The Incredulity of Father Brown

buttoned up tight in an elegant overcoat with strips of astrachan. The eager face and brilliant eyes of Wynd, on the other hand were in the full light from the other window overlooking the little garden, for his chair and desk stood facing it; and though the face was preoccupied, it did not seem unduly preoccupied about the millionaire. Wynd’s valet or personal servant, a big, powerful man with flat fair hair, was standing behind his master’s desk holding a sheaf of letters; and Wynd’s private secretary, a neat, red-haired youth with a sharp face, had his hand already on the door handle, as if guessing some purpose or obeying some gesture of his employer. The room was not only neat, but austere to the point of emptiness; for Wynd, with characteristic thoroughness, had rented the whole floor above, and turned it into a loft or storeroom, where all his other papers and possessions were stacked in boxes and corded bales.

“Give these to the floor-clerk, Wilson,” said Wynd to the servant holding the letters, “and then get me the pamphlet on the Minneapolis Night Clubs; you’ll find it in the bundle marked G. I shall want it in half an hour, but don’t disturb me till then. Well, Mr. Vandam, I think your proposition sounds very promising; but I can’t give a final answer till I’ve seen the report. It ought to reach me tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll phone you at once. I’m sorry I can’t say anything more definite just now.”

Mr. Vandam seemed to feel that this was something like a polite dismissal; and his sallow, saturnine face suggested that he found a certain irony in the fact.

“Well, I suppose I must be going,” he said.

“Very good of you to call, Mr. Vandam,” said Wynd, politely; “you will excuse my not coming out, as I’ve something here I must fix at once. Fenner,” he added to the secretary, “show Mr. Vandam to his car, and don’t come back again for half an hour. I’ve something here I want to work out by myself; after that I shall want you.”

The three men went out into the hallway together, closing the door behind them. The big servant, Wilson, was turning down the hallway in the direction of the floor-clerk and the other two moving in the opposite direction towards the lift; for Wynd’s apartment was high up on the fourteenth floor. They had hardly gone a yard from the closed door when they became conscious that the corridor was filled with a marching and even magnificent figure. The man was very tall and broad-shouldered, his bulk being the more conspicuous for being clad in white or a light grey that looked like it, with a very wide white panama hat and an almost equally wide fringe or halo of almost equally white hair. Set in this aureole his face was strong and handsome, like that of a Roman emperor, save that there was something more than boyish, something a little childish, about the brightness of his eyes and the beatitude of his smile.

“Mr. Warren Wynd in?” he asked, in hearty tones.

“Mr. Warren Wynd is engaged,” said Fenner; “he must not be disturbed on any account. I may say I am his secretary and can take any message.”

“Mr. Warren Wynd is not at home to the Pope or the Crowned Heads,” said Vandam, the oil magnate, with sour satire. “Mr. Warren Wynd is mighty particular. I went in there to hand him over a trifle of twenty thousand dollars on certain conditions; and he told me to call again like as if I was a call-boy.”

“It’s a fine thing to be a boy,” said the stranger, “and a finer to have a call; and I’ve got a call he’s just got to listen to. It’s a call out of the great good country out West where the real American is being made while you’re all snoring. Just tell him that Art Alboin of Oklahoma City has come to convert him.”

“I tell you nobody can see him,” said the red-haired secretary sharply. “He has given orders that he is not to be disturbed for half an hour.”

“You folks down East are all against being disturbed,” said the breezy Mr. Alboin, “but I calculate there’s a big breeze getting up in the West that will have to disturb you. He’s been figuring out how much money must go to this and that stuffy old religion; but I tell you any scheme that leaves out the new Great Spirit movement in Texas and Oklahoma, is leaving out the religion of the future.”

“Oh, I’ve sized up those religions of the future,” said the millionaire, contemptuously. “I’ve been through them with a tooth-comb; and they’re as mangy as yellow dog. There was that woman called herself Sophia; ought to have called herself Sapphira, I reckon. Just a plum fraud. Strings tied to all the tables and tambourines. Then there were the Invisible Life bunch; said they could vanish when they liked, and they did vanish, too, and a hundred thousand of my dollars vanished with them. I knew Jupiter Jesus out in Denver; saw him for weeks on end; and he was just a common crook. So was the Patagonian Prophet; you bet he’s made a bolt for Patagonia. No, I’m through with all that; from now on I only believe what I see. I believe they call it being an atheist.”

“I guess you got me wrong,” said the man from Oklahoma, almost eagerly. “I guess I’m as much of an atheist as you are. No supernatural or superstitious stuff in our movement; just plain science. The only real right science is just health, and the only real right health is just breathing. Fill your lungs with the wide air of the prairie and you could blow all your old eastern cities into the sea. You could just puff away their biggest men like thistledown. That’s what we do in the new movement out home: we