CHAPTER XLIX
MR. DORRIGAN
Carl, traveling north after a day of earnest discussion in his cousin'scamp, thought much of the second candlestick. Since that night inPhilip's wigwam, it had haunted him persistently. Now with Diane'spermission to probe its secret--if, indeed, it had one like its charredcompanion--he was fretting again, as he had intermittently fretted inthe lodge of Mic-co, at the train of circumstances that had interposeddelay.
Train and taxi were perniciously slow. Carl found his patience taxedto the utmost.
The grandfather's clock was booming eight when at length, after agauntlet of garrulous servants, he pushed back the great, iron-bounddoors of the old Spanish room in his cousin's house and entered. Thewar-beaten slab of table-wood, the old lanterns, the Spanish grandeeabove the mantel, the mended candlestick and its unmarred mate, allbrought memories of another night when Starrett's glass had struck themarble fireplace. Vividly, too, he recalled how the firelight hadstained the square-paneled ceiling of oak overhead, and how Diane hadstood in the doorway. The room was the same. It was a little hard,however, to reconcile the sullen, resentful, impudent young scapegraceof that other night with the man of to-night.
He put out his hand to touch the second candlestick--the telephone bellrang.
Carl frowned impatiently and answered it.
"Hello," said he. "Yes, this is Carl Granberry speaking . . .Who? . . . Oh! Hello, Hunch, is that you?"
It plainly was. Moreover, Mr. Dorrigan was very nervous and ill atease. Carl laughed with relish.
"What's the trouble?" he demanded. "You're stuttering like a kid . . .Shut up and begin over again. . . . Hello. . . . Yes. . . . Well,I've been out of town since January. . . . Hum! . . . Well," hehinted dryly, "there was sufficient time for an explanation before Iwent. . . . I guess you're right. . . . I went up to the farm inOctober with Wherry."
Mr. Dorrigan desperately admitted that some of the time between theescape of His Nibs and Carl's departure for the farm had been spent inpanic-stricken remorse and dread--some in the hospital due to analtercation with Link Murphy, who for reasons not immediately apparentwished jealously to obliterate his other eye. He begged Carl to givehim an immediate opportunity of squaring himself, for he had telephonedthe house so frequently of late that the butler had grown insulting.Mr. Dorrigan added that he hoped Mr. Granberry's wholly justified wrathhad somewhat abated, but that for purposes of initial communication thetelephone had seemed more prudent.
He was plainly relieved at the answer.
Carl glanced at the tormenting candlestick and sighed. Another delay!
"All right," he said finally to Hunch, "come along. I'll give youtwenty minutes. If you're not through then, like as not I'll stir upthe grudge again--"
The telephone at the other end clicked instantly. Conceivably Hunchwas already on his way up town.
Carl impatiently busied himself with some mail upon the table. It hadfollowed him from the farm to Palm Beach and from Palm Beach to NewYork. There were half a dozen wild letters of gratitude from Wherryand a letter from the old doctor, Wherry's father, that brought a flushof genuine pleasure to Carl's face.
"Wherry, too!" said he softly. "Of course. He stuck that other night.I've been too blind to see." Drawing his flute from his pocket, heglanced with a curious smile and glow at a row of notches in the wood.The first notch he had cut in the flute after the rainy night inPhilip's wigwam, the second by Mic-co's pool, the third was subtlylinked with the marshes of Glynn, and a fourth had been furtively addedin the camp of his cousin. Now with a glance at Wherry's letters, hewas quietly carving a fifth. Who may say what they portended--thisrecord of notches carved upon the one friend who had always understood!
Carl was to carve another, of which he little dreamed, before thesummer waned; and the spur to its making was close at hand.
The doorbell rang as he finished, and dropping the flute back into hispocket, he rang for some whiskey and cigars for the entertainment ofMr. Dorrigan, who presently appeared, at the heels of a servant,twirling his hat with a nonchalant ease much too elaborate and atvariance with the look in his good eye to be genuine.
"'Lo!" said Hunch uncomfortably.
"Hello!" said Carl pleasantly, pushing the decanter across the table.
Hunch stared at his host, fidgeted, poured himself a generous drink andwaited suggestively.
Carl merely laughed good-humoredly and lighted a cigar.
"Sorry, Hunch," he regretted, "but I've joined the Lithia League!"
