# The House of Intrigue/Chapter 4
### CHAPTER FOUR

I SIGHED heavily, as I sat there on my park bench, not so much at that long retrospect of a wasted young life, but more at the discovery that I was as hungry as a cracker's hound. And I also remembered that I'd surely enjoy a respectably long walk before stumbling over my next meal.
Post-mortems, as a rule, are apt to be depressing. And I'd reviewed my past and worried my brain until I was tired, yet it didn't seem to throw any light on the dilemma that still confronted me. It wasn't my nature, I know, to be morbid, but when you've got a past that you can't walk through without wearing shin-pads, it's better to keep to the open. What was over was over, and instead of carrying wreaths to the cemetery, I told that hungry soul which is so often the stepsister of a hungry body, it behooved me to hie to a lunchery where I could partake of Hamburger steak and hot coffee.
So I got up from my bench and started eastward toward Fifth Avenue. I moved quickly along the lonely walks, for the evening air had given me a ​sense of chilliness and the thought of hot coffee was a spur to my steps.
I was almost at the avenue when I became aware of a certain fact. Yet it was not a fact. It was more a surmise, the same as you see a lightning flash with your eyes shut. Some one was following me.
I did not look back until I had dodged a bus and a covey of motor-cars scurrying northward to home and dinner. Then I walked south a block, and turned east again. Then what had at first only been a question grew into a suspicion, and the suspicion merged into a certainty. I was being followed. And the cave-woman who still housed inside my twentieth-century skin sounded a second alarm to me in the shape of a sudden little tingle of nerve-ends.
I stopped and stared up at a house-number. The man who was shadowing me came closer, hesitated for a moment, passed by, and plainly slackened his pace.
I still found it hard to believe that I was his quarry. So, to try him out, I swung about and started in the opposite direction. The moment he saw my move, he did the same. I even crossed the street at the next corner and doubled on my tracks. ​The man followed me, not a hundred steps behind. Big Ben Locke, I promptly decided, was having me "tailed."
Then I swung about, and calmly sized up my shadower. It gave me a start to see that it was the same weasel- faced little old man who had watched me in the elevator of the Asteroid Theater Building.
I recognized the rusty black. Then I remembered the narrow-set eyes and the pinched old face and the air of shabby and shuffling gentility. Yet, transparent as were his movements as a tailer, there was a note of determination in those same movements, a rat-like furtiveness which made him almost funny. But if Big Ben and his office were sending out that sort of operative to shadow my steps, I decided, they might as well announce it in a sky-sign. A runaway baby from the Mall would have known what was after it, in a chase like that. And when you've chicken-stalled up and down a country you kind of get the habit of watching the rear view in your off moments, the same as a robin does, no matter how thick the angle-worms may be.
Yet I prided myself on knowing all the operatives In Locke's offices, and I felt sure this old man who walked as though he had chalk in his joints wasn't one of them. He couldn't be one of them. So the ​rage which had burned up in me at Big Ben Locke suddenly focused itself on that wizened old gumshoe who had the impertinence to follow me for two hours about the city.
It wasn't until I stopped short for the second time, and he came ambling up, preening himself as he came, that it occurred to me my annoyer might be nothing more than a senile old lady-killer dreaming he was running down a wanderer from the squab-dumps. And the mere thought of this made me madder than ever.
He was almost up to me by this time, walking mincingly. I was so hot that I could hear my blood boil in my ears. But I walked on again, waiting until he was almost by my side.
Then I swung about on him. I must have looked like a wild-cat with bells on. I'd had too much of men for that one day.
"How dare you try to follow me, you old hound?"
He stopped up short, with a sort of startled wince.
"Oh, I say!" he squeaked, in a thin little voice, blinking at me reprovingly from under his rusty hat-rim.
"How dare you follow me?" I repeated. There must have been a look of desperation in my eyes, ​for he began to back away, a shuffling step at a time. But his thin old weasel face was still studying my face.
"Really, you know, I wouldn't harm you for the world," he argued. "Nothing was—"
But I cut him short.
"And how dare you speak to me?" I continued, still in my white heat of indignation. I was in a rage at the whole world. And he was all I had to take it out on.
"But, my dear young lady, I'm compelled to speak to you," persisted that weasel-faced old man, with his shoulders uplifted and a sort of apologetic blink about his wistful old eyes. I noticed, for the first time, the look of strained anxiety, of hungry eagerness, which made those deep-set old eyes rather remarkable. But the rest of the face was as hard as nails.
