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K wB Owl #a ?JwWr 2 •: Osa 3A I r x ff' Jf I & Jf9 < I-o vlj JbJbJIC, ■ / ® I W, mfß' MART FOBEKU' KINHIAKT 1i »/ ? or THE CIRCULAR A’HERGAfE' \ 1 1* fffl ' s LLtUSHtATfOMf'£r As. \ 1 I • OOPXRT&KT eoEERAR'y & SYNOPSIS. CHAPTER I.—Lawrence Blakley, law yer, goes to Pittsburg with the forged notes in the Bronson case to take the dep osition of the chief witness for the pros ecution, John Gilmore, a millionaire. In the latter’s house the lawyer is attracted by the picture of a girl, whom Gilmore explains is his granddaughter, Alison West. He says her father is a rascal and a friend of the forger. CHAPTER ll.—Standing in line to buy a Pullman ticket Blakeley is requested by a lady to buy one for her. He gives her lower 11 and retains lower ten. He finds a man in a drunken stupor in lower ten, and retires in lower nine. CHAPTER lII.—He awakens in lower seven and finds that his traveling bag has disappeared and in its stead is another. His clothes likewise have been exchanged for others. CHAPTER IV.—An amateur detective Interests himself in the case. It is learned that the dead man is Simon ’ Harrington of Pittsburg. CHAPTER V.—Henry Pinckney Sulli van is believed to be the name of the man who disappeared with Blakeley’s clothes and grip. He is suspected of the murder. CHAPTER Vl.—Blakeley becomes in terested in a girl in blue. A dirk and blood stains are found in lower seven. Blakeley comes under suspicion. CHAPTER Vlf.—Circumstantial evi dence against Blakeley is strengthened. The train is -wrecked. CHAPTER VIII.— Blakeley is rescued from the burning car by the girl in blue. His arm is broken. "From Richey McKnight?” frankly curious. “Yes. From Richey McKnight,” I assented. Was it any wonder Mc- Knight was crazy about her? I dug my heels into the dust. “I have been visiting near Cresson, in the mountains,” Miss West was say ing. “The person you mentioned, Mrs. Curtis, was my hostess. We —we were on our way to • Washington to gether.” She spoke slowly, as if she wished to give the minimum of expla nation. Across her face had come again the baffling expression of per plexity and trouble I had seen before. “You were on your way home, I sup pose? Richey—spoke about seeing you,” I floundered, finding it necessary to say something. She looked at me with level, direct eyes. “No.” she returned quietly. “I did not intend to go home. I —well, it doesn’t matter; I am going home now.” A woman in a calico dress, with two children, each an exact duplicate of the other, had come quickly down the road. She took in the situation at a glance, and was explosively hospit able. “You poor things,” she said. “If you’ll take the first road to the le.t over there, and turn in at the second pigsty, you will find breakfast on th** table and a coffee pot on the stove. And there’s plenty of soap and water, too. Don’t say one word. There isn’t a soul there to see you.” We accepted the invitation and she hurried on toward the excitement and the railroad. I got up carefully and helped Miss West to her feet. “At the second pigsty to the left,” I repeated, “we will find the breakfast I promised you seven eternities ago. Forward to the pigsty!” We said very little for the remaind er of that walk. I had almost reached the limit of endurance; with every step the broken ends of the bone grated together. We found the farm house without difficulty, and I remem ber wondering if I could hold out to the end of the old stone walk that led between hedges to the door. "Allah be praised,” I said with all the voice I could muster. “Behold the coffee pot!” And then I put down the cup and folded up like a jack-knife on the porch floor. When I came around something hot was trickling down my neck, and a despairing voice was saying, “Oh, I don’t seem to be able to pour it into your mouth. Please open your eyes.” “But I don’t want it in my eyes,” I replied dreamily. "I haven’t any idea what came over me. It was the shoes, I think; the left one is a red-hot tor tare.” I was sitting by that time and booking across into her Never before or since have I faint ed, but I would do it joyfully, a dozen times a day, if I could waken again to the blissful touch of soft fingers on my face, the hot ecstasy of coffee spilled by those fingers down my neck. There was a thrill in every tone of her voice that morning. Before long my loyalty to McKnight would step between me and the girl he loved; life would develop new complexities. In these early hours after the wreck, full of pain as they w r ere, there was nothing of the suspicion and distrust that came later. Shorn of our gauds and baubles, we were primitive man and woman, together; our w'orld for the hour was the deserted