by Zenith Brown
“What did he say to that?” Mr. Sullivan asked.
“He smiled.”
Mr. Rand cleared his throat.
“I think it’s dangerous,” he said slowly, “to implicate a person of Arbuthnot-Howe’s standing in an affair of this sort. He is after all a colonel in the British army. I know his uncle and respect him highly. He’s here with a definite mission—he’s told all of you about that, Mrs. Niles. If he has any other mission, it seems to fall in your line, Sullivan.”
I thought it was clear that Mr. Rand knew more than we did—at least more than I did. Was Mr. Baca playing with fire, after all?
“At any rate, Mr. Sullivan,” I said with determination, “two things are true. One is that someone in the lodge released the latch so we could open the gate night before last. The other is that somebody was in this room when we came through the hall.”
“I’m aware of that, Mrs. Niles,” he said shortly. “If you see Miss Thorn Carter will you ask her to come in here?”
I accepted my dismissal gratefully, and went out into the hall and straight into the arms, as it were, of Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe. My eyes met his twinkling steely grey ones, wrinkling a little at the corners, rather amused, I thought, at my discomfiture. It must have been pretty obvious.
I must admit that I was very much ashamed of myself. I had someway in the last half hour changed my mental picture of him. To see him now absolutely unchanged, just as fine-looking, as keenly intelligent and alert and kindly as ever, was a shock to me.
“I’ve just done you in frightfully,” I said sheepishly.
He grinned broadly.
“How, Mrs. Niles?”
“I got angry at Mr. Sullivan for accusing my husband of shooting Mr. Sutton, and I told him you weren’t in your room the other night.”
He raised his eyebrows in a quizzical mock alarm.
“What’s that? and how did you know it?” he demanded amiably.
“Thorn went in there to get Wally up, and the room was empty. Then you told me you and Wally had changed rooms. It was all very simple.”
“It just goes to show, Mrs. Niles,” he replied, shaking his head solemnly. “And you let me put my foot in it without saying a word. Tut tut! Is that friendly?”
“I did say a word, I said ‘Oh.’ Well, then I told Mr. Sullivan that you had on rubber-soled shoes, and that Mr. Baca knows you if you don’t know him.”
He smiled again. Then his sun-bronzed face became very serious.
“I should have had more respect for your powers of observation, Mrs. Niles,” he said soberly.
“I’m sorry if I’ve been a nuisance,” I said.
“Oh not at all.”
“Then I’ll see you later. I’ve got to get Thorn now. Mr. Sullivan is going to grill her again.”
“Cheerio,” he said. I went upstairs to find Thorn.
I had a job of work—as Lillie says—to do for Susan at Seaton Hall that afternoon. It was a little after two o’clock when I came down my garden walk, just in time to see Wally’s blue roadster tearing out of York Road into the Baltimore pike.
The Suttons had finished lunch. By discreet investigation I discovered that the two girls and Miss Carter were upstairs, Dan was with Mr. Rand in the library, Mr. Baca was (so Bill said) in the guest wing packing, and Bill in complete dejection still was playing solitaire in the back drawing room.
“This whole place is cockeyed,” he said, shoving back the bridge table and turning a pair of troubled brown eyes to me.
“What’s the matter with it?”
I offered him a cigarette. He took it with entirely no interest in whether he lived or died, smoked or didn’t smoke.
“Oh, everything. You know, it’s funny, Martha, but four days ago I was just thinking all of a sudden that we’re all pretty happy here.”
He offered that thought rather tentatively, with a glance at me. I don’t suppose Bill had ever thought of, much less discussed, the problem of human happiness before. Parlor philosophy wasn’t his line, decidedly. He didn’t know now quite how to handle it.
“I mean, you know, even with Dad being hard to get on with and everything. . . . Then suddenly everything just went to pieces.”
“And you’re not happy now?”
“I guess not.”
“Well,” I said, getting up. “I’ve got to get along. I’m helping Susan pack.”
He jumped as if he had got an electric shock.
