The Corbin necklace
I’d grown to the rug. Applebury was sound asleep again. No need waiting
any longer for him.
“Then I happened to look out the window, and saw Grant and the girl
making a get-away. Well, that was made to order for me, or so it looked
anyhow. I might have known it looked too good to be true.
“It involved a change in my plan, of course. I had meant to shave and
go back to the box room and wait till the time of the wedding this
afternoon. I knew there’d be hundreds of people here, with a special
train coming down from town and all that. Then I’d put on these clothes
that I’m wearing now, come down-stairs, and be one of the guests. I
even thought of staying for the ceremony and picking up a ride back to
town.
“It was a pretty sort of idea, the sort that looks good when you think
of it, although on general principles the sooner you can get away after
you’ve got what you’ve come for, the better.
“Now, of course, there was no question about it. The girl had gone and
there wouldn’t be any wedding, and with the necklace gone, on top of
that, there would be one hell of a commotion.
“The thing for me to do was to get out. There’d be no question in
anybody’s mind but that the elopers had the necklace. Applebury would
think his cousin had come back and got it. If I ever saw anything that
looked like plain sailing, I saw it then.
“I got the necklace without any trouble, and went back to the box room
to dress in those filthy working clothes you found me in. These I’ve
got on are too damned light colored and conspicuous for a get-away of
that sort.
“Then I came back to the head of the stairs and stopped short. Somebody
was doing a regular sentry go in the hall below, back and forth, back
and forth. I thought he’d get tired of it pretty soon and I’d hear a
door shut somewhere and know the coast was clear. But I didn’t. I don’t
know who it was nor what he was doing it for, but he kept it up until
daylight. So I had to go back and hide again.”
He must have read something in our faces, for he turned once more to
Punch.
“Don’t tell me _that_ was you too!” he snapped.
Punch nodded. “I wasn’t waiting for you, though,” he said. “I didn’t
have my rifle or anything.”
“Oh, my God!” cried Raglan, with as deep a concentration of bitterness
as I’ve ever heard in human voice.
“Well, I know now,” he went on after a while, addressing Mr. Smith,
“what my real mistake was. And I swear to God I’ll never make it again.
I’ll never tackle another job where there are any damned boys on the
premises.”
“You know, that, I believe,” said Mr. Smith, “is a perfectly sound
idea.”
But Raglan was past being wooed back into a good humor.
“I’m sick of this damned country anyhow,” he declared. “The
profession’s being ruined by a lot of young hop-heads, hooligans,
stick-up boys who shoot first and try to think afterward and find
they haven’t brains enough. It’s no place for a gentleman, that’s the
trouble with this country. I’m going abroad again.”
“After you’ve served out your sentence for this affair, I suppose you
mean,” said Mr. Smith.
“Served out my sentence!” Raglan laughed. “I’ll go by the next boat.
You’re going to take me down-stairs now, aren’t you, and see me out
through the front door? And if you’re wise, you’ll send for a car to
take me back to town.”
“Punch,” said Mr. Smith, “go find your Uncle Alexander.”
Punch was gone in a flash.
Something else flashed too. Raglan saw it before I did and stiffened
in his chair. Old Mr. Smith, with a steady hand, was pointing his
automatic pistol straight at his head.
“Don’t be a fool,” said Raglan.
“I don’t intend to be,” said Mr. Smith.
“Then listen,” said the thief. “Do you think I’ve been in this house
four days without knowing what’s been going on in it? I know enough
queer things about this family to put it on the blink for the next
twenty years. I tell you what I’ll do unless you let me go, and let me
go damn quick. _I’ll confess._ Just ask the women, any one of them, how
they’ll like that. I know what I’m talking about.”
Any notion I may have had that I’d found in Raglan an example of that
romantic type endeared to the popular mind by scores of detective
stories, a gentleman who has taken to a life of crime, but remains
a gentleman none the less, had been dissipated during the past two
minutes. The fellow, for all his airs, was nothing but a shabby-minded
rascal. He had told us his story partly out of vanity, no doubt, but
in the pretty confident hope that we could be blackmailed into letting
him go free. I’ll confess to the pusillanimous notion that perhaps we’d
better.
I couldn’t tell what Mr. Smith thought. He said, with a perfectly
expressionless face, “You don’t know the Corbin family as well as you
think you do.” But, after all, this committed him to nothing, and he
was interrupted before he could go any further.
It was a thump rather than a knock that we heard at the door just then.
I guessed who it was, gathered up my crutches, and went and opened it.
There sat old Mrs. Corbin in her wheel chair, unattended. She must have
run herself up in the elevator.
“You’ve taxed my curiosity beyond what it would bear,” she announced
grimly. “I hope what you’ve got for me, in here, is worth my coming up
to look at.”
It was an immense relief to me that she had come, and even more that
she’d arrived on the scene ahead of her son. It was, after all, for her
to decide what was to be done with our disgusting captive.
She turned a long stare upon him, and evidently saw him, despite
his fine feathers, for exactly what he was, for, without a word of
enlightenment either from Mr. Smith or from me, she said, “So this is
the thief Punch has been thinking about for the whole of the past
week? I’m glad he’s been brought to light.”
