"A dangerous experiment, I always thought," Kenwick remarked.
"So is dynamite, but sometimes we have to use it, and nothing else will take its place."
"Are you advising me to put a bomb under somebody on the chance that it might be the man who shuffled the deck?"
"No. I'm advising you to do the bramble-bush stunt. Don't jump forward; jump back."
"What do you mean?"
"Why, the more I think of it the more I believe that the solution of this mystery is to be found in the place where it began."
"But where did it begin?"
"So far as your knowledge of it extends, it began in the cañon or ravine or whatever place it was that you had the accident. If I'm not mistaken, Kenwick, that place is your bramble-bush."
The curtain rose upon the first act and there was no opportunity for further conversation. It was during the intermission between the second and third acts that Jarvis, leaning over the balcony, said suddenly, "There's a friend of yours; fourth row on the right."
Kenwick made a cursory examination of the seats and shook his head. "Don't see him. Don't see anybody I know here to-night except Aiken, our dramatic critic."
"This is a woman. Count seven seats over in the fourth row. Isn't that lady in the garnet-colored coat your Madame Rosalie?"
"You're right; it is."
"I thought I couldn't be mistaken. There's a certain air of distinction about that woman in spite of——" Jarvis stopped, for he saw that his companion was not listening. For a moment Kenwick sat there staring down at the fourth row like a man in a dream. Then he gripped Jarvis's arm. "Look!" he cried. "Down there with Madame Rosalie."
"What's the matter? You're such an excitable cuss, Kenwick."
"That fellow who's with her. Look! Jarvis, that's the man!"
"What man?"
"The man we've been talking about—my Missing Link."
Together they leaned over the balcony and scrutinized, with the intent gaze of a pair of detectives, the couple in the fourth row right. It may have been coincidence, or it may have been that species of visual hypnotism known to us all, which suddenly impelled Madame Rosalie's escort to turn in his seat. His eyes swept the house with a casual glance, then lifted to the balcony. Slowly they surveyed the arc of faces above the lights. The two men leaning toward him did not move. In another instant he had found them, and for a full minute he and Roger Kenwick held each other. And then the theater went black as the curtain rose on the last act.
Just before it was over Kenwick bade his companion a hurried farewell. "I'm going down and introduce myself to that fellow. I know I've seen him before somewhere, and he may be able to give me my clue. You don't mind if I break away? I want to catch him before he is lost in the crowd."
But this hope was thwarted. For hurrying down the aisle in that moment before the rush of exit, while the audience was finding its wraps, he found two seats in the fourth row empty. Slowly he walked back to the St. Germaine, his thoughts in a tumult. Why should they have wanted to leave before the end of as good a performance as that? Something must have happened. Could it be that they had wanted to escape him? At such long range it hadn't been possible for him to determine whether or not there was a flash of recognition in the other man's eyes, but his mysterious disappearance was haunting. On the following morning, before going to the "Clarion" office he took a car out to Fillmore Street.
At Madame Rosalie's shabby home a man in shirt sleeves opened the door. "Oh, she don't live here any more," he explained to the caller. "She moved a week ago. I'm gettin' the place ready for a new tenant."
"Do you know where she went?"
The man grinned. "Them mediums don't generally leave no forwardin' address. Their motto is 'Keep Movin'.' I will say, though, that the Rosalie woman was a perfect lady and paid her rent regular in advance."
Kenwick walked away, turning this latest development slowly in his mind, looking at it from every angle. At his office he worked mechanically, scarcely conscious of what he wrote. He was in two minds now about the Eastern trip. Perhaps it would be better to take Jarvis's advice and let things have their head a bit longer. And he was certain of some of his facts now. The face of the man in the fourth row had been like the flash of a torch at midnight. For most of the night he had been awake, going back over the painful trail of the past, fitting some of its previously incomprehensible details into their places. What a curious mosaic his life had been! What contrasts of light and shade! But as for going back to Mont-Mer——The idea made him shudder. No, that was one thing he would not do. It would be like courting the return of a nightmare.
At four o'clock he left the office and went to keep an appointment with Dr. Gregson Bennet in the Physicians' Building. Dr. Bennet belonged to that class of specialists who designate their business quarters in plural terms. His offices comprised a suite of four rooms. The sign on the door of the first one invited the caller to enter, unheralded. Complying with this injunction, Kenwick found himself in a well-lighted chamber containing a massive collection of light-green upholstery and an assortment of foreign-looking pictures artfully selected to convey the impression that their owner was on chummy terms with the capitals of Europe.
As the door closed automatically behind him, a white-uniformed figure appeared, like a perfectly trained cuckoo, from the adjoining room and announced in level tones, "The-doctor-will-see-you-in-just-a-minute." Kenwick accepted this assurance with the grave credulity that one fiction-maker accords another. He glanced at the five other patients already awaiting their turns and picked up a magazine.
By four-thirty he had read the jokes in the back of "Anybody's Magazine" for the preceding six months. No physician in reputable standing ever removes old numbers of periodicals from his files. For what better testimony can he offer in support of his claim upon a long-established practice? As Kenwick read, he was aware that his companions were being summoned one by one to embark upon that mysterious journey from whose bourne no traveler returns, departure having been arranged for around some obscure corner, to prevent exchange between arriving and retreating patient of a "Look! Stop! Listen!" signal.
By five o'clock only one other patient besides himself remained; a little woman in shiny serge suit and passée summer hat. Kenwick put down his magazine with a long-drawn sigh, and she smiled in patient sympathy. "Gets pretty tiresome waitin', doesn't it?" she ventured.
His quick eyes took in her shabby suit and the knotted ungloved hands. She was probably the mother of a growing family, he reflected, and would not get home in time now to prepare dinner. His easy sympathy flared into words.
"It's an outrage to keep people waiting like this when they have an appointment for a definite hour. They tell me Bennet's a nerve specialist, and I believe it."
She smiled wanly, but there was an eager championship in her response. "Oh, but he's wonderful! When he once begins to talk to you, you forget all about bein' mad at him. Seems like he sees right through your head to tell what's the matter with you."
The white uniform appeared and pronounced a name: "Mr. Kenwick." He rose and followed her through the door. The second room was like the first, minus reading-matter and plus wall-charts. Here he sat, gazing at the fire-escapes on the opposite building, while the white uniform made a not completely satisfying attempt to collect family statistics. And then, at last, the door of the third room opened and Dr. Bennet himself emerged. He was enveloped in a heavy white apron that recalled to Kenwick's mind the pictures he had seen in the agricultural magazines featuring model dairying.
