The Rest Hollow Mystery Part 16

The burly man began to walk slowly away and Kenwick fell into step beside him. "Ye-a, I've been waiting for you. And even if I hadn't been, I might have got suspicious a minute or so ago. Let me give you a tip for your own good; don't talk to yourself in public. It's a bad habit for anybody in your line of trade."

Kenwick stopped short. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, Mr. Kenwick, that you are under arrest."

The slanting pavement seemed suddenly to be moving of its own accord and Kenwick felt it carrying him along as though he were on an escalator.

Then he heard himself ask dully, "What for?"

The officer looked bored. But he stood there waiting in grim patience for his companion to regain the power of locomotion. "I asked you what for?" Kenwick repeated sharply. "You've made a mistake, but you've got to answer that question. If I'm going to be hauled into jail, the law gives me the right to know why."

"Oh, cut it out!" the other admonished. "You're surprised all right; they always are. But I'll say this for you, Mr. Kenwick, there's nothing amateurish about your work. Plans all laid to make a quiet getaway East, but no dodging around cheap lodging-houses for yours. Business as usual, and friends kept happy and unsuspecting; everything strictly on the level. You know as well as I do why I'm on your track. You're wanted for murder--for the murder of Ralph Regan."

CHAPTER XV

In the twelve hours that intervened between Roger Kenwick's arrest and his transference to the authorities at Mont-Mer, he was not allowed to see any one. As rigid a watch was kept beside his cell as though he were a hardened criminal who had on previous occasions escaped the clutches of justice. Even reporters were denied admittance, but he was permitted, in courtesy to his former position as journalist, to read the papers. In these he found, spread large upon the front pages, highly colored stories concerning his manoeuvers and final capture. Only the "Clarion's" story was conservative and hinted at a colossal mistake which would lead later to more sensational developments.

When he left San Francisco, heavily hand-cuffed, a crowd followed to the depot. The trip down the coast was uneventful, and he sat staring out of the window, recalling his former ride through that same country when the pruners had waved their shears to him in a sort of voiceless G.o.dspeed.

There were no pruners visible from the car-window now, and the stark stretches of orchard looked bleak and desolate. The bare, tangled branches of the roadside poplars showed against the dull January sky like intricate designs of lacework. They seemed to Kenwick to have lost the comforting warmth of their leaves just when they needed them most.

It was almost dusk when the train drew into Mont-Mer, and here another crowd was waiting. The engine appeared to plow its way through them.

Never had the quiet little city been so stirred. Never in all its decorous history had the white spot-light of sensationalism played upon it. It knew that its name was featured in every newspaper of the country.

And Kenwick found the Mont-Mer papers even more lavish in descriptive detail than those of the city had been. There was a picture of the murdered man and one of himself spread upon the front page of the evening sheet, and below, a cut of Rest Hollow, with the inevitable black cross marking the spot under the dining-room window where the body of Ralph Regan had been found. The morning daily matched this with a picture of the handsome Kenwick home in New York, and an account of the death, the previous spring, of Everett Kenwick and his wife, victims of influenza. As he read, Kenwick reflected that Richard Glover must have been very busy, very busy indeed since the night that they had encountered each other at the theater.

And outside the county jail the city buzzed with comment and speculation. Mont-Mer real estate men were elated over this unexpected scandal in high society which had resulted in putting their town "on the map." Better a gruesome publicity, they told each other, than no publicity at all. Tourists from Los Angeles and the near-by towns motored up during the week-end and made futile attempts to gain access to Rest Hollow. The old conservative residents of the aristocratic little city were horrified, and the colony of Eastern capitalists, who made up a large part of the suburban population, were hotly resentful of the hideous notoriety which had invaded their retreat by the sea. The two country estates that bordered Rest Hollow were put on the market at what the local realty dealers advertised as "spectacular bargains."

After the body of Ralph Regan had been exhumed and identified by the grief-stricken little woman who was his sister, the links of the chain which incriminated Kenwick seemed to fall of their own volition into place. He reviewed them himself, sitting alone in Mont-Mer's bleak little jail.

