Mercer smiled faintly. “There are two more telephones in the house,” he observed. “You can call off your dogs easily any time you wish. Also you can hear from the Palace. Will you come up-stairs with me? I assure you I have not the least intention to harm you or the honest sergeant.”
“You take the first trick, Mercer,” said the colonel. “I supposed the bell was your signal to have the wires cut. But about going; no, I think we will stay here. There is a door out on the court which, if you will open—thank you. A charming prospect! Excuse me if I send Haley out there; and may I go myself?”
Anticipating the answer, he stepped under the low mission lintel into a fairy-like Californian court or patio of pepper-trees and palms and a moss-grown fountain. There was the usual colonnade with a stone seat running round the wall. Mercer, smiling, motioned to one of them. “I wish I could convince you, Colonel, that you are in no need of that plaything in your hand, and that you are going to dine with your boy—isn’t he a fine fellow?”
The colonel did not note either his admission that he had seen Archie, nor a curious warming of his tone; he had stiffened and grown rigid like a man who receives a blow which he will not admit. He stole a glance at the detective and met an atrocious smirk of complacency. They both had caught a glimpse of a figure flitting into a door of the court. They both had seen a woman’s profile and a hand holding a little steel tool which had ends like an alligator’s nose. And both men had recognized Miss Smith.
CHAPTER IX
THE AGENT OF THE FIRELESS STOVE
The time was two hours later. Rupert Winter was sitting on one of the stone benches of the colonnade about the patio. The court was suffused with the golden glow presaging sunset. Warm afternoon shadows lay along the flags; wavering silhouettes of leafage or plant; blurred reflections from the bold bas-reliefs of Spanish warriors and Spanish priests sculptured between the spandrels of the arches. Winter’s dull eyes hardly noted them: the exotic luxuriance of foliage, the Spanish armor and Spanish cowls were all too common to a denizen of a Spanish colony in the tropics, to distract his thoughts from his own ugly problem. He had been having it out with himself, as he phrased it. And there had been moments during those two hours, when he had ground his teeth and clenched his fists because of the futile and furious pain in him.
When he recognized Janet Smith, by that same illuminating flash he recognized that this woman who had been tricking him was the woman that he loved. He believed that he had said his last word to love, but love, after seeming to accept the curt dismissal, was lightly riding his heart again. “Fooled a second time,” he thought with inexpressible bitterness, recalling his unhappy married life and the pretty, weak creature who had caused him such humiliation. Yet with her there had been no real wrong-doing, only absolute lack of discretion and a childish craving for gaiety and adulation. Poor child! what a woeful ending for it all! The baby, the little boy who was their only living child, to die of a sudden access of an apparently trifling attack of croup, while the mother was dancing at a post ball! He was East, taking his examination for promotion. The frantic drive home in the chill of the dawn had given her a cold which her shock and grief left her no strength to resist—she was always a frail little creature, poor butterfly!—and she followed her baby inside of a month. Had she lived, her husband might have found it hard to forgive her, for already a sore heart was turning to the child for comfort; but she was dead, and he did not let his thoughts misuse her memory. Now—here was another, so different but just as false. Then, he brought himself up with a jerk; he would be fair; he would look at things as they were; many a man had been fooled by the dummy. He would not jump at conclusions because they were cruel, any more than he would because they were kind. There was such a thing, he knew well, as credulous suspicion; it did more harm than credulous trust. Meanwhile, he had his detail. He was to find Archie; therefore, he waited. They were in the house; it were only folly to give up their advantage under the stress of any of Mercer’s plausible lurings to the outside.
Moreover, by degrees, he became convinced that Mercer, certainly to some extent, was sincere in his profession of belief in Archie’s absence and safety. This, in spite of hearing several times that Archie was not returned. Mercer did all the speaking, but he allowed Birdsall to hold the receiver and take the message from Mrs. Winter.
The telephone was in an adjoining room, but by shifting his position a number of times the colonel was able to catch a murmur of the conversation. He heard Mercer’s voice distinctly. He had turned away and was following the detective out of the room. “I don’t understand it any more than you do, Mr. Birdsall,” he said; “you won’t believe me, suh, but I am right worried.”
“Of course I believe you,” purred the detective so softly that the colonel knew he did not believe any more than Mercer suspected. “Of course I believe you; but I don’t know what to do. It ain’t on the map. I guess it’s up to you to throw a little light. I’ve called the boys off twice already and told ’em to wait an hour or a half-hour longer. I got to see the colonel.”