But if the specialist had been slow to admit him, he was equally reluctant to let him go. When he had finished his examination, Kenwick stood beside the couch in the fourth and last room pulling on his coat. "Then you think I'm in pretty good condition, doctor?" Through the half-open door he could see the white uniform hovering, like an emblem of peace, above a steaming basin of warlike instruments.
"I should say," the physician told him slowly, "that you are absolutely sound. Your nerves are a bit too highly charged, but I imagine that is more a matter of temperament than overstrain."
"Is that all?"
"No, that isn't all. The history of your case, as you have given it to me, is a most interesting one. And you were right to let me make the examination and form my own conclusions before telling me anything about your history. I wish it were possible for you to recall the name of the physician who handled your case in France. I'd like to get the scientific beginning of the story. Without it I can only make a guess, and guessing is not satisfactory. But I think that in his place I should have taken the chance and operated. However, you can't judge; he may not have had the proper equipment. I wish you would come around next Saturday when the office is closed, and let me make some X-ray plates. I'd like to display them at the medical convention in April."
"And what do you advise me to do for my—my mental health?"
"Forget your mental health. Take some regular out-of-door exercise and mix with your friends. I can't give you any better prescription than that. If it were something done up in pink paper you'd be more apt to take it, I know."
Kenwick walked back through the darkening streets with a feeling of exultation. The pendulum of his despair was swinging backward to a height only attained by those who can plumb the depths of wretchedness. For the first time in six weeks he felt his old defiance of life. And recalling the pale ghost of a former prayer, he was ashamed of its cowardice. "That never happens to the desperate and the lonely," he reminded himself grimly. "The best security on earth for a prolonged life is to express a sincere desire to die. After that, you lead a charmed existence. Houses burn to the ground and not one inmate escapes; ships go down with everybody aboard; pedestrians are run over by cars and shot by thugs, but none of these things come near the man who courts them. They overtake those whom others find it hard to spare, those whose lives are vivid with purpose."
As he walked back to the hotel he found himself thinking of Marcreta again. Had he ever really made a place for himself in her life? Whether he had or not, he knew that he had never, even in his blackest moments, given her up. All the plans for his future centered still about her. Well, he had a fight before him now, and not until he won it would he make himself known at the house on Pine Street.
On the corner a newsboy thrust a paper under his face. He waved it aside. "I can read all that bunk for nothing, sonny," he told him cheerfully. The huge head-lines filled him with a spiritual nausea. The chronicle of the day's tragedies for the public to batten upon! Was there never to be an end to America's greed for the sensational?
At the St. Germaine the clerk handed him a telephone call. It was from Jarvis and urged him to call him up immediately. In his own room Kenwick complied with this request. The voice of the Southerner came to him, sharply commanding, over the wire. "Can you come around right away? I want to talk it over with you."
"Talk what over?" Kenwick's voice was almost defiant.
"Why, haven't you seen it? Well, come around anyway. I'll be here for the next hour."
When Kenwick arrived at the Hartshire he found the photographer sorting over a pile of films. But as his guest entered, he swept these into a pasteboard box, and cleared off a chair for him. "Where have you been?" he demanded. "I called you at the hotel and the 'Clarion' office twice."
Kenwick gave him a brief account of the last two hours. Jarvis grunted. "Well, I don't blame you for wanting to get the seal of scientific approval but—I can't believe that you haven't read the 'Record' yet. And you a newspaper man!"
He fished the paper out from under a stack of developing-trays and searched the columns of the second page. "Remember what I suggested to you last night, that you let things take their own course for a while? Well, it seems that they've been taking them in rather a headlong fashion." He creased back the page and handed the paper to Kenwick. "Read that and see if it doesn't give you something of a jolt."
He took the paper. The head-lines at the top of the third page riveted themselves upon his brain.
RELATIVE SEEKS MISSING MAN
Body of Roger Kenwick to Be Exhumed at Mont-Mer
The body of Roger Kenwick, son of the late Charles Kenwick, of New York, who died at Rest Hollow last November, is to be exhumed for examination on the demand of Mrs. Hilda Fanwell, of Reno, Nevada. Mrs. Fanwell, a widow, arrived from her home last week in search of her brother, Ralph Regan, who has been a resident of Mont-Mer for the last two years. A letter received from him in the early part of November indicated, according to the sister's statement, that he was in failing health. Being unable to come to him then, owing to the illness of her husband, Mrs. Fanwell wrote several letters, none of which were answered. The description of her brother, which she furnished the police, has resulted in a demand to the authorities to have the body of Roger Kenwick exhumed.
Kenwick let the paper slide to the table. "My Lord!" he murmured. "Jarvis, what would you do about it?"
"Why should you do anything about it? This Fanwell woman is apparently the oldest Gold Dust twin. Let her do your work."
But Kenwick's eyes were still fixed upon the paper. Over it a drop of acid from the developing-tray was eating a slow passage. "But to see my name tied up to a gruesome thing like that——Why, you can't imagine how it——It gives me the feeling that—that I've just begun on this thing. And I thought when I came in here that I had all the cards in my hands."
He got up from the table slowly, like a hospital patient testing his strength on the first day out of bed. And Jarvis, after one glance at his pale face, rose too. "You've got nothing to worry about——," he began. But Kenwick waved the soothing aside with a fierce impatience.
"Nothing to worry about?" he cried hotly. "Don't offer me that stuff, Jarvis. How do I know—how can I ever know what I may have done during those ghastly ten months?"
When Kenwick entered the St. Germaine on the evening after his interview with Jarvis, a man rose from the farther corner of the lobby and came toward him. "Kenwick!" he cried, and held out his hand. "I thought you never would come. I've been waiting here an eternity." It was Clinton Morgan.
When the first, somewhat incoherent greetings were over and the two men sat facing each other across Kenwick's untidy writing-table, a moment of embarrassed silence fell between them. Then, in a desperate attempt to start the conversation, "I'm afraid I've kept you waiting rather a long time," the host apologized.
"You have," his caller agreed. "It's been more than a year, hasn't it?" He spoke in a cheerful, matter-of-fact tone as though a mere pleasure-trip had intervened between this and their last encounter. But Kenwick was looking at him intently.
"You know—about it then?"
"Yes, we know all about it." Clinton Morgan leaned over and put his hand affectionately upon the other man's shoulder. "And, by George, Kenwick, I congratulate you. I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. It was one chance against a thousand that you could win out. It's a miracle!"
Kenwick was scarcely conscious of the last sentences. His attention had stopped short at that word "we." He reached down and picked a burnt match from the carpet as he asked with a pathetic attempt at formal courtesy, "How is your sister?"
