Anthony Trent leaned from the window and breathed in the soft night air.
“It’s a great old city,” he said, half affectionately, “and I make my living by letting my hook down into the night and drawing up a mystery. You mustn’t mind if I sometimes rattle the old Royal when better folks are asleep.”
“If you’ll take the advice of an older man,” said Mr. Lund with an air of firmness, “you’ll let crook stories alone and choose something a little healthier. Your mind is full of them.”
Still a little outraged Mr. Lund bowed himself from the room. Anthony Trent fed his ancient briar and took the seat by the window.
“I wonder if he’s right,” mused Anthony Trent.
CHAPTER III
THE DAY OF TEMPTATION
THE dawn had long passed and the milkmen had awakened their unwilling clients two hours agone before Anthony Trent finished his story. He was not a quick worker. His was a mind that labored heavily unless the details of his work were accurate. This time he was satisfied. It was a good story and the editor for whom he was doing a series would be pleased. He might even increase his rates.
Crosbeigh, the editor of the magazine which sought Anthony Trent’s crook stories, was an amiable being who had won a reputation for profundity by reason of eloquent silences. He would have done well in any line of work where originality was not desired. He knew, from what his circulation manager told him, that Trent’s stories made circulation and he liked the writer apart from his work. Perhaps because he was not a disappointed author he was free from certain editorial prejudices.
“Sit down,” he cried cordially, when Anthony Trent was shown in. “Take a cigarette and I’ll read this right away.” Crosbeigh was a nervous man who battled daily with subway crowds and was apt to be irritable.
“It’s great,” he said when he had finished it, “Great! Doyle, Hornung, well – there you are!” It was one of his moments of silent eloquence. The listener might have inferred anything.
“But they are paid real money,” replied Anthony Trent gloomily.
“You get two cents a word,” Crosbeigh reminded him, “you haven’t a wife and children to support.”
“I’d be a gay little adventurer to try it on what I make at writing,” Trent told him. “It takes me almost a month to write one of those yarns and I get a hundred and fifty each.”
“You are a slow worker,” his editor declared.
“I have to be,” he retorted. “If I were writing love slush and pretty heroine stuff it would be different. Do you know, Crosbeigh, there isn’t a thing in these stories of mine that is impossible? I take the most particular care that my details are correct. When I began I didn’t know anything about burglar alarms. What did I do? I got a job in the shop that makes the best known one. I’m worth more than two cents a word!”
“That’s our maximum,” Crosbeigh asserted. “These are not good days for the magazine business. Shot to pieces. If I said what I knew. If you knew what I got and how much I had to do with it!”
Anthony Trent looked at him critically. He saw a very carefully dressed Crosbeigh to-day, a man whose trousers were pressed, whose shoes were shined, who exuded prosperity. Never had he seen him so apparently affluent.
“Come into money?” he enquired. “Whence the prosperity? Whose wardrobe have you robbed?”
“These are my own clothes,” returned Crosbeigh with dignity, “at least leave me my clothes.”
“Sure,” said Trent amiably, “if I took ’em you’d be arrested. But tell me why this sartorial display. Are you going to be photographed for the ‘great editors’ series?”
“I’m lunching with an old friend,” Crosbeigh answered, “a man of affairs, a man of millions, a man about whom I could say many things.”
“Say them,” his contributor demanded, “let me in on a man for whom you have arrayed yourself in all your glory. Who is your friend? Is she pretty? I don’t believe it’s a man at all.”
“It’s a man I know and respect,” he said, a trifle nettled at the comments his apparel had drawn. “It’s the man who takes me every year to the Yale-Harvard boat race.”
“Your annual jag party? He’s no fit company for a respectable editor.”
“It is college spirit,” Crosbeigh explained.
“You can call it by any name but it’s too strong for you. What is the name of your honored friend?”
“Conington Warren,” Crosbeigh said proudly.
“That’s the millionaire sportsman with the stable of steeple-chasers, isn’t it?” Trent demanded.
“He wins all the big races,” Crosbeigh elaborated.
“He’s enormously rich, splendidly generous, has everything. Only one thing – drink.” Crosbeigh fell into silence.
“You’ve led him astray you mean?” The spectacle of the sober editor consorting with reckless bloods of the Conington Warren type amused Trent.
“Same year at college,” Crosbeigh explained, “and he has always been friendly. God knows why,” the editor said gloomily. The difference in their lot seemed suddenly to appal him.
“There must be something unsuspectedly bad in your make-up,” Trent declared, “which attracts him to you. It can’t be he wants to sell you a story.”
“There are all sorts of rumors about him,” Crosbeigh went on meditatively, “started by his wife’s people, I believe. He was wild. Sometimes he has hinted at it. I know him well enough to call him ‘Connie’ and go up to his dressing-room sometimes. That’s a mark of intimacy. My Lord, Trent, but it makes me envious to see with what luxury the rich can live. He has a Japanese valet and masseur, Togoyama, and an imported butler who looks like a bishop. They know him at his worst and worship him. He’s magnetic, that’s what Connie is, magnetic. Have you ever thought what having a million a year means?”
“Ye Gods,” groaned Trent, “don’t you read my lamentations in every story you buy from me at bargain rates?”
“And a shooting box in Scotland which he uses two weeks a year in the grouse season. A great Tudor residence in Devonshire overlooking Exmoor, a town house in Park Lane which is London’s Fifth Avenue! And you know what he’s got here in his own country. Can you imagine it?”
“Not on forty dollars a week,” said Anthony Trent gloomily.
“You’d make more if you were the hero of your own stories,” Crosbeigh told him.
Anthony Trent turned on him quickly, “What do you mean?”
“Why this crook you are making famous gets away with enough plunder to live as well as Conington Warren.”
“Ah, but that’s in a story,” returned the author.
“Then you mean they aren’t as exact and possible as you’ve been telling me?”
“They are what I said they were,” their author declared. “They could be worked out, with ordinary luck, by any man with an active body, good education and address. The typical thick-witted criminal wouldn’t have a chance.”
It was a curious thing, thought Anthony Trent, that Crosbeigh should mention the very thing that had been running in his mind for weeks. To live in such