Children of the Whirlwind Part 50

"I sized you up for that kind of rat and was watching you," continued Joe in his same awful grimness. "I'm not going to shoot you, unless you make me. I'm going to twist that pretty neck of yours. But first, out with anything you've got to say for yourself!"

"I haven't had anything to do with this business," said Barney, trying to affect a bold manner.

"You lie! I know that in this game against d.i.c.k Sherwood, in which you used my girl, you were the real leader!"

"Well--even if I did use your girl, I only used her the way I found her."

"You lie again! I know how your kind work: cleverly putting crooked ideas into girls' minds, and exciting their imagination, so they'll work with you. Your case is closed." He turned to his one-time friend. "What have you got to say for yourself, Jimmie Carlisle?"

Old Jimmie believed that his last hour was come. He showed something of the defiant, almost maniacal courage of a coward who realizes he can retreat no farther.

"What I got to say, Joe Ellison," he snarled in a sudden rage which bared his yellow teeth, "is that I'm even with you at last!"

"Even with me? What for?"

"For the way you double-crossed me in nineteen-one in that Gordon business. You never gave me a dime--said the thing had fallen down--yet I know there was a big haul!"

"I told you the truth. That Gordon thing was a fizzle."

"There's where you're lying! It was a clean-up! And I knew you'd been cheating me out of my share in other deals!"

"You're absolutely wrong, Jimmie Carlisle. But if you thought that, why didn't you have it out with me at the time?"

"Because I knew you would lie! You were a better talker than I was, and since our outfit always sided with you, I knew I wouldn't have a chance then. But I reasoned that if I kept quiet and kept on being your friend, I'd get my chance to get even if I waited awhile. I waited--and I certainly got my chance!"

"Go on, Jimmie Carlisle!"

And Old Jimmie went on--a startlingly different Old Jimmie, his pent-up evil now loosed into quivering, malignant triumph; went on with the feverish exultation of a twisted, perverted mind that has brooded long over an imagined injustice, that has brooded greedily and long in private over his revenge, and at last has his chance to gloat in the open.

"When you were sent away, Joe Ellison, and turned over your daughter to me with those orders about seeing that she was brought up as a decent girl, I began to see the big chance I'd been waiting for. I asked myself, What is the dearest thing in the world to Joe Ellison? The answer was, this idea he'd got about his girl. I asked myself, What is the biggest way I can get even with Joe Ellison? The answer was, to make Joe Ellison believe all the time he's in stir that his girl is growing up the way he wants her to be and yet to bring her up the exact thing he didn't want her to be. And that's exactly what I did!"

"You--did--such a thing?" breathed Joe Ellison, almost incredulous.

"That's exactly what I did!" Old Jimmie went on, gloatingly. "It was easy. No one knew you had a daughter, so I pa.s.sed her off as my own baby by a marriage I'd not told any one about. I saw that she always lived among crooks, looked at things the way crooks do, and grew up with no other thought than to be a crook. I never had an idea of using her myself, till she began to look like such a good performer this last year; and then my idea, no matter what Barney Palmer may have planned, was to use her only in a couple of stunts. My main idea always was, when you came out with your grand idea of what your girl had grown up to be, for you suddenly to see your girl, and know her as your girl, and know her to be a crook. That smash to you was the big thing to me--what I'd planned for, and waited for. I didn't expect the blow-off to come like this; I didn't expect to be caught in it when it did happen. But since it has happened, well--There's your daughter, Joe Ellison! Look at her!

Look at what I've made her! I guess I'm even all right!"

"My G.o.d!" breathed Joe Ellison, staring at the lean face twisting with triumphant malignancy. "I didn't think there could be such a man!"

He slowly turned upon Maggie. This was the first direct recognition he had taken of her since his entrance.

"I don't suppose you can guess what your being what you are has meant to me," he began in a numbed tone which grew accusingly harsh as he continued. "But I'd think that a daughter of mine, with such a mother, would have had more instinctive sense than to have gone into such a game with such a pair of crooks!"

"It's true--I have been what you think me--I did go into this thing against d.i.c.k Sherwood," Maggie responded in a voice that at first was faltering, then that stumbled rapidly on in her eagerness to pour out all the facts. "But--but Larry Brainard had kept after me--and finally he made me see how wrong I was headed. And then, this afternoon, before I spoke to you, Larry told me that you were my real father. When I learned the truth--how I had been cheated out of being something else--how I was the exact opposite of what you had wanted me to be and believed me to be--I felt about it almost exactly as you feel about it.

I--I made up my mind to clear up at once all the wrong I was responsible for--and then disappear in such a way that you'd never have your dream of me spoiled. And so--and so this afternoon, after I left Cedar Crest, I confessed the whole truth to d.i.c.k Sherwood--about our plan to cheat him. And like the really splendid fellow he is, d.i.c.k Sherwood offered to help me set straight the things I wanted to set straight. Particularly to clear Larry Brainard. And so my being here as you find me is part of a plan between d.i.c.k Sherwood and myself. It's really a frame-up. A frame-up to catch Barney Palmer and Jimmie Carlisle."