“What the . . . ?” he demanded coarsely.
“Pack. Susan. Helping her,” I said amiably.
“What do you mean? She’s not going?”
“Must be, or she wouldn’t be packing. Or so I should think.”
Suddenly he flared up like a rocket.
“Is she going with that damn Mexican?”
I attempted an arch smile.
“I’ll put a stop to that. Where is he?”
That was my cue.
“Where is she, is more to the point,” I said calmly.
He looked at me very like a child trying to understand how the moon and the stars are so far away. Then he turned and in a second I heard him taking the steps three and four at a time. I heard a door burst open and slam shut.
My job of work for Susan was done. I sat down and finished Bill’s game of solitaire.
CHAPTER XXVIII
I’ll never forget the rest of that day as long as I live. It seemed almost as if Mr. Sutton’s death—we’d quit calling it by its other name—had happened years before, and was a sort of background for what was going on instead of its motivating force.
I was just shuffling the deck for another try at my game of solitaire when Wally came in through the side door from the guest hyphen. He didn’t look very well. His drawn face was almost ludicrous in contrast with his lacquered black hair and immaculate blue suit and dark tie—as if somebody had dressed a dummy and then plastered the wrong face on it.
I glanced up, smugly aware that I was very glad I wasn’t in his shoes. As a matter of fact, I wondered how he had courage to stick around. I think I’d have gone and crawled in a hole somewhere.
“Have you seen Arbuthnot?” he asked.
“Not since before lunch. Why?”
“I just wondered,” he said uneasily. “There’s a fellow outside from the British Embassy. I just wondered.”
“He’s probably upstairs.”
I saw for the first time a move that would have taken the ten of hearts, which I’d just blocked the two of spades with. As I don’t believe in cheating myself at solitaire I didn’t go back, and consequently I finished with only six cards out.
Wally still stood in the middle of the room, his face a picture of irresolution.
“I thought you were on your way to Baltimore,” I said, by way of making conversation while dealing down seven cards.
“I?”
I nodded, dealing out six more.
“I saw you going into the Baltimore pike on two wheels. How long do you think it’ll be before they straighten out that curve? Somebody’s going to get killed there.”
I dealt down five, then four, and so on, and found myself confronted with one king, no aces, and nothing else above a five spot. It was a hopeless layout and I lost interest in it.
I glanced at Wally, still standing there in the middle of the room. As far as I could see he was trying to pull his tiny black mustache to bits. Quite abruptly he turned and left the room by the French window off the garden verandah. I went back to my game, but only for a minute or so. Mr. Rand suddenly appeared in the door.
“Have you seen Arbuthnot-Howe, Mrs. Niles?”
“No,” I said. “Why?”
He didn’t stop to answer, but turned back at once. I heard his heavy tread going slowly up the stairs. I sat still thinking about Wally, and how oddly he was acting, and wondering what was in store for him. Mr. Sullivan suddenly stuck his head in the door.
“Have you seen Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe, Mrs. Niles?”
“No,” I said.
“Why?”
He didn’t answer me either, unless an unintelligible snarl can be taken as an answer. Its meaning seemed to be clear enough.
With that I abandoned my solitaire and went out into the hall. It was curious how a little crowd of us gathered there all of a sudden, quite as though the denouement of the piece were unexpectedly at hand. Dan was there when I came in, and Thorn and Franklin came in a minute or so later. Mr. Rand came downstairs looking very worried; and after a bit Bill and Susan appeared, like a radiant youth and maiden from the vales of Cyprus, holding each other’s hand. Shamelessly.
No one seemed to know quite what was the matter. Then Mr. Sullivan came back, and motioned us all into the front drawing room.
“I have just got information,” he said quietly, “that indicates the arrest of Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe.” He wasn’t in the least pompous or important, now that he might have some reason for being.
We all gasped. Susan’s eyes were like blue delft saucers. And just then Mr. Baca stepped into the room. Susan didn’t seem even to see him.
