The Story So Far:
JOHN SCHMAAR was quite sure that he knew women for what they were—light things, beautiful, expensive toys. He'd had little experience with them in his early days as a professional gambler in the West; of late, however, he had found them useful in the more highly evolved financial operations he carried on at his country place on the Hudson.
Take Aileen Dulcifer, for instance, the pretty little waster who had run through her inheritance and to pay a bridge-debt had given Schmaar a check which was returned N. S. F., by the bank; Schmaar found it easy, under the circumstances, to persuade Aileen to accept much-needed money from him, easy to persuade her that there was no harm in doing what he asked in exchange—keep the wealthy young Westerner, Gladden, amused, so that Gladden would stay on in New York until a certain “financial deal” Schmaar had on with him should be completed. And when, that afternoon, a group of Schmaar's guests, men and women, were out on the cliff above the river in front of his place, and the Bannerman girl told again the story of the Indian maiden who had jumped over in the effort to save her lover—and thus gave the place the name Lovers' Leap—Schmaar again showed his opinion by offering a thousand dollars to any modern woman who would make even the first partial descent.
So, some days later, when Schmaar informed Aileen that the deal had turned out badly for Gladden, that it would now be unwise for her to marry the impoverished Westerner, the gambler was a bit surprised that she took the matter so seriously. He let her run on, however—best let her work off her hysteria. And then it was that Aileen Dulcifer, in the effort to save her lover from Schmaar, made a strange proposal to him.
CHAPTER IV
SCHMAAR looked her over—before she got going again and saw the shape she was in: flushed, staring like a scared school-child, stammering with excitement.
“Listen! Wait a minute,” he cautioned. He couldn't have her like that if anybody came in. “Before you go any farther, sit down and cool off!
“Take your time,” he told her “They wont be down—the rest of them—yet awhile.”
He got up then—giving her time to get a new grip on herself, and walked over to the old French window at the end of the room. They were in his library, on the east side of the house. Looking out, he saw it was to be a moonlight night again; the fall moon was just then rising over the rounded dead-gold hills across the Hudson.
“The great sacrifice, huh?” said Schmaar to himself, watching her. “How do you like now you've got it?”
Moonlight meant little in the life of John Schmaar; his education—as the education of the poor is apt to be—had been neglected in this regard. Yet at this time, as all mariners know, in October, the moon is at the height of her power on sea an land.
John Schmaar, watching at his window, saw that enormous yellow disk separate itself from its dull golden hill, from the black shadows of trees against it, and swim up into the dull violet sky. He felt the sense of something new and extraordinary just come into the world, that sensation of something stealing upon you that comes sometimes at the rising of the moon, especially in a clear, still, mild October night.
The daylight was not yet all gone. To the south, farther down across the Hudson, the rich, soft illumination of the autumn after-light struck on the white, square buildings of the upper city. The lights were coming on about them; they looked, in the breathless night, against the violet velvet sky, like a white enchanted city in a child's tale.
To John Schmaar, of course, they did not look that way. In common with his kind, he had lived a childhood without fairy tales, and a youth without the more delicate shades of illusions, the more sentimental views of love and women. He had lived his later life much at night certainly—but not night out of doors! All that he retained of memory from what he saw outside now, was that vague sense of surprise and wonder and almost suspicion men have at moonrise—at the sliding of this great new thing up into the night. He had learned to feel something of the sort before, perhaps,—in his more impressionable childhood,—when he had watched the same natural phenomenon on an even greater scale, seen the moon come stealing up over the spear-pointed fir trees upon the mountains of the West—like a still, sudden messenger of God!
He turned and came again to where the girl was sitting. It seemed to him now, when he looked at her, that they might safely go or again.
“That's right,” he said, sitting down near her once more. Ease up a little! Now, what is this little thing you've got up your sleeve?”
“Did you ever hear of an American duel?” she asked him, leaning forward in her chair, still staring, he saw, but quieter—quite a little quieter.
“No,” he told her, “—not by that name.” And yet at the same time he did have a vague sort of half-memory.
“I never did either—before just lately,” she went on, still staring at him, a little absent-mindedly. “But that's what they call it abroad, so they say. The English called it that—in the war.”
“Abroad, huh?” John Schmaar said to himself. He saw right away, of course, what it probably was—another wild idea of Gladden's—or some other of those boys who had come back to fill girls' heads with emotional novelties.
“Well, what is it?” he asked finally.
“It's what I said,” she told him, looking up. “It gives everybody an equal chance.”
“To kill each other?” he asked, thinking now that she was calmer, the best thing would be to smile it out of her—whatever it might be.
“Yes,” she said, and her face did not change.
“Like they used to say in the old days in the West about those ancient pistols,” he went on, watching her and just as serious as she was, “—that the derringer made all men the same height.”
“This does more than that,” she answered. “It makes women just as tall as men, and just as strong. It's the only thing I ever heard of that will give a woman an equal chance with a man.”
“What is it?” Schmaar asked her a little impatiently. “Go on.”
“Will you give it to me—the chance?” she insisted. “Will you promise?”
“I guess so. Yes,” he promised. “What is it?”
HER eyes were growing bright and staring again. He must still keep her in hand, he decided, and jolly her along.
“It's simple—terribly simple,” she said. “All you have to do is to draw lots.”
“Or cut cards!” John Schmaar added with a little jump, for he saw now, what she had probably got hold of!
“Yes.”
“To see who'll kill themselves?”
“Yes,” she answered, still staring at him.
He stopped—staring somewhat himself. He thought at first he would burst out laughing, that he couldn't help himself, watching her—that light thing, with about the courage and will-power of a butterfly, proposing that deadliest of all tests of courage—that chance at death, in cold blood, which the nerviest of fighters have qualms about. He almost laughed in her face. As it was, all that prevented, probably, was his memory of the time he had witnessed one of those contests—that little crooked-legged gambler dusting off his shining shoes with his silk handkerchief, and smiling, and the big 'red neck' starting out the door to finish himself—the look on both their faces!
