Chapter 1

The first time that Colonel Rupert Winter saw Cary Mercer was under
circumstances calculated to fix the incident firmly in his memory. In
the year 1903, home from the Philippines on furlough, and preparing to
return to a task big enough to attract him in spite of its exile and
hardships, he had visited the son of a friend at Harvard. They were
walking through the corridors of one of the private dormitories where
the boy roomed. Rather grimly the soldier’s eyes were noting marble
wainscoting and tiled floors, and contrasting this academic environment
with his own at West Point. A caustic comment rose to his lips, but it
was not uttered, for he heard the sharp bark of a pistol, followed by a
thud, and a crackle as of breaking glass.

“Do you fellows amuse yourselves shooting up the dormitory?” said he.
The boy halted; he had gone white.

“It came from Mercer’s room!” he cried, and ran across the corridor to
a door with the usual labeling of two visiting cards. The door was not
locked. Entering, they passed into a vestibule, thence through another
door which stood open. For many a day after the colonel could see just
how the slender young figure looked, the shoulders in a huddle on the
study table, one arm swinging nerveless; beside him, on the floor,
a revolver and a broken glass bottle. The latter must have made the
crackling sound. Some dark red liquid, soaking the open sheets of a
newspaper, filled the room with the pungent odor of alcohol. Only the
top of the lad’s head showed--a curly, silky, dark brown head; but even
before the colonel lifted it he had seen a few thick drops matting the
brown curls. He laid the head back gently and his hand slipped to the
boy’s wrist.

“No use, Ralph,” he said in the subdued tones that the voice takes
unconsciously in the presence of death.

“And Endy was going to help him,” almost sobbed Ralph. “He told me he
would. Oh, _why_ couldn’t he have trusted his friends!”

The colonel was looking at the newspaper--“Was it money?” said he;
for a glance at the dabbled sheet had brought him the headings of the
stock quotations: “Another Sharp Break in Stocks. New Low Records.”
It _had_ been money. Later, after what needed to be done was over,
after doctors and officers of the law were gone, Colonel Winter heard
the wretched story. A young, reckless, fatally attractive Southerner,
rich friends, college societies, joyous times; nothing really wicked
or vicious, only a surrender to youth and friendship and pleasure, and
then the day of reckoning--duns, college warnings, the menace of black
disgrace. The young fellow was an orphan, with no near kindred save
one brother much older than he. The brother was reputed to be rich,
according to Southern standards, and young Mercer, who had just come
into a modest patrimony of his own, invested in his brother’s ventures.
As to the character of these ventures, whether flimsy or substantial,
the colonel’s informants were absolutely ignorant. All they knew of the
elder Mercer was that he was often in New York and had “a lot to do
with Wall Street.” He wasn’t a broker; no, he was trying to raise money
to hang on to some big properties that he had; and the stocks seemed
to be going at remarkable rates just now, the bottom dropping out of
the market. If a certain stock of the Mercers’--they didn’t know the
name--could be kept above twenty-seven he would pull through. Colonel
Winter made no comment, but he remembered that when he had studied
the morning’s stock-market pages for himself, he had noted “bad slump
in the Southern steels,” and “Tidewater on the toboggan slide; off
three to four points, declining from twenty-seven and a fraction to
twenty-three.”

“Another victim of the Wall Street pirates,” was the colonel’s silent
judgment on the tragedy. “Lucky for her his mother’s dead.”

The next morning he had returned and had gone to his young friend’s
rooms.

The boy was still full of the horror of the day before. Mercer’s
brother was in Cambridge, he said--arrived that morning from New York.
“Endy is going to fetch him round to get him out of the reporters’
way sometime this evening; maybe there’s something I can do”--this
in explanation of his declining to dine with the colonel. As the two
entered the rooms, Winter was a little in advance, and caught the first
glimpse of a man sitting in a big mission arm-chair, his head sunk on
his breast. So absorbed was this man in his own distempered musings
that the new-comers’ approach did not arouse him. He sat with knitted
brows and clenched hands, staring into vacancy; his rigid and pallid
features set in a ghastly intensity of thought. There was suffering in
the look; but there was more: the colonel, who had been living among
the serpent passions of the Orient, knew deadly anger when he saw it;
it was branded on the face before him. Involuntarily he fell back; he
felt as if he had blundered in on a naked soul. Noiselessly he slipped
out of the range of vision. He spoke loudly, halting to ask some
question about the rooms; this made a moment’s pause.