"Getting well, I believe. She has been——Well, this case of yours is a most enthralling one, Kenwick. Anybody would be interested, but particularly any one who has known you. We have been following it with great interest."
Kenwick looked at him incredulously. "How could you?"
The caller shifted his position uneasily. "Well, that's rather a long story. And Marcreta might prefer to tell you part of it herself. And that brings me to my errand. I came here to ask you up to the house. We've just got the old place fixed over, and,"—he glanced at his watch,—"it's not nine o'clock yet. If you haven't something else on hand that——"
Kenwick cut in almost harshly. "Are you sure that your sister would care to see me? That she wouldn't perhaps be—well, afraid of me?"
Morgan laughed. "Well, I'll be there, you know, if you should get violent and begin throwing things around."
But the other man's face did not relax. His voice came low and strained as though it were being let out cautiously under high gear. "You don't understand. Nobody can, I suppose, who hasn't been through this experience." His nervous hands stiffened upon the arms of the chair. "I tell you, Morgan, it's easier for a denizen of the underworld to live down her reputation and achieve a reputable place in society than for a man or woman to regain the confidence of the world after a period of——Well, I may as well out with the damned word—insanity."
"Don't call it that, Kenwick. It wasn't that. In the trenches you got a blow that put you out of commission. But you were simply in a dazed condition; mental aberration beginning with melancholia. You were never violently insane; never dangerous to anybody else."
"How do you know? How do I know? I've suffered the anguish of hell, wondering about it. Somebody may have been killed in that accident that restored me to life. It may have been all my fault. I don't know. I've spent the last month trying to find out in a quiet way. I suppose you think I'm a coward for not going at it more directly." He looked at his companion with a defiant appeal in his eyes. "But there were reasons why I didn't want to kick up a lot of notoriety about myself. For any harm that ever came to man or woman through me, I'm eager to pay. No court decision would have to make me do it; no court decision could keep me from doing it. But I wanted to save my name if I could. I wanted to save my name so that some time it might be fit——"
"I know." Clinton Morgan interrupted hastily. The memory of that traitorous bit of paper which he had discovered in the gold and ivory book came back to him and brought a guilty flush to his cheeks. Whether he would or no, he seemed to hold in his own hands all the threads of this tragic romance. A line of Marcreta's lyric drifted through his brain:
How well that word had been chosen to describe and conceal the living death which this man had suffered!
"You see," Kenwick went on, "I'm the spiritual counterpart of the Man Without a Country. I don't belong anywhere. And, more than that, I'm a charge on the public conscience. Everybody who knows about my period of—of incompetency belongs to an unofficial vigilance committee, whose duty it is to warn society against me."
Clinton groped for a reply, but words would not come. And the fact that there was no bitterness in the other man's voice, but only the level monotony which is achieved by long suppression, made it infinitely pathetic.
"If it suited your whim to do so," Kenwick continued, "you might reverse the usual order of dining; begin with pie and end with soup. And the public would regard it either as a new cure for dyspepsia or an eccentricity of genius. But if I should try it, somebody would immediately suggest that I shouldn't be allowed at large. It's the irony of fate that I, who have always had a contempt for the trivial conventions of life (such a contempt that my sister-in-law never quite trusted me in polite society), should now be in a cowering bondage to them. I live all my days in a horror of doing something that might appear erratic. And I spend the nights going back over every inch of the road to see if I have. Why don't the adherents of the fire-and-brimstone theory picture hell as a place where we can never act on impulse? As a place which dooms us forever to a hideous self-consciousness?"
Clinton Morgan spoke with a sort of angry championship. "You've had tough luck, my boy, the toughest kind of luck. But you've come out of it all right. By George, you can show the world now that you've come out on top."
"I haven't come out; that's just the trouble. I'll never be out of the woods until I've accounted for them. Did you read last night's paper, Morgan?"
"Yes. That's one thing that brought me here. Let me tell you something, Kenwick. Until about a week ago we thought you were dead. And we were relieved, for we felt that it was a happy release for you; your only way out. And then one day, not long ago, we got a clue." He still clung to the plural pronoun. "We fell over a clue, you might say, which aroused our suspicions—and we followed it down."
"You followed it down!" Kenwick cried. "You cared enough about it for that?"
His friend's reply came through guarded lips. "You have suffered horribly during these past months," he said. "But you are not the only one who has suffered."
Kenwick glanced at him sharply. Then he seemed to sense the delicacy of the other man's position. "It's just this," Kenwick explained after a moment of silence. "Since this—this thing fell on me, I instinctively divide all people into two classes; those who knew me before it happened, and those who have only known me since. With the second group I'm always wondering if they are still unsuspecting: with the first, I'm wondering if they will ever be convinced. But go on with your story. What did you do about the clue?"
"I'll tell you about that later. It's enough to say right now that Richard Glover——"
"Glover!" The word seemed to explode from Kenwick's lips. He leaped to his feet. "That's the name!" he cried. "That's the name that I've been groping after for two days. Sometimes I almost had it and then it would escape me. I had an idea fixed in my mind somehow that it began with a 'B.' Why, I saw that fellow at the theater the other night, Morgan. It was a most curious thing, for as soon as my eyes lighted on him the vacuum in my mind was suddenly filled. I remember traveling across the continent with him. I remember my brother Everett introducing me to him one day at home before I came West this last time. That's all I do remember about him, but it sort of connects things in my brain. I wanted to talk to him the other night and see if he couldn't help me clear things up, but when I got down to his seat, he was gone. I don't know whether he had recognized me too or not. But even so, I can't account for his wanting to avoid me. I haven't got anything against him. I might have thought the whole thing was a hallucination (for I never quite trust my own senses now), but I had a reliable witness. Now what I want to know is, why should Glover be afraid to meet me?"
"If you'll come up to the house," Morgan suggested again, "we may be able to straighten out some of these things."
When they arrived, a few minutes later, at the Pine Street home, Clinton lingered outside fussing with the engine of his car, and Roger Kenwick went alone to meet Marcreta. He found her in the fire-lighted living-room where he had parted from her, and she came to greet him with that slow grace that he knew so well, and that seemed now to stop the beating of his heart. But if either of them had expected the first moments of reunion to melt away the shadows that lay between them, they were disappointed. For the fires of memory burn deep. And the ghastly suffering with which the two years of separation had been freighted had left marks that were not to be obliterated by those words of carefully casual welcome. In spite of their efforts at commonplace dialogue, they spoke to each other in the subdued voices of those who converse in the presence of death. By tacit consent they avoided, during the first half-hour, all mention of the tragedy which had separated them.
