Mary laughed heartily at the conclusion of this episode.
“Wherever had he got the parson’s clothes from?” she queried.
“Oh,” said Ellis, with a grin, “when I landed back to the Post with him I heard the city police’d received a report from the Reverend Seccombe—the Baptist minister—to the effect that his house had been broken into the night before and some of his clothes pinched. We got him to come down to the guardroom right away, and he immediately identified the clothes the prisoner was wearing as his—and the bag, too. He and the other gink were just about the same build and height. Oh, his understudy pleaded guilty to burgling this house then and there, when he saw a bluff wouldn’t go. Made a statement and told us the whole business.
“It appears he’d broken into a shack when he first made his get-away from the ‘pen,’ and stolen some workman’s clothes. He was kind enough to leave these behind him when he exchanged with Seccombe. Oh, he sure was some ‘Holy Roller,’ this Mr. Arthur Forbes. Just such another flim-flammer as that Jabez Balfour, who put that smooth ‘Liberator gold brick come-on’ over a lot of the smug Nonconformist fraternity in the Old Country many years back, and then skipped out to Buenos Ayres. This beauty was doing eight years for a somewhat similar fake—a big oil well ‘salting’ swindle. He’d defrauded the public out of something like four hundred thousand dollars.”
He rolled and lit a cigarette and, after carefully extinguishing the match, gazed dreamily awhile across at the mountains, behind which the sun was gradually disappearing. Presently, looking up at his companion with a faint, whimsical smile playing over his stern features, he said quietly:
“Now it’s your turn to be Scherazerade. So far, I’ve been in the rôle of Sinbad—completely monopolizing this ‘Arabian Nights’ entertainment in a very one-sided manner. Won’t you tell me something of your life—in return?”
She shrugged her broad, gracefully rounded shoulders with a queer little hopeless gesture, all the life seeming to have gone suddenly out of her mobile face as she regarded him now with grave introspection.
“I’ll tell you a little,” she said slowly. “But I’m afraid you won’t find it very interesting.”
What she related was a very fair corroboration of the facts previously told him by Trainor; and though in their narration she strove to appear indifferent to the changing fortunes of her family, and to gloss over her father’s improvidence and selfishness, reading between the lines it was very apparent to Ellis what sacrifices she had made willingly for those same young brothers of whom she spoke with such loving solicitude.
“So ye see, me frind,” she wound up with a kind of forced gaiety: