Chapter XI - Page 2

at all?

"I know perfectly well that nothing but your own eyes would convince you of what it's up to me to prove--to say nothing of the fact that I count on your entrance at the last minute to put an end to the whole bad business. For it is a bad business--believe me. But not a word of that now. You couldn't pry open my lips with a five dollar Havana."

"Well--you say you had a talk with Madame Delano to-day. Surely you can tell me some of the things you have discovered."

"A whole lot. I've been waiting for the chance. Not that I got anything out of her. She's one grand bluffer and no mistake. I take off my hat to her. When I told her that I could lay hands on the proof that she was Marie Garnett--although Jim had married her in his home town under his own name--and that she'd gone home to France with the kid when it was five, taking the cue from her friend, Mrs. Lawton, and sending word back she was dead--"

"You were equally sure a few days ago that she was Mrs. Lawton--"

"That was just my constructive imagination on the loose. It was a lovely theory, and I sort of hung on to it. But I had no real data to go on. Now I've got the evidence that Jim Garnett died two months before the fire burnt up pretty nearly all the records, and that his body was shipped back to Holbrook Centre to be buried in the family plot. You see, he was sick for some time out on Pacific Avenue, and his death was registered where the fire didn't go--"

"But what put you on?" asked Ruyler impatiently. "I should almost rather it had been any one else. He seems to have been about as bad a lot as even this town ever turned out."

"He was, all right, and his father before him, although they came from mighty fine folks back east. His father came out in '49 with the gold rush crowd, panned out a good pile, and then, liking the life--San Francisco was a gay little burg those days--opened one of the crack gambling houses down on the Old Plaza. Plate glass windows you could look through from outside if you thought it best to stay out, and see hundreds of men playing at tables where the gold pieces--often slugs--were piled as high as their noses, and hundreds more walking up and down the aisles either waiting for a chance to sit, or hoping to appease their hunger with the sight of so much gold. They didn't try any funny business, for every gambler had a six-shooter in his hip pocket, and sometimes on the table beside him.

"Sometimes men would walk out and shoot themselves on the sidewalk in front of the windows, and not a soul inside would so much as look up. Well, Delano the first had a short life but a merry one. He couldn't keep away from the tables himself, and first thing he knew he was broke, sold up. He went back to the mines, but his luck had gone, and his wife--she had followed him out here--persuaded him to go