Sundry Accounts

Not quite sure she had stopped at the right place, Miss Smith hailed a man pottering in a chrysanthemum bed in the yard of the adjoining cottage.

"Mrs. Vinsolving?" he said, lifting a tousled head above his palings. "Yessum, she lives there – leastwise she did. She moved away only the day before yesterday. Sort of sudden, I think it must have been. I didn't know she was going till she was gone." He grinned in extenuation of the unaccountable failure of a small-town man to acquaint himself with all available facts regarding a neighbor's private affairs. "But then she never wasn't much of a hand, Mrs. Vinsolving wasn't, for mixing with folks. I'll say she wasn't!"

Back she turned to seek out Searle, he of up-to-date real estate. In a dingy office upstairs over the local harness store a lean and rangy gentleman raised a brindled beard above a roll-top desk and in answer to her first question crisply remarked, "Can't tell."

"But surely if she put her property in your hands for disposal she must have given you some address where you might communicate with her?" pressed Miss Smith.

"Oh, yes, she done that all right, but that ain't the question you ast me first. You ast me if I could tell you where she was – and that I can't do."

"I see. Then I presume she left instructions with you not to give her present whereabouts to anyone?"

"Well, you might figger it out that way and mebbe not so far wrong," said the cryptic Mr. Searle. "But if you think you'd like to buy or rent her place I'm fully empowered to act. Got the keys right here and a car standing outside – take you right on out there in a jiffy if you say the word."

He rose up and followed her halfway down the steps, plainly torn between a desire to make a commission and a regret that under orders from his client he could furnish no details regarding her late movements.

"If you're interested in any other piece of property in this vicinity – " were the last words she heard floating down the stair well as she passed out upon the uneven sidewalk.

She knew exactly what she meant to do next. At sight of her badge, as shown to him through his wicketed window marked "General Delivery," the village postmaster gave her a number on a side street well up-town in New York, adding: "Going away, Mrs. Vinsolving particularly asked me not to tell anybody where her mail was to be sent on to. Kind of a secretive woman anyhow, she was, and besides she's had some very pressing trouble come on her lately. I presume you've heard something about that matter?"

She nodded.

"I suppose now," went on the postmaster, his features sharpening with curiosity, "that the Federal authorities ain't looking into that particular matter? Not that I care to know myself, but I just thought it wouldn't be any harm to ask."

"No," said Miss Smith, "I merely wanted to see her on a personal matter and I only let you see my credential in order to learn her forwarding address."

Provided with the requisite information, she figured that before night she would interview the widow or know good reasons why. That the other woman had quitted her home seemingly in a hurry and with efforts at secrecy gave zest to the quest and added a trace of bepuzzlement to it too. Even so, she did not herself know what she meant to say to the woman when she had found her in her present abiding place or what questions she would ask. Only she knew that an inner prompting stronger than any reasoned-out process drove her forward upon her vague and blinded mission. Fool's errand it might be – probably was – yet she meant to see it through.

But she had not reckoned upon the contingency that on this fine October forenoon, for the first time since buying his new touring car, Mr. Jake Goebel, shirt-waist manufacturer in a small way in Broome Street and head of a family in a large way in West One Hundred and Ninety-ninth Street, would be undertaking to drive the said car unaided and untutored by a more experienced charioteer on a trial spin up the Albany Post Road, accompanied – it being merely a five-passenger car – only by Mrs. Rosa Goebel, wife of the above, six little Goebels of assorted sizes and ages and Mrs. Goebel's unmated sister, Miss Freda Hirschfeld of Rivington Street. In Getty Square, Yonkers, about noontime occurred a head-on collision, the subsequent upshots of which were variously that divers of those figuring in the accident went in the following directions:

Miss Smith to a doctor's office near by to have a sprained wrist bandaged; and thence home in a hired automobile.

Her runabout to a Yonkers repair shop and garage.

Mr. Goebel, with lamentations, to the office of an attorney making a specialty of handling damage suits, thence home by train with the seven members of his family party, all uninjured as to their limbs and members but in a highly distracted state nervously.

Mr. Goebel's car to another repair shop and garage.