“Where did you get that idea?” he asked her finally. “Who put that into your head?”
“Oh—I got it,” she answered, dodging him—and going right back to the point again. “Will you do it—will you give me my equal chance?”
He knew he would have to humor her. He didn't want a scene.
“You want to kill me, huh?” he said, keeping his face straight—thinking of course he could bring her around, show her the absurdity of it, finally. Memory of that time he had really seen the thing she was talking of kept coming back to him.
“I want an even chance too,” she answered, her mouth snapping closed after she said it.
THERE was a change in her—Schmaar had to admit it to himself—in her face and in her manner! In some ways, one wouldn't have said it was the same girl. Hysteria, of course.
“Why?” he asked her. “What would you get out of it, if you did kill me?”
“You dead!” she replied blankly.
“Can you beat them?” thought Schmaar to himself, studying her. Here was this soft, pretty, luxury-loving little waster, afraid of every street-corner without a policeman on it. A fool boy comes along from nowhere and tells her what he thinks she is, and what she'll do—feeds her moonshine; and nothing will do but she must become just what he tells her she is, right off. She must become a heroine, braving the most terrible of deaths.
“That's nice,” he said, smiling, and yet a little impatient too, as he saw how the thing was going. “That would be nice, killing me off! But what then—what good would that do you afterwards?”
Then he remembered. It would save him—save him! There would be a chance for him, with Schmaar dead. He had admitted that himself!
He had to smile inside. She was out to save Gladden—to save him! She was the real little heroine. And all the time that other thing—that she was talking about without the slightest realization of what it meant—kept coming back to him as she prattled on, that thing he had seen when he was a boy, that game of death between the little crippled gambler and the big rough-neck murderer.
“So that's all,” he said at last. “You just want to save him—and kill me! But now suppose the other thing!”
“What other thing?”
“Suppose the cut of the cards should go against you?”
Oh, that was all right, too. What was there to live for—after it all came out—after Gladden knew what she had done?
“Oh, why not live a little longer?” he chanced. “Why not take a chance at it, anyhow?”
How could she live now—without money? She'd starve to death—even if she wanted to live!
“Why not take a chance at what I offer,” he asked, studying her, “of coming with me?”
No. No. She'd rather die—a thousand thousand times!
He saw of course that it was no use—yet. When they get that way, he assured himself, you just can't talk with them; you've got to let them run on, till they're over it.
“I see,” said Schmaar.
“And anyhow I'd have a chance—a chance to kill you! To put a man like you out of the world!”
“That would be fine, wouldn't it?” Schmaar replied. “But you didn't think that awhile ago.”
“I do now,” she snapped.
He kept wondering just how much he had that Gladden to thank for all this, whether or not he had put this idea into her head. He was angry: he wasn't feeling so friendly toward her as he had. But he hadn't changed his mind about her really. He never saw her look better. They are apt to, when they start to fight, he reminded himself.
“No,” she said, “no. You are going to give me my chance just as you would a man!” She was becoming excited again, and he saw he would have to go along with her, a little farther.
“Let's look at it closer, first,” he told her.
“You will!” she cried—getting a little wild again. “You will do it! Unless you are too big a coward.”
Schmaar's smile dried up a little on his face. There was one word he had never been accustomed to take—from anybody.
“Ah-hah!” he said, his voice changing slightly. “But how'll we do it? Have you got that all planned out too? I never thought much of shooting; it's too messy. I never cared for taking poison, either, much. Have you thought that out?” he asked her.
But not a response—not a smile. She didn't care how it was. Anything for her!
“And another thing: you wouldn't want a scandal, would you?” he asked, keeping on. “That is, if you could avoid it?”
No. No. She thought not.
“Just a plain suicide,” he suggested to her, “even, might cause talk—which would be just what you wouldn't want, or I either. Or maybe you haven't got it planned so far as that?”
Well, yes, that was right, too.
“And another thing,” he went on: “you've got to remember there are laws against dueling—death in some States! I don know how it is in this. And you wouldn't want that to happen—you wouldn't want the winner to be killed off too.”
No. She understood that. Still deadly serious.
“How would you fix that?” he asked.
He could see all the time—one reason that she couldn't smile—her mind was going round and round still, like a squirrel in cage. Yet now, she found an answer for him.
“You remember that offer you made yesterday—to all of us—about that Lovers' Leap?”
He nodded.
“Well—if I should be found—there—at the bottom—”
There she was again, back to yesterday. And yet after all the idea wasn't so bad—hitching up that way with the crazy dare he had made them.
“But what about me?” Schmaar said, putting it up to her again. “If they found me down there?”
“Well,” she answered, a little bit flurried, “that could be an accident—you might have slipped.”
“I might just naturally go out and—step off into five hundred feet of moonlight for exercise?” he asked.
“Or we could do this,” she said, hurrying, bringing out something—bound to answer him some way: “We could just say we got talking about it again—and we made a bet about doing it, making that jump—understanding, of course, between us—you and me—that we would never make it! The loser, I mean!” she said, looking at him, a little breathless.
“I see,” he returned, keeping his face straight.
“Then there couldn't be any question, anyway—about any—any duel—any killing of each other,” she was saying. “It would just go back to that dispute we had yesterday.”
“So the plan is this, is it?” said Schmaar, making a last attempt to make clear to her the absurdity of it all. “Let's see if I get it right: Summing it all up, your idea is that we'll cut the cards—on the bet that the loser takes the Lovers' Leap—that first one. Must try it! That's the way it will listen to the outside public. But instead, what will really happen—the loser will walk out, when he's ready, and just step off over the cliff into five hundred feet of moonshine. And they'll find him there in the morning.”
She didn't smile. She just sat there with her eyes on his face and nodded.