“Raglan is well up to the top of his class as a gem thief,” Mr. Smith
now explained. “I’ve known him and his exploits for years. But since
Punch caught him and we took the necklace away from him he seems to
have turned his thoughts from burglary to blackmail.”
“Blackmail, eh?” the old woman echoed, with a sardonic grin. “Well,
you may tell him there’s nothing in it. It’s never worth while paying
money to a blackmailer, since no one with decency enough to stay bought
overnight will offer his silence for sale.”
“Exactly,” Mr. Smith agreed. “Raglan has been hidden,” he went on,
“most of the time since Wednesday, in the trunk closet on this floor.
It appears that this room has certain acoustical peculiarities....”
“Been eavesdropping, has he--on me and Victoria? Well, he’s welcome to
tell his story to any one he can get to listen. I don’t like to look at
him. Can’t he be tied up and put out of sight somewhere till he can be
taken to jail?”
Alec’s arrival just then answered the question. Punch, who came back
with him, had told him enough of the story to obviate the need of
further explanations.
Raglan was looking venomous by now. He was evidently under a heavy
temptation to free his mind. But Alexander Corbin had a way with him
which, to one constitutionally averse to violence, must have been
overpowering. He didn’t take the trouble to tie the rascal; merely
ordered him to stick his hands as deep as he could in his trousers
pockets and walked him off at the muzzle of his revolver.
“Have some of the men take him to the lock-up in the village,” Mrs.
Corbin told Alec, “and come back as soon as you’ve disposed of him.
You’ll find us in my sitting-room down-stairs.”
Punch was for following his uncle and the prisoner, but the old lady
called him back.
“I shall want you,” she said. Then she asked what time it was.
I wouldn’t have believed my watch, had not Mr. Smith’s majestic
time-piece confirmed the fact that it was only nine o’clock in the
morning. Heavens, what a day! It had begun for me when Judy whispered
my name through the window just before dawn, a bare five hours ago.
Already it seemed a week. And there were people in this house now,
plenty of them, just waking up and thinking lazily about breakfast;
people to whom it still figured as the wedding day of Judith Corbin and
Bruce Applebury!
I must have uttered some sort of consternated exclamation, for old Mrs.
Corbin nodded at me with a grim smile. “This is only the beginning of
it,” she said. “Go down and have breakfast, both of you, and then come
up at ten o’clock to my sitting-room. I’m an old woman--worse than
old--and I can’t put things off. I must settle them now, while I can.
Take me down to my room, Punch.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE AUTOCRAT
We made a rather silent meal, served imperturbably by Belden. I found
myself wondering whether that perfect butler’s manner would survive
the events which this volcanic day was likely to bring forth. Did he
foresee, or even allow himself to guess, what they might be? If I’d
been alone with him I would have sounded him out, since he and I are
friends of long standing, but in the presence of a comparative stranger
like Mr. Smith it wasn’t possible.
Just as we finished Victoria came in and the old gentleman, perceiving
that she wanted to talk to me, withdrew with his cigar for a stroll in
the veranda. She wasted no time after he had gone.
“You don’t owe me any favors,” she began candidly. “I haven’t been any
too decent to you, lately, but I believe you’ll help all the same.”
“I’m glad you believe that,” I told her. “I wish you wouldn’t think of
me as unfriendly. I’ll be glad to do all I can to help you as soon as I
know what it is that wants to be done.”
“There’s only one possible thing to do,” she asserted urgently. “There
can’t be two opinions about that; not two sane opinions. And if we’re
going to save anything at all out of the wreck we’ve got to do it at
once. But it can’t be done--nothing can be done--till my mother-in-law
can be persuaded to consent to it. You know she won’t listen to me--so
I’m putting it up to you.”
“I still don’t know what the thing is,” I told her. “If it aims in
any way at a reconciliation between Judy and Bruce Applebury, looking
toward their marriage....”
She interrupted me with a sharp laugh. “We’re long past that,” she
answered me. “They’re leaving, the whole crowd, on the eleven o’clock
train to town. Do you wonder?”
“Not a bit. They’ll have had enough of the Wild West, that crowd, to
last them another ten generations. Think of the myth that will grow up
among them, to terrify wayward little Appleburys with.”
Victoria smiled at that in spite of herself.
“Oh, if you want to joke about it....” she said petulantly.
“You don’t regret it, do you?” I asked. “You love Judy, and you know
her. You wouldn’t want her to marry a man like that!”
“Oh, I suppose not,” she admitted. “He shouldn’t have told her, when he
did, that he’d lent me money. And of course he shouldn’t have tried to
make us think that Bill had stolen the necklace.
“But what’s the good talking about that? Do you realize what’s supposed
to happen to-day? There are more than a thousand people who’ve been
invited to this wedding. There’s a special train coming down from town.
It’s to leave at two o’clock. And there’ll be hundreds coming from all
around the county in cars.
“There’s just one thing to do, unless we mean to have Belden meet them
at the gate and send them home. Judy’s grandmother’s got to be suddenly
ill. She could be easily enough. Everybody knows about her. With all
this excitement it’s likely to happen before night, anyhow.
“But if she’ll agree to it now, within the next half-hour or so,
we can call up all the afternoon papers in town and tell them the
wedding’s been postponed on account of it. We can cancel the special
train and have someone at the station to tell them about it. We can
telephone to a lot of people who’d be driving, and Belden can turn back