“Where did you get that idea?”

“He told me. It was in a letter he left. He said you were his friend, the only friend he had except the old woman who took care of him, and that I must trust you in everything.”

“In view of this, Mrs. Findlay, tell me in what way I can be of service?”

“Mr. Pentecost, what will become of my little Mildred?”

“It strikes me” (in a suddenly sharp, penetrating voice) “you’re the one to answer that.”

She looked at him in amazement.

“I?” she finally asked in a faint voice.

“Who else?” he inquired. “Aren’t you the one who’s proposing to abandon her?”

“Abandon——!” (With a slight gasp.) “Why——How——You don’t mean——”

“Well what would you call it?”

“No—no—no! Oh, wait! Let me tell you!” (With all her earnestness she could hardly do more than whisper.) “Oh, I couldn’t stay—I don’t want to!” She shook her head a little on the pillow. “He’s gone—gone! The thought of it is killing me. I want to go. I want to be where he is!”

“How do you know where he is?” Pentecost’s voice cut in like a knife.

She stared at him in astonishment.

“My religion tells me that, Mr. Pentecost,” she whispered, reverently.

“And does this religion of yours omit to tell you where your daughter is?”

“Oh yes—yes!—that’s why I wanted to see you. That’s why I——” She broke off and glanced distressfully about the room.

“You seem to have made up your mind to leave her,” Pentecost observed.

Edith was silent.

“Aren’t the living of some consequence,” he went on, “or is it only the dead we have to consider?”

“No no—that’s wrong! I hadn’t forgotten her! Oh, how can you think such a thing, when it was about her that I wanted to see you—just about her—nothing else!”

“What can I do?”

“I hope—I hope you’ll consent to take her—to take care of her! I don’t know who else to ask—and he told me to trust in you—about everything. If I can only know she’ll be with you I shall die happy!”

Pentecost suddenly turned and blazed out upon her—something as he used to do in the Chicago days when he leaped, tigerlike, on a victim in the witness stand.

“What is it to me whether you die happy or not! Whatever I can do in this affair I’m doing on account of someone else—not for you Mrs. Findlay! You cut no figure with me—why in God’s name should you? I’ve never laid eyes on you before—and now I come to see you it looks to me like a cursed low-down play you’re making, that while I’m doing my best to carry out everything he wanted, you’re lying here doing your best to block his game! That’s just what you’re doing, Mrs. Findlay,—pitching the fulfillment of his most vital wish into the discard!”

“Why I——Why you——” She couldn’t go on.

“Look, then—look at this! The one thing in the world he wanted money for—the reason he was mad and crazy and demented to sell his machine and get it, was so he could send you here and do everything on earth to save your life! He lived for that—nothing else—it was the one thought that possessed him! He made a will to make it certain that—if anything happened to him—the money would be used for that and nothing else. And after all this—which you know as well as I do, I come over here and find you deliberately throwing away all he worked for and hoped for and—for all I know—prayed for. Of course if you’re bound to go against it I’ll do what I can about the child—though God knows the little one needs you. It all rests with you, Mrs. Findlay. The head medical sharp that came over, tells me it isn’t the disease that’s killing you—it’s yourself. He says you’ve made up your mind to die—you’re determined to do it—and that play’s certainly going to take the trick if you sit in the game long enough. It’s up to you to quit that if you want to do the right thing by the dead——and by the living.”

Pentecost rose and took her thin little hand in his. “I’ll say good-by, Mrs. Findlay,” he said in an altered tone. “They’ll keep me informed” (motioning toward the nurse’s room) “of which way the cards fall, and I’ll act accordingly.”

As he reached the door he thought he heard her call to him faintly, and went back to see if it was so. She was looking up at him as he stood by the bed, and tried to speak—but only her lips moved. He bent nearer to catch what she said.

“I’ll try,” she whispered.

He took her hand again.

“There’s some sense to that Mrs. Findlay,” he said; and after looking down into her eyes a moment he laid her hand back on the coverlet where he’d found it, and quietly left the room.

It was still early enough to get the afternoon train out—which he did.

A few days short of a month after Mr. Pentecost’s brief visit to the Austrian Alps, he walked, one wintry afternoon, into the office of the firm, having come direct from a trans-Atlantic steamer—just docked. Wasting no more time on salutations than he usually did—which was precisely none at all, he quickly got Harker into the small inner office—sometimes referred to by the staff as the dissecting room—and after pushing him into a chair and drawing one for himself close to it, began talking to him in tones that were subdued to the limit.

“We’re moving the office to London,” he said, “—and inside of twenty-one days. I’ve got something I want to put on over there. I’ll need most of the office force—especially Finch Dugas—and I’m taking eleven of the boys.” (By which he meant his “trusties.”)

“What’s the matter,” Harker inquired; “can’t you play it with the natives?”

“You’re dippy! Hasn’t the Yard got their numbers?”