"We've just had the house done over," Marcreta was saying as her brother entered. "During the war it was a sanitarium, and although it has all been retinted and there are new hangings everywhere, Clinton says it still smells of anesthetics. I tell him it's only his imagination. Do you get any odor of ether?"
"No," Kenwick answered.
He found talking horribly difficult. This woman, for whom his soul had yearned, seemed now to be looking at him from across a deep chasm. Between them stretched the bramble-bush; a tangle of underbrush; stark sycamore-trees that rattled hideously in the winter wind; uprooted madrone bushes stretching distorted claws heavenward in a mute appeal for vengeance. And insistently now the question beat against his brain—had he ever succeeded in crossing that ravine? Would he ever really succeed in crossing it? With the clutch of desperation he clung to the verdict of Dr. Gregson Bennet, as he had once clung for support to those grim, high-backed chairs at Rest Hollow. He recalled having once read the story of an ex-convict coming home after his release from the penitentiary to meet that most crucial of all punishments; the eyes of the woman that he loved. To his supersensitive soul, the stigma attached to him was something that was worse than crime; a thing that branded deeper and more indelibly. That it had come to him in the discharge of duty weighed not a jot on his account-sheet. He told himself that it had been a judgment. He had always been a worshiper of intellect. It had seemed to him the one enduring possession. And now it had proved itself even more ephemeral than physical health. As his eyes rested upon her, unconscious of their own sadness, he knew all at once that Marcreta understood and was trying to make it easy for him.
"The only way to make this easy for me," he heard himself saying suddenly, "is to drag it out into the light. As long as the past lies shrouded between us, we will never be able to forget it."
It was eleven o'clock when Kenwick went down the steps of the Morgan home. He refused Clinton's invitation to ride back in the car. For he wanted to walk, to walk on and on forever in the glorious starlight. There were no stars. A gray fog had rolled in from the bay and spread itself like a huge blotter across the heavens. But he was unaware of it. Even the street lights, shining dimly as through frosted glass, seemed to shed across his path a supernatural radiance. For although no word of love had passed between him and Marcreta Morgan, he had come away from that visit with a wild happiness surging in his heart. There had been no effort to reëstablish life upon its old basis. Marcreta, with what seemed to him an almost superhuman tact, had divined the ghastly futility of such an endeavor. And instead she had conveyed to him, by some indescribable method of her own, the assurance that she would welcome, with unquestioning faith, the opening of a new and happier era. As he had sat there in the comfort of that living-room, where on a night, not long ago, he had caught a glint of a departed glory, desire and something finer had struggled for supremacy in his soul. But courageous self-analysis had driven home to him the realization that he had Marcreta Morgan at a cruel disadvantage. Whether he would or no, he had come back to her clothed in the appealing garments of tragedy. He was a pensioner on her sympathy, and in her eagerness to restore to him his lost heritage, she had unconsciously disarmed herself. The temptation to cherish and set a jealous guard upon such an advantage has overpowered men and women innumerable. Kenwick sensed the treacherous sweetness of it flooding his heart like the seductive fragrance of some rare perfume, and then in a sudden fury he tore himself free of it.
"By God! I haven't got as deep in as that!" he muttered, and was unconscious that he said the words aloud. "I haven't sunk so deep that I'd pull myself up that way!" He buttoned his overcoat about him conscious for the first time of the chill breeze. Not yet, he reminded himself sharply, not yet did he have the right to conquer.
As he took the intersecting street to cut the steep down-hill slope to the hotel, he heard the echo of footsteps behind him. He quickened his gait, impatient of any distracting element, and was instantly aware that the other footsteps had quickened theirs. For half a block he walked at a round pace. Then he stopped short and waited for the other pedestrian to overtake him. A thick-set man in a black overcoat passed him, slowed down to a creeping walk, and under the feeble light of the corner street-lamp came to a halt. Kenwick glanced at him sharply, but the man was a stranger to him. He passed on unaccosted, but as he was stepping from the curb the stranger loomed up suddenly behind him. "Stop!" he commanded.
Kenwick turned. A heavy hand was laid upon his arm. He stood waiting, under the gleam of the bleary light, detained more by curiosity than by the grip upon his arm. From the burly figure came a burly voice. "You are Roger Kenwick."
It was not a question, but the other man gave it sharp-voiced response. "Yes. What is it to you?"
"A good deal to me. I've been waiting for you. Some people wouldn't have waited, but I'm a gentleman and I let you have your visit out with the lady. We'll take, the rest of the walk together. Beastly night, isn't it?"
Kenwick did not move, and his voice was more astonished than resentful. "I think you've made a mistake in your man. You say you have been waiting for me?"
The burly man began to walk slowly away and Kenwick fell into step beside him. "Ye-a, I've been waiting for you. And even if I hadn't been, I might have got suspicious a minute or so ago. Let me give you a tip for your own good; don't talk to yourself in public. It's a bad habit for anybody in your line of trade."
Kenwick stopped short. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, Mr. Kenwick, that you are under arrest."
The slanting pavement seemed suddenly to be moving of its own accord and Kenwick felt it carrying him along as though he were on an escalator. Then he heard himself ask dully, "What for?"
The officer looked bored. But he stood there waiting in grim patience for his companion to regain the power of locomotion. "I asked you what for?" Kenwick repeated sharply. "You've made a mistake, but you've got to answer that question. If I'm going to be hauled into jail, the law gives me the right to know why."
"Oh, cut it out!" the other admonished. "You're surprised all right; they always are. But I'll say this for you, Mr. Kenwick, there's nothing amateurish about your work. Plans all laid to make a quiet getaway East, but no dodging around cheap lodging-houses for yours. Business as usual, and friends kept happy and unsuspecting; everything strictly on the level. You know as well as I do why I'm on your track. You're wanted for murder—for the murder of Ralph Regan."
In the twelve hours that intervened between Roger Kenwick's arrest and his transference to the authorities at Mont-Mer, he was not allowed to see any one. As rigid a watch was kept beside his cell as though he were a hardened criminal who had on previous occasions escaped the clutches of justice. Even reporters were denied admittance, but he was permitted, in courtesy to his former position as journalist, to read the papers. In these he found, spread large upon the front pages, highly colored stories concerning his manœuvers and final capture. Only the "Clarion's" story was conservative and hinted at a colossal mistake which would lead later to more sensational developments.
When he left San Francisco, heavily hand-cuffed, a crowd followed to the depot. The trip down the coast was uneventful, and he sat staring out of the window, recalling his former ride through that same country when the pruners had waved their shears to him in a sort of voiceless Godspeed. There were no pruners visible from the car-window now, and the stark stretches of orchard looked bleak and desolate. The bare, tangled branches of the roadside poplars showed against the dull January sky like intricate designs of lacework. They seemed to Kenwick to have lost the comforting warmth of their leaves just when they needed them most.