"What compels you to?" I demanded, staring back at him. There was a sneer in my question, but it didn't seem to jolt him in the least. "What do you want, anyway?" I asked with all the world-weariness I could possibly throw into the question.
I began to realize that I wasn't being buzzed over by an zooing-bug. The old man, I began to see, was something more than a street masher. But he ​seemed to find it hard to explain just what his business might be.
* T wanted to—" Then he stopped short, as though the look of belligerency on my face left him a little doubtful as to what extremes I might go. Then he peered up and down the street, to make sure we were alone. Then he took a step closer to me. "The—the truth is I—er—wanted to explain something—something which, I am afraid, is not going to prove easy of explanation."
"Then why take the chance?" I curtly inquired, for I was still an enemy to everything in shoe-leather.
But with all his timidity he had no intention of being side-tracked by any mere display of bad temper. And it wasn't so easy to stay in a rage at that funny little man with the ferrety gray eyes. That much I was discovering, even against my will.
"Because I think you are in rather desperate straits, and I want to help you," he explained. The old idiot had apparently thought I was considering the movie-stunt of taking a header into one of the park-lakes. Life may have looked anything but promising on that particular evening, but I certainly had no intention of messing up my permanent-wave with pond-weeds.
​"And what d' you expect to get out of it?" I inquired. My iciness didn't seem to affect him.
"I expect your help in return," he told me.
I looked him over, from top to toe.
"Say, what's your game, anyway?" I demanded. I think he even chuckled a little.
"It's a most unusual game, I'll acknowledge," was his retort. "And it offers you a chance for a most unusual reward."
"In this world, or the next?" I inquired.
"The one we still occupy is the only one we need take into our active consideration," he retorted, with a touch of tartness.
"And what shape will the reward take?" I pursued, still trying to size him up. I noticed, as he took off his hat in his excited solemnity, that a fringe of silvery hair ringed his bald little head, giving him the disturbing and altogether incongruous effect of wearing a halo. At first sight it made him look saintly. But at a second glance it seemed simply to make him foolish, for there was little of the stained-glass-window effect about the face of that old fox with the scheming eyes. His thin lips, puckered close to his teeth as though he were forever holding pins in his mouth, even had a touch of cruelty about them.
​"What shape will the reward take?" I repeated.
"Any shape you may desire," he finally replied.
"Well, when I work I usually work for money!"
"Then money it shall be," was his prompt reply. "The question is, what amount would you expect for a couple of hours of work?"
"But what kind of work?" I repeated.
He hesitated for a moment. His ferrety eyes grew narrower.
"The attesting of a document," he explained, with an effort at a shrug, as though to intimate that all such details were insignificant.
"Attesting? What do you mean by attesting?" I promptly inquired.
"Well, perhaps the signing of a document would cover the case better," he meekly explained.
"But what good would my name be on any such document?" I demanded.
"None whatever," he acknowledged. "So it may be necessary for you to use a name not your own."
He waited, to make sure what effect this would have on me. And I began to see light.
"Say, mister, my middle name is Jeremiah when it comes to putting one over on the penal code."
"But this wouldn't be forgery," he calmly explained.
​"Why not?"
"Because you would really be the owner of the signature you might use!" he had the brazenness to try to tell me.
"I'd be the owner, you say, of somebody else's signature?" I snorted.
"For the time being, at least," he announced.
"Might I, now! And wouldn't even that be what you'd call impersonation?"
"It might be called that."
"And what would save us from getting in Dutch, doing a stunt like that?" I asked, trying to let him see, by my talk, that I wasn't the lambkin he might have taken me for.
"You would," was his reply. He had his nerve, that old codger, and I take off my hat to any man with nerve.
"How?"
"By acting as the clever young woman you are?"
"I guess I'm not so clever, or I wouldn't be out of a job," I told him, as certain events of that afternoon suddenly flashed back on my mind.
"It will be a long time before you will need another," he calmly informed me.
"Why?"
'Because you will be so well paid for this one!" ​he explained, with all the placidity of a floor-boss to a factory hand. Then he moved forward a little, with a sign for me to follow. "Will you be so good as to walk beside me, toward the east here," he went on in a lowered voice. "For I preceive a stranger approaching. And this is a case where caution is of great value."
