Mercer’s faint smile made the colonel feel boyish and impetuous. “Of course not, suh,” he answered. “I told you he was alive, myself. I reckoned you knew when a man is lying and when he is telling the solemn truth. You know I have told you the truth and treated you on the square. But, just the same, if you try to take that man away, you’ll only have his dead body. He can’t do any more harm then, and a dead man can’t vote.”
The colonel, who had taken out his cigarette case, opened it and meditatively fingered the rubber band. “Do you reckon,” he suggested, in his most amiable voice, “do you reckon young Arnold and Endicott Tracy will stand for such frills in warfare as assassination?”
“I do not, suh,” replied Mercer gravely, and as he spoke he pushed back the heavy tapestry hiding a window opposite the colonel’s head, “but they can both prove an alibi. Mr. Arnold is in Pasadena, and there goes Mr. Tracy now in his machine—to try to find Archie. Do you see?”
The colonel saw. He inclined his head, at the same time proffering his case.
“I rather think, Mr. Mercer, that I was wrong. You have the last trump.”
CHAPTER XI
THE CHARM OF JADE
It was no false lure to distract pursuit, that hurried sentence of Randall’s which had met the colonel’s angry appeal for information. The woman was not only repeating Mrs. Winter’s message; the message itself described a fact. As she stood at her room telephone, Aunt Rebecca had happened to glance at Randall, supplementing the perfunctory dusting of the hotel maid with her own sanitary, dampened, clean cloth; Randall’s eyes suddenly glazed and bulged in such startling transformation that, instead of questioning her, Mrs. Winter stepped swiftly to the window where she was at work, to seek the cause of her agitation.
“Oh, Lord! Oh, Mrs. Winter!” gasped Randall. “Ain’t that Master Archie?”
Mrs. Winter saw for herself; the face at a cab window, the waving of a slim hand—Archie’s face, Archie’s hand. Brief as was the Space of his passing (for the two horses in the cab were trotting smartly), she was sure of both. “Give me my bonnet,” she commanded, “any bonnet, any gloves! And my bag with some money!”
It was as she flung through the door that she threw her message to the colonel back exactly as Randall had submitted it. Miss Smith was coming along the loggia. “Don’t stop me!” said Mrs. Winter sternly. “I’ve seen Archie; I’m after him.”