It was too much for John Schmaar, finally. He burst out laughing. He had to.
“That's the best,” he said, “that I ever heard.”
She didn't change a feature.
“Wake up,” he said to her. “Wake up! You are talking in your sleep!”
But instead of smiling, she passed him that old fighting word.
“Are you too much of a coward?” she said to him.
His smile died out again. He was getting tired of that. It was like the crying of a child shut up in a room with you. Enough is enough. You can reason and reason with yourself that it's nothing. But after a while you can't stand it.
“You'll do it,” she told him, without the quiver of an eyelash “You'll do it before you're through. I'll make you!”
He looked at her—and got hold of himself again. Saw how silly he himself was, to let that one word from her affect him so.
“Or, I'll—I'll kill you, somehow,” she said to him calmly. “Myself! Somehow I'll kill you!”
IT was close to dinner-time; and the other women were likely to come down any moment—his sister and the two other girls. He saw he hadn't made any headway toward breaking her up, yet. And he would have to do something—get somewhere—with her. So he thought he'd try a new tack.
“So you think you could go through with that?” he said to her, serious again. And he went on and told her the story with all details, of that thing he had seen in the old days in that old gambling-house in the West—that fight by cutting the cards between the crippled gambler and the gunman.
“He never carried a gun,” he explained to her. “They generally knew it—let him alone, knowing he was a cripple. But that wouldn't do for the other man. He just had to kill off one more!”
John Schmaar could see them still—their faces through the cigar-smoke, twenty years ago—as he told it to her.
“You'd have thought, to hear her, when she was coming to, that it was her last night on earth!”
“He had to have it!” he went on. “So the cripple looked him up and down and said—why not? And made this proposition of yours about the cards—because he hadn't any other way of fighting.”
“Exactly. Yes,” she said, breaking in.
In memory now Schmaar could see the murderer's face change as they held him back—him and his gun—when the proposition was made him, and realized he would have to take it up. He had had a lot of wrinkles—parallel wrinkles across his forehead. They turned a bright red.
“All right, how'll we do it?” he had said, putting up his gun—trying to act easy.
“We'll cut the cards,” the little cold-faced one had replied, looking up at him—with an eye like a snake's. “And then you'll cut your throat!”
“You will, you mean!” the gunman had said.
“Does that go?” the cripple had asked him.
“Sure!” the other one had swaggered. “Let her go.” But his face turned white and shiny.
“How soon?” the gambler had asked.
And they made it within forty-eight hours—to give them both time to settle their affairs.
“All right,” the big rough-neck murderer had said. “We're off!”
Then they had cut the cards. John Schmaar could see them now! The red-neck first, his big shaking hand—the sweat that rose and stood on the parallel ridges of his forehead—the look of nausea that came—when he cut a jack!
He saw the sleek-haired, snake-eyed, still-faced cripple cut. His right eyelid twitched as he did it. A ten-spot!
He could hear, as he told her of it, the gunman's heavy boot heels clatter as he turned in the silence of the breathless roomful—speaking finally:
“That's when they say good night to each other, both looking at it, from their own rooms.”
“God! Cut my own throat—like a pig's!”
That was all he said. Then he went out—everybody standing to one side for him, silent.
“Did he do it?” the girl asked, not a quiver in her face. John Schmaar wouldn't have believed it, knowing the kind she was.
“Did he?” he said, disgusted at himself, for not having made the impression he was after. “He did not. He was drowned later, in a river in Alaska—taking too big a chance. But he ran away—from that thing—as fast as his feet would carry him.”
“He was a coward, then,” she said, “really.”
“You wouldn't be calling him that so much,” he informed her, a little snarl in his voice, “—not if you had been around in those days. He had killed half a dozen men in fair fights. But going out into the dark, by yourself, and carrying it through in cold blood—that's different! It isn't done, that's all—very often even by the best of them!”
“He was a coward; that's all,” she kept on.
“You're pretty free with that word, aren't you?” said Schmaar, irritated in spite of himself—knowing just how imbecile it was, but reasoning on just the same, as one does with an insistent child.
“You want to know why I don't do this thing you're crying about?” he asked her. “In the first place, because I'm not an idiot, and in the second—” He broke off. “Stand up! I'll show you the second reason.”
There came a change in the situation now, but not precisely the change John Schmaar had calculated on.
“Stand up,” he said. And she did. There was a mirror back of her—a big one.
“Now turn around,” he told her. And she did.
“That's the reason right there!” he said, taking her arm—watching his own reflection in the mirror.
“What?”
“This!” he said, pushing her forward toward the glass.
She said nothing.
“You want me to bet my life with you—that was your idea wasn't it, stripped down to its bones?”
She didn't move, stood staring at his image in the mirror.
“I'd be likely to—bet my life—with that!” he said. His laugh was rather short and not very humorous. “Especially after I've seen once just how good it is at cliff-jumping.”
There was not a smile—not the least let-down from the girl's same deadly serious look.
“So that's the excuse!” she said finally.
“Ah-hah!” Schmaar answered. But as he said it he raised his head and looked around. He heard this sound he had been waiting for, the closing of a bedroom door above.
“That's your excuse—that I'm a coward! That wont do!” she said, still not smiling at all—not ever seeming to remember about herself at all. “That wont go—not now. And I'll show you that, before I'm done.”
“Wake up. Have some sense!” he said to her, turning and listening to the women's voices in the upper hall.
“You'll give me my chance,” she declared simply, “because I'll make you.”
“You'll make me, huh?” he returned.
“Or I'll show up to everybody—what you are—a coward!”
John Schmaar's eyes narrowed a trifle. He was deadly tired of this easy use of that word by her. “You might have to have a little lesson,” he said to himself, “if you keep on—really to show you what you're talking about!”
“All right,” he challenged her, “show ahead!” To be sure she might make a scene—in spite of him. But if it had to be all right, let it come. He could stand it—if she could.
