“Now,” said the adviser, “I’ll notify Haley to have my own hired motor ready for you and you can slip out and take it after you’ve had something to eat. Here’s the restaurant card. Haley will be there. Leave it at the drug store on Van Ness Street—Haley will give you the number—and get home as unobtrusively as possible. You can peel off these togs in the motor if necessary. You’ve your own underneath except your coat. Wrap that in a newspaper and carry it. I don’t know that Atkins has any one on guard at the hotel, but I think it more than likely he suspects some connection between our party and Keatcham’s. But first, tell me about Atkins; what do you know about him? It’s an American name.”
“America can take all the glory of him, I fancy,” said Tracy. “He’s been Keatcham’s secretary for six years. He seems awfully mild and useful and timid. He’s not a bit timid. He’s full of resource; he’s sidled suggestions into Keatcham’s ear and has been gradually working to make himself absolutely necessary. I think he aimed at a partnership; but Keatcham wouldn’t stand for it. I think it was in revenge that he sold out some of Keatcham’s secrets. Cary got on to that and has a score of his own to settle with him, besides. I don’t know how he managed, but he showed him up; and Keatcham gave him the sack in his own cold-blooded way. I know him only casually. But my cousin, Ralph Schuyler, went to prep. school with him, so I got his character straight off the bat. His father was a patent-medicine man from Mississippi, who made a fair pile, a couple of hundred thousand which looked good to that section, you know. I don’t know anything about his people except that his father made the ‘Celebrated Atkins’ Ague Busters’; and that Atkins was ashamed of his people and shook his married sisters who came to see him, in rather a brutal fashion; but I know a thing or two about him; he was one of those bounders who curry favor with the faculty and the popular boys and never break rules apparently, but go off and have sly little bats by themselves. He never was popular, yet, somehow, he got into things; he knew where to lend money; and he was simply sickeningly clever; in math. he was a wonder. Ralph hated him. For one thing, he caught him in a dirty lie. Atkins hated him back and contrived to prevent his being elected class president, and when he couldn’t prevent Ralph’s making his senior society the happy thought struck Atkins to get on the initiation committee. They had a cheery little branding game to make the fellows quite sure they belonged, you know, and he rammed his cigar stump into Ralph’s arm so that Ralph had blood-poisoning and a narrow squeak for his life. You see that I’m not prepossessed in the fellow’s favor. He’s got too vivid an imagination for me!”
“Seems to have,” acquiesced the colonel.
“I think, you know”—Tracy made an effort to be just—“I think Atkins was rather soured. Some of the fellows made fun of the ‘Ague Busters’; he had a notion that the reason it was such uphill work for him in the school, was his father’s trade. No doubt he did get nasty licks, at first; and he’s revengeful. He hasn’t got on in society outside, either—this he lays to his not being a university man. You see his father lost some of his money and put him to work instead of in college. He was willing enough at the time—I think he wanted to get married—but afterward, when he was getting a good salary and piling up money on his tips, he began to think that he had lost more than he had bargained for. Altogether, he’s soured. Now, what he wants is to make a thundering big strike and to pull out of Wall Street, buy what he calls ‘a seat on the James’ and set-up for a Southern gentleman. He’s trying to marry a Southern girl, they say, who is kin to the Carters and the Byrds and the Lees and the Carys—why, you know her, she’s Mrs. Winter’s secretary.”
“Does—does she care for him?” The colonel suddenly felt his mouth parched; he was savagely conscious of his mounting color. What a fiendish trick of fate! he had never dreamed of this! Well, whether she cared for him or not, the man was a brute; he shouldn’t get her. That was one certainty in the colonel’s mind.
“Why, Cary vows she doesn’t, that it was only a girlish bit of nonsense up in Virginia, that time he was prospecting, you know. But I don’t feel so safe. She’s too nice for such a cur. But you know what women are; the nicest of them seem to be awfully queer about men. There’s no betting on them.”
“I’m afraid not,” remarked the colonel lightly. But he put his fingers inside his collar and loosened it, as if he felt choked.
Because he had a dozen questions quarreling for precedence in his head, he asked not one. He only inquired regarding the situation; discovering that both Mercer and Tracy were equally in the dark with himself as to Atkins’ plans, Atkins’ store of information, Atkins’ resources. How he could have waylaid Tracy and the boy without knowing whence they came was puzzling; it was quite as puzzling, however, assuming that he did know their whereabouts, to decide why he was so keen to interrogate the boy. In fact, it was, as Tracy said, “too much like Professor Santa Anna’s description of a German definition of metaphysics, ‘A blind man hunting in a dark room for a black cat that isn’t there.’”
“In any event, you would better keep away from me,” was the colonel’s summing up of the situation; “I don’t want to be inhospitable, but the sooner you are off, and out of the hotel, the safer for your speculation.”
“Friends will please accept the intimation,” said Tracy good-humoredly. “Very well, it’s twenty-three for me. I’m hoping you’ll see your way clear to run over as soon as the old man has surrendered; I’m going to invite him to make us a proper visit, then, and see the country. I’m always for letting the conquered keep their side-arms.”