The traffic policeman on duty in Getty Square to the station house to make a report of the fifth smash-up personally officered by him within eight hours – on a Sunday his casualty list would have been longer, but this was a week day, when pleasure travel was less fraught with highway perilousness.

It so happened that Mullinix came to town from Washington next morning and, following his custom, rang up his unpaid but none the less valued aid to inquire whether he might come a-calling. No, he might not, Miss Smith being confined to her room with cold compresses on her injured wrist, but he might render a service for her if so minded – and he was. To him, then, over the wire Miss Smith stated her requirements.

"I want you please to go to this address" – giving it – "and see whether you find there a Mrs. Janet Vinsolving, a widow. I rather imagine the place may be a boarding house, though I won't be sure as to that. It will not be necessary for you to see her in person; in fact I'd rather you did not. What I want you to do is to learn whether she is still there, and if so how long she expects to stay there, and generally anything you can about her movements. She went there only three days ago and inasmuch as she has a reputation in her former home for keeping very much to herself this may be a more difficult job than it sounds. But do the best you can, won't you, and then notify me of the results by telephone? No, it is a personal affair – nothing to do with any of our official undertakings. I'll tell you more about it when I see you. I expect I shall be able to receive visitors in a day or two; just now I feel a bit shaken up and unstrung. That's all, and thank you ever so much."

Within an hour he had her on the telephone again.

"Hello!" she said. "Yes, this is Miss Smith. Oh, it's you, is it? Well, what luck?.. Oh, so it was a boarding house, after all… And you found her there?.. No? Then where is she?.. What? Where did you say? Bellevue!.. I knew it, I knew it, something told me!.. No, no, never mind my ravings! Go on, please, go on!.. Yes, all right. Now then, listen please: You jump in a taxi and get here to my apartments as soon as you can. I'll be dressed and ready when you arrive to go over there with you… What?.. Oh, bother the doctor's instructions. It's only a sprain anyhow and I feel perfectly fit by now, honestly I do … tell you I'd get up out of my dying bed to go… Yes, indeed, it is important – much more important than you think! Come on for me, I'll be waiting."

When fifteen minutes later the perplexed Mullinix halted a taxi at the Deansworth Studio Building she was at the curbing, her left arm in a sling and her eyes ablaze with barely controlled emotions. Before he could move to get out and help her in she was already in.

"Bellevue Hospital, psychopathic ward," he told the driver as she climbed nimbly inside.

As the taxi started she turned to Mullinix, demanding: "Now tell it to me all over again. When you are through, then I'll explain to you why I am so interested."

"Well," he said, "there isn't so very much to tell. The address you gave me turned out to be a boarding house just as you suspected it might – a second-rate place but apparently highly respectable, kept by a Mrs. Sheehan. It's been under the same management at the same place for a good many years. It wasn't very much trouble for me to find out what you wanted to know, because the whole place was in turmoil after what had happened just an hour or so before I got there. And when it developed that I had come to inquire about the cause of all the excitement every old-lady boarder in the house wanted to tell me about it all at the same time.

"It seems that three days ago this Mrs. Vinsolving applied at the place for room and board. Mrs. Sheehan vaguely remembered her as having been her guest for a short time ten or twelve years ago. At that time she was with her husband, Colonel Vinsolving, who it appears has since died, and a daughter about ten years or twelve years of age – a little girl with red hair, as Mrs. Sheehan recalls. This time, though, she came alone, carrying only hand baggage. Except that she seemed to be nervous and rather harassed and unhappy looking, there was nothing noticeably unusual about her. Mrs. Sheehan took her in willingly enough.

"She went straight to her room on the third floor and stayed there, having her meals brought up to her. But this morning early she went to the landlady and begged for protection, saying she was in fear of her life. Mrs. Sheehan very naturally inquired to know what was up – and then Mrs. Vinsolving told her this story:

"She said she had discovered a conspiracy to murder her, headed by – guess who? The late Kaiser, no less! She said that the Kaiser in disguise had escaped from Holland, leaving behind him in his recent place of exile over there a double made up to look like him, and was now in hiding in this country for the sole purpose of having Mrs. Vinsolving assassinated in revenge, because her late husband, while an officer in the Army, had perfected a poison gas deadlier than any other known, which, being kept a secret by this Government and used against the German army in the war, had brought about the victory for our side and led to the overthrow of the Kaiser's outfit.