"A frame-up!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed these two in startled unison.

"How a frame-up?" demanded her father, no bit of the accusing harshness gone out of his voice.

"Our plan against d.i.c.k Sherwood was to have him propose to me, then for me to confess that I was really married to a mean sort of man I didn't love--the idea being that d.i.c.k would be infatuated enough to pay a big sum to a dummy husband, and the three of us would disappear as soon as we got d.i.c.k's money. d.i.c.k offered to go through with the plan as Barney Palmer and Jimmie Carlisle had shaped it up--go through with it to-night--and then after money had pa.s.sed, we'd have a criminal case against them. By reminding him that Larry Brainard knew just what we were up to, and might spoil everything if we didn't act at once, I got Barney Palmer worked up to the point where he was going to pose as my husband and take the money. d.i.c.k Sherwood was to come a little later, after he'd first telephoned me, with a big roll of marked money."

There were stuttered exclamations from Barney and Old Jimmie, which were cut off by the dominant incisiveness of Joe Ellison's words to his daughter:

"I think you're lying to me! Besides, even if you're telling the truth, it's a pretty way you've taken to clear things up! Don't you see that by letting d.i.c.k Sherwood come here and play such a part, you'd be dead sure to involve him and his family in a dirty police story that the papers of the whole country would play up as a sensation? It's plain to any one that that's no way a person who wanted to square things would use d.i.c.k Sherwood. And that's why I think you're lying!"

"I had thought of that--you're right," said Maggie. "And so I wasn't going to do it. He was going to telephone me--just about this time--and when he called up I was going to fake his message. I was going to tell Barney Palmer and Old Jimmie that d.i.c.k had just telephoned he wasn't coming, because one of the two had just sold him a tip for ten thousand dollars that this was a crooked game. I thought this would have started a quarrel between the two; they are suspicious of each other, anyhow.

Each would have accused the other, and in their quarrel they would have been likely to have let out a lot of truth that would have completely given each other away."

"Not a bad plan at all," commented Joe Ellison. He tried to peer deep into his daughter for a moment, his inflamed face relaxing neither in its harshness nor its doubt of her. "But since you are the clever crook I actually know you to be from your work on d.i.c.k Sherwood, and since Jimmie Carlisle says he has trained you to be a crook, I believe that everything you've told me is just something you've cleverly invented on the spur of the moment--just so many lies."

"But--but--"

She broke off before the harsh, accusing doubt of his pale face. For a fraction of a moment no one spoke. Then the telephone bell began to ring.

"d.i.c.k!" breathed Maggie, and started for the telephone.

"Stay right where you are!" her father ordered. "I'll answer that telephone myself, and see whether you're lying to me about d.i.c.k Sherwood!... No, we'll do this together. I'll hold the receiver and hear what he says. You'll do the talking and you'll answer just what I tell you to, and you'll keep your hand tight over the mouthpiece while I'm giving you your orders. You two"--to Barney and Old Jimmie, with a significant movement of Barney's automatic--"you'd better behave while this telephone business is going on."

The next moment Larry was hearing, or rather witnessing, the strangest telephone conversation of his experience. Maggie was holding the transmitter, and Joe had the receiver at his ears, grimly covering the two men with the automatic. Maggie obediently kept her palm tight over the mouthpiece during Joe's brief whispered directions, and no one in the room except Joe, not even Maggie, had the slightest idea of what was really pa.s.sing over the wires.

What Larry heard was no more than a dozen most commonplace words in the world, transformed into the most absorbing words in the language. Joe ordered Maggie to answer with "h.e.l.lo" in her usual tone, which she did, and Joe, after a startled expression at the first words that came over the wire, listened with immobile face for four or five seconds. Then he nodded imperatively to Maggie and she put her hand over the mouthpiece.

"Ask him how much, and when he wanted it to be paid," he ordered.

"How much, and when does he want it to be paid?" repeated Maggie.

Again Joe listened for several moments; and then ordered as before: "Say 'Yes.'"

"Yes," said Maggie.

Another period of waiting, and Joe ordered: "Say, 'I've got a much better plan that supersedes the old.'"

"I've got a much better plan that supersedes the old."

There was yet another period of waiting, then Joe commanded: "Tell him he really mustn't and say good-bye quick."

"You really mustn't! Good-bye!"

The instant her "Good-bye" was out of her mouth Joe clicked the receiver upon its hook, and stood regarding the breathless Maggie. His pale, stern face was not quite so severe as before. Presently he spoke: "I know now that you really were sick of what you'd been trying to do--that you'd really broken away from these two--that you'd really confessed to d.i.c.k, and are now all square with him."

The word "Father!" struggled chokingly toward her lips. But she only said:

"I'm glad--you know."

"And you were shrewd in that guess you made of what one of these two would do." Joe crossed back to Barney and Old Jimmie. "You two must have been almighty afraid, because of Larry Brainard, that your game was suddenly collapsing, and each must have been trying to grab a piece for himself before he ran away."

"What you talking about?" gruffly demanded Barney.