Held to Answer: A Novel

by Peter Clark MacFarlane

To the young man's tortured imagination, the necklace became again a serpent. He could feel it crawling there over his heart, could hear it hissing and rattling as if about to strike. Then it ceased to be a serpent, and was a nest of birds. He knew that every time a reporter asked a question, one of those birds would stretch its wings and call "Cuckoo."

There! It said "Cuckoo" just then. Was the bank haunted? Rollie looked up frightened. Cold sweat was on his brow. Not his hands alone but his whole body trembled. He was really in a very bad way. Could a man have delirium tremens, just from fright? Rollie didn't know, but if a reporter came in just then, he was sure that he would take out the diamonds and hurl them at the news gatherer.

Speaking of delirium tremens, he wished he had a good stiff highball. He must slip out presently long enough to get one. Worse than reporters would be coming round, too. Detectives would come. Chief of detectives Benson might come in person. Rollie disliked Benson and mistrusted him. Benson went on the theory that it takes a crook to catch a crook! When it came to inducing a crook to talk, he was a very handy man with a club. Benson would at once scour the pool rooms and hop joints. Suppose he got the Red Lizard in the dragnet. Suppose he hit the Red Lizard a clip or two with that small, ugly billy that was generally in Benson's pocket when he went to the sweat room; or suppose he kept Red's 'hop' away from him for a few hours? Or suppose Benson happened to know in that uncanny way of his that he, Rollie, had done business with Spider Welsh? He might just walk into the bank and search Rollie on suspicion. And Rollie would have to submit, would have to seem to invite him, almost. His teeth were chattering at the thought.

Discovery—disgrace—conviction—ruin—that was the sequence of the ideas. Stripes! Ugh! Just when the way out, "the way up," was opening to him, too. Discovery, now that a moral hope was gleaming, would be infinitely more terrible than an hour ago, when he was only a rat burrowing from a terrier.

He tried to shake himself together. He must brace up and play the game with a cool head, or he could not play it at all. One thing was clear. The diamonds must be got out of his possession temporarily. But where should he put them? In his desk? Anywhere about the bank? Benson would find them if he started a search, and if Benson didn't search, some one in the bank might stumble upon them accidentally, and then the cat would be out of the bag for fair.

There was a police whistle now! The agitated young man looked about, startled, and then laughed at himself. It was not a police whistle at all. It was the first clear, bell-like note of the bank clock, beginning the stroke of nine.

With a sensation of relief that for a few minutes waiting was over and there was occupation for mind and body, Rollie took the minister's key and strolled in the most casual manner he could command down to the vault room.

"Doctor Hampstead's box," he announced, exhibiting his key. The vault clerk turned to his card index as a mere matter of form, for he remembered well enough Rollie's authorization, and read upon the card of the Reverend John Hampstead his signed permission for Rollo Charles Burbeck to do with his box "as I might or could do if personally present." The clerk stepped inside the vault, scanned the numbers and tiers, and thrust his master-key into the proper lock. Rollie slipped the minister's key into its own place, turned it, and the door flew open. The vault clerk returned to his stand outside the door. Rollie took the box and walked into one of the private rooms provided for the safe deposit patrons. In a moment he was ripping open the envelope marked "Wadham Currency", which he found exactly as the minister had described it.

At sight and feeling of the money in his fingers, a great wave of hope surged over Rollie. It was a solid assurance of escape. With this assurance, there came to the young man a sharp, definite impulse to begin at once the work of character building. As an initial step, he wrote upon one of his personal cards: "I.O.U. $1,100," and signed it, not with his initials, but boldly in vigorous chirography, to express the stoutness of his purpose, with the whole of his name, "Rollo Charles Burbeck." When putting this card carefully back in the envelope from which he had extracted the currency, and placing the envelope on the top of the papers in the box, the young man experienced a fine glow of satisfaction. He had done a good and honorable act in this bold assumption of his debt and in thus leaving the written record there behind him.

But when Rollie took up the currency from the table and slipped the long, thin package into his inside pocket, his fingers came in contact with that other envelope, the presence of which, under the strain of what he must go through this morning, threatened to break down his nerve completely.