Krutzmacht struggled hard to pronounce a name, but he could not utter the word.
“It’s no use!” the doctor exclaimed. “Tell him to wait until he’s better.”
But Brainard, moved by the sick man’s intense look of mental distress, raised his hand to the doctor and listened. At last the whispered syllable reached his ear:
“M-M-Mel—”
“I tell you it’s no use!” the ambulance doctor repeated irritably. “They’ll find out at the hospital what he wants done. Come on!”
As they bore the stretcher through the narrow door, the agonized expression gave way, and the sick man articulated more distinctly:
“Mel-Melo—”
“Melo-melodrama!” Brainard said. “It’s all right, my friend. Don’t worry—I’ll fix it up for you!”
With astonishing distinctness came back the one word:
“Melody!”
“All right—Melody!”
The sick man would have said more, but the ambulance men bore him swiftly to the waiting vehicle and shoved him in.
“Will you come along?” the doctor asked.
“No. I’ll look in some time to-morrow, probably—St. Joseph’s, isn’t it?”
The sick man’s eyes still rested on Brainard, when the latter poked his head into the dark ambulance. They seemed to glow with a full intelligence, and also with a command, as if they said:
“Do just what I’ve told you to do!”
“He knows what he wants, even if he can’t say it,” Brainard muttered to himself as the ambulance moved off. “Poor old boy!”
III
When Brainard opened the door of his room, he heard the rustle of papers on the floor, blown about by the draft from the window. He lighted his lamp and picked up the loose sheets, which were the typewritten leaves of his last play—the one that he had finally got back that very afternoon from a famous actor-manager, without even the usual note of polite regret from the secretary. The absence of that familiar note had dejected him especially.
He shoved the rejected play into his table drawer indifferently, thinking of the sick man’s last urgent look, and of the terrible effort he had made to articulate his final words. What did he mean by “Melody”? Perhaps the old fellow was really out of his head, and all the rest about his valuable papers in some private safe at the other end of the continent was mythical—the fancy of an unhinged mind.
But the memory of the old man’s face—of those keen blue eyes—made Brainard reject such a commonplace solution of the puzzle. The sick man had been in this room with him for a full half-hour, and the place still seemed filled with his positive, commanding personality.
No! The man who signed “H. Krutzmacht” to the sheet lying on the table before him was no vague lunatic. Though he might be at the extremity of life, almost unable to articulate, nevertheless his purpose was clear to himself, and his will was as strong as ever.
Brainard was hungry. Snatching up his old cap, he went out to the neighboring avenue, and, without hesitation, entered the most expensive restaurant in sight—a resort he frequented only on rare days of opulence. Instead of the oyster-stew and doughnuts which had latterly been his luxurious limit, he ordered a good dinner, as if he had earned it, and devoured the food without the usual qualms of prudence.
His spirits had undergone a marvelous change from the timid, fearful state in which he had been that afternoon. He wondered at his own confidence. Complacently selecting a good cigar at the cashier’s desk, he strolled back to his room, his body peacefully engaged in the unaccustomed task of digesting a full meal.
When he entered his dreary little room, his eye fell upon the wallet, which lay under the table where he had dropped it. What was he going to do with that—with this whole Krutzmacht business? Why, simply nothing at all. In the morning, he would go around to St. Joseph’s and see how the sick man was. If Krutzmacht recovered, there was nothing to do but to return his pocketbook. But if he got worse, or was dead already? Well, Brainard could turn the wallet over to the hospital people or the coroner, and that would end the affair for him.
With this prudent resolution he took his play from the drawer, and looked it over. His interest in the thing had quite gone, and the sting of its rejection no longer smarted. Very likely it was as bad as the managers to whom he had submitted it seemed to think. He tied the manuscript together with a piece of twine, and shoved it back into the drawer.
One sheet—that last one on which he had taken down Krutzmacht’s dictation—was missing from this roll. That sheet contained his final curtain. He looked at the lines, and smiled as he read. The Lady Violet was parting from her lover, with the following dialogue:
Violet.—Oh, Alexander!
Alexander.—Violet!
Violet.—What will you do, dearest?
Alexander.—I go on my great adventure!
Violet.—Your great adventure?
Alexander.—Life!
He turned the sheet over. On the other side were the few shorthand notes he had hastily jotted down—the figures of the safe combination and the power of attorney with its legal phrases, the latter written out again below in long hand. At the bottom of the sheet, just beneath Alexander’s heroic announcement to Violet, were the three signatures. The old man’s blunt name dominated the others—a firm, black scrawl with a couple of vicious dashes.
The powerful will of the sick man, working in what might be the agony of death, spoke in that signature. Brainard felt that there was something mysterious in it. The name spoke to him as the eyes had spoken to him, personally. Criminal? Possibly. Dramatic? Oh, surely! He felt instinctively that there was more drama on this side of the sheet than on the other.
He folded the paper carefully and put it in his inner pocket. It would be an interesting souvenir.
As the young man sat and smoked in his little room, the comfort of his abundant meal penetrating his person, he felt more and more the drama of actual life touching him, calling to him to take a hand in it. He reached unconsciously for the fat wallet, and opened it. There were some legal papers—contracts and leases and agreements, at which Brainard merely glanced.
He felt into the inner recesses of the old-fashioned wallet, and from one pocket extracted a thick sheaf of bank-notes. They were in large denominations—hundreds, fifties, and twenties. Brainard smoothed out the bills on his knee and carefully counted them; in all there was rather more than four thousand dollars.
“The old boy traveled with quite a wad!” he muttered, fingering the crisp bills.
The touch of the money gave a curious electric thrill to his thoughts. Here was an evidence of reality that made the old man’s mumbled words and intense effort assume a reasonable shape. When Krutzmacht let Brainard take possession of this wallet, he knew what it contained. He trusted to a stranger in his desperate need.
Still feeling around in the folds of the wallet, Brainard extracted a railroad-ticket of voluminous length for San Francisco.
“He was on his way to the train!” Brainard exclaimed, and added unconsciously, “when they got him and did him up!”
Already his busy mind had accepted the hypothesis of enemies and foul play rather than that of disease.
With the railroad-ticket and the money in his hand, he stood staring before him, still debating the