“All right,” he repeated. “But now, if you've got any sense left, quit, for the time. Forget it. Powder your nose. We'll talk further about it later.”
He left her and went into the living-room—to meet the others. He knew then there was something ahead of him, probably.
CHAPTER V
THE two others—the Hunter and Bannerman girls—came into the big room from the hall, laughing. John Schmaar's old-maid sister, who kept house for him and furnished respectability, came in after them silently, with her eyes cast down as usual.
The two men, the automatic Captain Armitage and the Westerner, had not yet arrived.
“What are you two plotting here by yourselves?” called the Bannerman girl in her loud voice. “An elopement?”
“He's telling her all about the stock-market, I believe,” said the Hunter woman. “I wish somebody would do that for me.”
“That's it. He's showing her how to invest all she made last night,” said Billie Bannerman, referring to the money John Schmaar had let the Dulcifer girl take out of the game that night before, just to make her feel good-natured.
And now the girl herself spoke up from behind Schmaar.
“It's a good deal worse than that,” she declared. Her voice, he noticed, was high and sharp; and she laughed a high, unnatural laugh.
“She's going on with it,” he said to himself. “She's going to force me!”
“Worse!” the other two exclaimed after her—themselves probably noticing the tone of her voice.
SCHMAAR'S feelings were changing pretty rapidly now. He had expected to laugh her out of it; but he was growing a little weary of humoring her—less playful by quite a lot than he had been. “All right,” he said to himself. “If she's got to have it, let her!” And he stood watching her, with his motionless face and still gray eyes.
“I wouldn't have believed it!” she was going on to the others.
“What?”
“I've just offered him a bet he wont take,” she informed them. “Too big for him! He's reneged.”
John Schmaar saw now, of course, her game.
“I wouldn't have believed that,” said the Hunter girl.
“I don't believe it now,” said Billie Bannerman.
The two of them approached Schmaar and the Dulcifer girl at one end of the big table in the center of the room under the huge glass chandelier. Schmaar's sister, with her perpetual set smile, sat down on the lounge facing the fireplace.
“Wait a minute,” said Schmaar. He went over to the wall and switched on the light in the big chandelier. The room, the pictures on the wall, and the statues in the corners—which once had decorated Schmaar's gambling-house—sprang out in the full light. It was a superb room.
“Now, then,” he said, coming back, “we can see what we are talking about.” He realized the game she was playing, that she was going to go for him on that reputation of his, that everybody knew, of never refusing to take a fair bet with anybody.
“Was it a fair bet?” the Hunter girl asked Aileen Dulcifer.
“Absolutely,” she answered. “Ask him if it wasn't.”
Schmaar's eyes didn't change, but his face grew just a trifle red. He felt the blood come up into his head, the way it did sometimes lately when he let himself go a little—making him a bit dizzy. But one would scarcely have noticed this in his face.
“Fair, yes!” he said, looking at her with his best gambler's look—putting it back up to her, as he knew how to do as well as any man alive.
“Then I don't believe it,” announced Eloise Hunter.
“I don't either,” the other one echoed. “I don't believe anybody ever backed John Schmaar down on a bet—not a fair, equal bet.”
“Especially a woman!” the Hunter girl amplified.
“This was a fair, equal bet against a woman,” the Dulcifer girl asserted. “Wasn't it?” she asked Schmaar.
“It was—yes,” Schmaar answered, his mind about made up now. He'd be likely to stand here taking that kind of stuff—from a pack of women!
“A good woman is the bravest thing in the world, huh?” said John Schmaar to himself. “She'll go the limit—when she cares,” he thought, recalling the talk of yesterday. “All right, we'll take you up to the limit and let you have a look at it.”
So now he “called” her.
“Tell them why it was,” he said.
“Why what was?”
“Why it was I wouldn't do it. What I was afraid of—the only thing!”
“That I can't tell—not being you!” she said with that same bitter, sneering tone in her voice. But her face changed a little too.
“About who would welch—who would be sure to?” Schmaar said.
That stirred her up again as he thought it would.
“Not I!" she came back at once. “You know that. I wouldn't welch. I couldn't welch—if I lost. I'd rather die a thousand times!”
“Die a thousand times!” cried the Bannerman girl, catching it up. “Some excitement! But what's it all about?”
“It's something we can't talk about,” Aileen told them, dodging. “Or it couldn't happen.”
“And he wont do it?” inquired the Bannerman girl, keeping the game interesting.
“No,” said Aileen Dulcifer. “I wouldn't have believed it myself. I thought he would take any bet. I thought that was his reputation—the one he had built up.”
She was laughing again now, but a light, hard laugh that was not very pleasant to John Schmaar.
“You're cooking it up for yourself good!” thought Schmaar—watching her under his eyelids, waiting for his time.
“If it had been anybody else,” the Dulcifer girl kept on—looking at him, her voice a little bit shriller and louder even under her laughter. “If it hadn't been John Schmaar, I'd have said he was just plain afraid—in fact, almost a cow—”
“So you've got to have it!” said Schmaar's voice, breaking in before she had finished.
And they were all still—when they heard the tone of it. He could see the Dulcifer girl's face change—looking actually pleased, thinking she had “got” him finally. And she had too, in a way.
“And you think you can go through, if you lose,” he went on in his deadliest, quietest voice.
“I'll go as far as you will!” she said. staring back without a quiver. He could see she thought she would, too.
“All right!” said Schmaar. “Let's go!”
She was all ready for her lesson.
“Now we understand each other,” he said. “If this goes, it means the whole thing.”
“It certainly does—for me,” she said, her eyes still hard and shiny. “It has to!”
“All right,” he said. “I guess you can count on me. A number of people have. I guess my past reputation is good for it, if yours is!”
“I'll stick,” she told him. “Don't worry about me.”