It was almost dusk when the train drew into Mont-Mer, and here another crowd was waiting. The engine appeared to plow its way through them. Never had the quiet little city been so stirred. Never in all its decorous history had the white spot-light of sensationalism played upon it. It knew that its name was featured in every newspaper of the country.
And Kenwick found the Mont-Mer papers even more lavish in descriptive detail than those of the city had been. There was a picture of the murdered man and one of himself spread upon the front page of the evening sheet, and below, a cut of Rest Hollow, with the inevitable black cross marking the spot under the dining-room window where the body of Ralph Regan had been found. The morning daily matched this with a picture of the handsome Kenwick home in New York, and an account of the death, the previous spring, of Everett Kenwick and his wife, victims of influenza. As he read, Kenwick reflected that Richard Glover must have been very busy, very busy indeed since the night that they had encountered each other at the theater.
And outside the county jail the city buzzed with comment and speculation. Mont-Mer real estate men were elated over this unexpected scandal in high society which had resulted in putting their town "on the map." Better a gruesome publicity, they told each other, than no publicity at all. Tourists from Los Angeles and the near-by towns motored up during the week-end and made futile attempts to gain access to Rest Hollow. The old conservative residents of the aristocratic little city were horrified, and the colony of Eastern capitalists, who made up a large part of the suburban population, were hotly resentful of the hideous notoriety which had invaded their retreat by the sea. The two country estates that bordered Rest Hollow were put on the market at what the local realty dealers advertised as "spectacular bargains."
After the body of Ralph Regan had been exhumed and identified by the grief-stricken little woman who was his sister, the links of the chain which incriminated Kenwick seemed to fall of their own volition into place. He reviewed them himself, sitting alone in Mont-Mer's bleak little jail.
There would be first the testimony of the coroner who would describe the gunshot wound. And then the evidence that he, Kenwick, had been armed on that fatal night. The woman, or whoever it was that occupied the right wing of the house, would narrate in detail all that he had said about being a good shot and would doubtless follow this with the testimony that he was obviously looking for trouble. The revolver, which he had left on the table in the den, would add its mute confirmation of these assertions. And his own mode of departure from that house, under such circumstances, was sufficient in itself to send him to the electric chair without any further testimony. Glover would be, of course, the star witness for the State, and against his glib and convincing story would be pitted the word of a man known to have been of an unsound state of mind and never proved to have recovered from it. It was this last evidence, he knew, that would acquit him. With the brand of Cain upon his forehead he would be set free. The ghastly notoriety which he had striven, with the difficult patience of the impatient temperament, to avoid, had struck him with the force of a bomb and blown him skyward to be the cynosure of every eye. Never while the world stood could he ask Marcreta Morgan to take the name of Kenwick. Acquittal on any terms was all that most men would have asked of fate. But Kenwick was made of finer stuff. And so far as his future was concerned, he was already tried, convicted, and sentenced.
A week intervened between his arrival at Mont-Mer and the day set for the trial. During that time he knew himself to be under the most relentless surveillance. By day and by night his every act was watched. With his food they brought him neither knife nor fork. On the second day of this startling omission he smiled grimly at the attendant. "You can tell the jailer," he said, "that he needn't be worried about me to that extent. You see, I've worn my country's uniform, and that spoils a man for taking the Dutch route."
The stolid-faced attendant looked at him without replying. Kenwick felt a sudden pity for him. "I suppose he thinks I'm likely to get violent and begin smashing up things at any moment," he reflected. For in the jailer's eyes was that thing for which he had been on the watch for almost two months. He pushed away his food almost untasted. When he was left alone again he walked over to the heavily barred window and stood looking down at the court-house garden. Very gently he shook one of the iron rods. "For almost a year," he muttered. "Barred in for almost a year; and the world has no intention of ever letting me forget it."
The date-palms in the grounds below swept the wintry air with long graceful plumes. How helpless they were in the driving force of the wind! And yet they were moored to something, securely rooted. The storm might buffet but would not utterly destroy them. Down the curving path which they bordered he saw a man approaching with a flat leather case under his arm. It was Dayton, the young attorney whom the court had appointed for his defense. Kenwick, who had taken his intellectual measure at their first meeting the day before, had little faith in his legal ability. But he liked him; liked his buoyant, unspoiled personality. And Dayton was undisguisedly elated over this sudden opportunity to try his mettle in so conspicuous a case. It was the chance he had been hoping for during three years of commonplace practice.
As the prisoner heard his step in the upper corridor he turned from the window. Dayton closed the portal behind him and sat down on the edge of the narrow cot. Downstairs he had just held brief parley with the jailer. "Hasn't Kenwick got any family?" he had inquired.
The official shook his head. "As I understand it, he didn't have anybody but a brother, and he died last spring, the papers said."
"No friends either?"
"Friends? Well, he wouldn't be likely to have any, would he—a feller that's been crazy?"
"It's cursed luck!" Dayton had told him. He was still young enough to feel resentful of life's contemptuous injustices. "And he's only twenty-five; got his whole life before him. He's got to have his chance. He's got to have a fighting chance."
As he looked at his client now, he was careful to keep anything like compassion out of his eyes. He removed a cracked pitcher full of purple asters from its perilous position at the head of the bed and swept his glance over the crude table littered with envelopes in cream and pastel shades. "Correspondence still growing?" he inquired genially.
Kenwick stacked the vari-colored missives into a pile. Most of them had been accompanied by flowers, and all were signed by society women of Mont-Mer. A few bore the more guarded signature of "A Friend," or "A Sympathizer," with initials underneath. They condoled, they admonished, they even made cautious love.
"Can you fathom it, Dayton?" the prisoner asked, weighing the correspondence in one hand as though the answer to the riddle lay in avoir-dupois. "These women think I'm guilty of murder. They all seem to think I'm guilty as hell; and yet they send me flowers, and love-letters." He turned his back contemptuously upon the purple asters. "It comes over me every once in a while, Dayton, that I'm not the only person in this world who has had moments of mental aberration."
The other man reached over, took up the stack of envelopes, and examined them with curious interest. Here and there he recognized a coat of arms or a monogram. "Going to answer any of them?" he queried.
"Answer them!"
"Well, most of them seem to expect a reply. You see, you really can't blame them very much, either. These women are fed up on life. They come out here every winter seeking a new sensation."
"And I am a new sensation, am I?"
