“Let's see you write what I tell you on this,” I suggested, handing him a fountain-pen and a torn envelope, turned inside out.
Word by word after my dictation he wrote. “Until you hear from me again
Yours truly,
No Name.
I took the paper from him and studied the handwriting. “How long were you on that spree?” I asked.
“Which?” he twinkled.
“Before you came to and had but eleven thousand dollars left,” I explained. “I don't know,” he said, “I didn't know anything I had been doing.”
“I can tell you one thing you did,” I said.
“What?” he queried.
“You put four packets, each of one hundred hundred-dollar bills, in a thin manila clasp- envelope, directed it to a New York lawyer and mailed the envelope to him with no letter in it, only a half sheet of dirty paper with nothing on it except: 'Keep this for me until I ask for it,' and the signature you have just written.”
“Honest?” he enunciated incredulously. “Fact!” I said.
“Then you believe what I've told you,” he exclaimed joyfully. “Not a bit I don't,” I asseverated.
“How's that?” he asked.
“If you were drunk enough,” I explained, “to risk forty thousand dollars in that crazy way, you were drunk enough to dream all the complicated nightmare you have spun out to me.
“If I did,” he argued, “how did I get the fifty thousand odd dollars?”
“I'm willing to suppose you got it with no more dishonesty on your part,” I told him, “than if you had come by it as you described.”
“It makes me mad you won't believe me,” he said. “I don't,” I finished.
He gloomed in silence. Presently he said: “I can stand looking at him now,” and led the way to the cage where the big blue-nosed mandril chattered his inarticulate bestialities and scratched himself intermittently.
He stared at the brute. “And you don't believe me?” he regretted.
“No, I don't,” I repeated, “and I'm not going to. The thing's incredible.”
“Couldn't there be a mongrel, a hybrid?” he suggested.
“Put that out of your head,” I told him, “the whole thing's incredible.”
“Suppose she'd seen a critter like this,” he persisted, “just at the wrong time?”
“Bosh!” I said. “Old wives' tales! Superstition! Impossibility!”
“His head,” he declared, “was just like that.” He shuddered.
“Somebody put drops in some of your drink,” I suggested. “Anyhow, let's talk about something else. Come and have lunch with me.”
Over the lunch I asked him:
“What city did you like best of all you saw?”
“Paris for mine,” he grinned, “Paris forever.”
“I tell you what I advise you to do,” I said.
“What's that?” he asked, his eyes bright on mine. “Let me buy you an annuity with your forty thousand,” I explained, “an annuity payable in Paris. There's enough interest already to pay your way to Paris and leave you some cash till the first quarterly payment comes due.”
“You wouldn't feel yourself defrauding the Eversleighs?” he questioned. “If I'm defrauding any people,” I said, “I don't know who they are.”
“How about the fire?” he insisted. “I'll bet you heard of it. Don't the dates agree?”
“The dates agree,” I admitted. “And the servants were all dismissed, the remaining buildings and walls torn down and the place cut up and sold in portions just about as it would have been if your story were true.”
“There now!” he ejaculated. “You do believe me!”
“I do not!” I insisted. “And the proof is that I'm ready to carry out my annuity plan for you.”
“I agree,” he said, and stood up from the lunch table.
“Where are we going now?” he inquired as we left the restaurant.
“Just you come with me,” I told him, “and ask no questions.”
I piloted him to the Museum of Arch?ology and led him circuitously to what I meant for an experiment on him. I dwelt on other subjects nearby and waited for him to see it himself.
He saw.
He grabbed me by the arm. “That's him!” he whispered. “Not the size, but his very expression, in all his pictures.” He pointed to that magnificent, enigmatical black-diorite twelfth-dynasty statue which represents neither Anubis nor Seth, but some nameless cynocephalus god.
“That's him,” he repeated. “Look at the awful wisdom of him.” I said nothing.
“And you brought me here!” he cried. “You meant me to see this! You do believe!”
“No,” I maintained. “I do not believe.”
After I waved a farewell to him from the pier I never saw him again. We had an extensive correspondence six months later when he wanted his annuity exchanged for a joint-life annuity for himself and his bride. I arranged it for him with less difficulty than I had anticipated. His letter of thanks, explaining that a French wife was so great an economy that the shrinkage in his income was more than made up for, was the last I heard from him.
As he died more than a year ago and his widow is already married, this story can do him no harm. If the Eversleighs were defrauded they will never feel it and my conscience, at least, gives me no twinges.
Alfandega 49 A
The Alders was the last place on earth where anyone would have expected to encounter an atmosphere of tragedy and gloom. The very air of the farm seemed charged with the essence of cheerfulness and friendliness. There appeared to be diffused about the homestead some subtle influence promoting sociability and cordiality.
Perhaps it was merely that the Hibbards had miraculous luck in attracting only the right kind of boarders; possibly, they possessed an almost superhuman intuition which enabled them to avoid accepting any applicant likely to be uncongenial to the others, to themselves or to the place; maybe it was merely the personal effect of the Hibbards and of their welcome which seemed, in some magical fashion, to make all newcomers as much at home as if they had lived at the Alders from childhood. Certainly all their boarders were mutually congenial.
Never was summer-boarding-house so free from cliques, coteries, jealousies, enmities, bickerings and squabbles. The children played all day long apparently, but never seemed noisy or quarrelsome. The old ladies knitted or crocheted, teetering everlastingly in their rocking-chairs on the veranda, beaming at each other and at the landscape. The almost daily games of cards gave rise to scarcely any disputes. The folks at the Alders were very unlike an accidental gathering of summer boarders and much more resembled an unusually large and harmonious family.
This, I suppose, was due to the Hibbards' positive genius for managing a boarding-house and to their genial disposition. Naturally, from their temperament, they enjoyed it, they showed that they enjoyed it and they made everybody feel that they enjoyed it, so that each boarder felt like an invited guest.
The girls never seemed to have anything to do except to make everybody have a good time. Yet they had a great deal to do. In the heydey of the Alders the four girls divided their duties systematically.
Susie, the eldest, and the head of the house, rose early, oversaw the getting of the breakfast, and superintended everything. After dinner she always took a long rest and nap. Then, after supper, she stayed up until the last boarder had come indoors and said goodnight, chiefly occupying herself with seeing to it that all together were enjoying themselves, and each separately. She did it very well too. It was a sight to see her, the moment she was free from presiding at the supper table, appear out on the lawn or on the piazza, or in the parlor, according to the weather. She was tall, plump and handsome, held herself erect and had the art of making herself look well in very inexpensive dresses, mostly of her own devising. She was always smiling, her light brown hair haloing her face, her blue eyes shining. As she came she swept one comprehensive glance over her guests, unerringly picked out that