"She went on to say she had run away from some suburban town or other to hide in New York and that was why she had taken refuge at Mrs. Sheehan's, thinking she would be in safety. But now she knew the plotters had tracked her, because she had just detected that the maid who had been bringing up her meals to her was really a German agent, and acting under orders from the Kaiser had put poison into her food. All of which naturally surprised Mrs. Sheehan considerably, especially as the accused servant happened to be a perfectly reliable Finnish girl who has been working for Mrs. Sheehan for five years and who had two brothers in the Seventy-seventh Division overseas.

"It didn't take Mrs. Sheehan two minutes – she being a pretty level-headed person evidently – to see what ailed her new boarder. She managed to get Mrs. Vinsolving quieted down and get her back again into her room, and then she called in the policeman on the post and inside of an hour the woman had been smuggled out of the house and was on her way to Bellevue in an ambulance with a doctor and a policeman guarding her. But by that time, of course, the news had leaked out among the other boarders and the whole place was beginning to stew with excitement. It was still stewing when I got there.

"Well, as soon as you told me over the telephone that you were bent and determined on going to Bellevue, though I do not see why you should be in such a hurry about it and taking chances on setting up an inflammation in your injured arm, because even though you do know the poor crazed creature you can't be of any help – "

"I don't know her. I never saw her in my life."

"Then why – "

"That part can wait. I'll explain later. You were saying that as soon as you talked with me over the telephone you did something. What was it?"

"Oh, yes, I called up Doctor Steele, chief surgeon in the psychopathic ward, who happens to be a friend of mine and one of us besides" – he tapped the badge he wore under his coat lapel – "and told him I was bringing you down to see this woman, and he volunteered some information of the case in advance of your coming. I've forgotten just what he called the form of insanity which has seized her – it's a jaw-breaking Latin name – but anyhow, he said his preliminary diagnosis convinced him that it must have been coming on her for some time; that it was marked by delusions of persecution and by an exaggerated ego, causing its victims to imagine themselves the objects of plots engineered by the most distinguished personages, such as rulers and high dignitaries; and that while in this state a man or a woman suffering from this particular brand of lunacy was apt to shift his or her suspicion from one person to another – first perhaps accusing some perfectly harmless and well-meaning individual, who might be a relative or a near friend, and then nearly always progressing to the point in his or her madness where the charge was directed against some famous character."

"Did you hear anywhere any mention made of a daughter – the red-haired child of twelve years ago?" inquired Miss Smith.

"To be sure I did, but I'd forgotten about her," said Mullinix. "Mrs. Sheehan told me that somewhere in her excited narrative Mrs. Vinsolving did say something about the daughter. As nearly as I can recall, she told Mrs. Sheehan that five or six weeks ago, or some such matter, her daughter had tried to kill her and that she thought then the daughter had gone mad, but that now she knew the girl had joined the Kaiser's gang for pay. I made a mental note of this part of the rigmarole at the time Mrs. Sheehan was repeating it to me, and then it slipped my mind. But now putting that yarn alongside of what Doctor Steele tells me about the symptoms of the disease, I see the connection – first the daughter, then the strange servant girl and finally the Kaiser. But say, I wonder why the daughter hasn't been keeping some sort of a guard over the poor demented creature? What can she have been thinking about herself to let her mother go running foot-loose round the country, nursing these changing delusions?"

"She couldn't very well help herself," put in Miss Smith. "The daughter is in an asylum – put there five weeks ago on the mother's complaint."

"But heavens alive, how could that have happened?"

"Very easily – under the laws of this state," she answered grimly. Then speaking more quickly: "I've changed my mind about going to Bellevue with you. Please tell the driver to take me to the Grand Central Station. I don't know what train I'm going to catch, except that it's the next one leaving on the Hudson River Division for up state. You go on then, please, to the hospital and find out all you can about this case and call me on the long-distance to-night – no, that won't do either. I don't know where I'll be. I may be in Peekskill or in Albany – I can't say which. I tell you – I'll call you at eight o'clock; that will be better.