farmhouse, the slope of wheatflelfl that led to the road, the woodland lot, the pasture. We breakfasted together across the homely table. Our cheerfulness, at first sheer reaction, becamejless forced as we ate great slices of bread from the granny oven back of the house, and drank hot fluid that smelled like coffee and tasted like nothing that I have ever swallowed. We found cream in stone jars, sunk deep in the chill water of the springhouse. And there were eggs, great yellow-brown ones— a basket of them. An. lilrr- two children awakened from * » a nightmare, we chatted over our food; w r e hunted mutual ffiends, we laughed together at my feeble witticisms, but we put the horror behind us resolute ly. After all, it was the hat with the green ribbons that brought back the strangeness of the situation. All along I had had the impression that Alison West was deliberately put ting out of her mind something that obtruded now and then. It brought with it a return Of the puzzled expres sion that I had surprised early in the day, before the wreck. I caught it once, when, breakfast over, she was tightening the sling that held the broken arm. I had prolonged the morning meal as much as I could, but when the wooden clock with the pink roses on the dial pointed to half after ten, and the mother with the duplicate youngsters had not come back, Miss West made the move I had dreaded. “If we are to get into Baltimore at a 1! we must start,” she said, rising. “You ought to see a doctor as soon as •possible.” VHush,” I said warningly. “Don’t mention the arm, please; it is asleep now. You may rouse it.” “If I only had a hat,” she reflected. “It wouldn’t need to be much of one, but—” She gave a little cry and darted to the corner. “Look,” she said triumphantly, “the very thing. With the green streamers tied up in a bow, like this —do you suppose the child would minfl? I can put $5 or so here —that would buy a dozen of them.” It was a queer affair of straw, that hat, with a round crown and a rim that flopped dismally. With a single movement she had turned it up at one side and fitted it to her head. Gro tesque by itself, when she wore it it was a thing of joy. Evidently the lack of head covering had troubled her, for she was elate - at her find. She left me, scrawling a note of thanks and pinning it with a bill to the table-cloth, and ran up stairs to the mirror and the promised soap and water. I did not see her when she came down. I had discovered a bench with a tin basin outside the kitchen door, “No, I Did Not Intend to Go Home.” and was washing, in a helpless, one sided way. I felt rather than saw that she was standing in the doorw’ay, and I made a final plunge into the basin. “How is it possible for a man with only a right hand to wash his left ear?" I asked from the roller towel. I | was distinctly uncomfortable: Men are more rigidly creatures of (conven ! tion than women, whether they admit It or not “There is so much soap on me still that if I laugh I will blow bubbles. Washing with rain water and home-made soap is like motoring on a slippery road. I only struck the high places.” Then, having achieved a brilliant , polish with the towel, I looked at the girt. She was leaning against the frame of the door, her f' ce perfectly color less, her breath coming in slow, dis ficult respirations. The erratic hat was pinned to place, but it had slid rakishly to one side. When I real ized that she was staring, not at me, but past me to the road along which we had come, I turned and followed her gaze. There was no one in sight; the lane stretched dust white in the sun—no moving figure on it, no sign of life. CHAPTER X. Miss West's Request. The surprising change in her held !me speechless. All the animation of the breakfast table was gone; there ; was no hint of the response with which, before, she had met my non ' sensical sallies. She stood there, 1 white-lipped,unsmiling, staring down j the dusty road. One hand was clench ed tight over some small object. Her ' eyes dropped to it from the distant road, and then closed, with a quick. Indrawn breath. Her color came back slowly. What ever had caused the change, she said nothing. She was anxious to leave at once, almost impatient over my de liberate masculine way of getting my things together. Afterward I recalled that I had wanted to explore'the barn for a horse and some sort of a ve hicle to tab.? hs to the trollev. and GRANT COUNTY HERALD LANCASTER, WISCONSIN, MARCH 16, 1910 that she had refused to allow me to look. I remembered many things later that might have helped me, and did not. At the time, I was only com pletely bewildered. Save the wreck, the responsibility for which lay be tween Providence and the engineer of the second