IV
IT would be needless if not tedious to tell at length all that was said. The young people had no sooner left the room than Daniel got up and drew together the sliding-doors across the entrance from the hallway. Joseph, with an attempt at a confidential smile, moved his chair a little closer toward me. Daniel looked about cautiously and, seeming satisfied, also pulled his chair a little nearer to me.
“Mr. Everhard,” Daniel began, rubbing his hands together, “chance has at last brought us together.”
He said it with a grin, smugly. His grin was unpleasant. His smugness repugnant.
For a brief moment I wondered if he knew more than I gave him credit for knowing and if he thought that he had trapped me. But he was merely trying to make me think accident had taken the place of design.
“And, Mr. Everhard,” he went on, “as we have conveyed to you before, we are rich men.”
Joseph nodded and smiled encouragingly.
I did not say anything. I looked at them, from one to the other. My thoughts were scooting in and out. I knew that Daniel Cornwall had enemies; some of them—one at least—a very powerful man who thought himself more or less helpless so long as Daniel retained possession of a little black steel box, or rather of its contents. I knew too that he had another enemy said to be a wild, dangerous fellow who would have—had he known who I was—possibly have tried to make good certain and jealous threats.
“And we will be generous,” Daniel added impressively, as if I did not know that he had a reputation for being miserly.
The point to the fifteen minutes of fumbling speech was this:
They had previously tried to engage me as a sort of personal guard and they now asked me to state what terms I pleased. They were old, innocent men and in danger. Would I interest myself in their behalf? In looking about anxiously for some one to help them, they had thought no one else could do so well as I. They had written letters asking me to call on them. Those being coldly answered, they had sent a lawyer to engage my interest. They might have sent the devil with results. I dislike lawyers—all of them.
I mentioned the protective value of the police.
Daniel made a deprecating gesture and grinned. The police were all right for watching rat-holes. They could follow tracks. This was different.
I mentioned private agencies.
He came back flatteringly and said their need was for a man of high personal courage and resource. Steve Ellis, he said, could evade the police. Private detectives would not be likely to stand against him.
Daniel Cornwall himself was a crafty, vicious, enormously rich old rascal—the sort of a man of whom it was said that he never kept an inconvenient promise nor rewarded a friend.
I knew something of Steve Ellis. I had known his wife very well. I also knew something of the man who was then governor of Utah and Cornwall's most powerful enemy. Perhaps that was one—or maybe the—reason why Daniel Cornwall was out of the State, though in his little black box he had put evidence that could ruin and wreck the man.
It was a curious and complicated situation. The governor, whom I will call Walsh, though that in no way resembles his name, had in his younger days become involved, perhaps more or less innocently, in some profitable crooked work. Cornwall had stored the indubitable legal evidence of that in his little black box. Walsh knew much that was crooked, wicked, even dastardly, of Cornwall and longed to bring him to justice, to crush him, wipe him out; but to do so he would have to sacrifice his own career, for Cornwall would have retaliated by opening the little black box.
Cornwall, for his part, would have liked to exterminate Walsh, but if he attacked Walsh then the Governor would probably, in the midst of his own ruin, land Cornwall in prison, if not on to the scaffold—supposing that a multimillionaire can ever be hanged, which is doubtful in a country that leaves justice in the hands of lawyers.
So it was that they were like two powerful giants, deadly in their enmity but aware that it would be mutually ruinous if they made an open fight. Let Walsh once get his hands on that black box, and Cornwall was doomed. Nor did I doubt at all that Cornwall hesitated at thoughts of assassination in trying to figure out how he could dispose of Walsh.
The immediate concern of the Cornwall's however, was not with Walsh. It was with Steve Ellis. The situation was made more peculiar and complicated by Ellis.
Whereas Cornwall and Walsh were continually bluffing each other, and neither wanted or dared to come actually to a crisis, Ellis was thought to be implacable in his hatred of Daniel Cornwall.
The Cornwalls thought, as many people have, that I was a sort of cutthroat, for sale to a high bidder and with cunning enough to evade punishment. I have evaded punishment largely because I never deserved it. Even the police, East and West, certainly no friends of mine, were not without a kind of—hum—let me say a kind of gratitude for the way I had come out of corners into which I had occasionally been crowded.
Law-abiding citizens, whom the police feel it their duty to protect and to avenge, do not shoot at people from the rear or from shadows, do not pick quarrels and lay traps. Moreover, I never bothered the police with complaints. The police and courts everywhere more or less respect the ruling of Western juries to the effect that the man who draws last and shoots first is innocent.
So those two old fellows, wholly unaware that I knew a great deal about the cause of their fears, with a kind of grotesque eagerness, in which both became excited, tried to tell me the history of their haunting terrors. It was a long story and Daniel lied a great deal.
I won't repeat their story, for it was largely false and when I have said that Daniel claimed Steve Ellis' hate was inspired over certain mining claims, I have told enough. That part may or may not have been true. I did not know. Anyway, perhaps money had originally been at the bottom of the trouble, but Ellis seemed to have been the sort of man who looked for trouble. He had—so I heard—repeatedly said that he would kill me. He did not know my name. He knew merely the name I happened to be using at the time, and then he was in a position to make threats with impunity, for he was in the penitentiary. He believed, or pretended to believe, that my presence under the roof of his wife's house was injurious to his honor, and, since he was in prison, he was dependent on the tales that other men carried to him.