"That was just my constructive imagination on the loose. It was a lovely theory, and I sort of hung on to it. But I had no real data to go on. Now I've got the evidence that Jim Garnett died two months before the fire burnt up pretty nearly all the records, and that his body was shipped back to Holbrook Centre to be buried in the family plot. You see, he was sick for some time out on Pacific Avenue, and his death was registered where the fire didn't go—"
"But what put you on?" asked Ruyler impatiently. "I should almost rather it had been any one else. He seems to have been about as bad a lot as even this town ever turned out."
"He was, all right, and his father before him, although they came from mighty fine folks back east. His father came out in '49 with the gold rush crowd, panned out a good pile, and then, liking the life—San Francisco was a gay little burg those days—opened one of the crack gambling houses down on the Old Plaza. Plate glass windows you could look through from outside if you thought it best to stay out, and see hundreds of men playing at tables where the gold pieces—often slugs—were piled as high as their noses, and hundreds more walking up and down the aisles either waiting for a chance to sit, or hoping to appease their hunger with the sight of so much gold. They didn't try any funny business, for every gambler had a six-shooter in his hip pocket, and sometimes on the table beside him.
"Sometimes men would walk out and shoot themselves on the sidewalk in front of the windows, and not a soul inside would so much as look up. Well, Delano the first had a short life but a merry one. He couldn't keep away from the tables himself, and first thing he knew he was broke, sold up. He went back to the mines, but his luck had gone, and his wife—she had followed him out here—persuaded him to go back home and live in the old house, on a little income she had; and he bored all the neighbors to death for a few years about 'early days in California' until he dropped off. Her name was Mary Garnett.
"That's what put me on—the G. in the middle of the name of the man Madame Delano married. I telegraphed to Holbrook Centre to find out what his middle name was, and after that it was easy. I also found out that he was born in California, and I guess that old wild life was in his blood. He stood Holbrook Centre until he was sixteen, and then homed back and took up the trade he just naturally had inherited.
"I figger out that he didn't tell his wife the truth when he married her back there, not until he was on the train pretty close to S.F., and then he told her because he couldn't help himself. She couldn't help herself, either, and besides she was in love with him. He was a handsome, distinguished lookin' chap, and he kept right on bein' a fascinator as long as he lived.
"I guess that's the reason she left him in the end. She stood for the gambling joint, and, although she had a cool sarcastic way with her that kept the men who fell for her at a distance, she was a good decoy, and she looked a regular queen at the head of the green table. She was chummy with Jim's intimates, two of whom were D.V. Bimmer and 'Gene Bisbee, but even 'Gene didn't dare take any liberties with her.
"It was natural that a woman brought up as she had been should have kept her child out of it, and I figger that she got disgusted with Jim and came to the full sense of her duty to the poor kid about the same time. But she didn't go until Jim settled so much a month on her through old Lawton—who used to amuse himself at Garnett's a good deal in those days, and who was one of her best friends.
"Well, she also got Garnett to make a curious sort of a will, leaving his money to James Lawton, to 'dispose of as agreed upon.' She had a thrifty business head, had that French dame, and she had made him buy property when he was flush, and put it in her name, although she gave a written agreement never to sell out as long as he lived.
"He agreed to let her go because he was dippy about another skirt at the time, and, besides, she played on his family pride—lineal descendant of the Delanos, Garnetts, and so forth. He'd never seen the kid after it was taken to the convent, but I guess he liked the idea, all right, of its being brought up wearing the old name, and gettin' rid of Marie at the same time.