section, all the events of that strange morning were logically connected; they came from one cause, and tended unerringly to one end. But the cause was buried, the end not'yet in view. Not until we had left the house well behind did the girl’s face relax its tense lines. I was watching her more closely than I had realized, for when we had gone a little way along the road she turned to me almost pet ulantly. “Please don’t stare so at me,” she said, to my sudden confusion. “I know the hat is dreadful. Green al ways makes me look ghastly.” “Perhaps it was the green.” I was unaccountably relieved. “Do you know, a few minutes ago, you looked almost pallid to me!” She glanced at me quickly, but I was gazing ahead. We were out of sight of the house, now, and with every step away from it the girl was obviously relieved. Whatever she held in her hand, she never glanced at it. But she was .conscious of it every sec ond. She seemed to come to a de cision about it while we were still in sight of the gate, for she murmured something and turned back alone, go ing swiftly, her feet stirring up small puffs of dust at every step. She fas-/ tened something to the gate post— I could see the nervous haste with which she worked. When she joined me again it was without explanation. Byt the clenched fingers were free now, and while she looked tired and worn, the strain had visibly relaxed. We walked along slowly in the gen eral direction jof the suburban trolley line. Once a man with an empty wagon offered us a lift, but after a glance at the springless vehicle I de clined. “The ends of the bone think they are castanets as it is,” I explained. “But the lady—” The young lady, however, declined and we went on together. Once, when the trolley line was in sight, she got a pebble in her low shoe, and we sat down under a tree until she found the cause of the trouble. “I —I don’t know what I should have done without you,” I blundered. “Moral support and —and all that. Do you know, my first conscious thought after the wreck was of relief that you had not been hurt?” She was sitting beside me where a big chestnut tree shaded the road, and I surpiised a look of misery on her face that certainly my words had not been meant to produce. “And my first thought,” she said slowly, “was regret that I —that I hadn’t been obliterated, blown out like a candle. Please don’t look like that! I am —only talking.” But her lips were trembling, and be- little shams of society are forgotten at times like this, I leaned over and patted her hand lightly, where it rested on the grass beside me. “You must not say those things,” T expostulated. “Perhaps, after all, your friends —” “I had no friends on the train,” Her voice was hard again, her tone final. She drew her hand from under mine, not quickly, but decisively. A car was in sight, coming toward us. The steel finger of civilization, of pro priety, of visiting cards and formal in troductions was beckoning us in. Miss West put on her shoe. We said little on the car. The few passengers stared at us frankly, and discussed the wreck, emphasizing its horrors. The girl did not seem to hear. Once she turned to me with the quick, unexpected movement that was one of her charms. “I do not wish my mother to know I was in the accident,” she said. “Will you please not tell Richey about hav ing met me?” , I gave my promise, of course. Again, when we were almost into Baltimore, she asked to examine the gun-metal cigarette case, and sat silent with it in her hands, while I told of the early morning’s events on the Ontario. “So you see,” I finished, “this grip, everything I have on, belongs to a fel low named Sullivan. He probably left the train before the wreck —perhaps just after the murder.” “And so—you think he committed the —the crime?” Her eyes were on the cigarette ease. “Naturally,” I eaid. “A man doesn’t Jump off a Pullman car In the middle of the night in another man’s clothes, unless he is trying to get away from something. Besides the dirk, there ware the stains that you saw. Why, I have the murdered man’s pocket book In this valise at my feet What does that look like?” I colored when I saw the ghost of a smile hovering around the corners of her mouth. “That is,” I finished, “if you care to believe that I am in nocent.” The sustaining chain of her small gold bag gave way just then. She did not notice it. I picked it up and slid the trinket Into my pocket for safe keeping, where I promptly forgot it Afterwards I wished I had let it lie un noticed on the floor of that dirty little suburban car, and even now, when I see a woman carelessly Wangling a similar feminine trinket I shudder in voluntarily; there comes back to me the memory of a girl’s puzzled eyes under the