"You bet you are! Why, man, you're nothing short of a godsend. And most of these people," he swept a hand over the coterie represented on the table, "are from New York themselves. They're not writing to a stranger exactly. They know who your family is—or was. They know all about you."
Kenwick's lips stiffened. "Well, they certainly have that advantage over me."
"I don't mean to imply, of course, that they've been investigating your personal history," Dayton hastened to explain. "But Kenwick is not an inconspicuous name in the East. And then you've been in the service and——"
"I'm glad you mentioned that," the prisoner cut in. "It reminds me of something I want to say to you. When you get up to talk in court, don't you make any plea for me on the grounds that I've been in the service. That's one thing I won't stand for. The man who was in the army is a different man from the alleged murderer of Ralph Regan. I'm not going to have his record smeared with this horrible thing."
Dayton dropped the letters to the table as though they had bitten him. "Why, Mr. Kenwick! You've got a right to the consideration that would naturally——"
"If I've got a right to it, I've got a right to waive it. This country is flooded with men who expect to beat their way all through life on the plea that they've been in the service. And there's nothing so despicable on God's earth as that. I use my uniform to fight in, not to hide in. Get me?"
Dayton was obviously crestfallen. He got up from the hard cot and stood looking at his client gravely. Kenwick gathered up the pile of envelopes. "Take this junk out of here when you go, please. And don't let them send in any more flowers. They can save those for the funeral. But I'm not dead yet."
"You may be very soon, though, if you don't listen to sense," his adviser remarked bluntly. "I haven't wanted to get you worked up over the case, because that's poor policy and it doesn't buy us anything. But it strikes me, Mr. Kenwick, that you don't realize what a very serious position you are in."
The ghost of a smile appeared upon the prisoner's face. It was a terrible little smile, and he was not even conscious of its existence. He was only conscious that every nerve in his body ached with weariness and that he felt faint from want of food. Two pictures were stamping themselves alternately upon his brain; the dim, sinister interior of Rest Hollow, and the fire-lighted room on Pine Street. One of these incessantly erased and superseded the other. And he knew that there could be no division of their supremacy. Only one of them might survive. Day and night the memory of them racked his jaded brain. For the humiliation of his present position, not the ultimate outcome of the trial, burned him with a consuming flame.
As he stood now at the barred window, he was doing that thing to which, ever since his arrest, all his energies had been directed. Hour by hour, minute by minute, he was welding together the joints of an armor. With a slow but ceaseless persistence he was girding himself with a graven-faced indifference that must be his shield against the barrage of the gaping, curious world. And this man, standing so close beside him, and in reality so far away that their spirits were scarcely discernible to each other in the distance was telling him that he seemed unaware of the peril of his position. That wave of deafening depression which engulfs the human soul in the moments when it realizes its utter loneliness surged over him like a tidal wave. He stood looking at Dayton and wondering what manner of man he was.
"I don't want to play up anything now that will sound like dramatics," the lawyer went on in a soothing voice. "But we've got to face this thing as it is. You know Glover, don't you?"
"No. But Glover knows me. He has that immense advantage. And he is using it to the full. He has been fighting a man who's got both hands tied behind him."
Dayton appeared to take new courage from this summary. "Well, I see you've got a line on his methods anyway, and that's something. That gives us our starting-point. And besides having both hands free, he's also got his eyes open. You've been blindfolded a part of the time. He never has."
There was a sound of a key grating in the lock. The dialogue ended abruptly and Kenwick turned from the window. On the threshold was a shabby, faded-looking little woman guarded by the relentless sentry. Kenwick advanced to meet her, apologizing for the discomfort of the backless chair which he offered.
"No, I don't want to sit down, thanks," she told him hurriedly. "I'm not goin' to stay but a minute." She twisted her ungloved hands nervously together under a scrawny wool scarf. "It's just this, Mr. Kenwick; I asked them to let me come just to tell you this——"
The prisoner stood waiting. The realization came to him that she was afraid of him, and he tried to help her to begin. "You are Mrs. Fanwell, aren't you?"
"Yes. But—you don't know me, do you?"
"No, I just guessed at who you were." His eyes rested compassionately upon her thin, eager face, her poverty-stricken mourning. She was obviously relieved at his quiet composure. "I just wanted to tell you this; that it's not revenge that I'm after. I've had a hard life, any way you look at it. But I'm in Science now and I'm tryin' to tear hate out of my heart. I haven't got any hard feelin's against you, for I don't believe, I never will believe that you really meant to do it."
"Won't you sit down?" Kenwick suggested, and forced her gently into the chair. Then he stood beside her, one hand resting upon the paper-littered table. "You believe, do you, that I—am responsible for your brother's death?"
She was looking past him, through the narrow window where Dayton stood watching her curiously. "I don't know just what to think. But I wanted you to know that I'm not wishin' you—any violent end. I never dreamed there was anything so horrible connected with his death when I came out here. But I felt that I had to know about him; I had to find out."
"Of course you had to find out," Kenwick agreed earnestly. "This thing must be cleared up in your mind—in everybody's mind. May I ask you a personal question, Mrs. Fanwell, to help me clear up a part of it myself? Were you dependent upon your brother to any degree for your support?"
"Dependent on Ralph?" The astonishment in her tone was sufficient reply in itself. "Oh, no. I was tryin' to help Ralph out, as much as I could without lettin' my husband know. It was hard, havin' always to stand between them. But I couldn't blame my husband either. He was always hard-workin' himself and he hadn't any patience with poor Ralph. He thought he ought to get a steady job at carpentry; that was his trade, and he made good at it till he got sick and began takin' that terrible stuff. It was the ruin of him."
"You mean that he took—drugs?"
She nodded. And Kenwick hastened to cover the pitiful little secret which he had laid bare.
"It was only for this reason that I asked, Mrs. Fanwell. If I am proved guilty of this crime, you shall receive whatever money recompense it is in my power to give. This is not an attempt to pay for it, but only to ease my own conscience."
The woman's eyes filled with tears. She leaned beseechingly across the table, clutching, with strange incongruity, one of the perfumed envelopes. "Then you are guilty!" she cried. "Oh, Mr. Kenwick, why don't you confess? All the lawyers have told me that if you confess, they can't give you the death sentence. And you hadn't ought to be in—in a place like this. Now that I've seen you I know that what the others say isn't so. You did it when you was crazy. You never would have done it if you had been in your right mind."
She rose and moved slowly toward the door, her gaze still fixed upon him with a mixture of pleading and horror. He followed, and opened the door himself. "I'm glad you came, Mrs. Fanwell. It was very kind indeed of you to come."
She stopped with her hand upon the knob. "I don't care what he says," she told him tremulously. "I don't care what anybody says; they can't none of them make me believe that you would have done it if you'd known what you was about."
