The Key to Yesterday

by Charles Neville Buck

“I am interested in South America now,” she informed him. “I wasn’t before. I shouldn’t think of letting you go there, but I guess I’m safe in Puerto Frio, and I might settle your doubts myself. You see,” she added judicially, “I’m the one person you can trust not to betray your secret, and yet to find out all about this mysterious Mr. Carter.”

Saxon was frankly frightened. Unless she promised that she would do nothing of the sort, he would himself go at once. He had waited in deference to her wishes, but, if the thing were to be recognized as deserving investigation at all, he must do it himself. He could not protect himself behind her as his agent. She finally assented, yet later Mrs. Horton once more referred to the idea of the trip as though she expected Duska to accompany her.

Then it was that Saxon was driven back on strategy. The idea was one that he found it hard to accept, yet he knew that he could never gain her consent, and her suggestion proved that, though she would not admit it, at heart she realized the necessity of a solution. The hanging of his canvases for exhibition afforded an excuse for going to New York. On his arrival there, he would write to her, explaining his determination to take a steamer for the south, and “put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.” There seemed to be no alternative.

He did not take Steele into his confidence, because Steele agreed with Duska, and should be able to say, when questioned, that he had not been a party to the conspiracy. When Saxon stood, a few days later, on the step of an inbound train, the girl stood waving her sunbonnet, slenderly outlined against the green background of the woods beyond the flag-station. A sudden look of pain crossed the man’s face, and he leaned far out for a last glimpse of her form.

Steele saw Duska’s smile grow wistful as the last car rounded the curve.

“I can’t quite accustom myself to it,” he said, slowly: “this new girl who has taken the place of the other, of the girl who did not know how to love.”

“I know more about it,” she declared, “than anybody else that ever lived. And I’ve only one life to give to it.”

Saxon’s first mistake was born of the precipitate haste of love. He wrote the letter to Duska that same evening on the train. It was a difficult letter to write. He had to explain, and explain convincingly, that he was disobeying her expressed command only because his love was not the sort that could lull itself into false security. If fate held any chance for him, he would bring back victory. If he laid the ghost of Carter, he would question his sphinx no further.

The writing was premature, because he had to stop in Washington and seek Ribero. He had some questions to ask. But, at Washington, he learned that Ribero had been recalled by government. Then, hurrying through his business in New York, Saxon took the first steamer sailing. It happened to be by a slow line, necessitating several transfers.

It was characteristic of Duska that, when she received the letter hardly a day after Saxon’s departure, she did not at once open it, but, slipping it, dispatch-like, into her belt, she called the terrier, and together they went into the woods. Here, sitting among the ferns with the blackberry thicket at her back and the creek laughing below, she read and reread the pages.