It was sufficient; in the study they found a quiet, calm, although
rather haggard-looking man, who greeted Winter’s companion courteously,
with a Southern accent, and a very good manner. He was presented to the
colonel as Mr. Mercer. He would have excused himself, professing that
he was just going, but the colonel took the words out of his mouth:
“Ralph, here, has a cigar for me--that is all I came for; see you at
the Touraine, Ralph, to-morrow for luncheon, then.” He did not see
the man again; neither did he see Ralph, although he made good, so far
as in him lay, his fiction of an engagement at the Touraine. But Ralph
could not come; and Winter had lunched, instead, with an old friend
at his club, and had watched, through a stately Georgian window, the
shifting greenery of the Common in an east wind.

All through the luncheon the soldier’s mind kept swerving from the talk
in hand to Cary Mercer’s face. Yet he never expected to see it again.
Three years later he did see it; and this second encounter, of which,
by the way, Mercer was unconscious, was the beginning of an absorbing
chapter in his life. A short space of time that chapter occupied; yet
into it crowded mystery, peril, a wonderful and awful spectacle, the
keenest happiness and the cruelest anxiety. Let his days be ever so
many, the series of events which followed Mercer’s reappearance will
not be blurred by succeeding experiences; their vivid and haunting
pictures will burn through commoner and later happenings as an electric
torch flares through layers of mist.

Nothing, however, could promise adventure less than the dull and chilly
late March evening when the chapter began. Nor could any one be less
on the lookout for adventure, or even interest, than was Rupert Winter.
In truth, he was listless and depressed.

When he alighted from his cab in the great court of the Rock Island
Station he found Haley, his old orderly, with a hand on the door-hasp.
Haley’s military stoicism of demeanor could not quite conceal a certain
agitation--at least not from the colonel’s shrewd eye, used to catch
the moods of his soldiers. He strangled a kind of sigh. “Doesn’t like
it much more than I,” thought Rupert Winter. “This is mighty kind of
you, Haley,” he said.

“Yes, sor,” answered Haley, saluting. The colonel grinned feebly.
Haley, busy repelling a youthful porter, did not notice the grin; he
strode ahead with the colonel’s world-scarred hand-luggage, found an
empty settee beside one of the square-tiled columns of the waiting-room
and disposed his burden on the iron-railed seat next the corner one,
which he reserved for the colonel.

“The train ain’t in yet, Colonel,” said he. “I’ll be telling you--”

“No, Haley,” interrupted the colonel, whose lip twitched a little; and
he looked aside; “best say good-by now; don’t wait. The fact is, I’m
thinking of too many things you and I have gone through together.” He
held out his hand; Haley, with a stony expression, gazed past it and
saluted, while he repeated: “Yes, sor; I’ll be back to take the bags
whin the train’s made up.” Whereupon he wheeled and made off with speed.

“Just the same damned obstinate way he’s always had,” chuckled the
colonel to himself. Nevertheless, something ached in his throat as he
frowned and winked.

“Oh, get a brace on you, you played-out old sport!” he muttered. “The
game’s on the last four cards and you haven’t established your suit;
you’ll have to sit back and watch the other fellows play!” But his
dreary thoughts persisted. Rupert was a colonel in the regular army
of the United States. He had been brevetted a brigadier-general after
the Spanish War, and had commanded, not only a brigade, but a division
at one critical time in the Philippines; but for reasons probably
known to the little knot of politicians who “hung it up,” although
incomprehensible to most Americans, Congress had failed to pass the
bill giving the wearers of brevet titles the right to keep their
hard-won and empty honors; wherefore General Winter had declined to
Colonel Winter.

