He pulled his roll of currency from his pocket, and handed five hundred-dollar bills to the reporter.
“You earned it! I never should have got away in time without you.”
“I guess that’s so. Much obliged for the dough; but the scoop alone is worth it. What a story! A light-fingered attorney from New York blowing in here under the court’s nose and lifting the whole Pacific Northern, and goodness knows what else besides, clean out of the State! Some folks who think they know how to do things will be sick to-morrow morning when they get the Despatch!”
He shoved the bills into his trousers pocket and pulled out another cigarette.
“There’s the gong!” he remarked.
“Thanks!” Brainard said warmly, shaking the reporter’s fat hand. “I’ll want to see your story. Send it to me!”
“And say, I’d make up a better yarn than that lawyer story, when you have time.”
“So you didn’t believe me?”
“I guess I’m no cub reporter!” the Despatch man laughed complacently, as the ferry-boat began to move out of the slip.
Then he started on a run for the nearest telephone booth.
“If that girl means business, as I think she does, I shan’t get as far as Chicago!” Brainard muttered to himself, turning into the cabin of the ferry-boat.
IX
When Brainard awoke the next morning the train was moving through the Mojave desert. He lay for some time in his berth trying to collect himself and realize all that had brought him thither. It was intensely hot in the narrow compartment that he had taken, and when he raised the window curtains the sunlight reflected from the desert was blinding. As he drew down the curtain, his eyes fell upon the large bag beside him, and with a start the adventure of the previous day came over him. He laughed aloud as he recalled the different scenes in Krutzmacht’s office—the stenographer’s suspicious reception, the endless bumping down the circular iron stairs with the bag and the valise, old Peters’s horrified face when he learned that the woman had been shut in the safe. Indeed, the entire week since he ran across the dying stranger at the door of his lodging seemed like a dream, peopled with faces and scenes that were extraordinarily vivid and of a kind he had never known in his narrow, sordid life. With a luxurious sense of new possession he went over all the little details of his journey across the continent. The week, he recognized, had been a liberal education to his mentally starved self. But what was he going to do now?
Hitherto he had been carried along easily on a wave of events that demanded instant action, and he had not worried about the future. Even when the reporter had given him the news of Krutzmacht’s death in the hospital he was already too deep in the affair to stop, although he realized that the crude power of attorney, which had been his sole legal protection in looting the safe, had lost all its force the instant its maker ceased to breathe. After that, he was, as the stenographer had said—merely a burglar. Yet he had not hesitated to obey the dead man’s will rather than the law. But now?
Thus far he had been executing Krutzmacht’s direct orders, with an unconscious sense of a living personality guiding him, taking the real responsibility for his deeds. The stranger who had been stricken near his door had seized upon him as the nearest available tool, had imposed on him his will, and had sent him hurrying across the continent on an errand the full nature of which was even yet a mystery to Brainard. And he had obeyed the dying stranger with a curious faith in his reasonableness—had responded to him pliantly as to the command of a natural master. But now that this master was dead, the situation was altogether different. Should he still attempt to execute his scarcely intelligible wishes?
He had learned enough about Krutzmacht these last few days to understand that the old man had been engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the control of large properties—one of those peculiarly modern duels fought with bankers’ credits and court decrees. Apparently his enemies, more powerful than he—at least with larger resources at their command—had been closing in on him for the final grapple, which threatened utterly to ruin him. He had gone to New York to raise the funds with which to evade impending bankruptcy and loss of control of the properties which he had created. Brainard now fully believed that Krutzmacht had succeeded in this, and that he had been stricken at last by the hand of a hired thug and thrown on the street to die. But even in the torture of his final convulsions the old man had exerted his powerful will to defeat these cowardly foes, and had lingered on in life just long enough to enable his agent to snatch the prey from their jaws.
What now was he to do with this bag of documents and securities that lay there, its fat sides bulging in proof of his deed? The obvious thing would be to seek the nearest federal authority, deposit his plunder, and allow an impartial court to settle the dispute between the dead man and his enemies. A week before, such a timid and safe course of conduct would have seemed to Brainard the only possible action to take. Now he found it not in the least to his taste, and dismissed it without further consideration. He had become an altogether different person, even in this week, from that beaten man who had stumbled homeward from a petty defeat through the New York streets in the gloom of an April day. For this one brief week in all the years he could remember he had been alive—fully alive—and with his hand now in the thick of this vital web he was not willing to withdraw. The one who had used him as a tool was dead, but his strong will lived on in him, not yet fulfilled, and to that strong will whose only hope of fulfillment lay in him—the chance stranger—a new sense of loyalty responded. He would not desert the old man in the present crisis, no matter what the merely legal aspects of his situation were. Already the stranger’s will like fertile seed was germinating within this fresh soil.
“Take everything,” Krutzmacht said. “Take it all to Berlin.” That he would do if he could.
But then what?
There was a strange name—Mell or Melody—that the dying man had been at such pains to enunciate. What had Melody to do with the matter? Was it the name of a person? Or an institution? He exercised all his ingenuity in trying to invent a reasonable explanation of this one word. Possibly Krutzmacht had tried to pronounce Mendel or Mendelssohn. Brainard thought there was a firm of German bankers with some such name. Light on the puzzle might be found in the contents of his bag, but at present he did not like to open it. At any rate Berlin must be his next destination.
He pondered all these things at his late breakfast, where in the close-shaded car electric fans buzzed to make a semblance of moving air. The fellow travelers on this train—returning tourists from Southern California resorts—did not interest him as had the varied company on the Overland, and he shut himself up in his compartment with his secret, not even leaving it for luncheon. It seemed that already the cares of property—even of another, unknown person’s property—were beginning to separate him from his fellows, rendering him less eager to make acquaintances, more suspicious than he was by nature. In the present circumstances he preferred to keep to himself. So all that long day, alone in his hot room, he thought, while the train slowly traversed the mighty Arizona plains, arid, limitless, austere, broken here and there by solitary rocky peaks that rose majestically out of the desert into the still, clear atmosphere. It was a stranger land than he had ever dreamed, outside all the world that he knew, remote, mysterious, calm.
He did not open the bag for fear of possible interruption. He thought, and as the hot day wore on into the afternoon he began to lose that sense of security he had had when he caught the train in San Francisco. The burden of the bag became heavier. If he were any judge of newspaper men, that reporter Farson had by this time spread the story of his deeds broadcast over the civilized world. Messages might be speeding past him even now on the wires, directions to intercept his flight at some convenient point farther to the east. He first