The colonel had suggested calling a doctor, but Aunt Rebecca had demurred: “Janet can do everything; it is just a question of his heart; and she has digitalis and nitroglycerin and strychnine, the whole outfit of whips. She has dressed the wound with antiseptics. To-morrow will be soon enough for the medical talent.” It was she, however, who, as soon as breakfast was over, took first Mercer and Tracy, then the colonel apart, and proposed calling up Keatcham’s confidential associates on the long-distance telephone. “Strike, but hear me, nephew,” she said languidly, smiling at his bewilderment. “Our only chance now is to exhaust trumps. Yesterday the game was won. Keatcham had surrendered, he had told his partners in the deal to make no fight on Tracy’s election; they could get what they wanted without the Midland; he advised them to cover their shorts and get ready for a bull market—”
“How did he do all that when he had lost his private code book?”
“How would you do it? You would use the long distance telephone. We caught them at Seattle, where his men had gone for the meeting. I don’t understand why they needed me to suggest that. There the poor man was, as your Harvard stove agent calls it, rubbering about the library, trying to find The Fortunes of Nigel in the edition Darley had illustrated; of course, it wasn’t there. He had lost it just before he came to the Palace, he thought. It seems his old cipher needs a particular book, that kind. No doubt in my mind that your theory is right and that Atkins stole it and perhaps thought he stole the key, but didn’t get it. He took a memorandum of ciphers which looked like a key. There Keatcham was, with millions hanging on his wires and his modern substitute for the medieval signet-ring that would enforce the message quite lost. What to do? Why, there was nothing to do but get another cipher! They made up a temporary one, right in that library, yesterday afternoon.”
“But how could Mercer be sure Keatcham would not play a trick on him? Did he hear the conversation?”
“Certainly not. He took Keatcham’s word. Whatever his faults, Keatcham has always kept his word. Mercer was sure he would keep it. He went out of the room. He was in the library when Keatcham was stabbed.”
The colonel drew a long, difficult breath. “Then you don’t believe Mercer did it?”
“I’m sure he didn’t. He didn’t hurt him. Why should he kill him after he had surrendered? He had nothing to gain and considerable to risk, if not to lose. We want that bull market.”
“But who did then? Atkins? But he is trying to rescue him.”
“Is he? How do we know? The rescue was only our supposition. I’m only certain none of our crowd did it.”
“Kito?”