The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack: 25 Classic Novels and Stories

by George Barr McCutcheon

  “You may ask any price you like, Abbie,” he said. “The letter I received this morning was written on the paper of the Plaza Hotel in New York. Anybody who can afford to put up at the Plaza, which is right on Central Park,—and also on Fifth Avenue,—ain’t going to haggle about prices. The party wants a bathroom with hot and cold water and electric lights. Well, you’ve got all these improvements, and—”

  “I’ve got to have references,” said Mrs. Nixon firmly.

  “I guess if the Plaza is willing to rent a room to a party, there oughtn’t to be any question as to the respectability of the said party,” said Mr. Singer. “They’re mighty particular in them New York hotels.”

  “Well, you write and tell the party—”

  “I am requested to telegraph, Abbie,” said he. “The party wants to know right away.”

  As the result of this conversation and a subsequent exchange of telegrams, the “party” arrived in Tinkletown on the first day of September. Mr. Singer’s contentions were justified by the manner in which the new tenant descended upon the village. She came in a maroon-and-black limousine with a smart-looking chauffeur, a French maid, a French poodle and what all of the up-to-date ladies in Tinkletown unhesitatingly described as a French gown à la mode.

  Miss Angie Nixon, who had never been nearer to Paris than Brattleboro, Vermont, said to her customers that from what she had seen of the new tenant’s outfit, she was undoubtedly from the Tooleries. Miss Angie was the leading dressmaker of Tinkletown. If she had said the lady was from Somaliland, the statement would have gone unchallenged.

  The same day, a man cook and a “hired girl” arrived from Boggs City, having come up by rail from New York.

  The tenant was a tall, slender lady. There could be no division of opinion as to that. As to whether she was young, middle-aged or only well-preserved, no one was in a position to asseverate. As a matter of fact, observers would have been justified in wondering whether she was black or white. She was never abroad without the thick, voluminous veil, and her hands were never ungloved. Mrs. Nixon and Angie described her voice as refined and elegant, and she spoke English as well as anybody, not excepting Professor Rank of the high school.

  By the end of her first week in the Nixon cottage, there wasn’t a person in Tinkletown, exclusive of small babies, who had not advanced a theory concerning Mrs. Smith, the new tenant. On one point all agreed; she was the most “stuck-up” person ever seen in Tinkletown.

  She resolutely avoided all contact with her neighbours. On several occasions, polite and cordial citizens had bowed and mumbled “Howdy-do” to her as she passed in the automobile, but there is no record of a single instance in which she paid the slightest heed to these civilities. All of her marketing was done by the man cook, and while he was able to speak English quite fluently when objecting to the quality, the quantity and the price of everything, he was singularly unable to carry on a conversation in that language when invited to do so by friendly clerks or proprietors.

  As for the French chauffeur, his knowledge of English appeared to be limited to an explosive sort of profanity. Lum Gillespie declared on the third day after Mrs. Smith’s car first came to his garage for live storage, that “that feller Francose” knew more English cuss-words than all the Irishmen in the world.

  The veiled lady did a good many surprising things. In the first place, she had been in the Nixon cottage not more than an hour when she ordered the telephone taken out—not merely discontinued, but taken out. She gave no reason, and satisfied the telephone-company by making the local manager a present of ten dollars. She kept all of the green window-shutters open during the day, letting the sunshine into the rooms to give the carpets the first surprise they had had in years, and at night she sat out on the screened-in porch, with a reading-lamp, until an hour when many of the residents of Tinkletown were looking out of their windows to see what sort of a day it was going to be. She paid cash for everything, and always with bright, crisp banknotes, “fresh from the mint.” She slept till noon. She went out every afternoon about four, rain or shine, for long motor-rides in the country. The queerest thing about her was that she never went near the “movies.”

  Nearly every afternoon, directly after luncheon—they called it dinner in Tinkletown—she appeared in the back yard and put her extraordinarily barbered dog through a raft of tricks. Passers-by always paused to watch the performance. She had him walking first on his hind legs, then on his front legs; then he was catching a tennis-ball which she tossed every which way (just as a woman would, said Alf Reesling); and when he wasn’t catching the ball, he was turning somersaults, or waltzing to the tune she whistled, or playing dead. The poodle’s name was Snooks.

