral being photographed; at Bland, author of the Arabella fiction, sprawling at ease before the fire; at the tawdry Mrs. Norton, and at Myra Thornhill, who had by her pleading the night before made him ridiculous. Who of these had the money now? Who but Cargan and Max, their faces serene, their eyes eagerly on the preparations for lunch, their plans for leaving Baldpate Inn no doubt already made?
And then Mr. Magee saw coming down the stairs another figure — one he had forgot — Professor Thaddeus Bolton, he of the mysterious dialogue by the annex door. On the professor’s forehead was a surprising red scratch, and his eyes, no longer hidden by the double convex lenses, stood revealed a washed-out gray in the light of noon.
“A most unfortunate accident,” explained the old man. “Most distressing. I have broken my glasses. I am almost blind without them.”
“How’d it happen, Doc?” asked Mr. Cargan easily.
“I came into unexpected juxtaposition with an open door,” returned Professor Bolton. “Stupid of me, but I’m always doing it. Really, the agility displayed by doors in getting in my path is surprising.”
“You and Mr. Max can sympathize with each other,” said Magee, “I thought for a moment your injuries might have been received in the same cause.”
“Don’t worry, Doc,” Mr. Bland soothed him, “we’ll all keep a weather eye out for reporters that want to connect you up with the peroxide blondes.”
The professor turned his ineffectual gaze on the haberdasher, and there was a startlingly ironic smile on his face.
“I know, Mr. Bland,” he said, “that my safety is your dearest wish.”
The Hermit of Baldpate announced that lunch was ready, and with the others Mr. Magee took his place at the table. Food for thought was also his. The spectacles of Professor Thaddeus Bolton were broken. Somewhere in the scheme of things those smashed lenses must fit. But where?
Chapter XIII
The Exquisite Mr. Hayden
It was past three o’clock. The early twilight crept up the mountain, and the shadows began to lengthen in the great bare office of Baldpate Inn. In the red flicker of firelight Mr. Magee sat and pondered; the interval since luncheon had passed lazily; he was no nearer to guessing which of Baldpate Inn’s winter guests hugged close the precious package. Exasperated, angry, he waited for he knew not what, restless all the while to act, but having not the glimmer of an inspiration as to what his course ought to be.
He heard the rustle of skirts on the stair landing, and looked up. Down the broad stairway, so well designed to serve as a show-window for the sartorial triumphs of Baldpate’s gay summer people, came the tall handsome girl who had the night before set all his plans awry. In the swift-moving atmosphere of the inn she had hitherto been to Mr. Magee but a puppet of the shadows, a figure more fictitious than real. Now for the first time he looked upon her as a flesh-and-blood girl, noted the red in her olive cheeks, the fire in her dark eyes, and realized that her interest in that package of money might be something more than another queer quirk in the tangle of events.