Ladies and Gentlemen

by Irvin S. Cobb

For his part, Chaney was inclined to accept the inevitable without crabbing. Something the heavy-set man said now at the outset bent him strongly to that course. It stilled a sudden fear in him. What charge could these insurance people bring against him except breach of trust, or whichever fancy name it was they called it by when a fellow kept his mouth shut and let somebody else pay over coin that wasn’t exactly owing?

Of course, having rounded him up this way, they would have to go through the forms of getting him extradited to Montana and getting him indicted and then bringing him to trial or something; but from what he knew about the law, he judged it would be more like a civil proceeding than a criminal one. It wasn’t as though he had profited in a money way by his own duplicity. An innocent party to the transaction had the spending of that five thousand. All along Chaney had viewed his behavior under this head in more or less a heroic light—standing aside and not saying a word while a dependent woman came into a mighty snug little fortune.

And wife-desertion was no felony; he had looked that point up. Even if Mrs. Chaney were inclined to be spiteful, they couldn’t stick you away for sliding out and leaving a woman. Thank heaven, a husband had a few rights left in this country. Chaney even abandoned a notion he had of denying that he was Chaney and fighting it out on that line. What would be the good? He settled on the hillocky mattress to hear what this hick-looking bull might have further to say about it all.

“I guess maybe you’re wondering in your own mind how I come to get into the case to begin with,” the latter had said a minute or two earlier. “Well, you might as well know it—I’ve been on the payroll of the Equity and Warranty Company from back when this thing first broke. Yes, sir, from the start back up there in Montana. It was them sent me out with orders to keep on goin’ till I’d turned you up. When you monkey with those folks you’re monkeyin’ with a buzzsaw. They don’t ever quit, not that outfit don’t. That’s why they paid up when your wife pushed her claim—to throw you off the track, case you heard about it. They’d rather see you nailed than have the money back. That’s them!”

He lighted a cheap cigar and then as an afterthought offered Chaney its mate. But Chaney didn’t want to smoke just then. All Chaney wanted to do was just to listen.

“Come to think about it, though, I guess the thing you’re wonderin’ about the most is how us insurance people come to figger out that you wasn’t dead but ’live and kickin’,” continued the smoker. “I know good and well that if I was in your fix that’s what I would be interested in the most. That’s right, ain’t it?”

Chaney raised his head from the pillow and nodded, and was, as the saying is, all ears.

“Well, sir, I got to take the compliments for that part of it all by myself. You might not believe it, but if it hadn’t been for me they or nobody else would probably never have suspicioned anything out of the way about you bein’ squashed out nice and flat under that landslide. The way it come up was this way: I live at Kalispel, out in the Flathead valley, you know. I’m the resident agent there for the Equity and Warranty Company and on the side I’m a deputy sheriff for Flathead County, or the other way around, whichever way you want to put it. And it so happened I was the second human bein’ to get into that Scalded Creek basin after the quake last year. But this boy Hurley’s brother was the first.

“Just as soon as they felt the quake down on the river, this here brother, name Sherman Hurley, he took a notion into his head that something was wrong up in the mountains with his brother, the one that had hired out to guide you. It was almost like as if he’d got a message from his brother’s spirit. So nothin’ would do but what he must start right in and make sure, one way or the other. So he lit out and he traveled all that night, him knowin’ all the trails and the lay of the land, and by movin’ about as fast over them ridges as his pony could take him he made the trip in four or five hours less time than ’twould take doin’ it the regular easy way.