  * * * *

  The venerable town marshal, Anderson Crow, sat in front of Lamson’s store one hot evening about a week after the advent of the mystery. He was the center of a thoughtful, speculative group of gentlemen representing the first families of Tinkletown. Among those present were: Alf Reesling, the town drunkard; Harry Squires, the reporter; Ed Higgins, the feed-store man; Justice of the Peace Robb; Elmer K. Pratt, the photographer; Situate M. Jones; and two or three others of less note. The shades of night had just descended; some of the gentlemen had already yawned three or four times.

  “There ain’t no law against wearin’ a veil,” said the Marshal, reaching out just in time to pluck a nice red apple before Lamson’s clerk could make up his mind to do what he had come out of the store expressly to do—that is, to carry inside for the night the bushel basket containing, among other things, a plainly printed placard informing the public that “No. 1 Winesaps” were “2 for 5c.”

  Crow inspected the apple critically for a moment, looking for a suitable place to begin; then, with his mouth full, he went on: “The only thing I got ag’inst her is that she’s settin’ a new style in Tinkletown. In the last two-three days I’ve seen more’n one of our fair sex lookin’ at veils in the Five an’ Ten Cent Store, and this afternoon I saw somebody I was sure was Sue Becker walkin’ up Maple Street with her head wrapped up in something as green as grass. Couldn’t see her face to save my soul, but I recognized her feet. My daughter Caroline was fixin’ herself up before the lookin’-glass last night, seein’ how she’d look in a veil, she said. It won’t be long before we won’t any of us be able to recognize our own wives an’ daughters when we meet ’em on the street.”

  “My girl Queenie’s got a new pink one,” said Alf Reesling. “She made it out of some sort of stuff she wore over her graduatin’ dress three years ago.”

  “Maybe she’s got a bad complexion,” ventured Mr. Jones.

  “Who? My girl Queenie? Not on your—” began Alf, bristling.

  “I mean the woman up at Mrs. Nixon’s,” explained Mr. Jones hastily.

  Harry Squires had taken no part in the conversation up to this juncture. He had been ruminating. His inevitable—you might almost say, his indefatigable—pipe had gone out four or five times.

  “Say, Anderson,” he broke in abruptly, “has it ever occurred to you that there might be something back of it that ought to be investigated?” The flare of the match he was holding over the bowl of his pipe revealed an eager twinkle in his eyes.

  “There you go, talkin’ foolishness again,” said Anderson. “I guess there ain’t anything back of it ’cept a face, an’ she’s got a right to have a face, ain’t she?”

  “I mean the reason for wearing a veil that completely obscures her face—all the time. They say she never takes it off, even in the house.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Angie Nixon. She says she believes she sleeps in it.”

  “How does she deduce that?” demanded Anderson, idly fingering the badge of the New York Detective Association, which for obvious reasons,—it being a very hot night,—was attached to his suspenders.

  “She deduced it through a keyhole,” replied Mr. Squires. “Angie was up at the cottage last night to get something she had left in an upstairs hall c
loset. She just happened to stoop over to pick up something on the floor right in front of Mrs. Smith’s door. The strangest thing occurred. She said it couldn’t occur again in a thousand years, not even if she tried to do it. Her left ear happened to stop not more than half an inch from the keyhole. She just couldn’t help hearing what Mrs. Smith said to her maid. Angie says she said, plain as anything: ‘You couldn’t blame me for sitting up all night, if you had to sleep in a thing like this.’ She didn’t hear anything more, because she hates eavesdropping. Besides, she thought she heard the maid walking toward the door. Now, what do you make of that, Mr. Hawkshaw?”

  “If you don’t stop callin’ me Hawkshaw, I’ll—”

  “I apologize. An acute case of lapsus lingua, Mr. Crow. But wasn’t that remark significant?”

  “I am a friend of Mrs. Nixon’s, an’ I must decline to criticize her beds,” said Mr. Crow rather loftily. “I ain’t ever slept in one of ’em, but I’d do it any time before I’d set up all night.”

  “Granting that the bed was all right, then isn’t it pretty clear that she was referring to something else? The veil, for instance?”