He had more substantial troubles, including a wound which would
probably make him limp through life and possibly retire him from
service at fifty. It had given him a six months’ sick leave (which he
had not wanted), and after spending a month on the Atlantic coast,
he was going for the spring to the Pacific. Haley, whose own term of
service had expired, had not reënlisted, but had followed him, Mrs.
Haley and the baby uncomplainingly bringing up the rear. It was not
fair to Haley nor to Mrs. Haley, the colonel felt. He had told Haley
so; he had found a good situation for the man, and he had added the
deed for a little house in the suburbs of Chicago.

If Haley wouldn’t reënlist--there never was a better soldier since he
had downed a foolish young hankering for wild times and whisky--if he
wouldn’t go back to the army, where he belonged, let him settle down,
take up the honest carpenter’s trade that he had abandoned, be a good
citizen and marry little Nora to some classmate in the high school,
who might make a fortune and build her a Colonial mansion, should the
Colonial still obtain in the twentieth century.

The colonel had spread a grand prospect before Haley, who listened
unresponsively, a dumb pain in his wide blue Irish eyes. The colonel
hated it; but, somehow, he hated worse the limp look of Haley’s back as
he watched it dwindle down Michigan Avenue.

However, Mrs. Haley had been more satisfactory, if none the less
bewildering. She seemed very grateful over the house and the three
hundred dollars for its furnishing. A birthday present, he had termed
it, with a flicker of humor because the day was his own birthday. His
fiftieth birthday it happened to be, and it occurred to him that a
man ought to do something a little notable on such an anniversary.
This rounding of the half-century had attributes apart; it was no mere
annual birthday; it marked the last vanishing flutter of the gilded
draperies of youth; the withering of the garlands; the fading tinkle
of the light music of hope. It should mark a man’s solid achievements.
Once, not so long ago, Winter had believed that his fiftieth birthday
would see wide and beneficent and far-reaching results in the province
where he ruled. That dream was shattered. He was generous of nature,
and he could have been content to behold another reap the fields which
he had sown and tilled; it was the harvest, whether his or another’s,
for which he worked; but his had been the bitter office to have to
stand aside, with no right to protest, and see his work go to waste
because his successor had a feeble brain and a pusillanimous caution in
place of his own dogged will. For all these reasons, as well as others,
the colonel found no zest in his fiftieth birthday; and his reverie
drifted dismally from one somber reflection to another until it brought
up at the latest wound to his heart--his favorite brother’s death.

There had been three Winter brothers--Rupert, Melville and Thomas.
During the past year both Thomas Winter and his wife had died, leaving
one child, a boy of fourteen, named Archibald after his father’s uncle.
Rupert Winter and the boy’s great-aunt, the widow of the great-uncle
for whom he had been named, were appointed joint guardians of the young
Archie. To-night, in his jaded mood, he was assailed by reproaches
because he had not seen more of his ward. Why, he hadn’t so much as
looked the little chap up when he passed through Fairport--merely had
sent him a letter and some truck from the Philippines; nice guardian
_he_ was! By a natural enough transition, his thoughts swerved to his
own brief and not altogether happy married life. He thought of the
graves in Arizona where he had left his wife and his two children,
and his heart felt heavy. To escape musings which grew drearier every
second, he cast his eyes about the motley crowd shuffling over the
tiled floors or resting in the massive dark oaken seats. And it was
then that he saw Cary Mercer. At first he did not recognize the face.
He only gazed indifferently at two well-dressed men who sat some paces
away from him in the shadow of a great tiled column similar to his own.
There was this difference, it happened: the mission lantern with its
electric bulbs above the two men was flashing brightly, and by some
accident that above the colonel was dark. He could see the men, himself
in the shadow.