When she had gone Kenwick drew a long sigh. The thing had come near to shattering his laboriously constructed mask. He spoke sharply to the man at the window. "What in the world did she mean by that, Dayton? They're certainly not trying to make her believe that I killed her brother when I was in my right mind?"
Dayton took a few slow steps toward him. "I was trying to lead up to that when she came in. But it's just as well to have had you get it from her. Now maybe you'll take more stock in it. That is exactly what they're trying to make her think; what they'll try to make the court think. Glover is going to try to prove (and he'll come within an ace of doing it, too) that when you were in your right mind you deliberately plotted to kill that man. He has the witnesses and the motive, and the thing that he's going to attempt to saddle upon you, Mr. Kenwick is—murder in the first degree."
On the day set for the trial of the Regan murder case the court-room at Mont-Mer was crowded. Long before ten o'clock men and women were flocking into the building, eager for the most desirable seats. Residents from some of the country districts brought their lunches and prepared to spend the day.
The court-house was an antique structure heated only by wood stoves, but the fur-coated and the threadbare rubbed elbows and were oblivious of drafts. For it is in the audience chamber of a criminal court that those who seek will find the true democracy. One touch of sensation makes the whole world kin.
A few hours before the trial Clinton Morgan arrived in town and was permitted to see the prisoner. The vigilance of the Mont-Mer officials did not preclude visitors, rather welcomed them as a possible means of gaining valuable information from the suspected murderer when he was off his guard. Dayton, who was in conference with his client when Clinton entered, was immensely relieved by the appearance of this new actor in the drama. "This thing seems to me to be a little too one-sided, professor," he remarked when introductions were over. "The court-room over there is jammed with people who expect to see us done to death. It's good to have an ally loom up in the offing."
He left them alone for a few moments while they waited for the sheriff, and Clinton measured his friend with an anxious eye. "I don't know what you could have thought of me for not coming sooner," he said, "but I couldn't possibly get away. You look all in, man. Haven't they been giving you anything to eat?"
"As much as I wanted." As he returned the grip of his hand, Kenwick was wondering if Clinton Morgan suspected that this encounter, in a prison cell, between himself and the brother of Marcreta filled his cup of humiliation to the brim. Her name was not mentioned by either of them. Clinton's whole attention was centered upon the developments in the case.
"You're not going to take the stand yourself, are you, Kenwick?" he questioned, standing with one foot upon the backless chair.
"I was, but Dayton has advised against it."
"Absolutely. You'd be at an immense disadvantage."
"I suppose so. I can furnish proof from Dr. Gregson Bennet, in the city, that I'm perfectly normal now. But after all, that doesn't really count for much with anybody but myself. It was such an immense comfort to me when he made the examination. I came away from his office feeling that it was going to clear up everything. But no matter what science says, I'll always be at a disadvantage."
Clinton laid a hand upon his shoulder. Ever since his first sight of him he had been trying to conceal the fact that Kenwick's altered appearance was a shock to him. And like the attempts of most straightforward men, the effort had been a failure. "Why, buck up, man," he admonished now. "They can't convict you, you know; not under—the circumstances. You haven't been thinking that?"
"I've been thinking a good many things since I came back to Mont-Mer," Kenwick answered slowly. "You see, Morgan, I know more now than I did when I was trying to ferret this thing out up in the city. For one thing, I know a little more about my adversary. As I've figured out this story now, it goes something like this.
"After that adventure out at Rest Hollow, Glover found himself in a hole. But there were three ways out of it for him. If he wanted to retain the grip that I think he has upon my estate, he had to choose between these. The first one was to make it appear that I was dead. This seems, at first thought, to be a hazardous venture, but it was not so difficult in my case as it would have been under normal circumstances. And when he first decided to take it I think he supposed that I was dead. He had every reason to think so. The man to whom he had entrusted me had mysteriously disappeared, and he had some strange woman come down and identify as himself a stranger who had been killed in an automobile tragedy; a very easy thing, in reality, you see. When Glover discovered, upon inquiry around town, that there had been such an accident, he concluded that I had been killed and that the man who was responsible for it was afraid to let him know and had made his escape after having himself declared dead. I haven't a doubt that Glover thought I was the man who was shipped up to San Francisco in a casket. And believing this, the whole thing seemed to play right into his hands. He knew, of course, that he couldn't keep his hold on my fortune forever, but he wanted to play the game until he got as much as he could out of it.
"But suddenly he discovered, by some means, that his whole hypothesis was wrong. He discovered that I was alive, and what was infinitely more appalling, that I was apparently restored to competency. He had been willing to risk my possible reappearance, you see, for if I were ever discovered wandering about deranged somewhere, I would have no means of identifying myself and, after a medical examination, would simply be committed to some institution. He would not have to connect himself with that at all. But since I had come to life mentally as well as physically, he had to take the second course—prove me irresponsible and have me sent to an asylum. How he went about this I don't know, but I'm sure that he must have attempted it. And I don't know either why he failed, for as I look back now upon some of my moves I can see that they might have appeared—erratic."
"I think," Clinton told him dryly, "that any of us could furnish convincing proof that we have been, at certain periods of our lives, dangerous to the public safety."
But Kenwick went on, unheeding this attempted solace.
"At any rate, Glover apparently failed in this attempt. So in order to get himself out of this mess, there is only one thing now for him to do." He broke off, eying his visitor with somber eyes. "You know what that is, Morgan. In order to save himself, he must prove me to be a cold-blooded murderer. Can he do it? Why shouldn't he? I'm certainly not in a position to offer any convincing opposition. A contemptuous pity is what I have read in the eyes of every person whom I've seen since this thing came to light. I don't suppose there is a person in this town who thinks I am innocent. I don't know whether Dayton himself does."
"But what motive could you have had for murder, Kenwick? You say that you never saw this Regan in your life."
"I say so, but what does my testimony amount to? And especially what does it amount to when I am trying to save my own skin? I told you once, Morgan, and I tell you again that it's impossible for a man to live down my sort of a past. He may get his eyes back out of the bramble-bush, but he'll never be able to make the world believe that he can really see with them. I feel sorry for Dayton. He's working day and night on this case, and he's a nice fellow. But he hasn't got any chance to make good on it. I feel sorry for him."
"I have been thinking," Clinton mused, "that there might be something out at Rest Hollow that would furnish a clue to help solve the question to the satisfaction of the jury, as to just when you arrived at that house, how long you stayed, and so on."