Mr. Sullivan put on his horn-rimmed spectacles and consulted a typed sheet of paper.
“I have Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe’s dossier from the British Embassy records,” he said, shortly. “And I may say that he’s everything he described himself as being. However, he’s also a good deal more.”
I remember so clearly that moment. Mr. Sullivan’s slightly rasping voice, drily reading off those surprising details; Mr. Rand sitting by him, the little group sitting around the room, Mr. Baca, slim and graceful, standing by the door. And how I had been deceived in Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe! There was a good deal that wasn’t relevant in that dossier; but I suppose to Mr. Sullivan’s mind most of it was not only relevant but conclusive. Height six feet four, it said; broad shoulders, weight sixteen stone; eyes blue-grey; hair light brown; always sun-tanned; pleasant expression and manner. Limps slightly from wound received in action in 1916. D.S.C.; V.C. for extraordinary valor under fire. He had without question a most distinguished military record. There was one exploit at which I caught my breath quickly; it was an extraordinary feat performed in the Dardanelles, after his wound; and he had been chosen for it because he was the best swimmer in the British army. There followed in the dossier a concise list of medals, cups and championships won before the War.
I think every eye in the room was fixed for a second on Sebastien Baca. I know that mine were then lowered an instant, a tribute to a brave man.
There was the other side of the medal then. A younger son of a younger son of an old family impoverished by income tax and death duties. There was no place in post-war England for such a man; and then the adventurer—never entirely dishonorable, not always entirely reputable—wandering from Ireland to Australia to Mexico to Siberia to Africa.
Mr. Sullivan paused.
“You can tell us, I understand, about Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe in Mexico?” he said.
Mr. Baca shook his head.
“Very little, I’m afraid. I knew him in Mexico City only as an adventurer and a gambler, and as a very charming man received in the best society. But when in New Mexico I came across him again. He was working, I was told, with a syndicate formed of men like himself, trying to get control of a great section of land.”
He smiled with a flash of white teeth, and shrugged deprecatingly.
“I did not know how determined they were, until Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe—what is it, Bill Sutton, you said to me if I did not leave Miss Susan alone—smashed me in the jaw, when we were swimming. You see, I had finished my arrangement with Mr. Sutton. The Colonel was a little too late. Still, if he could incapacitate me, he might make a deal. He did not know how far that I had got with Mr. Sutton.”
“He was trying to drown you?” Thorn asked abruptly.
The eyebrows, the hands, the slim shoulders raised together.
“But I don’t know. I do not think so. It was an intimidation. Or let us think so. But,” he added with an engaging smile, “I do not think Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe would have hesitated to drown me, if it had seemed necessary.”
Mr. Sullivan glanced down at the typed sheet in front of him.
“There is one other point to clear up,” he said, and left the room followed by Mr. Rand. The rest of us gathered in two little knots and talked, I suppose incoherently, about it.
“I hope they don’t find him,” Thorn said suddenly.
Susan smiled suddenly at Mr. Baca.
“I don’t think they will,” she said. “Sebastien and I helped him put his bag in Wally’s car. He said he’d leave it at the Calvert Street garage in Baltimore.”
Mr. Baca smiled amiably.
“And, on another matter, I believe I may congratulate you, sir?” He bowed to Bill, and held out his hand.
Bill shook it heartily, looking rather flustered.
Mr. Baca turned to Susan and bowed again.
“Consider me always at your service, Señorita,” he said, with a smile that had perhaps the faintest trace of good-humored mockery in it.
Susan blushed a little more than was becoming.
“Well, I had to,” she said stoutly. “I couldn’t have Bill going on thinking I was his sister forever. That’s what happened to Aunt Mildred.”
Mr. Sullivan returned.
“I’d like all of you to know that at least for the time being you’re at liberty. Mr. Fenton has cleared up several points. He was helping Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe to get hold of this ranch land, which as a matter of fact Mr. Sutton had once offered him, if he’d give up the stock market and go out and raise cattle on it.”
Susan sniggered audibly. Dan and Thorn glared at her; Bill glared at them.