Absurd as the whole thing was, I was beginning to be interested. So I swung in beside him as we moved on down the quiet canyon of the twilit side street. He kept walking faster and faster, until it took an effort for me to keep up with him.
"What is this, anyway?" I finally inquired. "A marathon or a free-for-all?"
"Oh, I beg your pardon," said the little old geeser, pulling up. "I must have been thinking of other things!"
We were walking eastward down a side street that was all Indiana limestone and swell-front. The neighborhood, I could see, was what Bud would have called a cuff-shooter colony. I could also see that the little two-legged rat was heading for his lair, wherever that might be, and not just meandering along to kill time. And I resented the fact that I was following him as meek as a French poodle on a ribbon-leash.
​"What are we steering for, anyway?" I asked him.
"For a place where we can talk this out in quietness," was his reply. I came to a stop. That was the second time, within the last few hours, that I had experienced a designing man advocating the advantages of quietude. And solitude of that sort held no charm for me.
"We can talk it out right here. But about the only thing that can talk with me is kudos, known to the mob as money!"
I found it easier to talk to him in the lingo of the underworld, for the situation seemed to smack more of the Eighth Ward than of Upper Fifth Avenue.
His ferrety little face lightened with comprehension. Then he studied my own face, critically, as though he were making some final decision as to whether or not I was going to fill the bill. The result of that scrutiny seemed a satisfactory one.
"Then the matter is easily settled," he announced. "Would five hundred dollars seem reasonable for your hour or two of quite leisurely activity?"
I was staggered, but I tried not to show it. It was, in fact, my turn to shrug.
"That's got to include sleeper and first-class fare to Frisco," I amended.
​The little old man's face positively beamed at this.
"Five hundred dollars with fare and Pullman berth to San Francisco," he agreed. "Or say six hundred dollars in cash, if you'd prefer it that way."
"In cash sounds good," I announced, blinking at him with bland expectancy. But he intended to nail me down before I could hit the pay-car. And the thought that I was eager to fly on to Frisco had given him great satisfaction. That was a point which did not altogether escape me.
"We'll just step in here, where we can talk things over quietly," he explained, as smooth as oil. He swung me about into the side entrance of a marble corniced mansion that looked like the home of a Pittsburgh millionaire. It was a palace, all right, but a palace with a sour-map, for every blind was down and every curtain drawn. There was not a sign of life in all that house-front.
But the little old ferret whipped out a pass-key and ushered me in through a narrow oak door with heavy scrolled hinges. He touched a button and a light showed. Then he turned and relocked the door, this time by sliding a Ruskin bronze bolt. But Still not a sign of life showed in that house. ​And I was beginning to get a chill from my Achilles tendon up. I suddenly remembered that I was ignorant of both the street and the number of the house that I had entered. But I decided to sit tight, and see the game out, whatever it might prove to be.
"This way," said the little old man at my side, swinging open a door.
I let him go first. I had my second wind of courage by this time, and somewhere just behind my frontal bone curiosity was burning like a head-light. I even forgot about being hungry. For a stronger appetite had asserted itself. I could hear the lights being switched on. And I was able to smile as I stepped into the room.
The ferrety little eyes regarded me with a sort of studious satisfaction.
"You've got grit," announced my guide, rubbing his bony old hands together.
"Sure I've got grit," I calmly acknowledged, "or I wouldn't fall for a Black Hand frame-up like this!"
He chuckled and wheezed at that speech of mine. But there was no mirth in his laugh.
"My dear young lady, this is anything but what ​you have designated it. It is, on the contrary, a movement that is essentially benevolent—essentially benevolent."
"That's what I've been waiting to hear about," I told him, staring around the room. They were no pikers, the people who'd furnished that room. It had a Belasco stage-setting all to the Cammenbert. And if she didn't peter out as one went upward, that mansion was sure the abode of some fine old mahogany and teak-wood!
My guide waved me into a chair. I made myself comfortable, watching him as he scratched his bony forehead with the tip of his forefinger. He was getting ready, apparently, for his high dive.
"You are an intelligent girl," he said, speaking now, as he had done before, in a carefully lowered voice. "I saw that, at the first glance. And I also saw that you were a girl who could be trusted. So I might say that the most difficult part of your work, to-night, will simply be keeping your mouth shut."
"I thank you for those kind words," I said, clearly puzzling him a little by my careless grin. "And I guess I understand about keeping the lid on. But I'd like to understand about the side-lines."