“All right,” he said, going on. He saw her almost crying now—she was so serious. “Now, then,” he said, letting her eyes go finally, and turning around to the other two, “you know my motto.”
“What?”
“If they lay themselves open to be shot, shoot them!”
Oh, yes, they remembered.
“You saw,” Schmaar told them, “I warned her! This was nothing of my cooking up, was it?” he asked, now turning suddenly to Aileen again.
“No,” she said, her eyes not dropping.
“All right,” said Schmaar her “Go ahead. Plan the obsequies. It's your funeral!”
IT was, too. If she thought she could go on playing at this fool thing to the end, it was up to her. He was some actor himself.
“Now, what is this thing? We've got to know!” Billie Bannerman was insistent. “What is this mystery? Is it as terrible as you two look?”
“Is it so hard to do?” inquired the Hunter girl.
“It's perfectly easy, isn't it,” said Aileen Dulcifer, looking at John Schmaar and smiling.
“Anybody can do it!” said Schmaar, smiling back.
And just then Captain Armitage, the automatic hero, came in, and they all had to stop and explain it to him.
“I thought Gladden was coming up with you!” Schmaar said, shaking hands with him.
“He did—over the ferry!” he told him. “But he had to walk the rest of the way for his exercise.”
“To get the vile air of New York out of his lungs,” said the Dulcifer girl, laughing. You would have thought now she hadn't a care on earth.
They all laughed with her, remembering the way the Westerner had of freeing his mind about New York.
“You'll hear him in a minute,” said the Hunter girl, “coming up the road—singing his song for Aileen to go out and meet him.”
Usually a remark like that would have set Aileen Dulcifer's face ablaze. But now it made no impression whatever.
“I can't go out tonight,” she said. “I haven't time. There's something more important going on right here.”
“Yes—come on! Listen!” called the bouncing Bannerman girl to the Captain. “There's something terribly intense going on here.”
“Tremendous. A huge mystery!” contributed the Hunter girl, and they told him all about it.
The whole thing, of course, was being turned into a game. It was a great joke.
“But look!” said the Bannerman girl, talking loud. “This will have to be done right, wont it? So there's no hole in it?”
Schmaar nodded, looking at them with a little smile—wondering how Aileen would turn this corner.
“Well, now—how can it be—how can it be a bet,” asked Billie Bannerman, “if nobody knows what it is? Somebody's got to know what it is. Somebody's got to decide, or it's no bet at all!”
“Ask her—it's her funeral!” said John Schmaar.
And just then he heard outside, the voice of that Westerner, coming up the road, turning into the driveway, starting that stammering song of his, that: “K-k-katy, Beautiful Katy,” who was going to meet him in the moonlight—that song which the Hunter girl had just been saying was a call and signal for Aileen.
The Dulcifer girl may have heard him, as she probably did, but if so, she paid no attention. She went on answering the Bannerman girl's suggestion, carrying on the game.
“Oh,” she said after a minute, “I've got the idea. Where's an envelope and paper and pencil?”
Schmaar got them for her, wondering just which way her mind would jump next.
“Now, then,” said Aileen to the rest, “keep away. I'll write it down.”
It was a great game. She laughed as she wrote something down.
“Here,” she said, covering the paper with her hand, and passing it to Schmaar, “is that right?”
“The loser,” he read, “will take the Lovers' Leap—as agreed!”
The last two words were underscored. They meant something to them—nothing to anybody else—according to her notion!
“That's good,' said John Schmaar, with still face looking at her. “That's just right!”
“And we understand?” she asked him with a quick sly look as their eyes met.
“I do,” he said, from his still face, “if you do!”
“Don't keep worrying about me!” she said, her face flushing, as it did when he said that. “You needn't! And don't be afraid—ever—that I wont go as far as you will!”
JUST then the Westerner—Gladden—appeared in the doorway, looking surprised and a little peevish. Aileen Dulcifer didn't even notice him—or at least seemed not to.
“Come in,” Billie Bannerman said. “But don't interrupt; there's something terribly intense going on here!” And she made him stand beside her as John Schmaar went on talking. He didn't like it much. Schmaar could see that.
“There's one thing,” Schmaar was saying, “that we haven't decided yet—when will this take place?”
“Any time,” was the reply.
“Well, let's say forty-eight hours,” he said, thinking first probably of that other thing—that duel by lot he had seen long ago, and realizing at the same time that it would give plenty of time—for Aileen to wake up.
“And where will it be?” somebody asked.
“Oh, that's settled already,” Aileen replied.
“Pretty gay, huh?” he said to her with his expressionless look—and caught that sly gleam in her eyes again. “Just lots and lots of fun!”
John Schmaar had seen them before like that. She showed no signs of waking yet. No. That would come later.
“Come on!” she said, hurrying him now. “Come on. Let's go!”
“What's next?” the Bannerman girl inquired.
“We'll show you,” said Schmaar, “in just a minute.”
“This first!” cried Aileen and held up the envelope.
“Oh, yes,” said the Hunter girl. And the Dulcifer girl sealed it. She was laughing again.
“Who's to hold it?”
“And when will it be opened?” asked the two other girls, one after the other.
“After forty-eight hours, I suppose,” said Schmaar, glancing over at Aileen Dulcifer.
“Yes,” she told him.
“And where?”
“Here.”
“And who'll hold it?” the Hunter girl asked again.
“I know!” shouted Billie Bannerman.
“Who?”
“A perfectly disinterested party.”
“Who's that?”
“Why, Mr. Gladden, of course!”
And all the rest laughed with her, seeing his face as he stood there, watching this foolish performance, and entirely ignorant of what it was all about.
“What is this pleasant party?” he asked, trying to act easy yet scowling at the same time—as he quite often did lately, John Schmaar remembered.
Then they all explained to him all that they knew—breaking in, laughing louder and louder.
