Jimmy had more than twenty thousand dollars cached away in a secret hiding place; Juno possessed half as much more. The marriage occurred in the late fall, and they went South, to one of the Florida beaches, where they secured a villa, and where they passed what was really a honeymoon.
When issuing from their cottage door one morning, they had found the insensible form of a man upon their doorstep.
One may be a crook, a burglar, and all that, and still possess much kindness of heart; two may be so, and these two were.
Together they carried their unconscious burden inside the cottage, summoned the one servant who waited upon their wants, and attended to the stricken man.
They did not ask where he came from, nor how it happened that he had fallen upon their doorstep in his present condition; and he could not have informed them, then, if the questions had been asked.
But they ministered to him; they kept him there and cared for him, making no inquiries concerning him, since by doing so they would have attracted attention to themselves, which was the one great thing they desired to avoid.
But the stricken man had arrived at the end of his journey. He had fallen upon their doorstep to die, and die he did, after three weeks, easily, painlessly, composedly, and tenderly cared for until the last, by these two bits of flotsam.
And there had been some hours of clearness of vision, of return to memory, before death claimed its prize. He had told them his name, and all about himself—and also that nowhere in the world did there remain one person who was nearly enough related to him to care whether he lived or died; that he was the last of his race, in the direct line, and that he bore an old and honored name upon which there had never been a blemish, save that one which poverty imposes.
Ledger Dinwiddie died in the spare bedroom of that cottage inhabited by these two products of the underworld, cared for during his last hours by two as uncompromising crooks and rogues as ever lived to prey upon mankind.