“Fenton did not know Mr. Baca’s arrangements with his uncle, until Mr. Baca himself told him something of them. He at once reported to Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe, who decided to investigate for himself. Fenton has told me that at about twenty minutes of two that morning Arbuthnot-Howe waked him up, told him that Sutton was dead and that Tim Healy was dead, and forced him to come downstairs. Arbuthnot-Howe sent him to the lodge to see that no one went out, or to find out who tried to get out. Fenton had a matter of his own to settle. He went down to lock the King Charles Street gate, Which he’d left open for Reverdy Hawkins. He was almost there when Miss Thorn Carter ran past him on her way to meet Franklin Knox. Bill Sutton had himself unlocked the gate for Thorn Carter, just after he had helped bring Mr. Baca to the house.”
I thought, glancing around the room, that the whole family looked uncomfortably like a pack of unsuccessful conspirators.
“Fenton saw Thorn Carter go through the gate. He locked it and came back to the lodge. What he had in mind I’m not sure. It was he who pressed the control to admit Thorn Carter and Mrs. Niles, who of course thought it was Tim Healy letting them in.”
I felt this to be a personal vindication, but prematurely, as I discovered later.
“It was undoubtedly Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe who was in the library. What he was doing with the safe is hard to say. Perhaps he was trying to find some record of Mr. Baca’s arrangement with Mr. Sutton. At any rate, it was certainly he whom Mrs. Niles heard in the back drawing room.”
He paused, a heavy frown on his brow.
“Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe was on York Road late that night. The revolver that shot Mr. Sutton was found in the river at the foot of York Road. He was also the first to find Mr. Sutton’s body. I have a warrant out for his arrest That is all.”
There was a silence. Then Susan said in her firm, confident, rather defiant young voice, “I’m sorry, Mr. Sullivan, but J don’t believe Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe killed Uncle Dan.”
Mr. Sullivan looked at her through his spectacles. Then he took them off and looked at her.
“Oh,” he said. “You don’t?”
He picked up his papers and went out of the room. The rest of us sat around talking with some excitement about it, demanding further information of Mr. Baca, and finding out from Franklin what the legal aspect
s of the case were.
“Isn’t Wally the swell guy,” Bill remarked suddenly, and we agreed. That was almost the only comment the Suttons ever made about their cousin. The day he left Susan stood in the door and with one palm airily whisked some imaginary dust from the other.
“The blue-eyed boy is gone,” she said. “And that, said John, is that.”
CHAPTER XXIX
Several weeks slipped by in Landover. The college term was nearing an end. Most of us were getting ready to go away, and the rest were settling down for the long hot sleepy months until the college opened again in September. The college itself was a hive of activity. Most of the boys were straining to be off. The seniors roamed around with that sick look in their eyes that comes to every boy when he’s leaving for the final time. The old college isn’t so deadly a grind as it’s been pretended, and most of the faculty aren’t such bad eggs when you get down to it.
It’s the familiar soul-sickness of the senior. I’ve listened to six generations of them at Landover. For each of them the experience is as unique and bewildering as is all human experience.
Mr. Rand was down from New York.
Suddenly Commencement was on us. Meeting parents oddly grateful that this their child had come at last to wear his cap and gown, and all the rest of it that makes each commencement an old story but a constantly new one, and never lets a college town get very old or un-understanding.
I was coming home one warm soft evening toward the end of May from a tea for the seniors at the library. I saw the familiar figure of the State’s Attorney. We greeted each other cordially, but not as cordially as before the grilling days just after Mr. Sutton’s death. A certain restraint marked our relations, even at the oyster supper and bridge at St. Margaret’s Parish House. But this evening Mr. Sullivan was rather expansive, and I was at peace with the world.
“How do you do, Mrs. Niles,” he said, stopping.
“How do you do, Mr. Sullivan. Have you heard anything of Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe?”
I suppose it was rather impolite of me, under the circumstances. One can’t expect State’s Attorneys to like references to men who’ve escaped them.