“What is this thing?” he asked, smiling,—trying to,—not knowing quite where the joke was, whether they were guying him or not. “What is this thing?” he inquired again, when they handed him the envelope—which they had sealed with sealing wax. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You're the holder of the key to the mystery. You keep the sacred envelope,” said the Hunter girl, “and you're not to open it, on your honor—till you are back here, in this room, forty-eight hours from now!”
SCHMAAR looked him over, standing there, looking surprised, apparently—surprised and a little annoyed.
“But there's another thing,” Billie Bannerman broke in, “that I wont stand for. He's not to come back here, either, or see Aileen, anyway—not for forty-eight hours.”
“Why not?” The voice of Aileen, speaking now, was a little high and sharp, John Schmaar thought.
“I wont have it; that's all,” said the Bannerman girl. “He'd get it out of her, sure. And I wont have anybody know it before I do!”
“Oh, that's all right. I'll see to that!” cried Aileen Dulcifer, laughing a high kind of flat laugh. “He wont see me—not for forty-eight hours—after tonight. I'll promise you that. And he wont know from me!”
“You swear?” demanded the Bannerman girl, snatching up a pocket dictionary from the table.
“I do,” said Aileen Dulcifer. They were making a screaming farce of it now growing a little hysterical—or the Dulcifer girl was,—Schmaar thought.
“And you too,” said Billie Bannerman turning to the Westerner.
“You'll swear on your honor that you wont open it—that sacred secret pact until after forty-eight hours, here—in this room!”
“I do, yes,” he answered, but still scowling and wondering and confused, as he well might be. And Schmaar was confused, almost, himself. He could scarcely have believed that it could have been done, that the mind of a foolish girl, once started going—darting one way and another, like a scared rabbit in a pen, trying to find a way out—would have landed her, and all the rest of them, in such a situation.
“So, then, that's understood,” Billie Bannerman was going on. “There'll be no advantage. He'll not look into that envelope, and you'll not see him, or talk to him, in any way.”
“Absolutely.” replied Aileen Dulcifer—not after tonight.”
“So he'll know nothing at all from you!”
“Absolutely not.”
“Now, then,” said the sprightly Bannerman person, taking charge of the ceremonies as usual, “what's the next move?”
JOHN SCHMAAR showed her—walking over now to the side of the room to the cabinet where he kept his cards. Looking in, he selected the pack he wanted and brought it back to where they all stood around the table.
“This!” he said.
“Cards!” cried Eloise Hunter.
“Worse and worse, and more terrible!” exclaimed Billie Bannerman, laughing again.
John Schmaar put the cards down on the big table between him and Aileen Dulcifer. He looked into her eyes—not smiling now, but with the cold, sinister businesslike eye of the professional gambler. She had wanted it, had she? Well, she was going to have it.
“How many cuts?” he asked. “One or three?”
“I don't care,” said the girl.
“Three—by all means! Three!” called Eloise Hunter.
“Absolutely. We want our money's worth. All the thrills there are!”
The big Westerner stood in the background, still doubtful, still scowling—and beside him the silent Armitage. Even Schmaar's sister stood up now, watching, with an apologetic smile.
“All right,” said Aileen Dulcifer.
Schmaar nodded his assent without speaking—looking into her face coldly. Her own face was pretty serious now, he saw. The hectic smile had rather dropped away from it.
“Are any side-bets allowable?” asked Billie Bannerman.
“All you want,” said Aileen Dulcifer—remembering to smile again.
“How can you bet,” inquired the Hunter girl, “when you don't even know what you're betting about?”
“I'll bet on Aileen,” said the Bannerman girl, “whatever it is! I'll back my own sex.”
“I'll take Mr. Schmaar!” said Eloise Hunter.
They all stood now around the two principals—waiting, laughing, or pretending to, anyway—even John Schmaar's anemic sister with her patient, bloodless smile!
“Ladies first,” said John Schmaar, smiling faintly, his eyes gray agate, “unless—”
“Oh, no. I'll cut,” she said at once. The speech was hurried. “I'm glad to!”
As she put her hands on the cards, for a second her smile dropped.
“It's all understood?” she asked, looking into Schmaar's face—with the sly gleam she had in her eyes before.
“It sure is,” said Schmaar—thinking behind his mask, how different it was.
The others stood close, crowding, watching the flushed face of the girl the dull-skinned, inscrutable features of John Schmaar. He saw she was going through it now, with every nerve and muscle of her face and body. Death lay before her on the table.
“Taking the last chance—at the great sacrifice!” Schmaar said to himself as he watched her put out her hand again for the cards.
She cut a six, John Schmaar an eight-spot. Her eyes gleamed; her upper lip drew back, showing her white teeth. She breathed hard—the disguise of her smile was all gone now.
“Ladies and gents,” the Bannerman girl called out in her best circus manner, “first round! The woman leads!”
“Shall I cut first?” Schmaar asked a second time.
“No, I'll go first. All the time,” she said, recalling once again her smile—and losing it immediately.
The girl's hands were shaking a little; her eyes, you'd think, would burn a hole in the back of the cards.
She cut a queen, John Schmaar a five-spot.
“The gent wins!” cried the Bannerman girl, shouting her circus stuff into the silence. “And now, ladies and gents, for the g-r-r-rand finale!”
THE faces of the little group, which had been laughing before, grew rigid now—almost as rigid as Aileen's. There was something in the atmosphere, in the girl's face, that they didn't understand, of course, but that reached them just the same. Even John Schmaar, staring with his gray agate eyes, could feel the tension.
“This time,” he suggested once more, with a faint sneering smile on his face, “if you prefer not—”
“I'll cut first—don't worry—as I have before!” she said, as he knew she would.
Reaching over, she cut—a jack!
John Schmaar perceived the queer coincidence—he remembered again in a flash that earlier time when he was a boy.
A groan went up around the table.