"You mean about what you are expected to do?"
​"Exactly!"
"We merely want you to go to bed and rest—rest as though you were in your own home," he announced, washing his hands with invisible soap.
"And then what?"
The shrewd old eyes studied me closely.
"You see, you are a tired girl, very tired! A doctor, one of the best doctors in New York, will be here to make you comfortable. Then a document will be brought to you to sign. You will do this, and before midnight a closed carriage will take you to the Grand Central Station, you and your six hundred dollars."
I tried to put this all in order, at the back of my head.
"And what name must I sign to that document?" I inquired.
For nearly a second or two the old man hesitated.
"Clarissa Rhinelander Bartlett," he said.
He watched my face intently. A look of relief crept into his eyes when he realized that the name meant nothing to me. He even began to wash his hands again with that invisible soap of his.
"And who is this Clarissa Rhinelander Bartlett?" I asked. And still again the shifty-eyed old rat hesitated for a moment or two.
​"She is the owner of this house," he finally acknowledged.
"And why should I be asked to forge her name?" was my next question.
He raised one hand, reprovingly, and blinked at me over the ends of his fingers. My use of the word "forge" seemed to shock him a little. He fumbled for a moment or two in his pocket. Then he produced a folded slip of paper.
"I have here," he said, as he unfolded this paper, "a duly executed power of attorney, permitting you to exercise that right of signature."
I had to hold my mouth straight. But I looked the document over carefully as he held it up to me. He might have fooled a seven-year-old child with that trumped-up blind. But as I had said before, my middle name was Jeremiah with that old rogue.
"But I am not Margaret Hueffer, and this power of attorney has been made out to her," I blandly protested.
He smiled mirthlessly, though triumphantly.
"But notice the words 'or bearer.' Margaret Hueffer or bearer! And clearly you will be the bearer. So that, my dear young lady, makes everything plain sailing for you, perfectly plain sailing. But this is not the point. The point is in the signa​ture itself. I mean to say well—er—the fact is, or rather, the question is, can you write a reasonably convincing copy of that signature?"
I leaned over the paper again, to hide my face from his cork-screw little eyes. The situation, at every step, was getting more and still more interesting.
"Yes, I could do that name to a turn," I admitted. "But five or ten minutes' practise would make it safer, I suppose."
He wagged his bony head at my sagacity.
"The fact of your illness, of course, will make the situation a very much easier one to handle. A dying woman, you see, doesn't always write copper-plate."
I sat straight up.
"So I'm a dying woman, am I?" I asked, staring him straight in the eye.
"You are not, of course," he explained, "but the woman you are acting for may safely be presumed to be in that condition."
"And where is that woman?"
"Right here in this house."
"Then why can't she sign her own papers?"
Still again the barricaded look came in his shifty little eyes.
​"She is not in a position to," he said. I saw his jaws set like a nut-cracker. But I didn't think much about his jaws, at the moment, for I was busy putting two and two together. It took me some time to work out that little sum. But I did my best to get it straight.
"You mean Clarissa Bartlett is lying up-stairs in bed, on the point of death, and that she simply refuses to sign the will you want her to!"
He sat there blinking. Then he took his turn at looking me square in the eye.
"My dear young lady, you are clever beyond your years! You have plainly seen much of the world, and it has brought you wisdom."
"Oh, I'm not such a wise baby," I flippantly interrupted.
"You are more than wise; you are clever," he protested. "And the crown of cleverness is the acquisition of its material rewards."
"Well, that's what I'm after," was my next mock-flippant retort.
"Precisely," he said, "and that is a question which we may as well settle now, without further loss of time."
I watched him as he took a plump and shiny bill-fold from his inner breast pocket. Then he slowly ​and carefully counted out six one-hundred-dollar bank-notes.
I looked at them hard, for it's seldom in this life that money, real money, comes to you as at that moment it seemed to be coming to me. I knew enough of the life of the wild to know that it seldom dealt in such things. The timber-wolves of the underworld were always ready enough to pass out promises; they were always ready to slip the gilded brick into your unsuspecting mitt. They were always long on pretensions and promises, but always short on performances. Yet here was a little old scoundrel of the first water actually flagging me with real money. He was flaunting it openly in my face. And that was enough to ballyhoo aloud to the world that the case was a most exceptional one.
"Six hundred dollars," the little old codger repeated, as solemn as an owl, as he handed the six bank-notes over to me.