“Sure—the Yard’s got everything. And take it from me if you’re going up against that layout you’ve got to watch your step and then some!”

“Now, Roxy—you’ve hit on the one thing that’s doing the pull on me. As I was over on that side I thought I’d come home by way of London and take a look around. While I was doing it a little something crossed my mind that looked to me as if it might interest ’em. That being so, we play it.”

“Don’t say we. Maybe you’ll play it, I don’t know; but if this London scheme you’re pulling off is one of your favorite flirtations with the undertaker, I declare myself out of it here and now. I can get myself nicely hung in the U. S. A. without going abroad for it—and I’d just as soon patronize home industries.”

“Not a killing to it I give you my word,” Pentecost assured him. “We play a corpse for two or three moves, but it’s handed to us—no chance of a line across—they’ll have the guy that did it. Now every one of us comes in from different places—I go round and get across from Stockholm—you and Dugas make it from Rio—plenty of time as you don’t play in till near the finish. Kennedy makes it from Holland—” and he went on laying out the “game” with Harker to the uttermost detail.

Three days later Pentecost (but not as Pentecost) embarked on a Swedish-American Line steamer. Harker was at the dock getting final instructions (of course he was going in on it as Pentecost knew he would), and there was a vast lot of things to do in a limited time.

The two stood talking on the pier, hidden by piled-up crates and boxes, yet only a short distance from the gangplank so that Pentecost could go on board at the last moment. When they had about finished up matters connected with the London “operation,” Harker happened to think of something.

“Oh—by the way,” he said; “how was that lady you went over to see?”

“Not so well,” Pentecost muttered in a way that suggested aversion to talking about it.

But Harker, not affected by this, cheerfully pursued the subject.

“Going to die?” he asked.

“Had it all fixed to.” (Speaking very shortly.)

“Who? Who do you mean had it fixed?”

“She did.”

“Oh—I see—she wanted to.”

“Yes, and her wanting was doing it. The doctors were hunting some way to shake her up, and left it to me. So I went in and gave her a jolt or two that might change her mind.”

“What did you say?”

“Anything I could grab off the line.”

“Then she’s going to get well, is she?”

“How the hell do I know?”

Pentecost had put an end to the subject with that, but after a silence of some little time, he went on,—and Harker took notice of a most unusual softness in his voice.

“D’you know what I’d do, Hark, if I had it to do again—that is, if I knew what it was that was eating him?”

Harker—surprised at his tone—kept his eyes on him for the answer.

“I’d ’a’ framed that Findlay soak for a twenty-year jack in a nice cool cell, and then staked those two out in the mountains—or wherever it was she had to go.”

“I thought you did know.”

“Not till too late. It was in a letter he left for me with Jamie Dreek.”

The two stood looking at one another.

“Well,” said Harker after a brief silence; “what’s the good of post mortems?”

Pentecost nodded. “What’s the good?” he muttered.

A moment later he was hurrying on board, and with that came the end of this “Pentecost Episode.”

I take the liberty of adding a brief statement.

H. McC.

Dudley sat smoking heavily and abstractedly after Mr. Barnes had finished a few business details with me, and after shaking hands with both of us, had gone. I was to take a night express for New York, as my time was up. We’d just got it in on the ten-day limit.

I saw that Duds had something on his mind—puffing away at his pipe and staring down at the floor—so, as there was plenty of time before my train I let him alone. He looked up at me after a wink, in the manner of rousing himself.

“D’you know who that was that just went out?” he asked.

“What?—Oh!—Why Barnes of course!”

“No.” He shook his head. “Not Barnes of course, but some one else of course. I’ve been keeping a few tabs on the man that’s been telling us all this stuff, and there’s four things—with a possibility of five—that no one on earth could know but Hugo Pentecost.”

“Good Lord!... Why ... then you think——”

“That’s it—I think.—But I’m going to make sure. He’s in town yet. I’ll drop you a line to-morrow.”

The “line” reached me a couple of days later.

“It was Pentecost,” was the statement it began with. And went on: “That is, I mean it was the man that was—he’s something else now. He’s in business abroad, and taking a steamer from here. His agent (or ‘trusty’ if you like) is going to get the manuscript from you when you write it out. Take my advice and put in all this at the end of the thing. It needs some sort of a finish, and this might do. If he doesn’t like it he can cut it out when he gets the proof—and you can bet he’ll get it.

“Couldn’t make him tell the sort of an enterprise he’s on over there—says maybe he will sometime.

“It seems the girl—Edith Findlay—is making a slow recovery. I asked him how the book would affect her if she got hold of it, and he said it wouldn’t do her any harm by then. ‘And by God!’ he went on, ‘it’s just as well for her to know—now she’s able to stand it—that such a man as Charles Michael Haworth went happily and eagerly to his death, so that she might live. You’d think she might run through her life on that, and ask for nothing more. But probably not.’”

THE END