“Too high! Too high!” screamed Billie Bannerman.
“This is excruciating,” exclaimed the Hunter girl. “Excruciating!”
John Schmaar's hand went out to the spread cards, and cut—his ten-spot!
A groan went up.
“The gent wins!” the Bannerman girl exclaimed, letting her shoulders and arms sink in mock despair. And the rest groaned with her. But Schmaar kept his eyes on Aileen Dulcifer, watching her, seeing if she would even now wake up.
She stood there for a moment, staring.
“The great sacrifice, huh?” said Schmaar to himself, watching her. “How do you like it, now you've got it?”
He watched to see the change come into her face with realization.
“Funny—isn't it?” he said to himself, watching her from under his thick eyelids, with her lips open and her eyes staring—going through the thing in her fuddled mind. “Laugh—why don't you!” he said to himself, remembering how things had changed, how ten minutes ago they had all been laughing at him!
“Well,” she said, with a hard, obstinate look at Schmaar, “that's settled!”
And then she started laughing. She had changed a little; the quick sly look she had been giving him, was gone. But her laugh didn't sound just right to Schmaar yet.
CHAPTER VI
THE only question now was, of course, just when she was going to realize what a crazy little fool she had been. She was still going too strong—still under too much excitement. Her laugh indicated that.
Schmaar kept watching her through dinner—that merry meal—through the chatter and guesses about the thing, which formed, of course, the chief subject of talk during the meal and after.
She held them off, laughing, with the usual light-hearted bluff in such circumstances, Schmaar perceived as they turned the talk one way and another. They are good at that kind of play—such women—clever at concealing their secret feelings. If Aileen was changing her mind, however, she didn't show it.
After dinner they all stopped at the center-table again in the living-room, and the Hunter girl—always full of tricks to draw the crowd around her—started telling the Dulcifer girl's fortune with the cards—“more man-and-woman stuff,” Schmaar muttered to himself.
She saw a dark man, she said, rolling her eyes at Schmaar—and a light man, with another roll toward Gladden. And a journey!
“Yes,” she said, flourishing her hands, which were very pretty, “you are going on a long journey.”
John Schmaar watched the way the Dulcifer girl took it.
“A long journey!” she cried, raising her hand. “Here's to it—and the light man!”
Whereupon they all cheered for the Westerner. Schmaar watched him now, as closely almost as he had the girl, before. He smiled, with the rest, Schmaar saw, but not easily. He took it hard, apparently—the mysterious envelope in his pocket, the jollying and mystery about it, and the girl's queer looks and laughter—wondering no doubt what such secrecy between the girl and Schmaar really amounted to.
Schmaar watched them together. The Westerner seemed to be losing control of himself a little, Schmaar thought, right after dinner. He noticed him then trying to get the girl to go to one side with him—into the library—before they started at the cards, and saw her go part way, and then refuse what he was asking and come back. Whereupon the Westerner had flushed and scowled.
After that Schmaar didn't pay much attention for a few minutes—while the women were getting themselves ready for the game. And when they were ready, he looked up, and the Westerner had disappeared.
“Where is he?” he asked. Finally it was discovered that he had left the house.
“Gone!” cried Aileen Dulcifer. An instant she looked as if the stars were falling down about her. Schmaar had never seen quite such a face on any girl. And then she toppled over in a faint.
So the time had come—finally. At last she saw where she had landed. Schmaar was glad, for he had thought at one time, that she wasn't going to break!
That broke up the game, of course The women assisted the girl upstairs when she came to. Captain Armitage after sitting around a few minutes, his mind and tongue completely frozen, finally excused himself and started back to New York.
Schmaar sat there alone, waiting and figuring on what should come next, just when and how the girl would come around to him, and what they would have to do to square that thing she had started with that fool envelope and make it seem sensible when they opened it. He sat there smoking and thinking until the women came down—or rather until Billie Bannerman came down alone—the other girl staying upstairs with Aileen, and his sister going back into her room. But the Bannerman girl, of course, had to come back—she couldn't help it.
“What's going on here?” she blurted out. Bluntness was her specialty. “What are you doing to her?”
“Nothing,” answered Schmaar. “She's the one that's doing it.”
“You and your envelope!” she went on.
“What is she,” Schmaar asked her, “—crazy? Do you know?”
“Why?” she asked.
“She's been acting so.”
“I should say she had,” she admitted.
“She's been that way,” said Schmaar, “since yesterday, since that fool talk you and your little friend Eloise started.”
“And our Westerner continued.”
“Would you believe,” he said, “that anybody just like her would take that in—all that slush he was handing out?”
“Was that what started her,” she asked, edging on, “on whatever this thing is?”
“Yes. Would you believe it?”
“Yes. I would.”
“Why?”
“You noticed who was talking it to her, didn't you?” she asked him.
“What of it?”
“Listen,” she said. She was one of the kind who make a specialty of plain speaking when they are alone with a man. “Are you still after her?”
“Why?” he asked her.
“You must be the one that's crazy. That's all!”
“I crazy!” said Schmaar. “What about her!”
“That's different, at her age,” she said. She was a little older than the other girl. “Crazy—of course they're crazy then. That's the normal thing to be. But you wouldn't know it! Because you never were there—in your life. You never were normal that way,” she said.
“Normal!” repeated Schmaar, his mind going back to yesterday. “How? I suppose all that slush we heard from Gladden was normal!”
“For him—yes, in his condition.”
“And what about her?” he asked, looking over at her again, mocking the Westerner's voice. “A good woman—the bravest thing in the world! The great sacrifice! You watched her drinking that in!”
“Why not!” she asked. “They do—don't they? The trouble is with you.”
“Me.”
“You—yes. You've never fallen in love! You don't know what it is!”
“No. Never. Not I!” said Schmaar.
“No, you never did. So you never had any experience with women.”
“No,” said Schmaar, “I guess not.”