"No, no!" she went on impetuously, reading on his face the protest he meant to utter. "My wrist is well bandaged and giving me no pain. I'm thinking now of what a poor brave girl had on both her wrists when last I saw her and of what she must have been enduring since then. I'll explain the biggest chapter of the story to you on the way over before you drop me at the station."

At the Grand Central she left behind a thoroughly astonished gentleman. He was clear on some points which had been puzzling him from time to time during this exceedingly busy morning, but still much mystified to make out the meaning of Miss Smith's farewell remark as he put her aboard her train.

"I only wish one thing," she had said. "I only wish I might take the time to stop at the village of Pleasantdale and break the news to a certain Doctor McGlore who lives there. I trust I am not unduly cattish, but I dearly would love to watch the expression on his face when he heard it. I think I'd do it, too, if I were not starting on the most imperative errand that ever called me in my life."

A week later, to the day, two expected visitors were ushered into the private chamber of the governor at Albany – one of them a small, exceedingly well-groomed and good-looking woman in her thirties, and one a slender pretty girl with big brown eyes and wonderful auburn hair.

"Governor," said Miss Smith, "I want the pleasure of introducing to you the gamest girl in the whole world – Margaret Vinsolving."

He took the firm young hand she offered him. "Miss Vinsolving," he said, "in the name of the State of New York and on behalf of it I ask your forgiveness for the great and cruel wrong which unintentionally was done to you."

"And I want to thank you for what you have done for me, sir," she answered him simply.

"Don't thank me," he said. "You know the one to thank. If I had not set the machinery of my office in motion on your behalf within five minutes after your benefactress here reached me the other day I should have deserved impeachment. But I should never have lived to face impeachment. I'm sure the slightest sign of hesitation on my part would have been the signal for your advocate to brain me with my own inkstand." His face sobered. "But, my child, for my own information there are some things I want cleared up. Why in the face of the monstrous charges laid against you did you keep silent – that is one of the things I want to know?"

Before answering, the girl glanced inquiringly at her companion.

"Tell him," counseled Miss Smith.

Steadily the girl made answer.

"When my poor mother accused me of trying to kill her I realized for the first time that her mind had become affected. No one else, though, appeared to suspect the real truth. Perhaps this was because she seemed so normal on every other subject. So I decided to keep silent. I thought that if I were taken away from her for a while possibly the separation and with it the lifting of the imaginary fear of injury at my hands, which had upset her, might help her to regain her reason and no outsider be ever the wiser for it. I am young and strong; I believed I could bear the imprisonment without serious injury to me. I believe yet – for her sake – I could have borne it. And I knew – I realized what would happen to her if she were placed in such surroundings as I have been in and made to pass through such experiences as those through which I have passed. I felt that all hope of a cure for her would then be gone forever. And I love my mother." She faltered, her voice trembling a bit, then added: "That is why I kept silent, sir."

"But, my dear child," he said, "what a wrong thing for you to have done. It was a splendid, chivalrous, gallant sacrifice, but it was wrong. And if you don't mind I'd like to shake hands with you again."

"You see, sir, there was no one with whom I might advise in the emergency that came upon me without warning," she explained. "I had no confidante except my mother, and she – through madness – had turned against me. I had no friend then – I have one now, though."

And she went to Miss Smith and put her head on the elder woman's shoulder.

With her arms about the girl, Miss Smith addressed the governor.

"We are going away a while together for a rest," she told him. "We both need it. And when we come back she is going to join me in my work. Some day Margaret will be a better interior decorator than her teacher can ever hope to be."

"Then from now on, so far as you two are concerned, this ghastly thing should be only an unhappy dream which you'll strive to forget, I'm sure," he said. "It's all over and done with, isn't it?"