The men were rather striking in appearance; they were evidently
gentlemen; the taller one was young, well set-up, clean-shaven and
quietly but most correctly dressed. His light brown hair showed a
slight curl in its closely clipped locks; his gray-blue eyes had long
lashes of brown darker than his hair; his teeth were very white, and
there was a dimple in his cheek, plain when he smiled. Had his nose
been straight he would have been as handsome as a Greek god, but
the nose was only an ordinary American nose, rather too broad at the
base; moreover, his jaw was a little too square for classic lines.
Nevertheless, he was good to look upon, as well as strong and clean
and wholesome, and when his gray-blue eyes strayed about the room the
dimple dented his cheek and his white teeth gleamed in a kind of merry
good-nature pleasant to see. But it was the other man who held the
colonel’s eye. This man was double the young man’s age, or near that;
he was shorter, although still of fair stature, and slim of build. His
face was oval in contour and delicate of feature. Although he wore no
glasses, his brow had the far pucker of a near-sighted man. There was
a mole on his cheek-bone and another just below his ear. Both were
small, rather than large, and in no sense disfiguring; but the colonel
noted them absently, being in the habit of photographing a man in a
glance. The face had beauty, distinction even, yet about it hung some
association, sinister as a poison label.

“Now, where,” said the colonel to himself, “_where_ have I seen that
man?” Almost instantly the clue came to him. “By Jove, it’s the
brother!” he exclaimed. Three years ago, and he had almost forgotten;
but here was Cary Mercer--the name came to him after a little
groping--here he was again; but who was the pleasant youngster with
him? And what were they discussing with so little apparent and so much
real earnestness?

One of the colonel’s physical gifts was an extraordinary acuteness of
hearing. It passed the mark of a faculty and became a marvel. Part
of this uncanny power was really due, not to hearing alone, but to
an alliance with another sense, because Winter had learned the lip
language in his youth; he heard with his eyes as well as his ears. This
combination had made an unintentional and embarrassed eavesdropper out
of an honest gentleman a number of times. To set off such evil tricks
it had saved his life once on the plains and had rescued his whole
command another time in the Philippines. While he studied the two faces
a sentence from the younger man gripped his attention. It was: “I don’t
mind the risk, but I hate taking such an old woman’s money.”

“She has a heap,” answered the other man carelessly; “besides--” He
added something with averted head and in too low a voice to reach the
listener unassisted. But it was convincing, evidently, since the young
man’s face grew both grave and stern. He nodded, muttering: “Oh, I
understand; I wasn’t backing water; I know we have lost the right to
be squeamish. But I say, old chap, how long since Mrs. Winter has seen
you? Would she recognize you?”

The colonel, who had been about to abandon his espionage as unbecoming
a soldier and a gentleman, stowed away all his scruples at the mention
of the name. He pricked up his ears and sharpened his eyes, but was
careful lest they should catch his glance. The next sentence, owing to
the speaker’s position, was inaudible and invisible; but he clearly
caught the young man’s response:

“You’re sure they’ll be on this train?”

And he saw the interlocutor’s head nod.

“The boy’s with them?”

An inaudible reply, but another nod.

“And you’re sure of Miss Smith?”

This time the other’s profile was toward the listener, who heard the
reply, “Plumb sure. I wish I were as sure of some other things. Have we
settled everything? It is better not to be seen together.”

“Yes, I think you’ve put me wise on the main points. By the way, what
_is_ the penalty for kidnapping?”

Again an averted head and hiatus, followed by the younger man’s
sparkling smile and exclamation: “Wow! Riskier than foot-ball--and even
more fun!” Something further he added, but his arms hid his mouth as he
thrust them into his greatcoat, preparing to move away. He went alone;
and the other, after a moment’s gloomy meditation, gathered up coat and
bag and followed. During that moment of arrested decision, however, his
features had dropped into sinister lines which the colonel remembered.

“Dangerous customer, or I miss my guess,” mused the soldier, who knew
the passions of men. “I wonder--they couldn’t mean my Aunt Rebecca?
She’s old; she has millions of money--but she’s not on this train.
And there’s no Miss Smith in our deck. I’m so used to plotting I go
off on fake hikes! Probably I’m getting old and dotty. Mercer, poor
fellow, may have his brain turned and be an anarchist or a bomb-thrower
or a dirty kidnapper for revenge; but that boy’s a decent chap; I’ve
licked too many second lieutenants into shape not to know something of
youngsters.”