There would be first the testimony of the coroner who would describe the gunshot wound. And then the evidence that he, Kenwick, had been armed on that fatal night. The woman, or whoever it was that occupied the right wing of the house, would narrate in detail all that he had said about being a good shot and would doubtless follow this with the testimony that he was obviously looking for trouble. The revolver, which he had left on the table in the den, would add its mute confirmation of these a.s.sertions. And his own mode of departure from that house, under such circ.u.mstances, was sufficient in itself to send him to the electric chair without any further testimony. Glover would be, of course, the star witness for the State, and against his glib and convincing story would be pitted the word of a man known to have been of an unsound state of mind and never proved to have recovered from it. It was this last evidence, he knew, that would acquit him. With the brand of Cain upon his forehead he would be set free. The ghastly notoriety which he had striven, with the difficult patience of the impatient temperament, to avoid, had struck him with the force of a bomb and blown him skyward to be the cynosure of every eye. Never while the world stood could he ask Marcreta Morgan to take the name of Kenwick. Acquittal on any terms was all that most men would have asked of fate. But Kenwick was made of finer stuff. And so far as his future was concerned, he was already tried, convicted, and sentenced.

A week intervened between his arrival at Mont-Mer and the day set for the trial. During that time he knew himself to be under the most relentless surveillance. By day and by night his every act was watched.

With his food they brought him neither knife nor fork. On the second day of this startling omission he smiled grimly at the attendant. "You can tell the jailer," he said, "that he needn't be worried about me to that extent. You see, I've worn my country's uniform, and that spoils a man for taking the Dutch route."

The stolid-faced attendant looked at him without replying. Kenwick felt a sudden pity for him. "I suppose he thinks I'm likely to get violent and begin smas.h.i.+ng up things at any moment," he reflected. For in the jailer's eyes was that thing for which he had been on the watch for almost two months. He pushed away his food almost untasted. When he was left alone again he walked over to the heavily barred window and stood looking down at the court-house garden. Very gently he shook one of the iron rods. "For almost a year," he muttered. "Barred in for almost a year; and the world has no intention of ever letting me forget it."

The date-palms in the grounds below swept the wintry air with long graceful plumes. How helpless they were in the driving force of the wind! And yet they were moored to something, securely rooted. The storm might buffet but would not utterly destroy them. Down the curving path which they bordered he saw a man approaching with a flat leather case under his arm. It was Dayton, the young attorney whom the court had appointed for his defense. Kenwick, who had taken his intellectual measure at their first meeting the day before, had little faith in his legal ability. But he liked him; liked his buoyant, unspoiled personality. And Dayton was undisguisedly elated over this sudden opportunity to try his mettle in so conspicuous a case. It was the chance he had been hoping for during three years of commonplace practice.

As the prisoner heard his step in the upper corridor he turned from the window. Dayton closed the portal behind him and sat down on the edge of the narrow cot. Downstairs he had just held brief parley with the jailer. "Hasn't Kenwick got any family?" he had inquired.

The official shook his head. "As I understand it, he didn't have anybody but a brother, and he died last spring, the papers said."

"No friends either?"

"Friends? Well, he wouldn't be likely to have any, would he--a feller that's been crazy?"

"It's cursed luck!" Dayton had told him. He was still young enough to feel resentful of life's contemptuous injustices. "And he's only twenty-five; got his whole life before him. He's got to have his chance.

He's got to have a fighting chance."

As he looked at his client now, he was careful to keep anything like compa.s.sion out of his eyes. He removed a cracked pitcher full of purple asters from its perilous position at the head of the bed and swept his glance over the crude table littered with envelopes in cream and pastel shades. "Correspondence still growing?" he inquired genially.

Kenwick stacked the vari-colored missives into a pile. Most of them had been accompanied by flowers, and all were signed by society women of Mont-Mer. A few bore the more guarded signature of "A Friend," or "A Sympathizer," with initials underneath. They condoled, they admonished, they even made cautious love.