“No. The trouble with you is, you've got the wrong idea of them,” she said. “Too limited by your own mind. You think a woman's a nice, expensive table d'hôte dinner. She isn't—honest! She's something different—as you'd know, if you ever got one in love with you.”
“The bravest thing in the world—when she cares, huh? Always ready for the great sacrifice!”
“Sure,” she answered instantly. “That's one way of putting it. You take this case, right here. Is there anything she wouldn't do, or anything she wouldn't try to do, if he wanted her to do it?”
“WHO—Aileen—that little bunch of fluff?”
“What difference does that make?” she asked him. “Where have you been all these days? Are you blind? I believe you are, at that. Haven't you ever seen her look at him? If he asked to have her eyes to roll marbles with, she'd have them out before he was through, and hand them to him. And if anything started happening to him, if he was going to be hurt in any way, she wouldn't lose her head—no, she'd just take it under her arm, and run out across country wild, attacking everything she came to. And if anybody started in to hurt him—oh, boy,—oh, man!”
“You're standing on your head yourself,” said Schmaar. “You've got them mixed. You're talking about him—not her. I know. I know how it started!”
“Maybe you do,” she said. “It may have started like that. They are both bad enough, but now she's the worst of the two.”
“That lightweight—that never had an idea except to spend all the money she could raise and rake upon herself! She's a great self-sacrificer—that one!”
“Wrong again,” she told him. “Light or heavy, good or bad or indifferent, we're all alike when we're that way. She may be just as light as you say; I guess she is. But let me tell you something,” she said, talking bold and rough again: “she'd go to hell, with flowers on, singing—for him—like the fellow, you know, in one of those operas. That's what she thinks of him. And when it comes to being crazy, you're the crazy one—and the blind one—to butt into a thing of at this stage of the game.”
SCHMAAR sat listening to her rave on, turning things upside down, but somewhat confused by what she said, too, for he perceived that underneath she was serious and meant just what she was telling him.
“You make me laugh,” she went on, “the way you miss the point of this thing.”
“I do, huh?” said Schmaar—puzzled, but not showing it, naturally.
“Yes. You know what this is, that you've been missing right along?”
“Shoot.”
“You know that thing we were saying about that song tonight, being a signal between them—for her to out and meet him?”
“I do—yes.”
“That was just right. That's just one scene out of many—in this play. This an old-fashioned case.”
“With her?”
“Yes, with her—just as much as with him. Old-fashioned love-stuff—full of signs, and secret words and signals between them. You'd laugh,” she said, “at some of them.”
She stopped and laughed herself, while Schmaar continued to watch her, still a little confused, wondering at her bringing out all this he had overlooked himself.
“What are you laughing at now?” he asked her finally.
“There's one,” she said, still laughing, “that's a wonder!”
“What's that?”
“Did you ever notice that just before eleven o'clock—when he isn't here, how she always excuses herself—and goes upstairs?”
“Maybe,” said Schmaar. He seemed to half-remember it. “What of it?”
“That's when they say good night—to each other!”
“When he's away—in New York?”
“Yes. Sure.”
“How?”
“You know how her room lies, don't you, on the east side, the northeast corner of the house.”
“What of that?”
“And you know how plain you can see the lights of the city from there, and the Metropolitan Tower?”
“Naturally.”
“You know how the big clock strikes the hour—red flashes—then white?”
“What of it?”
“Nothing, only that's when they say good night to each other, both looking at it, from their own rooms, thinking of each other at the same time, looking at the same thing, at eleven o'clock!”
“Aw—what're you giving us?” said Schmaar, staring at her blankly.
“Don't you believe it?” she asked. “All right. Do you want to see it for yourself? All right. You go out there and hide yourself, somewhere behind those trees; and watch at that window any night, any clear night, when he isn't here, just before eleven o'clock—and see what you see!”
“In the moonlight,” said Schmaar, still doubting her.
“In the moonlight—or any other night,” she told him, and he could see she meant it.
“Oh, you think I don't know,” she said. “But I do, and I can prove it you. And I could tell you something else if you wanted to know.”
“What?”
“That's why she fainted tonight.”
“Yes?” said Schmaar—smiling again at her explaining that, to the only who did know why she fainted. “All right. Why did she?”
“Because he went away without saying good-by to her! You saw that. You know what he did—left her—regardless—mad.”
“Yes,” said Schmaar, back on firm ground again. “I know a number of things that you don't.”
“About that envelope, you mean. I don't doubt it. But I know this, whether you do or not!”
“How do you know it?” he asked.
“I know it because I was there,” she said, “when she came out of that faint! There was something special about it—some special reason, why it was extra important that he say good night to her tonight—of all nights in the world! I don't know what it's all about, but I know that because I heard it!”
John Schmaar moved a little.
“Maybe you know the rest,” she told him, guessing. “It might have something to do with that envelope; I don't know. But I do know, that she put some great importance on saying good night tonight. You'd have thought, to hear her, when she was coming to, that it was her last night on earth!”
John Schmaar covered the little start he gave at that, and made to close the talk as soon as he could. But the Bannerman girl had to continue awhile of course, airing her opinion.
“You make me laugh, your kind—always,” she told him. “You know all about women. You know how to find your way around anywhere at night, as well as day. But there's one place you've never been.”
“Where's that?” Schmaar asked her.
“Where they are now—those two. That impossible country that you inhabit—when you're young, when you're first in love. I know it,” she said, sobering down a second. “I was there once. But you never were!”
It was nearly a quarter of eleven before he could get rid of her. He could still stroll outdoors and post himself by that window. Maybe you can't always tell about them. There had been another woman once, that they had tried to make Schmaar responsible for—for what she had done to herself before she—before she got over being excited.
The conclusion of Mr. Turner's fascinating story will appear in the forthcoming October issue of THE RED BOOK MAGAZINE.