SPARRING FOR A FEE.
Pierce Langford drove the automobile, in which he made his first trip to Stony Point, up to the end of the drive near the Graham cottage, and advanced to the front entrance. The porch on which he stood awaiting the appearance of someone to answer his knock—there was no bell at the door—was bordered with a railing of rough-hewn, but uniformly selected, limbs of hard wood or saplings. The main structure of the house was of yellow pine, but the outer trimmings were mainly of such rustic material as the railing of the porch.
The front door was open, giving the visitor a fairly good view of the interior. The front room was large and fairly well furnished with light inexpensive furniture, grass rugs and an assortment of nondescript, “catch-as-catch-can,” but not unattractive, art upon the walls. Langford, who was not a sleepy schemer, was able to get a good view of the room before any one appeared to answer his knock.
It was a woman who appeared, a sharp featured, well-dressed matron with a challenging eye. Perhaps no stranger, or person out of the exclusive circle that she assumed to represent ever approached her without being met with the ocular demand, “Who are you?”
Pierce Langford recognized this demand at once. If he had been of less indolent character this unscrupulous attorney might have made a brilliant success as a criminal lawyer in a metropolis. The fact that he was content with the limitations of a practice in a city of 3,500 inhabitants, Fairberry, his home town, was of itself indicative of his indolence. And yet, when he took a case, he manifested gifts of shrewdness that would have made many another lawyer of much greater practice jealous.
Attorney Langford’s shrewdness and indolence were alternately intermittent. When the nerve centers of his shrewdness were stimulated his indolence lapsed and he was very much on the alert. The present was one of those instances. He knew something, by reputation, of the woman who confronted him. He had had indirect dealing with her before, but he had never met her. However, he was certain that she would recognize his name.
“Is this Mrs. Graham?” he inquired, although he scarcely needed to ask the question.
“It is,” she replied with evidently habitual precision.
“My name is Langford—Pierce Langford,” he announced, and then waited for the effect of this limited information.
The woman started. It was a startled start. The challenge of her countenance wavered; the precision of her manner became an attitude of caution.
“Not—not Pierce Langford of—of—?” she began.
The man smiled on one side of his mouth.
“The very one, none other,” he answered cunningly. “Not to be in the least obscure, I am from the pretty, quiet and somewhat sequestered city of Fairberry. You know the place, I believe.”
“I’ve never been there and hope I shall never have occasion to go to your diminutive metropolis,” she returned rather savagely.
“No?” the visitor commented with a rising inflection for rhetorical effect. “By the way, may I come in?”
“Certainly,” Mrs. Graham answered recovering quickly from a partial lapse of mindfulness of the situation.
The woman turned and led the way into the house and the visitor followed. Mrs. Graham directed the lawyer to a reed rockingchair and herself sat down on another reed-rest of the armchair variety. The woman by this time had recovered something of her former challenging attitude and inquired:
“Well, Mr. Langford, what is the meaning of this visit?”
“Very much meaning, Mrs. Graham,” was the reply; “and of very much significance to you, I suspect. I come here well primed with information which I am sure will cause you to welcome me as you perhaps would welcome nobody else in the world.”
Mrs. Graham leaned forward eagerly, expectantly, apprehensively.
“You come as a friend, I assume,” she said.
“Have you any reason to doubt it?” the man inquired. “If it were otherwise, I must necessarily come as a traitor. I hope you will not entertain any such opinion of me as that. As long as you treat me fairly, you’ll find me absolutely on the square for you and your interests.”
“I hope so,” returned the woman in a tone of voice that could hardly be said to convey any significance other than the dictionary meaning of the words. “But let’s get down to business. What is this information that you come here primed with? Has it to do with the old subject?”
“Certainly, very intimately, and with nothing else.”
“In what way?” Mrs. Graham asked with more eagerness than she intended to disclose.
“Well, there are some spies in this neck of the woods.”
“Spies!” the woman exclaimed, betraying still more of the eagerness she was still struggling against.
“Yes spies. That’s exactly what they call themselves.”
“Who are they?—how do you know they are here to spy on me?”
“I overheard their plans. I got wind in a roundabout way, as a result of talk on the part of Mrs. Hutchins’ servants, that there was something doing, with Twin Lakes as a central point of interest. I suspected at once that your interests were involved; so I stole slyly, Willie Hawkshaw-like, up to their rendezvous one night and listened to some of them as they discussed their plans and—”
“Some of them,” Mrs. Graham interrupted. “How many are there?”
“Oh, a whole troup of them.”
“That’s a funny story,” the woman commented dubiously, searching the face of her visitor for an explanation of his, to her, queer statements.
“Not at all so funny when you hear it in detail,” Langford returned quietly.
“Well hurry up with the details,” the impatient Mrs. Graham demanded.
“There’s no need of being in a hurry,” the lawyer said with provoking calmness. “Business is business, you see, and full confidences should never be exchanged in a situation of this kind until a contract is drawn up, signed, sealed, witnessed, and recorded. In other words, I ought to have an understanding and a retainer before I go any farther.”
Mrs. Graham had no reason to doubt that this was coming sooner or later, but she winced nevertheless when it came.