"Over and done with for her – yes," said Miss Smith. "But how about your duty as governor? How about my duty as a citizen? Shouldn't we each of us, you in your big way and I in my small way, work to bring about a reform in the statutes under which such errors are possible? Think, governor, of what happened to this child! It may happen again to-day or to-morrow to some other equally innocent sufferer. It might happen to any one of us – to me or to someone dear to you."

"Miss Smith," he stated, "if ever it happens to you I shall take the witness stand on your account and testify to two things: First, that you are the sanest human being in this state; and second, that you certainly do know how to play a hunch when you get one. If I had your intuition, plus my ambition, I wouldn't be governor – I'd be running for president. And I'd win out too!"

CHAPTER V

THE RAVELIN' WOLF

When the draft came to our town as it came to all towns it enmeshed Jeff Poindexter, who to look at him might be any age between twenty-one and forty-one. Jeff had a complexion admirably adapted for hiding the wear and tear of carking years and as for those telltale wrinkles which betray care he had none, seeing that care rarely abode with him for longer than twenty-four hours on a stretch. Did worry knock at the front door Jeff had a way of excusing himself out of the back window. But this dread thing they called a draft was a worry which just opened the door and walked right in – and outside the window stood a jealous Government, all organized to start a rookus if anybody so much as stepped sideways.

Jeff had no ambition to engage in the jar and crash of actual combat; neither did the idea of serving in a labor battalion overseas appeal to one of his habits. The uniform had its lure, to be sure, but the responsibilities presaged by the putting on of the uniform beguiled him not a whipstitch. Anyhow, his ways were the ways of peace. As a diplomat he had indubitable gifts; as a warrior he felt that he would be out of his proper element. So when answering a summons which was not to be disregarded Jeff appeared before the draft board he was not noticeably happy.

"Unmarried, eh?" inquired his chief inquisitor.

"Yas, suh – I means, naw, suh," stated Jeff. "I ain't never been much of a hand fur marryin' round."

He forced an ingratiating smile. The smile fell as seed on barren soil – fell and died there.

"Mother and father? Either one or both of them living?"

Never had Jeff looked more the orphan than as he stood there confessing himself one. He fumbled his hat in his hands.

"No dependents at all then, I take it?"

"Yas, suh, dey shorely is," answered Jeff smartly, hope rekindling within him.

"Well, who is it that you help support – if it's anybody?"

"Hit's Jedge Priest – tha's who. Jedge, he jes' natchelly couldn't git 'long noways 'thout me lookin' after him, suh. The older he git the more it seem lak he leans heavy on me."

"Well, Judge Priest may have to lean on himself for a while. Uncle Sam needs every able-bodied man he can get these times and you look to be as strong as a mule. Here, take this card and go on through that door yonder to the second room down the hall and let Doctor Dismukes look you over."

Jeff cheered up slightly. He knew Doctor Dismukes – knew him mighty well. In Doctor Dismukes' hands he would be in the hands of a friend. Beyond question the doctor would understand the situation as this strange and most unsympathetic white man undoubtedly did not.

But Doctor Dismukes, all snap and smartness, went over him as though he had never seen him before in all his life. If Jeff had been a horse for sale and the doctor a professional horse coper, scarcely could the examination have been carried forward with a more businesslike dispatch.

"Jeff," said the doctor when he had finished and the other was rearranging his wardrobe, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself for being so healthy. Take your teeth now – your teeth are splendid. I only wish I had a set like 'em."

"Is dey?" said Jeff despondently, for the first time in his life regretting his unblemished ivory.

"They certainly are. You wouldn't need a gun, not with those teeth you wouldn't – you could just naturally bite a German in two."

Jeff shivered. The very suggestion was abhorrent to his nature.

"Please suh, don't – don't talk lak that," he entreated. "I ain't cravin' to bite nobody a-tall, 'specially 'tis Germans. Live an' let live – tha's my sayin'."

"Yep," went on the doctor, prolonging the agony for the victim, "your teeth are perfect and your lungs are sound, your heart action is splendid and I know something about your appetite myself, having seen you eat. Black boy, listen to me! In every respect you are absolutely qualified physically to make a regular man-eating bearcat of a soldier" – he paused – "in every respect excepting one – no, two."