  “Sounds reasonable,” said Newt Spratt, and then, after due reflection,—”mighty reasonable.”

  “I’d hate to sleep in a veil,” said Alf Reesling. “It’s bad enough to try to sleep with a mustard poultice on your jaw, like I did last winter when I had that bad toothache. Doc Ellis says he never pulled a bigger er a stubborner tooth in all his experience than—”

  “I think you ought to investigate the Veiled Lady of Nixon Cottage,” said Harry Squires, lowering his voice and glancing over his shoulder. “You can’t tell what she’s up to, Anderson. It wouldn’t surprise me if she’s a woman with a past. She may be using that veil as a disguise. What’s more, there may be a price on her head. The country is full of these female spies, working tooth and nail for Germany. Suppose she should turn out to be that society woman the New York papers say the Secret Service men are chasing all over the country and can’t find—the Baroness von Slipernitz.”

  “What fer kind of a dog is that you got, Ed?” inquired Mr. Crow, calmly ignoring the suggestion.

  Mr. Higgins’ new dog was enjoying a short nap in the middle of the sidewalk, after an apparently fatiguing effort to dislodge something in the neighbourhood of his left ear.

  “Well,” began Ed, eyeing the dog doubtfully, “all I know about him is that he’s a black dog. My wife has been sizin’ him up for a day or two, figgerin’ on having him clipped here and there to see if he can’t be made to look as respectable as that dog of Mrs. Smith. Hetty Adams has clipped that Newfoundland dog of hers. Changed him something terrible. When I come across them on the street today, I declare I only recognized half of him—an’ I wouldn’t have recognized that much if he hadn’t wagged it at me. It beats all what women will do to keep up with the styles.”

  “I seen him today,” said Mr. Spratt, “an’ I never in all my life see a dog that looked so mortified. I says to Hetty, says I: ‘In the name o’ Heaven, Hetty,’ says I, ‘what you been doin’ to Shep?’ An’ she says: ‘I’d thank you, Newt Spratt, not to call my dog Shep. His name is Edgar.’ So I says to Shep: ‘Come here, Edgar—that’s a good dog.’ An’ he never moved. Then I says: ‘Hyah, Shep!’ an’ he almost jumped out of his hide, he was so happy to find somebody that knowed who he was. ‘Edgar, your granny!’ says I to Hetty. ‘What’s the use of ruinin’ a good dog by calling him Edgar?’ An’ Hetty says: ‘Come here, Edgar! Come here, I say!’ But Edgar, he never paid any attention to her. He just kep’ on tryin’ to lick my hand, an’ so she hit him a clip with her parysol an’ says: ‘Edgar, must I speak to you again? Come here, I say! Behave like a gentleman!’ ‘There ain’t no dog livin’ that’s goin’ to behave like a gentleman if you call him names like that,’ says I. ‘It ain’t human nature,’ says I. An’ just to prove it to her, I turned an’ says to Shep: ‘Ain’t that so, Shep, old sport?’ An’ what do you think that poor old dog done? He got right up on his hind legs and tried to kiss me.”

  “No wonder she wants to call him Edgar,” said Harry Squires. “That’s just the kind of thing an Edgar sort of dog would do.”

  “I was just going to say,” said Mr. Crow, twisting his whiskers reflectively, “that maybe she does it because she’s had smallpox, or been terribly scalded, or is cross-eyed, or something like that.”

  Mr. Squires inwardly rejoiced. He knew that the seed had been planted in the Marshal’s fertile brain, that it would thrive in the night and sprout on the morrow. He saw delectable operations ahead; he was fond of the old man, but nothing afforded him greater entertainment than the futile but vainglorious efforts of Anderson Crow to achieve renown as a detective.

  The reporter was a constant thorn in the side of Crow, who both loved and feared him. The Banner seldom appeared without some sarcastic advice to the Marshal of Tinkletown, but an adjoining column invariably contained something of a complimentary character, the one so adroitly offsetting the other that Mr. Crow never knew whether he was “afoot or horseback,” to quote him in his perplexity.