He pushed the idea away; or, rather, his own problems pushed it out of
his mind, which went back to his ward and his single living brother.
Melville had no children, only his wife’s daughters, who were both
married--Melville having married a widow with a family, an estate and
a mind of her own. Melville was a professor in a state university, a
mild, learned man whom nature intended for science but whom his wife
was determined to make into the president of the university.

“Even money which will win,” chuckled Rupert Winter to himself.
“Millicent hasn’t much tact; but she has the perseverance of the
saints. _She_ married Mel; he doesn’t know, but she surely did. And she
bosses him now. Well, I suppose Mel likes to be bossed; he never had
any strenuous opinions except about the canals of Mars--_Valgame dios_!”

With a gasp the colonel sprang to his feet. There before him, in the
flesh, was his sister-in-law. Her stately figure, her Roman profile,
her gracefully gesticulating hand, which indicated the colonel’s
position to her heavily laden attendant, a lad in blue--these he knew
by heart just as he knew that her toilet for the journey would be in
the latest mode, and that she would have the latest fashion of gait and
mien. Millicent studied such things.

She waved her luggage into place--an excellent place--in the same
breath dismissing the porter and instructing him when he must return.
Then, but not until then, did she turn graciously to her brother-in-law.

“I hoped that I should find you, Bertie,” she said in a voice of such
creamy richness that it was hard to credit the speaker with only three
short trips to England. “Melville said you were to take this train;
and I was _so_ delighted, _so_ relieved! I am in a most harassing
predicament, my dear Bertie.”

“That’s bad,” murmured the colonel with sympathetic solicitude: “what’s
the trouble? Couldn’t you get a section?”

“I have my reservations, but I don’t know whether I shall go to-night.”

“Maybe I’m stupid, Millicent, but I confess I don’t know what you mean.”

“Really, there’s no reason why you should, Bertie. That’s why I was so
anxious to see you--in time, so that I might explain to you--might put
you on your guard.”

“Yes?” the colonel submitted; he never hurried a woman.

“I’m going to visit dear Amy--you remember she was married two years
ago and lives in Pasadena; she has a dear little baby and the loveliest
home! It’s charming. And she was so delighted with your wedding gift,
it was _so_ original. Amy never did care for costly things; these
simple, unique gifts always pleased her. Of course, my main object
is to see the dear child, but I shall not go to-night _unless_ Aunt
Rebecca Winter is on the train. If for any reason she waits over until
to-morrow I shall wait also.”

“Ah,” sighed the colonel very softly, not stirring a muscle of his
politely attentive face; “and does Aunt Rebecca expect to go on the
train?”

“They told me at the Pullman office that she had the drawing-room, the
state-room and two sections. Of course, she has her maid with her and
Archie--”

“Does _he_ go, too?” the colonel asked, his eyes narrowing a little.

“Yes, she’s taking him to California; he doesn’t seem well enough, she
thinks, to go to school, so he is to have a tutor out there. I’m a
little afraid Aunt Rebecca mollycoddles the boy.”

“Aunt Rebecca never struck me as a molly-coddler. I always considered
her a tolerably cynical old Spartan. But do you mean there is any doubt
of their going? Awfully good of you to wait to see if they don’t go,
but I’m sure Aunt Rebecca wouldn’t want you to sacrifice your section--”

Mrs. Melville lifted a shapely hand in a Delsartian gesture of arrest;
her smiling words were the last the colonel had expected. “Hush, dear
Bertie; Aunt Rebecca doesn’t _know_ I am going. I don’t want her to
know until we are on the train.”

“Oh, I see, a surprise?” But he did _not_ see; and, with a quiet
intentness, he watched the color raddle Mrs. Melville’s smooth cheeks.

“Hardly,” returned the lady. “The truth is, Bertie, Melville and I
are worried about Aunt Rebecca. She, we fear, has fallen under the
influence of a most plausible adventuress; I suppose you have heard of
her companion, Miss Smith?”

“Can’t say I have exactly,” said the colonel placidly, but his eyes
narrowed again. “Who is the lady?”

