And the little man, leaning forward, picked up a newspaper which lay on the table. It was the one from which, a month before, Hugh had taken his pumps and which, with artistic indifference, he had suffered to remain where it fell.
“Thundering guns!”
With the agility of a clown the little man had sprung to his feet, his eyes glued to the paper. His face was always red, but suddenly it had grown bright purple.
“What is the number of this house?” he blurted.
“Seventeen.”
“Tompkins Square?”
Hugh nodded.
“Is there anyone here by the name of Sisseton?”
“Yes,” Hugh answered, blankly astonished. “But why do you ask?”
“Where does he live? Tell me at once.”
“Over there,” Hugh replied, with a gesture. “It was with him I was talking when you came in.”
“Thundering guns!”
With the bound of a panther the little man sprang at the door and vanished downstairs, crossed the court, mounted the other stairway, the paper still in his hand and Hugh at his heels.
“It is here, isn’t it?” he cried, over his shoulder, and burst into the Sisseton parlor.
Jenny was practicing on a typewriter and her father was beating a tattoo on the window, but at the sudden eruption both started and turned.
“Are you Mr. Rufus Sisseton?” the little man gasped. Mr. Sisseton seemed incapable of reply. He looked as though paralysis was claiming him as its own. It was Jenny who answered in his stead.
“In that case,” the little man announced, “my name is John Anderson and I am—”
He had no time to add more; Mr. Sisseton uttered one faint moan, raised his hands and fell into a chair.
Jenny made a dash at him. “Papa, papa!” she cried, “what is it?”
“The end,” he groaned. “Love, matrimony, everything you have dreamed is over.”
Under Jenny’s ministrations, presently he was again on his feet, and motioning to the little man he went with him into the adjoining room.
The two lovers stared for a second into each other’s eyes. On the floor the paper lay. Hugh caught it up, and after a glance at the headlines turned to the advertisements. One of them, which he read aloud, ran as follows:
“The next of kin of Humphery Anderson, who died the 10th of June, 1880, will learn something to their advantage by addressing Mr. Rufus Sisseton, 17 Tompkins Square.”
V
“Well, sir,” said the little man, when Mr. Sisseton had closed the door. “What am I to learn to my advantage?”
At the moment Mr. Sisseton was enjoying the spectacle of that mental panorama in which the past unfolds and which is said to visit those about to drown. Ten years before, to a day, on a delightful June morning he had taken the express for Boston. Jenny was at school in a suburb of that city, and it was to see her that the excursion had been planned. He was not an accomplished traveler. Thus far his journeys—save that terrible one which we call the War—had been uneventful and few; as clerk in a wholesale grocery-shop his opportunities for travel had been slight; but a pension for which he had diligently petitioned to the Government had been granted, and to celebrate the occasion the firm he served had allowed him a holiday. On that morning he was therefore in the best of spirits, and as the train moved from the Grand Central Station he hummed very contendedly to himself. The distressing ugliness of the outlying districts were passed unmarked; it was the fragrance of Connecticut intervals that first attracted his attention; then he fell to musing about the possible existence of the people who dwelled in the roomy, white homesteads that appeared and vanished, the vocations of the loungers at the trim little stations that starred the route. A desire for life in the country beset him; he began to picture the pleasures he would enjoy on some little farm where Jenny could grow up in health and innocence, and presently his head nodded and he was asleep.
When he awoke, or perhaps it would be more exact to say when he recovered his senses, he was running like a deer across an empty field, fleeing from death and disaster. Then he had gone back, striving as best he could to aid the survivors of that collision, which, for its unparalleled horror, is cited still. There was a woman whom he had dragged from the burning wreck of a car; a child, for whose frail life he had struggled, and finally, by sheer strength, he had torn a man from a twisted seat that was holding him on a grill of flame.
The latter was dying, his face agonized, a leg broken, another charred to the bone, but even in his agony he retained his faculties.
“Take this,” he had said to his rescuer, “and give it yourself to my—”
At that the light had passed from his eyes; he was dead, and in Rufus Sisseton’s hand was a leather pocketbook on which the name Humphery Anderson shone in letters of gold.
When the old clerk reached New York his employers did not recognize him. He not only looked twenty years older, he seemed smitten with palsy. He took what money was due him, resigned his position and moved from the rooms he had occupied in St. Mark’s place to the less expensive region of Tompkins Square. He had but his pension now, and that pocketbook which contained absolutely nothing save a few memoranda and eighty-seven banknotes of the value of one thousand dollars each.
The memoranda related to the sale of a mine, but by whom or to whom there was not a word to indicate, and apart from them there was merely the name in gilt letters to show the