  Harry Squires had worked on a New York morning paper in his early days. His health failing him, he was compelled to abandon what might have become a really brilliant career as a journalist. Lean, sick and disheartened, he came to Bramble County to spend the winter with an old aunt, who lived among the pine-covered hills above the village of Tinkletown. That was twenty years ago. For nineteen years he had filled the high-sounding post of city editor on the Banner. He always maintained that the most excruciating thing he had ever written was the line at the top of the first column of the so-called editorial page, which said: “City Editor—Harry Sylvester Squires.” Nothing, he claimed, could be more provocative of hilarity than that.

  In his capacity as city editor, he wrote advertisements, personals, editorials, news-items, death-notices, locals and practically everything else in the paper except the poetry sent in by Miss Sue Becker. He even wrote the cable and telegraph matter, always ascribing it to a “Special Correspondent of the Banner.” In addition to all this, he “made-up” the forms, corrected proof, wrote “heads,” stood over the boy who ran the press and stood over him when he wasn’t running the press, took all the blame and none of the credit for things that appeared in the paper, and once a week accepted currency to the amount of fifteen dollars as an honorarium.

  Regarding himself as permanently buried in this out-of-the-way spot on the earth’s surface, he had the grim humour to write his own “obituary” and publish it in the columns of the Banner. He began it by saying that he was going to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the “deceased.” He had written hundreds of obituaries during his career as city editor, he said, and not once before had he been at liberty to tell the truth. In view of the fact that he had no relations to stop their subscriptions to the paper, he felt that for once in his life he could take advantage of an opportunity to write exactly as he felt about the deceased.

  He left out such phrases as “highly esteemed citizen,” “nobility of character,” “loss to the community,” “soul of integrity” and other stock expressions. At the end he begged to inform his friends that flowers might be deposited at the Banner office or at his room in Mrs. Camp’s boarding-house, as he was buried in both places. Buttonhole bouquets could be pinned upon him any day by simply stopping his customary funeral procession about town. Such attentions should always be accompanied by gentle words or exclamations of satisfaction, as for example: “How natural you look!” or “You owed me ten dollars, but I forgive you,” or “It’s a pity your friends allowed you to to be laid away in a suit of clothes like that,” or “I don’t believe half the things people said about you,” or “It’s a perfect shame you don’t feel like resting in peace,” or “Did you leave anything worth mentioning?” He also suggested that he would rest much easier in his grave if a slight increase in salary attended the obsequies.

  From this it m
ay be gathered that Harry Squires was a man who made the most out of a very ordinary situation.

  * * * *

  Marshal Crow’s suggestion met with instant response. “On the other hand, Anderson, the lady may be as beautiful as the fabulous houri and as devilish as Delilah. I don’t want to take any steps in the matter without giving you your chance.” He spoke darkly.

  Mr. Crow pricked up his ears. “What do you mean by that?”

  “As a newspaper man, I am determined to clear up the mystery of the Veiled Lady. If you persist in sitting around twiddling your thumbs and looking like a primeval goat, I shall send to New York and engage a detective to work on the case exclusively for the Banner. The Banner is enterprising. We intend to give our subscribers the news, no matter what it costs. If you—”

  The Marshal swallowed the bait, hook and all. He arose from his chair and faced Mr. Squires. “I’ll thank you, Harry Squires, to keep out of this. I didn’t mean to say a word about it to you or anybody else until I had gone a little further with my investigations, but now I’ve got to let the cat out of the bag. I’ve been working day and night on her case ever since she came to town. Never mind, Newt—don’t ask me. I’ll announce the result of my investigations at the proper time an’ not a minute sooner. Now I guess I’ll be moseyin’ along. It’s gettin’ purty late, an’ I’ve got a lot of work to do before midnight.”

  He started down the steps. Harry Squires leaned back in his chair and scratched a match on the leg of his trousers. By the time he raised the lighted match to the bowl of his pipe, the smile had left his lips.

  * * * *

  An uneventful week passed. The Veiled Lady made her daily excursions in the big high-powered car, pursued her now well-known domestic habits, retained her offensive aloofness, played games with the astounding Snooks, suffered no ill effects whatsoever from the inimical glares of the natives; and above all, she continued to set the fashions in Tinkletown.