“I thought--I am _sure_ Melville must have written you. But-- Oh,
yes, he wrote yesterday to Boston. Well, Bertie, Miss Smith is a
Southerner; she says she is a South Carolinian, but Aunt Rebecca picked
her up in Washington, where she was with a kind of cousin of ours who
was half crazy. Miss Smith took care of her and she died”--she fixed a
darkling eye on the soldier--“she _died_ and she left Miss Smith money.”

“Much?”

“A few thousands. That is how Aunt Rebecca met her, and she pulled the
wool over auntie’s eyes, and they came back together. She’s awfully
clever.”

“Young? Pretty?”

“Oh, dear, no. And she’s nearer forty than thirty. Just the designing
age for a woman when she’s still wanting to marry some one but
beginning to be afraid that she can’t. Then such creatures always try
to get _money_. If they can’t marry it, and there’s no man to set
their caps for, they try to wheedle it out of some poor fool woman!”
Millicent was in earnest, there was no doubt of that; the sure sign was
her unconscious return to the direct expressions of her early life in
the Middle West.

“And you think Miss Smith is trying to influence Aunt Rebecca?”

“Of course she is; and Aunt Rebecca is eighty, Rupert. And often while
people of her age show no other sign of weakening intellect, they are
not well regulated in their affections; they take fancies to people
and get doting and clinging. She is getting to depend on Miss Smith.
Really, that woman has more influence with her than all the rest of
us together. She won’t hear a word against her. Why! when I tried to
suggest how little we knew about Miss Smith and that it would be better
not to trust her _too_ entirely, she positively _resented_ it. Of
course I used tact, too. I was so hurt, so surprised!” Mrs. Millicent
was plainly aggrieved.

The colonel, who had his own opinion of the tact of his brother’s wife,
was not so surprised; but he made an inarticulate sound which might
pass for sympathy.

“We’ve been worried a good deal,” pursued Mrs. Melville, “about the way
Aunt Rebecca has acted. She wouldn’t stay in Fairport, where we could
have some influence over her. She was always going south or going to
the sea-shore or going _somewhere_. Sometimes I suspect Miss Smith made
her, to keep her away from _us_, you know.”

“Well, as long as I have known Aunt Rebecca--anyhow, ever since Uncle
Archibald died--she has been restless and flying about.”

“Not as she is now. And then she only had her maid--”

“Oh, yes, Randall; she’s faithful as they make ’em. What does _she_ say
about Miss Smith?”

“Bertie, she’s won over Randall. Randall swears by her. Oh, she’s
_deep_!”

“Seems to be. But--excuse me--what’s your game, Millicent? How do you
mean to protect our aged kinswoman and, incidentally, of course, the
Winter fortune?”

“I shall watch, Bertie; I shall be on my guard every waking hour. That
deluded old woman is in more danger, perhaps, than you dream.”

“As how?”

“Miss Smith”--her voice sank portentously--“_was a trained nurse_.”

“What harm does that do--unless you think she would know too much about
poisons?” The colonel laughed.

“It’s no laughing matter, Bertie. Rebecca is so rich and this other
woman is so poor, and, in my estimation, so ambitious. I make no
insinuations, I only say she needs watching.”

“You may be right about that,” said the colonel thoughtfully. “There
is Haley and the boy for your bags!”

The boy picked up the big dress-suit case, the smaller dress-suit
case and the hat case, he grabbed the bundle of cloaks, the case of
umbrellas, and the lizard-skin bag. Dubiously he eyed the colonel’s
luggage, as he tried to disengage a finger.

“Niver moind, young feller,” called Haley, peremptorily whisking away
the nearest piece, “I’ll help you a bit with yours, instead; you’ve a
load, sure!”

Mrs. Melville explained in an undertone: “I take all the hand-luggage I
possibly can; the over-weight charges are wicked!”

“Haley, they won’t let you inside without a ticket,” objected the
colonel. But Haley, unheeding, strode on ahead of the staggering youth.

“I have an English bath-tub, locked, of course, and packed with things,
but he has put _that_ in the car,” said Mrs. Melville.

“Certainly,” said the colonel absently; he was thinking: Mrs. Winter,
the boy, Miss Smith--how ridiculously complete! Decidedly _something_
will bear watching.