"My Gawd!" burst forth Hunch despairingly, adding in heartfelt memoryof his host's enviable steadiness of head, "My Gawd, Carl, what a wasteo' talents!"
Carl laughed.
"Sit down," he invited, "and get it off your mind."
But Hunch's single eye was wandering in fascinated appraisal overCarl's dark, pleasant face. Even he, coarse and brutal in perceptionas he was, was conscious of a difference not wholly attributable to theLithia League and felt himself impelled to some verbal recognition ofhis host's conspicuous well-being.
"Ye're on the level all right," he swore obscurely. "Ye're white!Ye're lookin' good, ye're lookin' fine-- By the Lord Harry, Carl, Idon't know as I blame yuh!"
Unable to fathom the nature of the censure thus withheld, Carl remainedsilent and Hunch fell again to staring, his immovable eye ridiculouslyexpressive in stony conjunction with the other. Whatever he found inCarl's face this time plainly afforded him intense relief, for heseated himself with a long breath and drew a yellowish paper from hispocket.
"I says to meself," he explained, "'Hunch, old sport, ye're in for it.He'll like as not drop yuh out of the window with an electric wire,feed yuh to an electric wolf or make yuh play hell-for-a-minute chessor some other o' them woozy stunts 'at pop up in his bean likemushrooms, but yuh gotta square yerself with that paper. Yuh gotta getup yer nerve an' hike up there to the brownstone with it.' I ask yuh,"he finished dramatically, and evidently laboring under the momentaryconviction that Carl, too, was optically afflicted, "I ask yuh, Carl,to cast yer good lamp over that there paper."
Carl opened the paper and stared.
"Hunch," he exclaimed with an involuntary glance at the mendedcandlestick, "where in the devil did you get this?"
"I ask yuh to remember," went on Hunch in some excitement, "that I wasdrunk an' the old she-wol--Gr-r-r-r-r!" Hunch cleared his heavy throatin a panic, with a rasp like the stripping of gears, and correctedhimself. "The Old One," he spoke somewhat as if this singular titlewas a degree, "the Old One put one over on me."
"My aunt, I imagine," said Carl, "has given me a fairly accurateversion of His Nibs' escape. I'll admit a pardonable anxiety tointerview you for a while. As a matter of fact there was a night--whenI was not in the Lithia League--that I drove down to look you up. Tellme," he added, "where you found this."
"It was not, stric'ly speakin', found," said Hunch with a modest cough.Once more, overwhelmed afresh by Carl's appearance, he let his good eyego roving.
"Tell it," said Carl with what patience he could muster, "in your ownway."
"I ask yuh to remember," urged Hunch with a firm belief in the dignityof this phrase, "that I was still drunk an' batty in me thinker whenthe old she-wol--Gr-r-r-r-r-r--the Old One told me to dig out. So Ihalts on the corner to collect me wits an' by'm'by I sees a guy wid adarkish face an' lips like Link. He comes along, looks up an' downsuspicious, sees the door ain't tight shut an' heel-taps it up thesteps. He opens the door an' by'm'by he helps the Old One to a taxian' makes out to walk off--see--whiles she's a watchin'. Later, whenthe taxi turns the corner, back he goes, heel-taps it up the stepsag'in, an' goes in at the door he ain't locked, though he'd made out hehad. An' right there," said Hunch impressively, "right there is whereyer Uncle Hunch feels a real glimmer in his bean an' goes back.Thin-lips ain't in sight. Yer Uncle Hunch softly heel-taps it upstairsan' finds the darkish guy adoptin' a paper with a fatherly pat, whichhe slips in his coat p
ocket. Whereupon--whiles he's lockin' the deskdrawer ag'in, aforesaid uncle slips downstairs an' out. By'm'by,Thin-lips trots out with an ugly grin on his mug--an' Uncle Hunch,gettin' soberer an' soberer by the minute, trots after him with hisgood lamp workin' overtime."
Carl glanced at the paper.
"Yes?" he encouraged.
"Well," said Hunch with a sheepish grin that was rendered somewhatsinister by the fixed eye, "I jostled him real rude in a crowd an'picked his pocket. An' there yuh are!"
There was some slight rustle of greenish paper in the handshake.
"I'm mighty grateful," said Carl. "That paper cost me a couple ofhours of laborious preparation. It's a duplicate, Hunch, for thepurpose of decoy. The original's in safe deposit."