At forty, then, Merlin was no different from himself at thirty-five; a larger paunch, a gray twinkling near his ears, a more certain lack of vivacity in his walk. His forty-five differed from his forty by a like margin, unless one mention a slight deafness in his left ear. But at fifty-five the process had become a chemical change of immense rapidity. Yearly he was more and more an “old man” to his family—senile almost, so far as his wife was concerned. He was by this time complete owner of the bookshop. The mysterious Mr. Moonlight Quill, dead some five years and not survived by his wife, had deeded the whole stock and store to him, and there he still spent his days, conversant now by name with almost all that man has recorded for three thousand years, a human catalogue, an authority upon tooling and binding, upon folios and first editions, an accurate inventory of a thousand authors whom he could never have understood and had certainly never read.
At sixty-five he distinctly doddered. He had assumed the melancholy habits of the aged so often portrayed by the second old man in standard Victorian comedies. He consumed vast warehouses of time searching for mislaid spectacles. He “nagged” his wife and was nagged in turn. He told the same jokes three or four times a year at the family table, and gave his son weird, impossible directions as to his conduct in life. Mentally and materially he was so entirely different from the Merlin Grainger of twenty-five that it seemed incongruous that he should bear the same name.
He worked still in the bookshop with the assistance of a youth, whom, of course, he considered very idle, indeed, and a new young woman, Miss Gaffney. Miss McCracken, ancient and unvenerable as himself, still kept the accounts. Young Arthur was gone into Wall Street to sell bonds, as all the young men seemed to be doing in that day. This, of course, was as it should be. Let old Merlin get what magic he could from his books—the place of young King Arthur was in the countinghouse.
One afternoon at four when he had slipped noiselessly up to the front of the store on his soft-soled slippers, led by a newly formed habit, of which, to be fair, he was rather ashamed, of spying upon the young man clerk, he looked casually out of the front window, straining his faded eyesight to reach the street. A limousine, large, portentous, impressive, had drawn to the curb, and the chauffeur, after dismounting and holding some sort of conversation with persons in the interior of the car, turned about and advanced in a bewildered fashion toward the entrance of the Moonlight Quill. He opened the door, shuffled in, and, glancing uncertainly at the old man in the skullcap, addressed him in a thick, murky voice, as though his words came through a fog.
“Do you—do you sell additions?”
Merlin nodded.
“The arithmetic books are in the back of the store.”
The chauffeur took off his cap and scratched a close-cropped, fuzzy head.
“Oh, naw. This I want’s a detecatif story.” He jerked a thumb back toward the limousine. “She seen it in the paper. Firs’ addition.”
Merlin’s interest quickened. Here was possibly a big sale.
“Oh, editions. Yes, we’ve advertised some firsts, but—detective stories, I—don’t—believe—What was the title?”
“I forget. About a crime.”
“About a crime. I have—well, I have ‘The Crimes of the Borgias’—full morocco, London 1769, beautifully—”
“Naw,” interrupted the chauffeur, “this was one fella did this crime. She seen you had it for sale in the paper.” He rejected several possible titles with the air of connoisseur.
“ ‘Silver Bones,’ ” he announced suddenly out of a slight pause.
“What?” demanded Merlin, suspecting that the stiffness of his sinews were being commented on.
“Silver Bones. That was the guy that done the crime.”
“Silver Bones?”
“Silver Bones. Indian, maybe.”
Merlin, stroked his grizzly cheeks. “Gees, Mister,” went on the prospective purchaser, “if you wanna save me an awful bawln’ out jes’ try an’ think. The old lady goes wile if everything don’t run smooth.”
But Merlin’s musings on the subject of Silver Bones were as futile as his obliging search through the shelves, and five minutes later a very dejected charioteer wound his way back to his mistress. Through the glass Merlin could see the visible symbols of a tremendous uproar going on in the interior of the limousine. The chauffeur made wild, appealing gestures of his innocence, evidently to no avail, for when he turned around and climbed back into the driver’s seat his expression was not a little dejected.
Then the door of the limousine opened and gave forth a pale and slender young man of about twenty, dressed in the attenuation of fashion and carrying a wisp of a cane. He entered the shop, walked past Merlin, and proceeded to take out a cigarette and light it. Merlin approached him.
“Anything I can do for you, sir?”
“Old boy,” said the youth coolly, “there are seveereal things. You can first let me smoke my ciggy in here out of sight of that old lady in the limousine, who happens to be my grandmother. Her knowledge as to whether I smoke it or not before my majority happens to be a matter of five thousand dollars to me. The second thing is that you should look up your first edition of the ‘Crime of Sylvester Bonnard’ that you advertised in last Sunday’s Times. My grandmother