"Can you fathom it, Dayton?" the prisoner asked, weighing the correspondence in one hand as though the answer to the riddle lay in avoir-dupois. "These women think I'm guilty of murder. They all seem to think I'm guilty as h.e.l.l; and yet they send me flowers, and love-letters." He turned his back contemptuously upon the purple asters.

"It comes over me every once in a while, Dayton, that I'm not the only person in this world who has had moments of mental aberration."

The other man reached over, took up the stack of envelopes, and examined them with curious interest. Here and there he recognized a coat of arms or a monogram. "Going to answer any of them?" he queried.

"Answer them!"

"Well, most of them seem to expect a reply. You see, you really can't blame them very much, either. These women are fed up on life. They come out here every winter seeking a new sensation."

"And I am a new sensation, am I?"

"You bet you are! Why, man, you're nothing short of a G.o.dsend. And most of these people," he swept a hand over the coterie represented on the table, "are from New York themselves. They're not writing to a stranger exactly. They know who your family is--or was. They know all about you."

Kenwick's lips stiffened. "Well, they certainly have that advantage over me."

"I don't mean to imply, of course, that they've been investigating your personal history," Dayton hastened to explain. "But Kenwick is not an inconspicuous name in the East. And then you've been in the service and----"

"I'm glad you mentioned that," the prisoner cut in. "It reminds me of something I want to say to you. When you get up to talk in court, don't you make any plea for me on the grounds that I've been in the service.

That's one thing I won't stand for. The man who was in the army is a different man from the alleged murderer of Ralph Regan. I'm not going to have _his_ record smeared with this horrible thing."

Dayton dropped the letters to the table as though they had bitten him.

"Why, Mr. Kenwick! You've got a right to the consideration that would naturally----"

"If I've got a right to it, I've got a right to waive it. This country is flooded with men who expect to beat their way all through life on the plea that they've been in the service. And there's nothing so despicable on G.o.d's earth as that. I use my uniform to fight in, not to hide in.

Get me?"

Dayton was obviously crestfallen. He got up from the hard cot and stood looking at his client gravely. Kenwick gathered up the pile of envelopes. "Take this junk out of here when you go, please. And don't let them send in any more flowers. They can save those for the funeral.

But I'm not dead yet."

"You may be very soon, though, if you don't listen to sense," his adviser remarked bluntly. "I haven't wanted to get you worked up over the case, because that's poor policy and it doesn't buy us anything. But it strikes me, Mr. Kenwick, that you don't realize what a very serious position you are in."

The ghost of a smile appeared upon the prisoner's face. It was a terrible little smile, and he was not even conscious of its existence.

He was only conscious that every nerve in his body ached with weariness and that he felt faint from want of food. Two pictures were stamping themselves alternately upon his brain; the dim, sinister interior of Rest Hollow, and the fire-lighted room on Pine Street. One of these incessantly erased and superseded the other. And he knew that there could be no division of their supremacy. Only one of them might survive.

Day and night the memory of them racked his jaded brain. For the humiliation of his present position, not the ultimate outcome of the trial, burned him with a consuming flame.

As he stood now at the barred window, he was doing that thing to which, ever since his arrest, all his energies had been directed. Hour by hour, minute by minute, he was welding together the joints of an armor. With a slow but ceaseless persistence he was girding himself with a graven-faced indifference that must be his s.h.i.+eld against the barrage of the gaping, curious world. And this man, standing so close beside him, and in reality so far away that their spirits were scarcely discernible to each other in the distance was telling him that he seemed unaware of the peril of his position. That wave of deafening depression which engulfs the human soul in the moments when it realizes its utter loneliness surged over him like a tidal wave. He stood looking at Dayton and wondering what manner of man he was.

"I don't want to play up anything now that will sound like dramatics,"

the lawyer went on in a soothing voice. "But we've got to face this thing as it is. You know Glover, don't you?"

"No. But Glover knows me. He has that immense advantage. And he is using it to the full. He has been fighting a man who's got both hands tied behind him."

Dayton appeared to take new courage from this summary. "Well, I see you've got a line on his methods anyway, and that's something. That gives us our starting-point. And besides having both hands free, he's also got his eyes open. You've been blindfolded a part of the time. He never has."