“How much convincing are you going to require?” Miss Wickford asked, her eyes surveying Wenston in a head-to-toe glance, which was something less than cordial.
“I’m going to need lots of convincing.”
“All right, here goes,” Miss Wickford said cheerfully, drawing up a chair and unfastening the snap on a large purse which she had carried under her arm.
“Tell me the name of your father,” Wenston said, glancing at Mason meaningly. “It might save time.”
Her glance was scornful. “His name was Wickford. He had trouble with creditors, so he went to the Orient. While he was in Shanghai, he took the name of Tucker.”
Wenston frowningly studied her. “He had rather an unusual firtht name. Perhaps you can tell us what that was.”
“I can tell you what it was,” she said, “and I can tell you how he happened to take it. The name was D-O-W, and it consists of the initials of my name. Doris Octavia Wickford. Octavia was my mother’s name, and when my father wanted some distinctive first name, he coined the word Dow from those initials.”
This time Wenston managed to keep his face more of a mask. “What else?” he asked. “Have you any proof?”
She took a somewhat dog-eared envelope from her purse. The envelope had a Chinese stamp and postmark. She said, “This letter was sent from Shanghai, January 8, 1921.”
Wenston and Mason both moved over to take a look at the envelope. Wenston reached for it. She pushed his hand back with a quick gesture and said, “Naughty, naughty! You can look, and that’s all.”
“Your father wrote that?” Wenston asked.
“That’s right, and you’ll notice the name, Doris O. Wickford, written on the envelope.”
“The return address in the upper left-hand comer,” Mason said, “is that of George A. Wickford at Shanghai.”
“That’s right. That was his real name. Here’s a photostatic copy of his marriage license to my mother. September, 1912, and here’s a copy of my birth certificate, November, 1913. You’ll notice my mother’s name was Octavia, and you’ll note that I was christened Doris Octavia Wickford.”
Mason examined the photostatic copies of the documents, then raised his eyes to meet Wenston’s perplexed gaze.
She said, “Now I’ll read you some of the excerpts from this letter. After all, remember I was a child of eight at the time, and he’s written to me the way a father would write to a girl of that age.”
She took some folded sheets of paper from the envelope. They were written in pencil. The paper was a thin, limp rice paper characteristic of Chinese manufacture. She read, “ ‘My dear daughter: It seems like a very long time since your daddy has seen you. I miss you very much and hope you are being a good girl. I don’t know just when daddy is coming back to you, but I hope it won’t be long. Over here, I am doing some good business and expect to return and clean up all of the debts I owe. You must remember not to mention to anyone where daddy is because some of those people who made so much trouble for me would try to keep me from getting enough together to pay off what I owe. If they will only leave me alone for a little while longer, I can not only pay off everything, but have money left. Then I will come back to you, and we will be together for a long time. You can have nice dresses and a pony if you still want one.’ ”
She looked up and said, “I had written him saying that I wanted a pony for Christmas.”
“Your mother?” Mason asked.
“She died when I was six, just before Dad went to China.”
“Go ahead.”
She turned back to the letter and read, “ ‘I have a very fine business here now, but I can’t tell you what it is. I have a partner. His name is Karr. Don’t you think that is a funny way for a man to spell his name? But he is a good partner, and he has lots of courage. Three weeks ago we were on a trip up the Yangtze River, and the boat he was in tipped over. Some of the Chinese boatmen clung to the overturned boat, but one of them was swept away. The current was very swift. This man couldn’t swim. He was only a Chinese, and over here the life of a laborer is not very valuable. I doubt if any one of the Chinese would have tried to rescue him, even if they had been strong swimmers. But my partner, Karr, swam out to the aid of this Chinaboy and brought him back to the boat. By that time my boat had come alongside, and the coolies managed to get it turned right side up. But we lost a lot of things in the river which we never recovered.
“ ‘The water of this river is very yellow. It is filled with a kind of mud. Even after it flows out into the ocean, it stains the whole region around the mouth of the river. It is a very big river, and Shanghai is on a branch of it called the Whangpoo.
“ ‘Shanghai is a very big city. You would never dream of the noise and bustle of one of these Chinese cities. It seems as though everyone is always screaming something at the top of his voice. You wouldn’t believe people could make that much noise.
“ ‘Now daddy wants Doris to be a good little girl, and study hard in school. Your daddy is sorry he couldn’t send you that pony for Christmas, because there is no way of sending a pony from China to the United States, but some day soon when your daddy comes back, you shall have your pony. Lots of love from a lonely father to his little girl. Your loving DAD. P.S. When you write me over here, you can write the letter addressed to me, but be sure you put it care of Dow Tucker and send it care of the American Express Company. I will get it all right.’ ”
She folded the letter, held it for a moment in her fingers as though contemplating whether she should pass it over to Mason for his inspection. Then abruptly she pushed it back into the envelope, and said simply, “I saved that one because it was the last letter I ever received. There were other letters, and I lost them. This one I kept. I never heard any more from him. I didn’t know what had happened to him.”
Wenston tried to keep from seeming impressed. “You have something else? Some better proof, perhaps?”
She looked at him with the impersonal appraisal one would give an insect impaled on a pin and said, “I’ve got lots of proof. Here’s a picture — a family group taken the year my mother died. I was six at the time, almost seven.”
She extracted a somewhat faded photograph from her purse. It was of the peculiar muddy tone which characterized the matte-surface prints of that period. It was a square picture three and a half inches by three and a half inches, and showed a man and a woman seated on what was apparently the upper step of a front porch. The man was holding a girl on his knee. Despite the pigtails and extreme youth of the girl in the picture, the resemblance to Doris Wickford was very pronounced.
Wenston pursed his lips, caught Mason’s eye, and almost imperceptibly nodded.
“You remember your father?” Mason asked.
“Naturally. Of course, it’s the memory of a girl of seven years of age. I was seven the last time I saw him. I suppose there are some things on which my memory is distorted, and you’ll have to make allowances for youth, but aside from that, I remember him quite distinctly, numerous little things about him, his tolerance, his unfailing consideration of the rights of others, and, what didn’t impress me as being particularly remarkable at the time but what does now that I’ve seen more of the world, is that I never knew him to lose his temper over anything, or say a sharp word to anyone. And yet the man must have been beset by worries.”
“Where did you live?”
“The address is on this letter,” she said. “It was in Denver, Colorado.”
“You lived there all the time until your father disappeared?”