"The place is full of clues, of course," Kenwick admitted. "But by this time they have all been carefully arranged. Dayton went out there, and he told me that the public are not being admitted to the grounds at all. The place is under guard night and day. There may be danger there for Glover; I don't know anything about that, of course, but he knows. And whatever else you may say about him, you can't say that he has been asleep on this job."
The door opened to admit the sheriff. He shook hands with Clinton Morgan and nodded to Kenwick. In absolute silence the trio walked through the semitropical grounds to the court-house. As they entered the packed audience chamber the buzz of conversation stopped, and in deathly silence Roger Kenwick took his place.
The barrage of eyes leveled upon him was only partly visible through the haze that for the first few moments blurred his vision. He told himself that it was like that last charge, through blinding smoke, that he had made across No-Man's-Land. Then the scene cleared and individual faces emerged from the mist. There were the weather-beaten faces of ranch workers, the smug, complacent faces of those whom life has petted, the resolute faces of those who have come to see grim justice administered. Among them, here and there, was a scattering of veiled faces; women eager to see, but ashamed of being seen. Kenwick wondered contemptuously if some of the writers of the perfumed notes were among these.
During his dispassionate survey of the spectators he was acutely conscious of the presence of a man sitting at the far end of the table around which the lawyers were assembled. He had felt this personality when he first entered, but had reserved his attention until the blur of his surroundings should clear. Now he turned slowly in his chair and looked straight into the "tiger eyes" of Richard Glover. There was neither anger nor appeal in his own face; only a curious, questioning expression. An anthropologist who has stumbled upon some strange human relic unknown to his research might wear such an expression. Any physiognomist could have read in Kenwick's gaze the question, "What is this all about?"
And here again his adversary had him at a disadvantage. For his was not the mobile temperament which gives visible response to its emotional experiences. Life played upon Kenwick as upon a highly strung instrument, and drew from him whatever notes she needed in the universal symphony. But Richard Glover permitted no hand but his own to manipulate the keys of his life-board.
It was ten o'clock now but the trial seemed long in beginning. The judge had barely noticed Kenwick's entrance and continued an inaudible conversation with some one at his high desk. The district attorney, a florid little man who seemed to find difficulty in keeping on his eye-glasses, fussed with a mass of papers at the end of the long table and spoke occasionally to the bald-headed man on his right, who was evidently his colleague. Dayton leaned back in his chair and tapped the table impatiently with his pencil. Kenwick was surprised to see that the nervousness which his attorney had shown when he had visited him in jail seemed now to have completely disappeared.
There was an eminent surgeon among Kenwick's New York acquaintances who suffered from a nervous malady that was akin to palsy, and yet who, in the vital crisis of an operation, had a hand as steady as an embedded rock. He found himself wondering curiously now whether Dayton would develop under pressure an abnormal sagacity. Some miracle would have to intervene if he was to be saved from the ravenous clutches of fate.
Other persons were entering the court-room now and taking places that had evidently been reserved for them. Dayton leaned over and presented them at long distance to his client. "That fellow that just came in is Gifford, the undertaker. He got the jolt of his life when this thing blew up. Don't think he'll be much of a witness. He gets rattled. That chap with him is Dr. Markham. Ever see him before?"
Kenwick nodded. "He bandaged my leg that night in the drug-store. He'll remember it, too, for he was a little suspicious at the time that the sprain was older than I admitted. And I think he knew the man whose name I chanced to give as mine."
"Yes, that was a bad break, your chancing upon the name of Rogers. A fellow by that name was visiting out at the Paddington place, and although the doctor had never seen him, he had an engagement to play golf with him that afternoon out at the country club. Fortunately the man himself left town the next day so it wasn't as bad as it might have been. But it was an unfortunate thing, such a beast of a thing, that you should have given an assumed name at all."
"I suppose so. But that one seemed safe enough; it was my own name backwards. And I'd been through enough during the last twenty-four hours to make me cautious and secretive. And as it turned out, the taking of another name was the thing to do, Dayton. If I had hurled 'Roger Kenwick' into that group, I imagine that some one would have made connections and turned me over to the lunacy commission. My guardian angel was on the job when I decided to keep my identity a secret that night."
Dayton surveyed him with obvious satisfaction. It was a good sign that Kenwick had thrown off some of his former apathy. And yet there still remained a cold indifference about him, a sort of contemptuous disregard of the crowded room, that for a man of Kenwick's caliber and social position seemed to him inexplicable. He had an uncomfortable conviction that this inscrutable self-possession would not take well with the jury; that it somehow gave credence to the theory of the prosecution that the prisoner was a hardened criminal. The local reporters were already busy with their pencils. And Dayton could visualize a paragraph in the evening sheet beginning, "Roger Kenwick himself showed a complete indifference to the proceedings which——"
The conference with the judge had ended and he was rapping for order. The charge against the prisoner was read and the tedious task of impaneling the jury began. Dayton paid little attention to the formal process of getting the legal machinery into action, except to object in a decisive voice to three or four of the prospective jurymen. Aside from these interruptions, he continued to identify the various witnesses to his client, in an impersonal, entertaining manner, like the official guide on a personally conducted excursion.
A short, ruddy man in long overcoat entered and cast impatient eyes about the room for a seat. One was immediately brought in for him from an adjoining room. "Annisen, ex-coroner," Dayton explained. "He's got a fine position now as health officer somewhere in Missouri. He hated like hell to come back and get mixed up in this fracas. You see, he never was a howling success out here; made the mistake of knocking the climate when he first came out, and no southern California town can stand for that. And then, he had too many irons in the fire all the time, and neglected his official position sometimes. I have a haunting suspicion myself that he didn't spend any too much of his valuable time over the examination of your supposed remains. We don't need to fear him; he'll be a reluctant witness."
He swung about in his chair to announce himself satisfied with the twelve men who had been selected to try the case, and then engaged for a moment in conversation with the district attorney.
Kenwick turned his gaze to the window where he could see the date-palms from a new angle, their curving leaves motionless now in the still wintry air. The swinging doors of the court-room fanned incessantly back and forth, but he no longer felt any interest in the hostile faces of the witnesses. His mind was wandering back along the sun-lighted path of his boyhood to the days when he had mother, father, and brother, and had never suspected that he would ever lose any of them. It was a good thing, though, he told himself bitterly, a good thing that they were gone; that the last of the Kenwicks should go down in disgrace without spreading the cankerous taint to anyone else of that proud name. The imminent exposé appeared to him all at once in the guise of a mighty tree, which was holding its place in the earth only by a single supporting root. Now that root was to be chopped away. The house of Kenwick was to fall. But in its fall it would harm no one else. For the tree had long stood alone, solitary and leafless amid the white wastes of life.