The lad sped away at a curt nod of dismissal, and was soon lost in the devil's whirlpool of the Bowery.
But, as Mr. Fritz Braun sedately finished his cosy dinner, he saw strange golden gleams in the blue, wreathing smoke mists of his Perfectos.
"Two hundred thousand; that would be a stake. And July, too; this lawyer fellow gone. What a chance! There must be no mistake now! He must lead himself on, now. One prick of the hidden hook and this fat trout would be off forever I must see Irma and coach her. Donnerwetter! It's too good to be true. After all this waiting. And now I've got to keep my eyes on both the spider and the fly. Irma is such a tempestuous devil. If Leah only had her years and looks and dash, she would twist any man in the world around her finger. But I can never teach this Hungarian madcap, Leah's velvet softness and never-tiring patience."
The prosperous pharmacist gleefully paid for his dinner and nimbly chased an East-side ferry-bound car. He laughed in spite of himself at Emil's unflagging deviltry. "He is a credit to Leah's Polish blood and my Austrian nurture," mused Braun. "The young wretch might be dangerous, too. He must know nothing of my deep game."
"If this Clayton will only break into the flirtation in the right way, the victory is assured. But, if he were to show her off around town, or try and dodge these spotter fellows in New York, then I should lose a year's time, my expenses, and this heavy money stake. It's the one chance of a life time."
In half an hour, Fitz Braun, crossing on the Tenth Street Ferry to Greenpoint, was soon lost, as was his wont, in the human hive of Brooklyn toilers. Men had seen him go over for years invariably on this ferry, his burly figure was always seen on the Fulton Ferry daily at half-past eight each morning, but not a soul among the thousand clients of Magdal's Pharmacy knew where the human fox, Fritz Braun, laid his head to rest at night.
From nine till four he lurked behind the high dispensing screen of Magdal's Pharmacy, his inner life and antecedents a sealed book to all the sleuth-eyed votaries of vice on Sixth Avenue.
And yet, for all his craft, on this balmy night of spring, the man who had buried Hugo Landor's stormy past forever under staid Fritz Braun's impenetrable mask, shivered while plotting his new iniquities lest the panther-footed pursuer might even now demand at his hand a life in return for those victims who had lain, staring eyed, cold in death, mute witness against him in far away Vienna. The terrible record of his past evil days haunted his every footstep now. He saw these avenging eyes even in his dreams.
There was but one who could lift the veil of the awful past. On this eventful night Fritz Braun hid, within his heart, an awful resolve, born of the fear of the disguised felon, floating uneasily in the maelstrom of a great city. "If she should betray me, and women are women, after all," he mused in his cowardly ferocity. "If she pulls this off for me, I'll"—he ceased, with an inward shudder, for he dared not give the awful thought its fitting frame.
"Only at the last," he murmured, as he sped along in Brooklyn's dingy water streets to take on another mask to veil his wolfishly evil life.
While snares and pitfalls were being laid for Randall Clayton's careless feet, that gentleman sat in a wrathful mood, pondering over Arthur Ferris' half-hearted disclosures. Clayton's face had frankly disclosed his displeasure at the false attitude of his chum, when Ferris reluctantly disclosed the fact of the secret financial espionage.
The three years of their past intimacy now took on a different color, at once, to the jaundiced eyes of the young cashier.
He had almost abruptly declined Ferris' invitation to spend Sunday at Seneca Lake, with the prosperous lawyer's mother and two sisters.
A feeling of bitter envy gnawed at Clayton's heart as he counted up the rapid rise of his quondam friend.
"So, he has been playing this double game for years; it must have been at Worthington's bidding. And why?"
It began to dawn at last upon Clayton that his Detroit patron had certainly followed a singular course in his apparent beneficence.
All unused to social intrigue, Clayton ignored the possible effect of his further presence in Worthington's household as an attractive young man when little Alice, at a bound, passed through the gates of girlhood and became the beautiful Miss Worthington. He had never seen the angel at his side, and yet Ferris, clearer eyed, had conquered in silent craft a golden future.
Clayton lingered at his table in the Grand Union café long after the waiter had removed his half-tasted dinner. He ordered an unaccustomed "highball" as he pondered over some means of circumventing the social treason of his dethroned "friend."
Clayton easily found a valid reason, for the semi-treason of Ferris.
"He is, after all, a stranger to me. His ambition leads him onward and upward. He would tread on my body gladly in mounting to the great monopolist's confidence. It is easy enough to see why Ferris has played both the spy and lickspittle. It has paid him well. Here's a jump to handling Worthington's power of attorney. Of course, Ferris seeks the position of the one Eastern lawyer of the great Trust.
"But," and a wave of anger swept away all the grateful memoirs of his youth, "why did this cool old badger, Worthington, take me to his home, later back me through college, and then, and there railroad me off here to be fenced around with his spies? He could have easily dropped me at any time. If he really cared to advance me, why not have made me a lawyer and breed me up to share his secrets?" There came no answer to his troubled mind as he sat there, alone, despising Ferris and doubting even Worthington's candor.
He had revolved several future plans of action in his mind before reaching the vitreous substratum of the generous high-ball. His first indignant impulse was to give up the joint apartment in a fortnight.
May the first was rapidly coming on by Nature's calendar of leaf and bird, of deepening green in the park and light-hearted woman's smartening attire.
"No," he resentfully cried, as he threw his cigar away and paid his bill, "that would only show them my hand. I'll make no open enemy of Ferris."
"But I will dodge Worthington's spies and then lock up my heart. I will keep on good terms with Worthington's lickspittle and try and later reach the secret of all this strange behavior. The old man seems unwilling to let me go out of his control, and yet he has tied me down to this ironclad money mill—as a slave rubbing the lamp for him." It opened a gloomy future to him, this dreary hour of introspection.
Randall Clayton had not lost all the opportunities of his New York life for a peep behind the metropolitan scenes. He knew that there was an inside view to be had of the clubs, the great hotels, the show life of the smart set, the pretentious apartment houses, the banks and theaters, the ambitious schemes of business and professional men.
One by one the shams had yielded to his prying gaze, and, but too well, he knew the truth of Tom Moore's trite remark, "False the light on glory's plume!"
But, straightforward and sincere, he had never watched his own environment. The loss of his mother in his childhood and his father's lonely struggle to retrieve his fallen fortunes had left the boy without happy memories of boyhood, with no family history to aid him, and the embarrassment of his dependence upon Hugh Worthington had robbed him of the confidences incident to young manhood.
Only in his books had he learned of the passionate, hot hearts beating behind the silken armor of womanhood.
For who had noticed the dependent, the poor, plodding college boy?
Worthington's Detroit home was a mere social machine-shop, a place of vanished glories during the adolescence of Miss Alice, and no Diana had stooped to kiss the forgotten young Endymion sleeping in the Lethe of a New York business obscurity. Clayton's life had been gilded by few joys.
His whole nature rose up in a sudden rebellion against this "personally conducted" career in life. "I am to be a mere hoodwinked worker in this millionaire's treadmill. A bond slave to one of the great Trusts which are chaining the whole American population to the galley-oar for life.
"I