brim of a flopping hat, the haunting suspicion of the sleepless nights that followed. Just then I was determined that my companion should not stray back to the wreck, and to that end I was determinedly facetious. “Do you know that it is Sunday?” she asked suddenly, “and that we are actually ragged??” “Never mind that,” I retorted. “All Baltimore is aiviaea on jsunaay inio three parts, those who rise and go to church, those who rise up and read the newspapers, and those who don’t rise up. The first are somewhere be tween the creed and the sermon, and we need not worry about the others.” “You treat me like a child,” she said almost pettishly. “Don’t try so hard to be cheerful. It —it is almost ghast ly” After that I subsided like a pricked balloon, and the remainder of the ride was made in silence. The information that she would go to friends in the city was a shock; it meant an earlier separation than I had planned for. But my arm was beginning again. In putting her into a cab I struck it and gritted my teeth with the pain. It was probably for that reason that J forgot the gold bag. She leaned forward and held out her hand. “I may not have another chance to thank you,” she said, “and I think I would better not try, any how. I cannot tell you how grateful I am.” I muttered something about the gratitude being mine. Owing to the knock I was seeing two cabs, and two girls were holding out two hands. “Remember,” they were both say ing, “you have never met me, Mr. Blxkeley. And —If you ever hear any thing about me —that is not —pleasant, I want you to think the best you can of me. Will you?” The two girls were one now, with little flashes of white light playing all around. “I —I’m afraid that I shall think too well for my own good,” I said unsteadily. And the cab drove on. CHAPTER XI. The Name of Sullivan. I had my arm done up temporarily in Baltimore and took the next train home. I was pretty far gone when I stumbled out of a cab almost into the scandalized arms of Mrs. Klopton. In 15 minutes I was in bed, with that good woman piling on blankets and blistering me in unprotected places with hot-water bottles. And in an hour I had had a whiff of chloroform and Dr. Williams had set the broken bone. I dropped asleep then, waking in the late twilight to a realization that I was at home again, without the pa pers that meant conviction for Andy Bronson, with a charge of murder hanging over my head, and with some thing more than an impression of the girl my best friend was in love with, a girl moreover who whs almost as great an enigma as the crime itself. "And I’m no hand at guessing rid dles,” I groaned half aloud. Mrs. Klopton came over promptly and put a cold cloth on my forehead. “Euphemia,” she said to some one outside the door, “telephone the doc tor that he is still rambling, but that he has switched from green ribbons to riddles.” “There’s nothing the matter with me, Mrs. Klopton,” I rebelled. “I was only thinking out loud. Confound that cloth; it’s trickling all over me!” I gave it a fling, and heard it land with a soggy thud on the floor. “Thinking out loud is delirium,” Mrs. Klopton said imperturbably. “A fresh cloth, Euphemia.” This time she held it on with a firm pressure that I was too weak to re sist. I expostulated feebly that I was drowning, which she also laid to my mental exaltation, and then I finally dropped into a damp sleep. It was probably midnight when I roused again. I had been dreaming of the wreck, and it was inexpressibly com forting to feel the stability of my bed, and to realize the equal stability of Mrs. Klopton, who sat, fully attired, by the night light, reading Science and Health. “Does that book say anything about opening the windows on a hot night?” I suggested, when I had got my bear ings. * She put it down immediately and came over to me. If there is one time when Mrs. Klopton is chastened • ' /ffl 11' " i Oi B “I May Not Have Another Cha nee to Thank You.” —and it is the only o»o—it is when she reads Scioaee aad Health. “I don’t like to open the shutters, Mr. Lawrence,” she explained. "Not since the night you wont away.” But, pressed further, she refused to explain. "The doctor said you were not to be excited,” she persisted. “Here’s your beef tea.” “Not a drop until you tell me,” I said grimly. “Besides, you know very well there’s nothing the matter with me. This arm of mine is only a false belief.” I sat up gingerly. "Now — whv don’t you nnen that window?” (TO BE CONTINUED.) ♦ A Clever Writer. Patrice —"You sa ’e is a clover writer?” "Patience—“ Very. Why, I’ve known her to use a fountain pen with out getting ink all over her fingers!” i Are you ready to BRIGHTEN UP ? ? ? ? ? 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