I took them without a smile. Then I counted them and still again made sure they weren't stage-money, and then backed discreetly away. I did this for the purpose of stowing that windfall deep down in my stocking top.
The little old rat, while I was doing this, stared pointedly up at the ceiling, with his clustered finger​tips rather fastidiously held over his lips. That lisle-thread national bank was plainly something quite new to him.
The next moment, however, I looked up at him sharply. He had not been as embarrassed, I discovered, as I had imagined.
"Why did you ring that bell?" I demanded, for with all that outward air of flippancy I was inwardly as nervous as a cat in a strange garret. And I had seen him quietly reach out and touch a push-button.
"Because we haven't a great deal of time to waste, young lady," was his placid enough response.
But I had no chance to question him as to the cause of his hurry, for at that moment an interruption came. It came in the form of a footman, or perhaps it was a butler, who silently and quietly opened the door in front of me. Never, even on the stage, had I ever clapped eyes on anything like that figure. He reminded me of a human peacock. He was arrayed in a claret-colored coat and knee-breeches, with a silk waistcoat and white stockings and pumps. There were monogramed metal buttons all over the coat and vest, and next to a circus-float he was the most magnificent thing that ever moved through life.
I backed discreetly away to store them in my stocking
"Why in damnation, sir, should I be kept waiting like this?" demanded the newcomer in a thin squeak of a voice that reminded me of a wheel badly in need of oil. It was a thinner voice even than the other's, though those two strange figures had so much in common that I instantly took them to be brothers. The newcomer, however, had a touch of brown in his make-up. Instead of reminding me of a weasel, he reminded me more of a chipmunk, or a red squirrel. His lean old throat was more pendulous than his brother's, his hunched-up shoulders were narrower, and his hearing seemed bad, for from time to time, I noticed, he kept cupping his left hand behind his ear, as though straining to catch what was being said to him.
​"Why bark at me?" asked the other old man, with a good deal of heat. "What have I done to keep you waiting?"
The other old autocrat gave an impatient snap of his fingers.
"But, gad, sir, they're all here—all here like a pack of blood-hounds sniffing about the trail!"
"Where have you got 'em?"
"How's that?" demanded the other, with his hand behind his ear.
"I say where have you got 'em?" shouted his brother.
"In the big drawing-room—herded there like buzzards on a housetop!"
"I know, I know," was the other's half-impatient retort as he turned back to me. But he did not speak, for as he was about to do so still another figure hurriedly stepped into the room. He stopped short as he saw me. It was plain he had not counted on my presence there.
"Well, Doctor?" snapped out the little man beside me. And the other little man, with his head on one side, stood with cupped hand to catch what might take place.
The man who had been addressed as doctor, I noticed, was a good six feet in height and built on ​the massive lines of a well-fed pork-butcher. His face was blond and fat and his rather watery gray-blue eyes weren't the kind you'd want to trust in the dark. His forehead was wet with perspiration, and he was breathing hard, as though he had been running and had no love for the game. With a quick gesture of his huge arms he motioned away the crimson-rambler butler who had stalked into the room after him. Then, still staring at me, he hurriedly mopped his face with a large handkerchief.
"Well?" repeated the old weasel at my side, as the latest arrival stood there struggling to recover his breath.
"Yes—well?" echoed the old red squirrel at the other end of the room.
"Quick, both of you," said the doctor, making a motion for them to withdraw beyond the still open door.
"But what's happened, what's wrong?" demanded the brisker of the two old brothers. For I was sure by this time that they were brothers. The scrawnier one with the hunched-up shoulders, I noticed, had slipped over to the second door through which I had entered the room. I saw him lock that door and quietly pocket the key. And I remembered that it marked my only visible avenue of escape.
​"Come outside," commanded the doctor. He was already backing off toward the still open door. The two little old men followed him, with creaking agility, like two rusty old crows on the wing.
I sat there with my knees crossed as one of the old conspirators reached back and swung the door shut. But the moment this closed door stood between me and that mysterious trio I darted across the room and got an ear against the panel.
"Well, what is it?" I heard in the thin falsetto of a half-querulous resentment.
"Bartlett, it's too late!" was the other man's answer. It was said in little more than a husky whisper, but I could hear it plainly enough, for it seemed to come with the weight of a thunder-clap.
"Too late? Why too late?" queried the squeakier voice.
"Because she is dead!" was the other man's answer.